KIPPS Read online

  “Sisters,” he said, “is rot. That’s what sisters are. Girls, if you like, but sisters—no!”

  “But ain’t sisters girls?”

  “N-eaow!” said Sid, with unspeakable scorn.

  And Kipps answered, “Of course. I didn’t mean—I wasn’t thinking of that.”

  “You got a girl?” asked Sid, spitting very cleverly again.

  Kipps admitted his deficiency. He felt compunction.

  “You don’t know who my girl is, Art Kipps—I bet.”

  “Who is, then?” asked Kipps, still chiefly occupied by his own poverty.

  “Ah!”

  Kipps let a moment elapse before he did his duty. “Tell us!”

  Sid eyed him and hesitated. “Secret?” he said.

  “Secret.”

  “Dying solemn?”

  “Dying solemn!” Kipps’ self-concentration passed into curiosity.

  Sid administered a terrible oath. Even after that precaution, he adhered lovingly to his facts. “It begins with a Nem,” he said, doling them out parsimoniously. “M-A-U-D,” he spelled, with a stern eye on Kipps, “C-H-A-R-T-E-R-I-S.”

  Now, Maud Charteris was a young person of eighteen and the daughter of the vicar of St. Bavon’s—besides which she had a bicycle—so that as her name unfolded the face of Kipps lengthened with respect. “Get out!” he gasped incredulously. “She ain’t your girl, Sid Pornick.”

  “She is!” answered Sid stoutly.

  “What—truth?”

  “Truth.”

  Kipps scrutinized his face. “Really?”

  Sid touched wood, whistled, and repeated a binding doggerel with great solemnity.

  Kipps still struggled with the amazing new light on the world about him. “D’you mean—she knows?”

  Sid flushed deeply, and his aspect became stern and gloomy. He resumed his wistful scrutiny of the sunlit sea. “I’d die for that girl, Art Kipps,” he said presently, and Kipps did not press a question he felt to be ill-timed. “I’d do anything she asked me to do,” said Sid—“just anything. If she was to ask me to chuck myself into the sea.” He met Kipps’ eye. “I would,” he said.

  They were pensive for a space, and then Sid began to discourse in fragments of love, a theme upon which Kipps had already in a furtive way meditated a little, but which, apart from badinage, he had never yet heard talked about in the light of day. Of course, many and various aspects of life had come to light in the muffled exchange of knowledge that went on under the shadow of Woodrow, but this of sentimental love was not among them. Sid, who was a boy with an imagination, having once broached this topic, opened his heart, or at any rate a new wing of his heart, to Kipps, and found no fault with Kipps for lack of return. He produced a thumbed novelette that had played a part in his sentimental awakening; he proffered it to Kipps and confessed there was a character in it, a baronet, singularly like himself. This baronet was a person of volcanic passions which he concealed beneath a demeanor of “icy cynicism.” The utmost expression he permitted himself was to grit his teeth; and now his attention was called to it, Kipps remarked that Sid also had a habit of gritting his teeth—and indeed had had all the morning. They read for a time, and presently Sid talked again. The conception of love Sid made evident was compact of devotion and much-spirited fighting and a touch of mystery, but through all that cloud of talk there floated before Kipps a face that was flushed and hair that was tossed aside.

  So they budded, sitting on the blackening old wreck in which men had lived and died, looking out to sea, talking of that other sea upon which they must presently embark …

  They ceased to talk, and Sid read; but Kipps falling behind with the reading and not wishing to admit that he read slower than Sid, whose education was of the inferior elementary school brand, lapsed into meditation.

  “I would like to ’ave a girl,” said Kipps. “I mean just to talk to and all that …”

  A floating object distracted them at last from this obscure topic. They abandoned the wreck and followed the new interest a mile along the beach, bombarding it with stones until it came to land. They had inclined to a view that it would contain romantic mysteries, but it was simply an ill-preserved kitten—too much even for them. And at last, they were drawn dinnerward and went home hungry and pensive side by side.

  5

  But Kipps’ imagination had been warmed by that talk of love, and in the afternoon when he saw Ann Pornick in the High Street and said, “Hello!” it was a different “hello” from that of their previous intercourse. And when they had passed, they both looked back and caught each other doing so. Yes, he did want a girl badly …

  Afterward, he was distracted by a traction engine going through the town, and his aunt had got some sprats for supper. When he was in bed, however, sentiment came upon him again in a torrent quite abruptly and abundantly, and he put his head under the pillow and whispered very softly, “I love Ann Pornick,” as a sort of supplementary devotion.

