KIPPS Read online

  But the sight of Chitterlow was a wholesome thing; it connected events together, joined him on again to the past at a new point, and that was what he so badly needed …

  It was all right—all right.

  He became suddenly very anxious to tell everybody at the Emporium, absolutely everybody, all about it. That was what wanted doing. He felt that telling was the thing to make this business real. He gripped his umbrella about the middle and walked very eagerly.

  He entered the Emporium through the Manchester department. He flung open the door (over whose ground glass he had so recently, in infinite apprehension, watched the nose of Chitterlow) and discovered the second apprentice and Pearce in conversation. Pearce was prodding his hollow tooth with a pin and talking in fragments about the distinctive characteristics of good style.

  Kipps came up in front of the counter.

  “I say,” he said; “what d’yer think?”

  “What?” said Pearce over the pin.

  “Guess.”

  “You’ve slipped out because Teddy’s in London.”

  “Something more.”

  “What?”

  “Been left a fortune.”

  “Garn!”

  “I ’ave.”

  “Get out!”

  “Straight. I been lef’ twelve ’undred pounds—twelve ’undred pounds a year!”

  He moved towards the little door out of the department into the house, moving, as heralds say, regardant passant. Pearce stood with mouth wide open and pin poised in air. “No!” he said at last.

  “It’s right,” said Kipps, “and I’m going.”

  And he fell over the doormat into the house.

  * * *

  4

  It happened that Mr. Shalford was in London buying summer sale goods—and no doubt also interviewing aspirants to succeed Kipps.

  So that there was positively nothing to hinder a wild rush of rumor from end to end of the Emporium. All the masculine members began their report with the same formula. “Heard about Kipps?”

  The new girl in the cash desk had had it from Pearce and had dashed out into the fancy shop to be the first with the news on the fancy side. Kipps had been left a thousand pounds a year, twelve thousand pounds a year. Kipps had been left twelve hundred thousand pounds. The figures were uncertain, but the essential facts they had correct. Kipps had gone upstairs. Kipps was packing his box. He said he wouldn’t stop another day in the old Emporium, not for a thousand pounds! It was said that he was singing ribaldry about old Shalford.

  He had come down! He was in the countinghouse. There was a general movement thither. Poor old Buggins had a customer and couldn’t make out what the deuce it was all about! Completely out of it was Buggins.

  There was a sound of running to and fro, and voices saying this, that, and the other thing about Kipps. Ring-a-dinger, ring-a-dinger, went the dinner bell all unheeded. The whole of the Emporium was suddenly bright-eyed, excited, hungry to tell somebody, to find at any cost somebody who didn’t know and be first to tell them, “Kipps has been left thirty—forty—fifty thousand pounds!”

  “What!” cried the senior porter, “Him!” and ran up to the countinghouse as eagerly as though Kipps had broken his neck.

  “One of our chaps just been left sixty thousand pounds,” said the first apprentice, returning after a great absence to his customer.

  “Unexpectedly?” said the customer.

  “Quite,” said the first apprentice …

  “I’m sure if anyone deserves it, it’s Mr. Kipps,” said Miss Mergle, and her train rustled as she hurried to the countinghouse.

  There stood Kipps amidst a pelting shower of congratulations. His face was flushed, and his hair disordered. He still clutched his hat and best umbrella in his left hand. His right hand was anyone’s to shake rather than his own. (Ring-a-dinger, ring-a-dinger ding, ding, ding, dang you! went the neglected dinner bell.)

  “Good Old Kipps,” said Pearce, shaking, “Good Old Kipps.”

  Booch rubbed one anaemic hand upon the other. “You’re sure it’s all right, Mr. Kipps,” he said in the background.

  “I’m sure we all congratulate him,” said Miss Mergle.

  “Great Scott!” said the new young lady in the glove department. “Twelve hundred a year! Great Scott! You aren’t thinking of marrying anyone, are you, Mr. Kipps?”

