He did not clearly know anything. It is the last achievement of the intelligence to get all of one’s life into one coherent scheme, and Kipps was only in a measure more aware of himself as a whole than is a tree. His existence was an affair of dissolving and recurring moods. When he thought of Helen or Ann or any of his friends, he thought sometimes of this aspect and sometimes of that—and often one aspect was finally incongruous with another. He loved Helen, and he revered Helen. He was also beginning to hate her with some intensity. When he thought of that expedition to Lympne, profound, vague, beautiful emotions flooded his being; when he thought of paying calls with her perforce, or of her latest comment on his bearing, he found himself rebelliously composing fierce and pungent insults, couched in the vernacular. But Ann, whom he had seen so much less of, was a simpler memory. She was pretty, she was almost softly feminine, and she was possible to his imagination just exactly where Helen was impossible. More than anything else, she carried the charm of respect for him, the slightest glance of her eyes was balm for his perpetually wounded self-conceit.
Chance suggestions it was set the tune of his thoughts, and his state of health and repletion gave the color. Yet somehow he had this at least almost clear in his mind, that to have gone to see Ann a second time, to have implied that she had been in possession of his thoughts through all this interval, and, above all, to have kissed her, was shabby and wrong. Only unhappily, this much of lucidity had come now just a few hours after it was needed.
6
Four days after this it was that Kipps got up so late. He got up late, cut his chin while shaving, kicked a slipper into his sponge bath, and said, “Dash!”
Perhaps you know those intolerable mornings, dear reader, when you seem to have neither the heart nor the strength to rise, and your nervous adjustments are all wrong and your fingers thumbs, and you hate the very birds for singing. You feel inadequate to any demand whatever. Often such awakenings follow a poor night’s rest, and commonly they mean indiscriminate eating or those subtle mental influences Old Kipps ascribed to “foozle ile” in the system or worry. And with Kipps—albeit Chitterlow had again been his guest overnight—assuredly worry had played a leading role. Troubles had been gathering upon him for days; there had been a sort of concentration of these hosts of Midian overnight, and in the grey small hours, Kipps had held his review.
The predominating trouble marched under this banner—
MR. KIPPS
MRS. BINDON BOTTING
At Home
Thursday, September 16th
Anagrams, 4 to 6:30
R.S.V.P.
—a banner that was the facsimile of a card upon his looking glass in the room below. And in relation to this terribly significant document, things had come to a pass with Helen that he could only describe in his own expressive idiom as “words.”
It had long been a smoldering issue between them that Kipps was not availing himself with any energy or freedom of the opportunities he had of social exercises; much less was he seeking additional opportunities. He had, it was evident, a peculiar dread of that universal afternoon enjoyment, the call, and Helen made it unambiguously evident that this dread was “silly” and had to be overcome. His first display of this unmanly weakness occurred at the Coote’s on the day before he kissed Ann. They were all there, chatting very pleasantly, when the little servant with the big cap announced the younger Miss Wace.
Whereupon Kipps manifested a lively horror and rose partially from his chair. “O Gum!” he protested. “Carn’t I go upstairs?”
Then he sank back, for it was too late. Very probably, the younger Miss Wace had heard him as she came in.
Helen said nothing of that, though her manner may have shown her surprise, but afterward, she tOld Kipps he must get used to seeing people, and suggested that he should pay a series of calls with Mrs. Walshingham and herself. Kipps gave a reluctant assent at the time and afterward displayed a talent for evasion that she had not suspected in him. At last, she did succeed in securing him for a call upon Miss Punchafer, of Radnor Park—a particularly easy call because Miss Punchafer being so deaf one could say practically what one liked—and then, outside the gate, he shirked again. “I can’t go in,” he said in a faded voice.
“You must,” said Helen, beautiful as ever, but even more than a little hard and forbidding.
“I can’t.”
He produced his handkerchief hastily, thrust it to his face, and regarded her over it with rounded, hostile eyes.