  In his subsequent dreams, he ran races with Ann, and they lived in a wreck together, and always her face was flushed and her hair about her face. They just lived in a wreck and ran races, and were very, very fond of one another. And their favorite food was rock chocolate, dates, such as one buys off barrows, and sprats—fried sprats …

  In the morning, he could hear Ann singing in the scullery next door. He listened to her for some time, and it was clear to him that he must put things before her.

  Towards dusk that evening, they chanced on one another at the gate by the church; but though there was much in his mind, it stopped there with a resolute shyness until he and Ann were out of breath catching cockchafers, and were sitting on that gate of theirs again. Ann sat up upon the gate, dark against vast masses of flaming crimson and darkling purple, and her eyes looked at Kipps from a shadowed face. There came a stillness between them, and quite abruptly, he was moved to tell his love.

  “Ann,” he said, “I do like you. I wish you was my girl … I say, Ann: will you be my girl?”

  Ann made no pretense of astonishment. She weighed the proposal for a moment with her eyes on Kipps. “If you like, Artie,” she said lightly. “I don’t mind if I am.”

  “All right,” said Kipps, breathless with excitement, “then you are.”

  “All right,” said Ann.

  Something seemed to fall between them, and they no longer looked openly at one another. “Lor’!” cried Ann suddenly, “see that one!” and jumped down and darted after a cockchafer that had boomed within a yard of her face. And with that, they were girl and boy again …

  They avoided their new relationship painfully.

  They did not recur to it for several days, though they met twice. Both felt that there remained something before this great experience was complete, but there was an infinite diffidence about the next step. Kipps talked in fragments of all sorts of matters, telling particularly of the great things that were being done to make a man and a draper of him, how he had two new pairs of trousers and a black coat and four new shirts. And all the while, his imagination was urging him to that unknown next step, and when he was alone and in the dark, he became even an enterprising wooer. It became evident to him that it would be nice to take Ann by the hand; even the decorous novelettes Sid affected egged him on to that greater nearness of intimacy. Then a great idea came to him in a paragraph called “Lovers’ Tokens” that he read in a torn fragment of Tit-Bits. It fell into the measure of his courage—a divided sixpence! He secured his aunt’s best scissors, fished a sixpence out of his jejune tin money box, and jabbed his finger in a varied series of attempts to get it in half. When they met again, the sixpence was still undivided. He had not intended to mention the matter to her at that stage, but it came up spontaneously. He endeavored to explain the theory of broken sixpences and his unexpected failure to break one.

  “But what you break it for?” said Ann. “It’s no good if it’s broke.”

  “It’s a Token,” said Kipps.

  “Like �
�?”

  “Oh, you keep half, and I keep half, and when we’re separated, you look at your half, and I look at mine—see! Then we think of each other.”

  “Oh!” said Ann, and appeared to assimilate this information.

  “Only I can’t get it in ’arf nohow,” said Kipps.

  They discussed this difficulty for some time without illumination. Then Ann had a happy thought. “Tell you what,” she said, starting away from him abruptly and laying a hand on his arm, “you let me ’ave it, Artie. I know where father keeps his file.”

  Kipps handed her the sixpence, and they came upon a pause.

  “I’ll easily do it,” said Ann.

  In considering the sixpence side by side, his head had come near her cheek. Quite abruptly, he was moved to take his next step into the unknown mysteries of love.

  “Ann,” he said, and gulped at his temerity, “I do love you. Straight. I’d do anything for you, Ann. Really—I would.”

  He paused for breath. She answered nothing, but she was no doubt enjoying herself. He came yet closer to her—his shoulder touched hers. “Ann, I wish you’d—”

  He stopped.

  “What?” said Ann.

  “Ann—lemme kiss you.”

  Things seemed to hang for a space; his tone, the drop of his courage, made the thing incredible as he spoke. Kipps was not of that bold order of wooers who impose conditions.