  “Three pounds, five and ninepence a day,” said Mr. Booch, working in his head almost miraculously …

  Everyone, it seemed, was saying how glad they were it was Kipps, except the junior apprentice, upon whom—he being the only son of a widow and used to having the best of everything as a right—an intolerable envy, a sense of unbearable wrong, had cast its gloomy shade. All the rest were quite honestly and simply glad—gladder perhaps at that time than Kipps because they were not so overpowered …

  Kipps went downstairs to dinner, emitting fragmentary, disconnected statements. “Never expected anything of the sort … When this here Old Bean told me, you could have knocked me down with a feather … He says, ‘You b’en lef’ money.’ Even then I didn’t expect it’d be mor’n a hundred pounds perhaps. Something like that.”

  With the sitting down to dinner and the handing of plates, the excitement assumed a more orderly quality. The housekeeper emitted congratulations as she carved, and the maidservant became dangerous to clothes with the plates—she held them anyhow, one expected to see one upside down even—she found Kipps so fascinating to look at. Everyone was the brisker and hungrier for the news (except the junior apprentice), and the housekeeper carved with unusual liberality. It was High Old Times there under the gaslight, High Old Times. “I’m sure if anyone deserves it,” said Miss Mergle—“pass the salt, please—it’s Mr. Kipps.”

  The babble died away a little as Carshot began barking across the table at Kipps. “You’ll be a bit of a swell, Kipps,” he said. “You won’t hardly know yourself.”

  “Quite the gentleman,” said Miss Mergle.

  “Many real gentlemen’s families,” said the housekeeper, “have to do with less.”

  “See you on the Leas,” said Carshot. “My—!” He met the housekeeper’s eye. She had spoken about that before. “My eye!” he said tamely, lest words should mar the day.

  “You’ll go to London, I reckon,” said Pearce. “You’ll be a man about town. We shall see you mashing ’em, with violets in your button ’ole down the Burlington Arcade.”

  “One of these West End Flats. That’d be my style,” said Pearce. “And a first-class club.”

  “Aren’t these clubs a bit ’ard to get into?” asked Kipps, open-eyed, over a mouthful of potato.

  “No fear. Not for money,” said Pearce. And the girl in the laces who had acquired a cynical view of Modern Society from the fearless exposures of Miss Marie Corelli, said, “Money goes everywhere nowadays, Mr. Kipps.”

  But Carshot showed the true British strain.

  “If I was Kipps,” he said, pausing momentarily for a knifeful of gravy, “I should go to the Rockies and shoot bears.”

  “I’d certainly ’ave a run over to Boulogne,” said Pearce, “and look about a bit. I’m going to do that next Easter myself, anyhow—see if I don’t.”

  “Go to Oireland, Mr. Kipps,” came the soft insistence of Biddy Murphy, who managed the big workroom, flushed and shining in the Irish way, as she spoke. “Go to Oireland. Ut’s the loveliest country in the world. Outside currs. Fishin’, shootin’, huntin’. An’ pretty gals! Eh! You should see the Lakes of Killarney, Mr. Kipps!” And she expressed ecstasy by a facial pantomime and smacked her lips.

  And presently they crowned the event.

  It was Pearce who said, “Kipps, you ought to stand Sham!”

  And it was Carshot who found the more poetical word, “Champagne.”

  “Rather!” said Kipps hilariously, and the rest was a question of detail and willing emissaries. “Here it comes!” they said as the apprentice came down the staircase. “How about the shop?” sai
d someone. “Oh! Hang the shop!” said Carshot and made gruntulous demands for a corkscrew with a thing to cut the wire. Pearce, the dog! had a wire cutter in his pocket knife. How Shalford would have stared at the gold-tipped bottles if he had chanced to take an early train! Bang with the corks, and bang! Gluck, gluck, gluck, and sizzle!

  When Kipps found them all standing about him under the gas flare, saying almost solemnly “Kipps!” with tumblers upheld, “Have it in tumblers,” Carshot had said; “have it in tumblers. It isn’t a wine like you have in glasses. Not like port and sherry. It cheers you up, but you don’t get drunk. It isn’t hardly stronger than lemonade. They drink it at dinner, some of ’em, every day.”

  “What! At three and six a bottle!” said the housekeeper incredulously.

  “They don’t stick at that,” said Carshot, “not the champagne sort.”

  The housekeeper pursed her lips and shook her head …

  When Kipps, I say, found them all standing up to toast him in that manner, there came such a feeling in his throat and face that for the life of him, he scarcely knew for a moment whether he was not going to cry. “Kipps!” they all said, with kindly eyes. It was very good of them, it was very good of them, and hard there wasn’t a stroke of luck for them all!