“’Possible,” he said in a hoarse, strange voice out of the handkerchief. “Nozzez bleedin’ …”
But that was the end of his power of resistance, and when the rally for the Anagram Tea occurred, she bore down his feeble protests altogether. She insisted. She said frankly, “I am going to give you a good talking to about this,” and she did …
From Coote, he gathered something of the nature of anagrams and anagram parties. An anagram, Coote explained, was a word spelled the same way as another, only differently arranged, as, for instance, T. O. C. O. E. would be an anagram for his own name, Coote.
“T. O. C. O. E.,” repeated Kipps very carefully.
“Or T. O. E. C. O.,” said Coote.
“Or T. O. E. C. O.,” said Kipps, assisting his poor head by nodding it at each letter.
“Toe Company like,” he said in his efforts to comprehend.
When Kipps was clear what an anagram meant, Coote came to the second heading, the tea. Kipps gathered there might be from thirty to sixty people present, and that each one would have an anagram pinned on. “They give you a card to put your guesses on, rather like a dance program, and then, you know, you go around and guess,” said Coote. “It’s rather good fun.”
“Oo, rather!” said Kipps, with simulated gusto.
“It shakes everybody up together,” said Coote.
Kipps smiled and nodded …
In the small hours all his painful meditations were threaded by the vision of that Anagram Tea; it kept marching to and fro and in and out of all his other troubles, from thirty to sixty people, mostly ladies and callers, and a great number of the letters of the alphabet, and more particularly P. I. K. P. S. and T. O. E. C. O., and he was trying to make one word out of the whole interminable procession …
This word, as he finally gave it with some emphasis to the silence of the night, was “Demn!”
Then, wreathed as it were in this lettered procession, was the figure of Helen as she had appeared at the moment of “words”; her face a little hard, a little irritated, a little disappointed. He imagined himself going around and guessing under her eye …
He tried to think of other things, without lapsing upon a still deeper uneasiness that was wreathed with yellow sea poppies, and the figures of Buggins, Pearce, and Carshot, three murdered Friendships, rose reproachfully in the stillness and changed horrible apprehensions into unspeakable remorse. Last night had been their customary night for the banjo, and Kipps, with a certain tremulous uncertainty, had put Old Methuselah amidst a retinue of glasses on the stable and opened a box of choice cigars. In vain. They were in no need; it seemed, of his society. But instead, Chitterlow had come, anxious to know if it was all right about that syndicate plan. He had declined anything but a very weak whiskey and soda, “just to drink,” at least until business was settled, and had then opened the whole affair with an effect of great orderliness to Kipps. Soon he was taking another whiskey by sheer inadvertency, and the complex fabric of his conversation was running more easily from the broad loom of his mind. Into that pattern had interwoven a narrative of extensive alterations in the pestered butterfly—the neck and beetle business was to be restored—the story of a grave difference of opinion with Mrs. Chitterlow, where and how to live after the play had succeeded, the reasons why the Hon. Thomas Norgate had never financed a syndicate, and much matter also about the syndicate now under discussion. But if the current of their conversation had been vortical and crowded, the outcome was perfectly clear.
Kipps was to be the chief participator in the syndicate, and his contribution was to be two thousand pounds. Kipps groaned and rolled over and found Helen, as it were, on the other side. “Promise me,” she had said, “you won’t do anything without consulting me.”
Kipps at once rolled back to his former position, and for a space lay quite still. He felt like a very young rabbit in a trap.
Then suddenly, with extraordinary distinctness, his heart cried out for Ann, and he saw her as he had seen her at New Romney, sitting amidst the yellow sea poppies with the sunlight on her face. His heart called out for her in the darkness as one calls for rescue. He knew, as though he had known it always, that he loved Helen no more. He wanted Ann; he wanted to hold her and be held by her, to kiss her again and again, to turn his back forever on all these other things …
He rose late, but this terrible discovery was still there, undispelled by cockcrow or the day. He rose in a shattered condition, and he cut himself while shaving, but at last, he got into his dining room and could pull the bell for the hot constituents of his multifarious breakfast. And then he turned to his letters. There were two real letters in addition to the customary electric belt advertisement, continental lottery circular, and betting tout’s card. One was in a slight mourning envelope and addressed in an unfamiliar hand. This he opened first and discovered a note:
MRS. RAYMOND WACE
Requests the pleasure of
MR. KIPPS’
Company at Dinner
on Tuesday, September 21st, at 8 o’clock
R.S.V.P.
