KIPPS

by WordFire Press

  He waved his stout stick to his receding nephew. Then he turned to Sid. “Now, if you could make something like that, young Pornick, you might blow a bit!”

  “I’ll make a doocid sight better than that before I done,” said Sid, hands deep in his pockets.

  “Not you,” said Old Kipps.

  The motor set up a prolonged sobbing moan and vanished around the corner. Sid stood motionless for a space, unheeding some further remark from Old Kipps. The young mechanic had just discovered that to have manufactured seventeen bicycles, including orders in hand, is not so big a thing as he had supposed, and such discoveries try one’s manhood …

  “Oh well!” said Sid at last, and turned his face towards his mother’s cottage.

  She had got a hot teacake for him, and she was a little hurt that he was dark and preoccupied as he consumed it. He had always been such a boy for teacake, and then when one went out specially and got him one—!

  He did not tell her—he did not tell anyone—he had seen young Kipps. He did not want to talk about Kipps for a bit to anyone at all.

  Chapter the Fifth

  The Pupil Lover

  When Kipps came to reflect upon his afternoon’s work, he had his first inkling of certain comprehensive incompatibilities lying about the course of true love in his particular case. He had felt without understanding the incongruity between the announcement he had failed to make and the circle of ideas of his aunt and uncle. It was this rather than the want of a specific intention that had silenced him, the perception that when he traveled from Folkestone to New Romney, he traveled from an atmosphere where his engagement to Helen was sane and excellent to an atmosphere where it was only to be regarded with incredulous suspicion. Coupled and associated with this jar was his sense of the altered behavior of Sid Pornick, the evident shock to that ancient alliance caused by the fact of his enrichment, the touch of hostility in his “You’ll soon be swelled too big to speak to a poor mechanic like me.” Kipps was unprepared for the unpleasant truth; that the path of social advancement is and must be strewn with broken friendships. This first protrusion of that fact caused a painful confusion in his mind. It was speedily to protrude in a far more serious fashion in relation to the “hands” from the Emporium, and Chitterlow.

  From the day at Lympne Castle, his relations with Helen had entered upon a new footing. He had prayed for Helen as good souls pray for Heaven, with as little understanding of what it was he prayed for. And now that period of standing humbly in the shadows before the shrine was over, and the Goddess, her veil of mystery flung aside, had come down to him and taken hold of him, a good, strong, firm hold, and walked by his side … She liked him. What was singular was that very soon, she had kissed him thrice, whimsically upon the brow, and he had never kissed her at all. He could not analyze his feelings, only he knew the world was wonderfully changed about them, but the truth was that, though he still worshipped and feared her, though his pride in his engagement was ridiculously vast, he loved her now no more. That subtle something woven of the most delicate strands of self-love and tenderness and desire had vanished imperceptibly, and was gone now forever. But that she did not suspect in him, nor, as a matter of fact, did he.

  She took him in hand in perfect good faith. She told him things about his accent; she told him things about his bearing, about his costume, and his way of looking at things. She thrust the blade of her intelligence into the tenderest corners of Kipps’ secret vanity; she slashed his most intimate pride to bleeding tatters. He sought very diligently to anticipate some at least of these informing thrusts by making great use of Coote. But the unanticipated made a brave number …

  She found his simple willingness a very lovable thing.

  Indeed she liked him more and more. There was a touch of motherliness in her feelings towards him. But his upbringing and his associations had been, she diagnosed, “awful.” At New Romney, she glanced but little; that was remote. But in her inventory—she went over him as one might go over a newly taken house, with impartial thoroughness—she discovered more proximate influences, surprising intimations of nocturnal “singsongs”—she pictured it as almost shocking that Kipps should sing to the banjo—much low-grade wisdom treasured from a person called Buggins—“Who is Buggins?” said Helen—vague figures of indisputable vulgarity, Pearce and Carshot, and more particularly, a very terrible social phenomenon, Chitterlow.

  Chitterlow blazed upon them with unheralded oppressive brilliance the first time they were abroad together.

