KIPPS Read online

  4

  The next morning he came down to breakfast looking grave—a man with much before him in the world.

  Kipps made a very special thing of his breakfast. Daily, once hopeless dreams came true then. It had been customary in the Emporium to supplement Shalford’s generous, indeed unlimited, supply of bread and butter-substitute by private purchases, and this had given Kipps very broad, artistic conceptions of what the meal might be. Now there would be a cutlet or so or a mutton chop—this splendor Buggins had reported from the great London clubs—haddock, kipper, whiting or fish-balls, eggs, boiled or scrambled, or eggs and bacon, kidney also frequently and sometimes liver. Amidst a garland of such themes, sausages, black and white puddings, bubble-and-squeak, fried cabbage, and scallops came and went. Always as camp followers came potted meat in all varieties, cold bacon, German sausage, brawn, marmalade and two sorts of jam, and when he had finished these he would sit among his plates and smoke a cigarette and look at all these dishes crowded round him with a beatific approval. It was his principal meal. He was sitting with his cigarette regarding his apartment with that complacency begotten of a generous plan of feeding successfully realized when newspapers and post arrived.

  There were several things by the post, tradesmen’s circulars and cards and two pathetic begging letters—his luck had got into the papers—and there was a letter from a literary man and a book to enforce his request for 10 shillings to put down socialism. The book made it very clear that prompt action on the part of property owners was becoming urgent if property was to last out the year. Kipps dipped in it and was seriously perturbed. And there was a letter from Old Kipps saying it was difficult to leave the shop and come over and see him again just yet, but that he had been to a sale at Lydd the previous day and bought a few good old books and things, it would be difficult to find the equal of in Folkestone. “They don’t know the value of these things out here,” wrote Old Kipps, “but you may depend upon it they are valuable,” and a brief financial statement followed. “There is an engraving someone might come along and offer you a lot of money for one of these days. Depend upon it; these old things are about the best investment you could make …”

  Old Kipps had long been addicted to sales, and his nephew’s good fortune had converted what had once been but a looking and a craving—he had rarely even bid for anything in the old days except the garden tools or the kitchen gallipots or things like that, things one gets for sixpence and finds a use for—into a very active pleasure. Sage and penetrating inspection, a certain mystery of bearing, tactical bids, and purchase—Purchase!—the old man had had a good time.

  While Kipps was re-reading the begging letters and wishing he had the sound, clear common sense of Buggins to help him a little, the Parcels Post brought along the box from his uncle. It was a large, insecure looking case held together by a few still loyal nails, and by what the British War Office would have recognized at once as an Army Corps of string, rags, and odds and ends tied together. Kipps unpacked it with a table knife, assisted at a critical point by the poker, and found a number of books and other objects of an antique type.

  There were three bound volumes of early issues of Chambers’s Journal, a copy of Punch’s Pocket Book for 1875, Sturm’s Reflections, an early version of Gill’s Geography (slightly torn), an illustrated work on Spinal Curvature, an early edition of Kirke’s Human Physiology, The Scottish Chiefs and a little volume on the Language of Flowers. There was a fine steel engraving, oak framed, and with some rusty spots, done in the Colossal style and representing the Handwriting on the Wall. There was also a copper kettle, a pair of candle snuffers, a brass shoehorn, a tea caddy to lock, two decanters (one stoppered), and what was probably a portion of an eighteenth-century child’s rattle. Kipps examined these objects one by one and wished he knew more about them. Turning over the pages of the Physiology again, he came upon a striking plate in which a youth of agreeable profile displayed his interior in an unstinted manner to the startled eye. It was a new view of humanity altogether for Kipps, and it arrested his mind.

  This anatomized figure made him forget for a space that he was “practically a gentleman” altogether, and he was still surveying its extraordinary complications when another reminder of a world quite outside those spheres of ordered gentility into which his dreams had carried him overnight, arrived (following the servant) in the person of Chitterlow.

  5

  Ul-lo!” said Kipps, rising.