With a hasty movement, Kipps turned his mind to the second letter. It was an unusually long one from his uncle, and ran as follows:
My Dear Nephew,
We are considerably startled by your letter though expecting something of the sort and disposed to hope for the best. If the young lady is a relation to the Earl of Beaupres well and good but take care you are not being imposed upon for there are many who will be glad enough to snap you up now your circumstances are altered—I waited on the old Earl once while in service, and he was remarkably close with his tips and suffered from corns. A hasty old gent and hard to please—I daresay he has forgotten me altogether—and anyhow, there is no need to rake up bygones. Tomorrow is bus day and as you say the young lady is living nearby we shall shut up shop for there is really nothing doing now what with all the visitors bringing everything with them down to their very children’s pails and say how de do to her and give her a bit of a kiss and encouragement if we think her suitable—she will be pleased to see your old uncle—We wish we could have had a look at her first, but still there is not much mischief done and hoping that all will turn out well yet I am—
Your affectionate uncle,
Edward George Kipps
“My heartburn still very bad. I shall bring over a few bits of rhubarb I picked up, a sort you won’t get in Folkestone and, if possible, a good bunch of flowers for the young lady.”
“Comin’ over today,” said Kipps, standing helplessly with the letter in his hand.
“’Ow the juice—?
“I carn’t.
“Kiss ’er!”
A terrible anticipation of that gathering framed itself in his mind—a hideous, impossible disaster.
“I carn’t even face ’er—!”
His voice went up to a note of despair, “And it’s too late to telegrarf and stop ’em!”
7
About twenty minutes after this, an outporter in Castle Hill Avenue was accosted by a young man with a pale, desperate face, an exquisitely rolled umbrella, and a heavy Gladstone bag.
“Carry this to the station, will you?” said the young man. “I want to ketch the nex’ train to London … You’ll ’ave to look sharp—I ’aven’t very much time.”
Chapter the Seventh
London
London was Kipps’ third world. There were no doubt other worlds, but Kipps knew only these three; firstly, New Romney and the Emporium, constituting his primary world, his world of origin, which also contained Ann. Secondly, the world of culture and refinement, the world of which Coote was chaperon, and into which Kipps was presently to marry, a world it was fast becoming evident absolutely incompatible with the first; and, thirdly, a world still to a large extent unexplored, London. London presented itself as a place of great, grey spaces and incredible multitudes of people, centering about Charing Cross station and the Royal Grand Hotel, and containing at unexpected arbitrary points shops of the most amazing sort, statuary, squares, restaurants—where it was possible for clever people like Walshingham to order a lunch item by item, to the waiters’ evident respect and sympathy—exhibitions of incredible things—the Walshinghams had taken him to the Arts and Crafts and to a picture gallery—and theatres. London, moreover, is rendered habitable by hansom cabs. Young Walshingham was a natural cab taker, he was an all-round large-minded young man, and he had in the course of their two days’ stay taken Kipps into no less than nine, so that Kipps was singularly not afraid of these vehicles. He knew that wherever you were, so soon as you were thoroughly lost, you said “Hi!” to a cab, and then “Royal Grand Hotel.” Day and night, these trusty conveyances are returning the strayed Londoner back to his point of departure; and were it not for their activity, in a little while the whole population, so vast and incomprehensible, in the intricate complexity of this great city, would be hopelessly lost forever. At any rate, that is how the thing presented itself to Kipps, and I have heard much the same from visitors from America.