  They were going along the front of the leas to see a school play in Sandgate—at the last moment, Mrs. Walshingham had been unable to come with them—when Chitterlow loomed up into the new world. He was wearing the suit of striped flannel and the straw hat that had followed Kipps’ payment in advance for his course in elocution, his hands were deep in his side pockets and animated the corners of his jacket, and his attentive gaze at the passing loungers, the faint smile under his boldly drawn nose, showed him engaged in studying character—no doubt for some forthcoming play.

  “What HO!” said he, at the sight of Kipps, and swept off the straw hat with so ample a clutch of his great, flat hand that it suggested to Helen’s startled mind a conjurer about to palm a halfpenny.

  “’Ello, Chitt’low,” said Kipps a little awkwardly and not saluting.

  Chitterlow hesitated. “Half a mo’, my boy,” he said, and arrested Kipps by extending a large hand over his chest. “Excuse me, my dear,” he said, bowing like his Russian count by way of apology to Helen and with a smile that would have killed at a hundred yards. He affected a semi-confidential grouping of himself and Kipps while Helen stood in white amazement.

  “About that play,” he said.

  “’Ow about it?” asked Kipps, acutely aware of Helen.

  “It’s all right,” said Chitterlow. “There’s a strong smell of syndicate in the air, I may tell you. Strong.”

  “That’s aw right,” said Kipps.

  “You needn’t tell everybody,” said Chitterlow with a transitory, confidential hand to his mouth, which pointed the application of the “everybody” just a trifle too strongly. “But I think it’s coming off. However—I mustn’t detain you now. So long. You’ll come ’round, eh?”

  “Right you are,” said Kipps.

  “Tonight?”

  “At eight.”

  And then, and more in the manner of a Russian prince than any common count, Chitterlow bowed and withdrew. Just for a moment, he allowed a conquering eye to challenge Helen’s and noted her for a girl of quality …

  There was a silence between our lovers for a space.

  “That,” said Kipps with an allusive movement of the head, “was Chitterlow.”

  “Is he—a friend of yours?”

  “In a way … You see, I met ’im. Leastways ’e met me. Run into me with a bicycle, ’e did, and so we got talking together.”

  He tried to appear at his ease. The young lady scrutinized his profile.

  “What is he?”

  “’E’s a nacter chap,” said Kipps. “Leastways ’e writes plays.”

  “And sells them?”

  “Partly.”

  “Whom to?”

  “Different people. Shares he sells … It’s all right, really—I meant to tell you about him before.”

  Helen looked over her shoulder to catch a view of Chitterlow’s retreating aspect. It did not compel her complete confidence.

  She turned to her lover and said in a tone of quiet authority, “You must tell me all about Chitterlow. Now.”

  The explanation began …

  The school play came almost as a relief to Kipps. In the flusterment of going in, he could almost forget for a time his Laocoon struggle to explain, and in the intervals he did his best to keep forgetting. But Helen, with a gentle insistence, resumed the explanation of Chitterlow as they returned towards Folkestone.

  Chitterlow was confoundedly difficult to explain. You could hardly imagine!

  T
here was an almost motherly anxiety in Helen’s manner, blended with the resolution of a schoolmistress to get to the bottom of the affair. Kipps’ ears were soon quite brightly red.

  “Have you seen one of his plays?”

  “’E’s tole me about one.”

  “But on the stage.”

  “No. He ’asn’t ’ad any on the stage yet. That’s all coming …”

  “Promise me,” she said in conclusion, “you won’t do anything without consulting me.”

  And of course, Kipps promised. “Oo—no!”

  They went on their way in silence.

  “One can’t know everybody,” said Helen in general.

  “Of course,” said Kipps; “in a sort of way, it was him that helped me to my money.” And he indicated in a confused manner the story of the advertisement. “I don’t like to drop ’im all at once,” he added.

  Helen was silent for a space, and when she spoke, she went off at a tangent. “We shall live in London—soon,” she remarked. “It’s only while we are here.”