  “Not busy?” said Chitterlow, enveloping Kipps’ hand for a moment in one of his own and tossing the yachting cap upon the monumental carved oak sideboard.

  “Only a bit of reading,” said Kipps.

  “Reading, eh?” Chitterlow cocked the red eye at the books and other properties for a moment and then, “I’ve been expecting you ’round again one night.”

  “I been coming ’round,” said Kipps. “On’y there’s a chap ’ere—I was coming ’round last night on’y I met ’im.”

  He walked to the hearthrug. Chitterlow drifted around the room for a time, glancing at things as he talked. “I’ve altered that play tremendously since I saw you,” he said. “Pulled it all to pieces.”

  “What play’s that, Chit’low?”

  “The one we were talking about. You know. You said something—I don’t know if you meant it—about buying half of it. Not the tragedy. I wouldn’t sell my twin brother a share in that. That’s my investment. That’s my Serious Work. No! I mean that new farce I’ve been on to. Thing with the business about a beetle.”

  “Oo, yes,” said Kipps. “I remember.”

  “I thought you would. Said you’d take a fourth share for a hundred pounds. You know.”

  “I seem to remember something—”

  “Well, it’s all different. Every bit of it. I’ll tell you. You remember what you said about a butterfly? You got confused, you know—Old Meth. Kept calling the beetle a butterfly, and that set me off. I’ve made it quite different. Quite different. Instead of Popplewaddle—thundering good farce name that, you know; for all that it came from a visitors’ list—instead of Popplewaddle getting a beetle down his neck and rushing about, I’ve made him a collector—collects butterflies, and this one you know’s a rare one. Comes in at window, center!” Chitterlow began to illustrate with appropriate gestures. “Pop rushes about after it. Forgets he mustn’t let on he’s in the house. After that—Tells ’em. Rare butterfly, worth lots of money. Some are, you know. Everyone’s on to it after that. Butterfly can’t get out of room, every time it comes out to have a try, rush and scurry. Well, I’ve worked on that. Only—”

  He came very close to Kipps. He held up one hand horizontally and tapped it in a striking and confidential manner with the fingers of the other. “Something else,” he said. “That’s given me a real Ibsenish touch—like the wild duck. You know that woman—I’ve made her lighter—and she sees it. When they’re chasing the butterfly the third time, she’s on! She looks. ‘That’s me!’ she says. Bif! Pestered butterfly. She’s the pestered butterfly. It’s legitimate. Much more legitimate than the wild duck—where there isn’t a duck!”

  “Knock ’em! The very title ought to knock ’em. I’ve been working like a horse at it … You’ll have a gold mine in that quarter share, Kipps …I don’t mind. It’s suited me to sell it and suited you to buy. Bif!”

  Chitterlow interrupted his discourse to ask, “You haven’t any brandy in the house, have you? Not to drink, you know. But I want just an eggcupful to pull me steady. My liver’s a bit queer … It doesn’t matter if you haven’t. Not a bit. I’m like that. Yes, whiskey’ll do. Better!”

  Kipps hesitated for a moment, then turned and fumbled in the cupboard of his sideboard. Presently he disinterred a bottle of whiskey and placed it on the table. Then he put out first one bottle of soda water and, after the hesitation of a moment, another. Chitterlow picked up the bottle and read the label. “Good old Methusaleh,” he said. Kipps handed him the corkscrew, and then his hand fluttered up to
his mouth. “I’ll have to ring now,” he said, “to get glasses.” He hesitated for a moment before doing so, leaning doubtfully as it were towards the bell.

  When the housemaid appeared, he was standing on the hearthrug with his legs wide apart, with the bearing of a desperate fellow. And after they had both had whiskeys—“You know a decent whiskey,” Chitterlow remarked and took another “just to drink”—Kipps produced cigarettes, and the conversation flowed again.

  Chitterlow paced the room. He was, he explained, taking a day off; that was why he had come around to see Kipps. Whenever he thought of any extensive change in a play he was writing, he always took a day off. In the end, it saved time to do so. It prevented his starting rashly upon work that might have to be rewritten. There was no good in doing work when you might have to do it over again, none whatever.

