KIPPS

by WordFire Press

  “You r’ember that half sixpence? What you cut for me?”

  “Yes.”

  “I got it still.”

  She hesitated. “Funny, wasn’t it?” she said, and then, “You got yours, Artie?”

  “Rather,” said Kipps. “What do you think?” and wondered in his heart of hearts why he had never looked at that sixpence for so long.

  Ann smiled at him frankly.

  “I didn’t expect you’d keep it,” she said. “I thought often—it was silly to keep mine. Besides,” she reflected, “it didn’t mean anything, really.”

  She glanced at him as she spoke and met his eye.

  “Oh, didn’t it!” said Kipps, a little late with his response, and realizing his infidelity to Helen even as he spoke.

  “It didn’t mean much anyhow,” said Ann. “You still in the drapery?”

  “I’m living at Folkestone,” began Kipps and decided that that sufficed. “Didn’t Sid tell you he met me?”

  “No! Here?”

  “Yes. The other day. ’Bout a week or more ago.”

  “That was before I came.”

  “Ah! that was it,” said Kipps.

  “’E’s got on,” said Ann. “Got ’is own shop now, Artie.”

  “’E tole me.”

  They found themselves outside Muggett’s cottages. “You going in?” said Kipps.

  “I s’pose so,” said Ann.

  They both hung upon the pause. Ann took a plunge.

  “D’you often come to New Romney?” she said.

  “I ride over a bit at times,” said Kipps.

  Another pause. Ann held out her hand.

  “I’m glad I seen you,” she said.

  Extraordinary impulses arose in neglected parts of Kipps’ being. “Ann,” he said and stopped.

  “Yes,” said she, and was bright to him.

  They looked at one another.

  All, and more than all, of those first emotions of his adolescence had come back to him. Her presence banished a multitude of countervailing considerations. It was Ann more than ever. She stood breathing close to him, with her soft-looking lips a little apart and gladness in her eyes.

  “I’m awful glad to see you again,” he said; “it brings back old times.”

  “Doesn’t it?”

  Another pause. He would have liked to have had a long talk to her, to have gone for a walk with her or something, to have drawn nearer to her in any conceivable way, and, above all, to have had some more of the appreciation that shone in her eyes, but a vestige of Folkestone still clinging to him told him it “wouldn’t do.” “Well,” he said, “I must be getting on,” and turned away reluctantly, with a will under compulsion …

  When he looked back from the corner, she was still at the gate. She was perhaps a little disconcerted by his retreat. He felt that. He hesitated for a moment, half turned, stood, and suddenly did great things with his hat. That hat! The wonderful hat of our civilization!

  In another minute, he was engaged in a singularly absentminded conversation with his uncle about the usual topics.

  His uncle was very anxious to buy him a few upright clocks as an investment for subsequent sale. And there were also some very nice globes, one terrestrial and the other celestial, in a shop at Lydd that would look well in a drawing room and inevitably increase in value … Kipps either did or did not agree to this purchase; he was unable to recollect.

  The southwest wind perhaps helped him back; at any rate, he found himself through Dymchurch without having noticed the place. There came an odd effect as he drew near Hythe. The hills on the left and the trees on the right seemed to draw together and close in upon him until his way was straight and narrow. He could not turn around on that treacherous, half-tamed machine, but he knew that behind him, he knew so well, spread the wide, vast flatness of the Marsh shining under the afternoon sky. In some way, this was material to his thoughts. And as he rode through Hythe he came upon the idea that there was a considerable amount of incompatibility between the existence of one who was practically a gentleman and of Ann.

  In the neighborhood of Seabrook he began to think he had, in some subtle way, lowered himself by walking along by the side of Ann … After all, she was only a servant.

  Ann!

  She called out all the least gentlemanly instincts of his nature. There had been a moment in their conversation when he had quite distinctly thought it would really be an extremely nice thing for someone to kiss her lips … There was something warming about Ann—at least for Kipps. She impressed him as having somewhen during their vast interval of separation contrived to make herself in some distinctive way his.