  But the sight of upturned chins and glasses pulled him together again …

  They did him honor. Unenviously and freely, they did him honor.

  For example, Carshot, being subsequently engaged in serving cretonne and desiring to push a number of rejected blocks up the counter in order to have space for measuring, swept them by a powerful and ill-calculated movement of the arm, with a noise like thunder, partly on to the floor and partly on to the foot of the still gloomily preoccupied junior apprentice. And Buggins, whose place it was to shopwalk while Carshot served, shopwalked with quite unparalleled dignity, dangling a new season’s sunshade with a crooked handle on one finger. He arrested each customer who came down the shop with a grave and penetrating look. “Showing very ’tractive line new sheason’s shun-shade,” he would remark, and, after a suitable pause, “’Markable thing, one our ’sistant leg’sy twelve ’undred a year. Very ’tractive. Nothing more today, mum? No!” And he would then go and hold the door open for them with perfect decorum and with the sunshade dangling elegantly from his left hand …

  And the second apprentice, serving a customer with cheap ticking, and being asked suddenly if it was strong, answered remarkably,

  “Oo! no, mum! Strong! Why it ain’t ’ardly stronger than lemonade …”

  The head porter, moreover, was filled with a virtuous resolve to break the record as a lightning packer and make up for lost time. Mr. Swaffenham, of the Sandgate Riviera, for example, who was going out to dinner that night at seven, received at half-past six, instead of the urgently needed dress shirt he expected, a corset specially adapted to the needs of persons inclined to embonpoint. A parcel of summer underclothing selected by the elder Miss Waldershawe was somehow distributed in the form of gratis additions throughout a number of parcels of a less intimate nature, and a box of millinery on approval to Lady Pamshort (at Wampachs) was enriched by the addition of the junior porter’s cap …

  These little things, slight in themselves, witness perhaps none the less eloquently to the unselfish exhilaration felt throughout the Emporium at the extraordinary and unexpected enrichment of Mr. Kipps.

  5

  The ’bus that plies between New Romney and Folkestone is painted a British red and inscribed on either side with the word “Tip-top” in gold amidst voluptuous scrolls. It is a slow and portly ’bus. Below it swings a sort of hold, hung by chains between the wheels, and in the summertime, the top has garden seats. The front over the two dauntless unhurrying horses rises in tiers like a theatre; there is first a seat for the driver and his company, and above that, a seat and above that, unless my memory plays me false, a seat. There are days when this ’bus goes and days when it doesn’t go—you have to find out. And so, you get to New Romney. This ’bus it was, this ruddy, venerable, and immortal ’bus, that came down the Folkestone hill with unflinching deliberation, and trundled through Sandgate and Hythe, and out into the windy spaces of the Marsh, with Kipps and all his fortunes on its brow. You figure him there. He sat on the highest seat diametrically above the driver, and his head was spinning and spinning with champagne and this stupendous tomfoolery of luck and his heart was swelling, swelling indeed at times as though it would burst him, and his face towards the sunlight was transfigured. He never said a word, but ever and again, as he thought of this or that, he laughed. He seemed full of chuckles for a time, detached and independent chuckles, chuckles that rose and burst in him like bubbles in a wine … He held a banjo scepter fashion and restless on his knee. He had always wanted a banjo, and now he had got one at Malchior’s while he was waiting for the ’bus.

  There sat beside him a young servant who was sucking peppermint and a little boy with a sniff, whose flitting eyes showed him curious to know why ever and again Kipps laughed, and beside the driver were two young men in gaiters talking about “tegs.” And there sat Kipps, all unsuspected, twelve hundred a year, as it were, disguised as a common young man. And the young man in gaiters to the left of the driver eyed Kipps and his banjo, and especially his banjo, ever and again as if he found it and him, with his rapt face, an insoluble enigma. And many a King has ridden into a conquered city with a lesser sense of splendor than Kipps.

  Their shadows grew long behind them and their faces were transfigured in gold as they rumbled on towards the splendid west. The sun set before they had passed Dymchurch, and as they came lumbering into New Romney past the windmill, the dusk had come.