  Presently they were descending the steps by the Parade en route for the Warren, with Chitterlow doing the talking and going with a dancing drop from step to step …

  They had a great walk, not a long one, but a great one. They went up by the Sanatorium, and over the East Cliff and into that queer little wilderness of slippery and tumbling clay and rock under the chalk cliffs, a wilderness of thorn and bramble, wild rose and wayfaring tree, that adds so greatly to Folkestone’s charm. They traversed its intricacies and clambered up to the crest of the cliffs at last by a precipitous path that Chitterlow endowed in some mysterious way with suggestions of Alpine adventure. Every now and then he would glance aside at sea and cliffs with a fresh boyishness of imagination that brought back New Romney and the stranded wrecks to Kipps’ memory; but mostly he bored on with his great obsession of plays and playwriting, and that empty absurdity that is so serious to his kind, his Art. That was a thing that needed a monstrous lot of explaining. Along they went, sometimes abreast, sometimes in single file, up the little paths, and down the little paths, and in among the bushes and out along the edge above the beach, and Kipps went along trying ever and again to get an insignificant word in edgeways, and the gestures of Chitterlow flew wide and far and his great voice rose and fell, and he said this and he said that and he biffed and banged into the circumambient inane.

  It was assumed that they were embarked upon no more trivial enterprise than the Reform of the British Stage, and Kipps found himself classed with many opulent and even royal and noble amateurs—the Honorable Thomas Norgate came in here—who had interested themselves in the practical realization of high ideals about the drama. Only he had a finer understanding of these things, and instead of being preyed upon by the common professional—“and they are a lot,” said Chitterlow, “I haven’t toured for nothing”—he would have Chitterlow. Kipps gathered few details. It was clear he had bought the quarter of a farcical comedy—practically a gold mine—and it would appear it would be a good thing to buy the half. A suggestion, or the suggestion of a suggestion, floated out that he should buy the whole play and produce it forthwith. It seemed he was to produce the play upon a royalty system of a new sort, whatever a royalty system of any sort might be. Then there was some doubt, after all, whether that farcical comedy was in itself sufficient to revolutionize the present lamentable state of the British drama. Better perhaps for such a purpose was that tragedy—as yet unfinished—which was to display all that Chitterlow knew about women, and which was to center about a Russian nobleman embodying the fundamental Chitterlow personality. Then it became clearer that Kipps was to produce several plays. Kipps was to produce a great number of plays. Kipps was to found a National Theatre.

  It is probable that Kipps would have expressed some sort of disavowal if he had known how to express it. Occasionally his face assumed an expression of whistling meditation, but that was as far as he got towards protest.

  In the clutch of Chitterlow and the incalculable, Kipps came round to the house in Fenchurch Street and was there made to participate in the midday meal. He came to the house, forgetting certain confidences, and was reminded of the existence of a Mrs. Chitterlow (with the finest completely untrained contralto voice in England) by her appearance. She had an air of being older than Chitterlow, although probably she wasn’t, and her hair was a reddish-brown, streaked with gold. She was dressed in one of those complaisant garments that are dressing gowns or tea gowns or bathing wraps or rather original evening robes according to the exigencies of the moment—from the first Kipps was aware that she possessed a warm and rounded neck, and her well-molded arms came and vanished from the sleeves—and she had large, expressive brown eyes that he discovered ever and again fixed in an enigmatical manner upon his own.

  A simple but sufficient meal had been distributed with careless spontaneity over the little round table in the room with the photographs and looking glass, and when a plate had by Chitterlow’s direction been taken from under the marmalade in the cupboard, and the kitchen fork and a knife that was not loose in its handle had been found for Kipps, they began; and she had evidently heard of Kipps before, and he made a tumultuous repast. Chitterlow ate with quiet enormity, but it did not interfere with the flow of his talk. He introduced Kipps to his wife very briefly, made it vaguely evident that the production of the comedy was the thing chiefly settled. His reach extended over the table, and he troubled nobody. When Mrs. Chitterlow, who for a little while seemed socially self-conscious, reproved him for taking a potato with a jab of his fork, he answered, “Well, you shouldn’t have married a man of genius,” and from a subsequent remark it was perfectly clear that Chitterlow’s standing in this respect was made no secret of in his household.