  Fancy keeping that half sixpence all this time!

  It was the most flattering thing that had ever happened to Kipps.

  2

  He found himself presently sitting over The Art of Conversing, lost in the strangest musings. He got up, walked about, became stagnant at the window for a space, roused himself, and by way of something lighter, tried Sesame and Lilies. From that, too, his attention wandered. He sat back. Anon he smiled, anon sighed. He arose, pulled his keys from his pocket, looked at them, decided, and went upstairs. He opened the little yellow box that had been the nucleus of all his possessions in the world, and took out a small “escritoire,” the very humblest sort of present, and opened it—kneeling. And there, in the corner, was a little packet of paper, sealed as a last defense against any prying invader, with red sealing wax. It had gone untouched for years. He held this little packet between finger and thumb for a moment, regarding it, and then put down the escritoire and broke the seal …

  As he was getting into bed that night, he remembered something for the first time!

  “Dash it!” he said. “Dashed if I told ’em this time … Well! I shall ’ave to go over to New Romney again!”

  He got into bed and remained sitting pensively on the pillow for a space.

  “It’s a rum world,” he reflected after a vast interval.

  Then he recalled that she had noticed his mustache and embarked upon a sea of egotistical musings.

  He imagined himself telling Ann how rich he was. What a surprise that would be for her!

  Finally, he sighed profoundly, blew out his candle, and snuggled down, and in a little while he was asleep …

  But the next morning and at intervals afterward he found himself thinking of Ann—Ann, the bright, the desirable, the welcoming, and with an extraordinary streakiness he wanted quite badly to go and then as badly not to go over to New Romney again.

  Sitting on the Leas in the afternoon, he had an idea. “I ought to ’ave told ’er, I suppose, about my being engaged.

  “Ann!”

  All sorts of dreams and impressions that had gone clean out of his mental existence came back to him, changed, and brought up to date to fit her altered presence. He thought of how he had gone back to New Romney for his Christmas holidays, determined to kiss her, and of the awful blankness of the discovery that she had gone away.

  It seemed incredible now, and yet not wholly incredible, that he had cried real tears for her—how many years was it ago?

  3

  Daily I should thank my maker that He did not appoint me censor of the world of men. I should temper a fierce injustice with a spasmodic indecision that would prolong rather than mitigate the bitterness of the day. For human dignity, for all conscious human superiority, I should lack the beginnings of charity, for bishops, prosperous schoolmasters, judges, and all large respect-pampered souls. And more especially bishops, towards whom I bear an atavistic, Viking grudge, dreaming not infrequently and with invariable zest of galleys and landings and well-known living ornaments of the episcopal bench sprinting inland on twinkling gaiters before my thirsty blade—all these people, I say, should treat below their deserts, but, on the other hand, for such as Kipps—There the exasperating indecisions would come in. The judgment would be arrested at Kipps. Everyone and everything would wait. You would wait. The balance would
sway and sway, and whenever it heeled towards an adverse decision, my finger would set it swaying again. Kings, warriors, statesmen, brilliant women of our first families, personalities, gallants, panting with indignation, headline humanity in general, would stand undamned, unheeded, or be damned in the most casual manner for their importunity, while my eye went about for anything possible that could be said on behalf of Kipps … Albeit I fear nothing can save him from condemnation upon this present score, that within two days he was talking to Ann again.