  Ann perceived that she was not prepared for kissing, after all. Kissing, she said, was silly, and when Kipps would have displayed a belated enterprise, she flung away from him. He essayed argument. He stood afar off, as it were—the better part of a yard—and said she might let him kiss her, and then that he didn’t see what good it was for her to be his girl if he couldn’t kiss her.

  She repeated that kissing was silly. A certain estrangement took them homeward. They arrived in the dusky High Street not exactly together, and not exactly apart, but struggling. They had not kissed, but all the guilt of kissing was between them. When Kipps saw the portly contours of his uncle standing dimly in the shop doorway, his footsteps faltered, and the space between our young couple increased. Above, the window over Pornick’s shop was open, and Mrs. Pornick was visible, taking the air. Kipps assumed an expression of extreme innocence. He found himself face to face with his uncle’s advanced outposts of waistcoat buttons. “Where ye bin, my boy?”

  “Bin for a walk, uncle.”

  “Not along of that brat of Pornick’s?”

  “Along of who?”

  “That gell”—indicating Ann with his pipe.

  “Oh, no, Uncle!”—very faintly.

  “Run in, my boy.”

  Old Kipps stood aside, with an oblique glance upward, and his nephew brushed clumsily by him and vanished out of sight of the street, into the vague obscurity of the little shop. The door closed behind Old Kipps with a nervous jangle of its bell, and he set himself to light the single oil lamp that illuminated his shop at nights. It was an operation requiring care and watching, or else it flared and “smelt.” Often it smelt after all. Kipps, for some reason found the dusky living room with his aunt in it too populous for his feelings and went upstairs.

  “That brat of Pornick’s!” It seemed to him that a horrible catastrophe had occurred. He felt he had identified himself inextricably with his uncle and cut himself off from her forever by saying, “Oh, no!” At supper, he was so visibly depressed that his aunt asked him if he wasn’t feeling well. Under this imminent threat of medicine, he assumed an unnatural cheerfulness.

  He lay awake for nearly half an hour that night, groaning because things had all gone wrong—because Ann wouldn’t let him kiss her, and because his uncle had called her a brat. It seemed to Kipps almost as though he himself had called her a brat …

  There came an interval during which Ann was altogether inaccessible. One, two, three days passed, and he did not see her. Sid, he met several times; they went fishing, and twice they bathed, but though Sid lent and received back two further love stories, they talked no more of love. They kept themselves in accord, however, agreeing that the most flagrantly sentimental story was “proper.” Kipps always wanted to speak of Ann, but never dared to do so. He saw her on Sunday evening, going off to chapel. She was more beautiful than ever in her Sunday clothes, but she pretended not to see him because her mother was with her. But he thought she pretended not to see him because she had given him up forever. Brat!—Who could be expected ever to forgive that? He abandoned himself to despair; he ceased even to haunt the places where she might be found.

  6

  With paralyzing unexpectedness came the end.

  Mr. Shalford, the draper at Folkestone to whom he was to be bound apprentice, had expressed a wish to “shape the lad a bit” before the autumn sale. Kipps became aware that his box was being packed, and gathered the full truth of things on the evening before his departure. He became feverishly eager to see Ann just once more. He made silly and needless excuses to go out into the yard; he walked three times across the street without any excuse at all to look up at the Pornick windows. Still, she was hidden. He grew desperate. It was within half an hour of his departure that he came on Sid.

  “Hello!” he said; “I’m orf!”

  “Business?”

  “Yes.”

  Pause.

  “I say, Sid. You going ’ome?”

  “Straight now.”

  “D’you mind? Ask Ann about that.”

  “About what?”

  “She’ll know.”

  And Sid said he would. But even that, it seemed, failed to evoke Ann.

  At last, the Folkestone bus rumbled up, and he ascended. His aunt stood in the doorway to see him off. His uncle assisted with the box and portmanteau. Only furtively could he glance up at the Pornick windows, and still, it seemed Ann hardened her heart against him. “Get up!” said the driver, and the hoofs began to clatter. No—she would not come out even to see him off. The bus was in motion, and Old Kipps was going back into his shop. Kipps stared in front of him, assuring himself that he did not care.

  He heard a door slam and instantly craned out his neck to look back. He knew that slam so well. Behold! Out of the haberdasher’s door, a small, untidy figure in homely pink print had shot resolutely into the road and was sprinting in pursuit. In a dozen seconds, she was abreast of the bus. At the sight of her, Kipps’ heart began to beat very quickly, but he made no immediate motion of recognition.