  They drank Old Methusaleh and siphoned soda, and there was no clearing away; they just sat among the plates and things, and Mrs. Chitterlow took her husband’s tobacco pouch and made a cigarette and smoked and blew smoke and looked at Kipps with her large, brown eyes. Kipps had seen cigarettes smoked by ladies before, “for fun,” but this was real smoking. It frightened him rather. He felt he must not encourage this lady—at any rate in Chitterlow’s presence.

  They became very cheerful after the repast, and as there was now no waste to deplore, such as one experiences in the windy, open air, Chitterlow gave his voice full vent. He fell to praising Kipps very highly and loudly. He said he had known Kipps was the right sort; he had seen it from the first, almost before he got up out of the mud on that memorable night. “You can,” he said, “sometimes. That was why—” he stopped, but he seemed on the verge of explaining that it was his certainty of Kipps being the right sort had led him to confer this great fortune upon him. He left that impression. He threw out a number of long sentences and material for sentences of a highly philosophical and incoherent character about Coincidences. It became evident he considered dramatic criticism in a perilously low condition …

  About four, Kipps found himself stranded, as it were, by a receding Chitterlow on a seat upon the leas.

  He was chiefly aware that Chitterlow was an overwhelming personality. He puffed his cheeks and blew.

  No doubt this was seeing life, but had he particularly wanted to see life that day? In a way, Chitterlow had interrupted him. The day he had designed for himself was altogether different from this. He had been going to read through a precious little volume called “Don’t” that Coote had sent round for him, a book of invaluable hints, a summary of British deportment that had only the one defect of being at points a little out of date.

  That reminded him he had intended to perform a difficult exercise called an afternoon call upon the Cootes, as a preliminary to doing it in deadly earnest upon the Walshinghams. It was no good today, anyhow, now.

  He came back to Chitterlow. He would have to explain to Chitterlow he was taking too much for granted, he would have to do that. It was so difficult to do in Chitterlow’s presence, though; in his absence, it was easy enough. This half share, and taking a theatre and all of it was going too far.

  The quarter share was right enough, he supposed, but even that—! A hundred pounds! What wealth is there left in the world after one has pai
d out a hundred pounds from it?

  He had to recall that, in a sense, Chitterlow had indeed brought him his fortune before he could face even that.

  You must not think too hardly of him. To Kipps, you see, there was as yet no such thing as proportion in these matters. A hundred pounds went to his horizon. A hundred pounds seemed to him just exactly as big as any other large sum of money.

  Chapter the Second

  The Walshinghams

  The Cootes live in a little house in Bouverie Square with a tangle of Virginia creeper up the veranda.

  Kipps had been troubled in his mind about knocking double or single—it is these things show what a man is made of—but happily, there was a bell.

  A queer little maid, with a big cap, admitted Kipps and took him through a bead curtain and a door into a little drawing room, with a black and gold piano, a glazed bookcase, a Moorish cozy corner and a draped looking glass overmantel bright with Regent Street ornaments and photographs of various intellectual lights. A number of cards of invitation to meetings and the match list of a Band of Hope cricket club were stuck into the looking glass frame, with Coote’s name as a Vice President. There was a bust of Beethoven over the bookcase, and the walls were thick with conscientiously executed but carelessly selected “views” in oil and watercolors and gilt frames. At the end of the room facing the light was a portrait that struck Kipps at first as being Coote in spectacles and feminine costume and that he afterward decided must be Coote’s mother. Then the original appeared, and he discovered that it was Coote’s elder and only sister, who kept house for him. She wore her hair in a knob behind, and the sight of the knob suggested to Kipps an explanation for a frequent gesture of Coote’s, a patting exploratory movement to the back of his head. And then it occurred to him that this was quite an absurd idea altogether.