  One seeks excuses. Overnight there had been an encounter of Chitterlow and young Walshingham in his presence, that had certainly warped his standards. They had called within a few minutes of each other, and the two, swayed by virile attentions to Old Methuselah Four Stars, had talked against each other, over and at the hospitable presence of Kipps. Walshingham had seemed to win at the beginning, but finally, Chitterlow had made a magnificent display of vociferation and swept him out of existence. At the beginning, Chitterlow had opened upon the great profits of playwrights, and young Walshingham had capped him at once with a cynical but impressive display of knowledge of the High Finance. If Chitterlow boasted his thousands, young Walshingham boasted his hundreds of thousands and was for a space left in sole possession of the stage, juggling with the wealth of nations. He was going on by way of Financial Politics to the Overman, before Chitterlow recovered from his first check, and came back to victory. “Talking of Women,” said Chitterlow, coming in abruptly upon some things not generally known, beyond Walshingham’s more immediate circle, about a recently departed empire-builder; “Talking of Women and the way they Get at a man—”

  [Though as a matter of fact they had been talking of the Corruption of Society by Speculation.]

  Upon this new topic, Chitterlow was soon manifestly invincible. He knew so much; he had known so many. Young Walshingham did his best with epigrams and reservations, but even to Kipps, it was evident that this was a book-learned depravity. One felt Walshingham had never known the inner realities of passion. But Chitterlow convinced and amazed. He had run away with girls, he had been run away with by girls, he had been in love with several at a time—“not counting Bessie”—he had loved and lost, he had loved and refrained, and he had loved and failed. He threw remarkable lights upon the moral state of America—in which country he had toured with great success. He set his talk to the tune of one of Mr. Kipling’s best-known songs. He told an incident of simple, romantic passion, a delirious dream of love and beauty in a Saturday to Monday steamboat trip up the Hudson, and tagged his end with, “I learned about women from ’er!” After that, he adopted the refrain and then lapsed into the praises of Kipling. “Little Kipling,” said Chitterlow, with the familiarity of affection, “he knows,” and broke into quotation:

  “I’ve taken my fun where I found it;

  I’ve rogued and I’ve ranged in my time;

  I’ve ’ad my picking of sweet’earts,

  An’ four of the lot was Prime.”

  (These things, I say, affect the moral standards of the best of us.)

  “I’d have liked to have written that,” said Chitterlow. “That’s life, that is! But go and put it on the stage, put even a bit of the realities of life on the stage, and see what they’ll do to you! Only Kipling could venture on a job like that. That Poem KNOCKED me! I don’t say Kipling hasn’t knocked me before and since, but that was a fair knock out. And yet—you know—there’s one thing in it … this:

  “I’ve taken my fun where I’ve found it,

  And now I must pay for my fun,

  For the more you ’ave known o’ the others,

  The less will you settle to one—

  “Well. In my case anyhow—I don’t know how much that proves, seeing I’m exceptional in so many things, and there’s no good denying it—but so far as I’m concerned—I tell you two, but of course you needn’t let it go any farther—I’ve been perfectly faithful to Muriel ever since I married her—ever since … Not once. Not even by accident have I ever said or done anything in the slightest—” His little, brown eye became pensive after this flattering intimacy, and the gorgeous draperies of his abundant voice fell into graver folds. “I learnt about women from ’er,” he said impressively.

  “Yes,” said Walshingham, getting into the hinder spaces of that splendid pause, “a man must know about women. And the only sound way of learning is the experimental method.”

  “If you want to know about the experimental method, my boy,” said Chitterlow, resuming …

  So they talked. Ex pede Herculem, as Coote, that cultivated polyglot, would have put it. And in the small hours Kipps went to bed, with his brain whirling with words and whiskey, and sat for an unconscionable time upon his bed edge, musing sadly upon the unmanly monogamy of soul that had cast its shadow upon his career, musing with his thoughts pointing around more and more certainly to the possibility of at least duplicity with Ann.

  4

  For some days he had been refraining with some insistence from going off to New Romney again …

  I do not know if this may count in palliation of his misconduct. Men, real Strong-Souled, Healthy Men, should be, I suppose, impervious to conversational atmospheres, but I have never claimed for Kipps a place at these high levels. The unquenchable fact remains that the next day, he spent the afternoon with Ann and found no scruple in displaying himself a budding lover.

  He had met her in the High Street, had stopped her, and almost on the spur of the moment had boldly proposed a walk, “for the sake of old times.”