  It was the first intimation she gave him of their post-nuptial prospects.

  “We shall have a nice little flat somewhere, not too far west, and there we shall build up a circle of our own.”

  * * *

  2

  All that declining summer, Kipps was the pupil lover. He made an extraordinarily open secret of his desire for self-improvement; indeed Helen had to hint once or twice that his modest frankness was excessive, and all this new circle of friends did, each after his or her manner, everything that was possible to supplement Helen’s efforts and help him to ease and skill in the more cultivated circles to which he had come. Coote was still the chief teacher, the tutor—there are so many little difficulties that a man may take to another man that he would not care to propound to the woman he loves—but they were all, so to speak, upon the staff. Even the freckled girl said to him once in a pleasant way, “You mustn’t say ‘contretemps’, you must say ‘contraytom’,” when he borrowed that expression from Manners and Rules, and she tried at his own suggestion to give him clear ideas upon the subject of “as” and “has”. A certain confusion between these words was becoming evident, the first fruits of a lesson from Chitterlow on the aspirate. Hitherto he had discarded that dangerous letter almost altogether, but now he would pull up at words beginning with “h” and draw a sawing breath—rather like a startled kitten—and then aspirate with vigor.

  Said Kipps one day, “’As ’e?—I should say, ah—Has ’e? Ye know I got a lot of difficulty over them two words, which is which?”

  “Well, ‘as’ is a conjunction and ‘has’ is a verb.”

  “I know,” said Kipps, “but when is ‘has’ a conjunction and when is ‘as’ a verb?”

  “Well,” said the freckled girl, preparing to be very lucid. “It has when it means one has, meaning having, but if it isn’t, it’s as. As for instance, one says ’e—I mean he—He has. But one says ‘as he has.’”

  “I see,” said Kipps. “So I ought to say ʻ’as ’e?’”

  “No, if you are asking a question you say has ’e—I mean he—’as he?” She blushed quite brightly, but still clung to her air of lucidity.

  “I see,” said Kipps. He was about to say something further, but he desisted. “I got it much clearer now. Has ’e? Has ’e as. Yes.”

  “If you remember about having.”

  “Oo, I will,” said Kipps.

  Miss Coote specialized in Kipps’ artistic development. She had early found an opinion that he had considerable artistic sensibility, his remarks on her work had struck her as decidedly intelligent, and whenever he called around to see them she would show him some work of art, now an illustrated book, now perhaps a color print of a Botticelli, now the Hundred Best Paintings, now “Academy Pictures,” now a German art handbook, and now some magazine of furniture and design. “I know you like these things,” she used to say, and Kipps said, “Oo, I do.” He soon acquired a little armory of appreciative sayings. When, presently, the Walshinghams took him up to the Arts and Crafts, his deportment was intelligent in the extreme. For a time, he kept a wary silence and suddenly pitched upon a color print. “That’s rather nace,” he said to Mrs. Walshingham. “That lill’ thing. There.” He always said things like that by preference to the mother rather than the daughter unless he was perfectly sure.

  He quite took to Mrs. Walshingham. He was impressed by her conspicuous tact and refinement; it seemed to him that the ladylike could go no further. She was always dressed with a delicate fussiness that was never disarranged, and even a sort of faded quality about her hair and face and bearing and emotions contributed to her effect. Kipps was not a big man, and commonly he did not feel like a big man, but with Mrs. Walshingham he always felt enormous and distended, as though he was a navvy who had taken some disagreeable poison which puffed him up inside his skin as a preliminary to bursting. He felt, too, as though he had been rolled in clay and his hair dressed with gum. And he felt that his voice was strident and his accent like somebody swinging a crowded pig’s pail in a free and careless manner. All this increased and enforced his respect for her. Her hand, which flitted often and again to his hand and arm, was singularly well-shaped and cool. “Arthur,” she called him from the very beginning.