His train was composed of corridor carriages, and he forgot his trouble for a time in the wonders of this modern substitute for railway compartments. He went from the non-smoking to the smoking carriage and smoked a cigarette, and strayed from his second-class carriage to a first and back. But presently, Black Care got aboard the train and came and sat beside him. The exhilaration of escape had evaporated now, and he was presented with a terrible picture of his aunt and uncle arriving at his lodgings and finding him fled. He had left a hasty message that he was called away suddenly on business, “ver’ important business,” and they were to be sumptuously entertained. His immediate motive had been his passionate dread of an encounter between these excellent but unrefined old people and the Walshinghams, but now that end was secured, he could see how thwarted and exasperated they would be.
How to explain to them?
He ought never to have written to tell them!
He ought to have got married and told them afterward.
He ought to have consulted Helen.
“Promise me,” she had said.
“Oh, desh!” said Kipps, and got up and walked back into the smoking car, and began to consume cigarettes.
Suppose, after all, they found out the Walshingham’s address and went there!
At Charing Cross, however, there were distractions again.
He took a cab in an entirely Walshingham manner and was pleased to note the enhanced respect of the cabman when he mentioned the Royal Grand. He followed Walshingham’s routine on their previous visit with perfect success. They were very nice in the office and gave him an excellent room at fourteen shillings the night.
He went up and spent a considerable time in examining the furniture of his room, scrutinizing himself in its various mirrors and sitting on the edge of the bed whistling. It was a vast and splendid apartment, and cheap at fourteen shillings. But, finding the figure of Ann inclined to resume possession of his mind, he roused himself and descended by the staircase after a momentary hesitation before the lift. He had thought of lunch, but he drifted into the great drawing room and read a guide to the hotels of Europe for a space until a doubt whether he was entitled to use this palatial apartment without extra charge arose in his mind. He would have liked something to eat very much now, but his inbred terror of the table was very strong. He did at last get by a porter in uniform towards the dining room, but at the sight of a number of waiters and tables, with remarkable complications of knives and glasses, te
rror seized him, and he backed out again, with a mumbled remark to the waiter in the doorway about this not being the way.
He hovered in the hall and lounge until he thought the presiding porter regarded him with suspicion, and then went up to his room again by the staircase, got his hat and umbrella, and struck boldly across the courtyard. He would go to a restaurant instead.
He had a moment of elation in the gateway. He felt all the Strand must notice him as he emerged through the great gate of the Hotel. “One of these here rich swells,” they would say. “Don’t they do it just!” A cabman touched his hat. “No fear,” said Kipps, pleasantly.
Then he remembered he was hungry again.
Yet he decided he was in no great hurry for lunch, in spite of an internal protest, and turned eastward along the Strand in a leisurely manner. He tried to find a place to suit him soon enough. He tried to remember the sort of things Walshingham had ordered. Before all things, he didn’t want to go into a place and look like a fool. Some of these places rook you dreadful, besides making fun of you. There was a place near Essex Street where there was a window brightly full of chops, tomatoes, and lettuce. He stopped at this and reflected for a time, and then it occurred to him that you were expected to buy these things raw and cook them at home. Anyhow, there was sufficient doubt in the matter to stop him. He drifted on to a neat window with champagne bottles, a dish of asparagus and a framed menu of a two-shilling lunch. He was about to enter when fortunately he perceived two waiters looking at him over the back screen of the window with a most ironical expression, and he sheered off at once. There was a wonderful smell of hot food halfway down Fleet Street and a nice-looking Tavern with several doors, but he could not decide which door. His nerve was going under the strain.
He hesitated at Farringdon Street and drifted up to St. Paul’s and round the churchyard, full chiefly of dead bargains in the shop windows, to Cheapside. But now Kipps was getting demoralized, and each house of refreshment seemed to promise still more complicated obstacles to food. He didn’t know how you went in and what was the correct thing to do with your hat; he didn’t know what you said to the waiter or what you called the different things; he was convinced absolutely he would “fumble,” as Shalford would have said, and look like a fool. Somebody might laugh at him! The hungrier he got, the more unendurable was the thought that anyone should laugh at him. For a time, he considered an extraordinary expedient to account for his ignorance. He would go in and pretend to be a foreigner and not know English. Then they might understand …Presently he had drifted into a part of London where there did not seem to be any refreshment places at all.
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