  “I don’t mind,” said Ann.

  Her consent almost frightened Kipps. His imagination had not carried him to that. “It would be a lark,” said Kipps, and looked up the street and down. “Now?” he said.

  “I don’t mind a bit, Artie. I was just going for a walk along towards St. Mary’s.”

  “Let’s go that way be’ind the church,” said Kipps, and presently they found themselves drifting seaward in a mood of pleasant commonplace. For a while, they talked of Sid. It went clean out of Kipps’ head at that early stage even that Ann was a “girl” according to the exposition of Chitterlow, and for a time, he remembered only that she was Ann. But afterward, with the reek of that talk in his head, he lapsed a little from that personal relation. They came out upon the beach and sat down in a tumbled, pebbly place, where a meagre grass and patches of sea poppy were growing, and Kipps reclined on his elbow and tossed pebbles in his hand, and Ann sat up, sunlit, regarding him. They talked in fragments. They exhausted Sid, they exhausted Ann, and Kipps was chary of his riches.

  He declined to a faint love-making. “I got that ’arf sixpence still,” he said.

  “Really?”

  That changed the key. “I always kept mine, some’ow,” said Ann, and there was a pause.

  They spoke of how often they had thought of each other during those intervening years. Kipps may have been untruthful, but Ann perhaps was not. “I met people here and there,” said Ann, “but I never met anyone quite like you, Artie.”

  “It’s jolly our meeting again, anyhow,” said Kipps. “Look at that ship out there. She’s pretty close in …”

  He had a dull period, became indeed almost pensive, and then he was enterprising for a while. He tossed up his pebbles so that as if by accident, they fell on Ann’s hand. Then, very penitently, he stroked the place. That would have led to all sorts of coquetries on the part of Flo Banks, for example, but it disconcerted and checked Kipps to find Ann made no objection, smiled pleasantly down on him, with eyes half shut because of the sun. She was taking things very much for granted.

  He began to talk, and, Chitterlow standards resuming possession of him, he said he had never forgotten her.

  “I never forgotten you either, Artie,” she said. “Funny, isn’t it?”

  It impressed Kipps also as funny.

  He became reminiscent, and suddenly a warm summer’s evening came back to him. “Remember them cockchafers, Ann?” he said. But the
reality of the evening he recalled was not the chase of cockchafers. The great reality that had suddenly arisen between them was that he had never kissed Ann in his life. He looked up, and there were her lips.

  He had wanted to very badly, and his memory leaped and annihilated an interval. That old resolution came back to him, and all sorts of new resolutions passed out of mind. And he had learned something since those boyish days. This time he did not ask. He went on talking, his nerves began very faintly to quiver, and his mind grew bright.

  Presently, having satisfied himself that there was no one to see, he sat up beside her and remarked upon the clearness of the air, and how close Dungeness seemed to them. Then they came upon a pause again.

  “Ann,” he whispered, and put an arm that quivered about her.

  She was mute and unresisting, and, as he was to remember, solemn.

  He turned her face towards him and kissed her lips, and she kissed him back again—kisses frank and tender as a child’s.

  5

  It was curious that in the retrospect he did not find nearly the satisfaction in this infidelity he had imagined was there. It was no doubt desperately doggish, doggish to an almost Chitterlowesque degree to recline on the beach at Littlestone with a “girl,” to make love to her and to achieve the triumph of kissing her, when he was engaged to another “girl” at Folkestone, but somehow these two people were not “girls,” they were Ann and Helen. Particularly Helen declined to be considered as a “girl.” And there was something in Ann’s quietly friendly eyes, in her frank smile, in the naïve pressure of her hand, there was something undefended and welcoming that imparted a flavor to the business upon which he had not counted. He had learned about women from her. That refrain ran through his mind and deflected his thoughts, but as a matter of fact, he had learned about nothing but himself.

  He wanted very much to see Ann some more and explain—He did not clearly know what it was he wanted to explain.