  She did not so much positively teach and tell him as tactfully guide and infect him. Her conversation was not so much didactic as exemplary. She would say, “I do like people to do,” so and so. She would tell him anecdotes of nice things done, of gentlemanly feats of graceful consideration; she would record her neat observations of people in trains and omnibuses; how, for example, a man had passed her change to the conductor, “quite a common man he looked,” but he had lifted his hat. She stamped Kipps so deeply with the hat-raising habit that he would uncover if he found himself in the same railway ticket office with a lady, had to stand ceremoniously until the difficulties of change drove him to an apologetic provisional oblique resumption of his headgear … And robbing these things of any air of personal application, she threw about them an abundant talk about her two children—she called them her Twin Jewels quite frequently—about their gifts, their temperaments, their ambition, their need of opportunity. They needed opportunity; she would say, as other people needed air …

  In his conversations with her, Kipps always assumed, and she seemed to assume, that she was to join that home in London Helen foreshadowed, but he was surprised one day to gather that this was not to be the case. “It wouldn’t do,” said Helen, with decision. “We want to make a circle of our own.”

  “But won’t she be a bit lonely down here?” asked Kipps.

  “There’s the Waces, and Mrs. Prebble, and Mrs. Bindon Botting, and—lots of people she knows.” And Helen dismissed this possibility …

  Young Walshingham’s share in the educational syndicate was smaller. But he shone out when they went to London on that Arts and Crafts expedition. Then this rising man of affairs showed Kipps how to buy the more theatrical weeklies for consumption in the train, how to buy and what to buy in the way of cigarettes with gold tips and shilling cigars, and how to order hock for lunch and sparkling Moselle for dinner, how to calculate the fare of a hansom cab—penny a minute while he goes—how to look intelligently at a hotel tape, and how to sit still in a train like a thoughtful man instead of talking like a fool and giving yourself away. And he, too, would glance at the good time coming when they were to be in London for good and all.

  That prospect expanded and developed particulars. It presently took up a large part of Helen’s conversation. Her conversations with Kipps were never of a grossly sentimental sort; there was a shyness of speech in that matter with both of them, but these new adumbrations were at least as interesting and not so directly disagreeable as the clear-cut intimations of personal defect that for a time had so greatly chastened Kipps’ delight in her presence. The future presented itself with an almost perfect frankness as a joint campaign of Mrs. Walshingham’s Twin Jewels upon t
he Great World, with Kipps in the capacity of baggage and supply. They would still be dreadfully poor, of course—this amazed Kipps, but he said nothing—until “Brudderkins” began to succeed, but if they were clever and lucky, they might do a great deal.

  When Helen spoke of London, a brooding look, as of one who contemplates a distant country, came into her eyes. Already it seemed they had the nucleus of a set. Brudderkins was a member of the Theatrical Judges, an excellent and influential little club of journalists and literary people, and he knew Shimer and Stargate and Whiffle, of the “Red Dragon,” and besides these were the Revels. They knew the Revels quite well. Sidney Revel, before his rapid rise to prominence as a writer of epigrammatic essays that were quite above the ordinary public, had been an assistant master at one of the best Folkestone schools, Brudderkins had brought him home to tea several times, and it was he had first suggested Helen should try and write. “It’s perfectly easy,” Sidney had said. He had been writing occasional things for the evening papers, and for the weekly reviews even, at that time. Then he had gone up to London and had almost unavoidably become a dramatic critic. Those brilliant essays had followed, and then “Red Hearts a-Beating,” the romance that had made him. It was a tale of spirited adventure, full of youth and beauty and naïve passion and generous devotion, bold, as the Bookman said, and frank in places, but never in the slightest degree morbid. He had met and married an American widow with quite a lot of money, and they had made a very distinct place for themselves, Kipps learned, in the literary and artistic society of London. Helen seemed to dwell on the Revels a great deal; it was her exemplary story, and when she spoke of Sidney—she often called him Sidney—she would become thoughtful. She spoke most of him, naturally, because she had still to meet Mrs. Revel … Certainly, they would be in the world in no time, even if the distant connection with the Beaupres family came to nothing.