  The driver handed down the banjo and the portmanteau, and Kipps having paid him—“That’s aw right,” he said to the change, as a gentleman should—turned about and ran the portmanteau smartly into Old Kipps, whom the sound of the stopping of the ’bus had brought to the door of the shop in an aggressive mood and with his mouth full of supper.

  “’Ullo, Uncle, didn’t see you,” said Kipps.

  “Blunderin’ ninny,” said Old Kipps. “What’s brought you here? Ain’t early closing, is it? Not Toosday?”

  “Got some news for you, Uncle,” said Kipps, dropping the portmanteau.

  “Ain’t lost your situation, ’ave you? What’s that you got there? I’m blowed if it ain’t a banjo. Goo-lord! Spendin’ your money on banjoes! Don’t put down your portmanty there—anyhow. Right in the way of everybody. I’m blowed if ever I saw such a boy as you’ve got lately. Here! Molly! And look here! What you got a portmanty for? Why! Goo-lord! You ain’t really lost your place, ’ave you?”

  “Somethin’s happened,” said Kipps, slightly dashed. “It’s all right, Uncle. I’ll tell you in a minute.”

  Old Kipps took the banjo as his nephew picked up the portmanteau again.

  The living room door opened quickly, showing a table equipped with elaborate simplicity for supper, and Mrs. Kipps appeared.

  “If it ain’t young Artie,” she said. “Why! Whatever’s brought you ’ome?”

  “’Ullo, aunt,” said Artie. “I’m coming in. I got somethin’ to tell you. I’ve ’ad a bit of luck.”

  He wouldn’t tell them all at once. He staggered with the portmanteau round the corner of the counter, set a bundle of children’s tin pails into clattering oscillation, and entered the little room. He deposited his luggage in the corner beside the tall clock, and turned to his aunt and uncle again. His aunt regarded him doubtfully; the yellow light from the little lamp on the table escaped above the shade and lit her forehead and the tip of her nose. It would be all right in a minute. He wouldn’t tell them all at once. Old Kipps stood in the shop door with the banjo in his hand, breathing noisily. “The fact is, Aunt, I’ve ’ad a bit of luck.”

  “You ain’t been backin’ gordless ’orses, Artie?” she asked.

  “No fear.”

  “It’s a draw he’s been in,” said Old Kipps, still p
anting from the impact of the portmanteau; “it’s a dratted draw. Just look here, Molly. He’s won this ’ere trashy banjer and thrown up his situation on the strength of it—that’s what he’s done. Goin’ about singing. Dash and plunge! Just the very fault poor Pheamy always ’ad. Blunder right in, and no one mustn’t stop ’er!”

  “You ain’t thrown up your place, Artie, ’ave you?” said Mrs. Kipps.

  Kipps perceived his opportunity. “I ’ave,” he said; “I’ve throwed it up.”

  “What for?” said Old Kipps.

  “So’s to learn the banjo!”

  “Goo Lord!” said Old Kipps, in horror to find himself verified.

  “I’m going about playing!” said Kipps with a giggle. “Goin’ to black my face, Aunt, and sing on the beach. I’m going to ’ave a most tremendous lark and earn any amount of money—you see. Twenty-six fousand pounds I’m going to earn just as easy as nothing!”

  “Kipps,” said Mrs. Kipps, “he’s been drinking!”

  They regarded their nephew across the supper table with long faces. Kipps exploded with laughter and broke out again when his aunt shook her head very sadly at him. Then suddenly, he fell grave. He felt he could keep it up no longer. “It’s all right, Aunt. Really. I ain’t mad and I ain’t been drinking. I been lef’ money. I been left twenty-six fousand pounds.”

  Pause.

  “And you thrown up your place?” said Old Kipps.

  “Yes,” said Kipps. “rather!”

  “And bort this banjer, put on your best noo trousers and come right on ’ere?”

  “Well,” said Mrs. Kipps, “I never did.”

  “These ain’t my noo trousers, Aunt,” said Kipps regretfully. “My noo trousers wasn’t done.”

  “I shouldn’t ha’ thought that even you could ha’ been such a fool as that,” said Old Kipps.

  Pause.

  “It’s all right,” said Kipps, a little disconcerted by their distrustful solemnity. “It’s all right—really! Twenny-six fousan’ pounds. And a ’ouse—”

  Old Kipps pursed his lips and shook his head.