  “Artie!” she cried breathlessly, “Artie! Artie! You know! I got that!”

  The bus was already quickening its pace and leaving her behind again when Kipps realized what “that” meant. He became animated, he gasped, and gathered his courage together, and mumbled an incoherent request to the driver to “stop just a jiff for sunthin’.” The driver grunted, as the disparity of their years demanded, and then the bus had pulled up, and Ann was below.

  She leaped up upon the wheel. Kipps looked down into Ann’s face, and it was foreshortened and resolute. He met her eyes just for one second as their hands touched. He was not a reader of eyes. Something passed quickly from hand to hand, something that the driver, alert at the corner of his eye, was not allowed to see. Kipps hadn’t a word to say, and all she said was, “I done it,’smorning.” It was like a blank space in which something pregnant should have been written and wasn’t. Then she dropped down, and the bus moved forward.

  After the lapse of about ten seconds, it occurred to him to stand and wave his new bowler hat at her over the corner of the bus stop, and to shout hoarsely, “Goo-bye, Ann! Don’t forget me while I’m away!”

  She stood in the road looking after him, and presently she waved her hand.

  He remained standing unstably, his bright, flushed face looking back at her, and his hair fluffing in the wind, and he waved his hat until, at last, the bend of the road hid her from his eyes. Then he turned about and sat down, and presently he began to put the half sixpence he held clenched in his hand into his trouser pocket. He looked
sideways at the driver, to judge how much he had seen.

  Then he fell a-thinking. He resolved that, come what might, when he came back to New Romney at Christmas, he would by hook or by crook kiss Ann.

  Then everything would be perfect and right, and he would be perfectly happy.

  Chapter the Second

  The Emporium

  When Kipps left New Romney, with a small yellow tin box, a still smaller portmanteau, a new umbrella, and a keepsake half-sixpence, to become a draper, he was a youngster of fourteen, thin, with whimsical drakes’ tails at the poll of his head, smallish features, and eyes that were sometimes very light and sometimes very dark, gifts those of his birth; and by the nature of his training he was indistinct in his speech, confused in his mind, and retreating in his manners. Inexorable fate had appointed him to serve his country in commerce, and the same national bias towards private enterprise and leaving bad alone, which entrusted his general education to Mr. Woodrow, now indentured him firmly into the hands of Mr. Shalford, of the Folkestone Drapery Bazaar. Apprenticeship is still the recognized English way to the distributing branch of the social service. If Mr. Kipps had been so unfortunate as to have been born a German, he might have been educated in an elaborate and costly special school (“over-educated—crammed up”—Old Kipps) to fit him for his end—such being their pedagogic way. He might … But why make unpatriotic reflections in a novel? There was nothing pedagogic about Mr. Shalford.

  He was an irascible, energetic little man with hairy hands, for the most part under his coattails, a long, shiny, bald head, a pointed, aquiline nose a little askew, and a neatly trimmed beard. He walked lightly and with a confident jerk, and he was given to humming. He had added to exceptional business “push,” bankruptcy under the old dispensation, and judicious matrimony. His establishment was now one of the most considerable in Folkestone, and he insisted on every inch of frontage by alternate stripes of green and yellow down the houses over the shops. His shops were numbered 3, 5, and 7 on the street, and on his billheads “3 to 7”. He encountered the abashed and awestricken Kipps with the praises of his system and himself. He spread himself out behind his desk with a grip on the lapel of his coat and made Kipps a sort of speech. “We expect y’r to work, y’r know, and we expect y’r to study our interests,” explained Mr. Shalford in the regal and commercial plural. “Our system here is the best system y’r could have. I made it, and I ought to know. I began at the very bottom of the ladder when I was fourteen, and there isn’t a step in it I don’t know—not a step. Mr. Booch in the desk will give y’r the card of rules and fines. Just wait a minute.” He pretended to be busy with some dusty memoranda under a paper-weight, while Kipps stood in a sort of paralysis of awe regarding his new master’s oval baldness. “Two thous’n three forty-seven pounds,” whispered Mr. Shalford audibly, feigning forgetfulness of Kipps. Clearly, a place of great transactions!