KIPPS Read online

  He never read a book; there were none for him to read, and besides, in spite of Mr. Woodrow’s guidance through a cheap and cheaply annotated edition of the Tempest (English Literature) he had no taste that way; he never read any newspapers, except occasionally Tit-Bits or a ha’penny “comic.” His chief intellectual stimulus was an occasional argey-bargey that sprang up between Carshot and Buggins at dinner. Kipps listened as if to unparalleled wisdom and wit, and treasured all the gems of repartee in his heart against the time when he, too, should be a Buggins and have the chance and courage for speech.

  At times there came breaks in this routine—sale times, darkened by extra toil and work past midnight, but brightened by a sprat supper and some shillings in the way of “premiums.” And every year—not now and then, but every year—Mr. Shalford, with parenthetic admiration of his own generosity and glancing comparisons with the austerer days when he was apprenticed, conceded Kipps no less than ten days’ holiday—ten whole days every year! Many a poor soul at Portland might well envy the fortunate Kipps. Insatiable heart of man! But how those days were grudged and counted as they snatched themselves away from him one after another!

  Once a year came stocktaking, and at intervals gusts of “marking off” goods newly arrived. Then the splendors of Mr. Shalford’s being shone with oppressive brilliancy. “System!” he would say, “system. Come! ’ussel!” and issue sharp, confusing, contradictory orders very quickly. Carshot trotted about, confused, perspiring, his big nose up in the air, his little eyes on Mr. Shalford, his forehead crinkled, his lips always going to the formula “Oh, my heart and lungs!” The smart junior and the second apprentice vied with one another in obsequious alacrity. The smart junior aspired to Carshot’s position, and that made him almost violently subservient to Shalford. They all snapped at Kipps. Kipps held the blotting pad and the safety inkpot and a box of tickets, and ran and fetched things. If he put the ink down before he went to fetch things, Mr. Shalford usually knocked it over, and if he took it away, Mr. Shalford wanted it before he returned. “You make my tooth ache, Kipps,” Mr. Shalford would say. “You gimme n’ralgia. You got no more System in you than a bad potato.” And at the times when Kipps carried off the inkpot Mr. Shalford would become purple in the face and jab round with his dry pen at imaginary inkpots and swear, and Carshot would stand and vociferate, and the smart junior would run to the corner of the department and vociferate, and the second apprentice would pursue Kipps, vociferating, “Look Alive, Kipps! Look Alive! Ink, Man! Ink!”

  A vague self-disgust that shaped itself as an intense hate of Shalford and all his fellow creatures filled the soul of Kipps during these periods of storm and stress. He felt that the whole business was unjust and idiotic, but the why and the wherefore was too much for his unfortunate brain. His mind was a welter. One desire, the desire to dodge some at least of a pelting storm of disagreeable comment, guided him through a fumbling performance of his duties. His disgust was infinite! It was not decreased by the inflamed ankles and sore feet that form a normal incident in the business of making an English draper; and the senior apprentice, Minton, a gaunt, sullen-faced youngster with close-cropped, wiry, black hair, a loose, ugly mouth, and a mustache like a smudge of ink, directed his attention to deeper aspects of the question and sealed his misery.

  “When you get too old to work, they chuck you away,” said Minton. “Lor! you find old drapers everywhere—tramps, beggars, dock laborers, bus conductors—Quod. Anywhere but in a crib.”

  “Don’t they get shops of their own?”

  “Lord! ’Ow are they to get shops of their own? They ’aven’t any capital! How’s a draper’s shopman to save up five hundred pounds even? I tell you it can’t be done. You got to stick to cribs until it’s over. I tell you we’re in a blessed drainpipe, and we’ve got to crawl along it till we die.”

  The idea that fermented perpetually in the mind of Minton was to “hit the little beggar slap in the eye”—the little beggar being Mr. Shalford—“and see how his blessed System met that.”

  The threat filled Kipps with splendid anticipations whenever Shalford went marking off in Minton’s department. He would look at Minton and look at Shalford, and decide where he would best like Shalford hit … But for reasons known to himself, Shalford never pished and tushed with Minton, as he did at the harmless Carshot, and this interesting experiment upon the System was never attempted.

  4

  There were times when Kipps would lie awake, all others in the dormitory asleep and snoring, and think dismally of the outlook Minton pictured. Dimly he perceived the thing that had happened to him—how the great, stupid machine of retail trade had caught his life into its wheels, a vast, irresistible force which he had neither strength of will nor knowledge to escape. This was to be his life until his days should end. No adventures, no glory, no change, no freedom. Neither—though the force of that came home to him later—might he dream of effectual love and marriage. And there was a terrible something called the “swap,” or “the key of the street,” and “crib hunting,” of which the talk was scanty but sufficient. Night after night, he would resolve to enlist, to run away to sea, to set fire to the warehouse, or drown himself; and morning after morning he rose up and hurried downstairs in fear of a sixpenny fine. He would compare his dismal round of servile drudgery with those windy, sunlit days at Littlestone, those windows of happiness shining ever brighter as they receded. The little figure of Ann seemed in all these windows now.

  She, too, had happened on evil things. When Kipps went home for the first Christmas after he was bound, that great suspended resolve of his to kiss her flared up to hot determination, and he hurried out and whistled in the yard. There was a still silence, and then Old Kipps appeared behind him.

  “It’s no good your whistling there, my boy,” said Old Kipps in a loud, clear tone, designed to be audible over the wall. “They’ve cleared out all you ’ad any truck with. She’s gone as help to Ashford, my boy. Help! Slavey is what we used to call ’em, but times are changed. Wonder they didn’t say lady-’elp while they was about it. It ’ud be like ’em.” And Sid? Sid had gone, too. “Arrand boy or somethink,” said Old Kipps. “To one of these here brasted cycle shops.”

  “Has ’e!” said Kipps, with a feeling that he had been gripped about the chest, and he turned quickly and went indoors.

  Old Kipps, still supposing him present, went on to further observations of an anti-Pornick tendency …

  When Kipps got upstairs safe in his own bedroom, he sat down on the bed and stared at nothing. They were caught—they were all caught. All life took on the hue of one perpetual, dismal Monday morning. The Hurons were scattered, the wrecks and the beach had passed away from him, the sun of those warm evenings at Littlestone had set forevermore …

  The only pleasure left for the brief remainder of his holiday after that was to think he was not in the shop. Even that was transient. Two more days—one more day—half a day. When he went back, there were one or two very dismal nights indeed. He went so far as to write home some vague intimation of his feelings about business and his prospects, quoting Minton. But Mrs. Kipps answered him, “Did he want the Pornicks to say he wasn’t good enough to be a draper?” This dreadful possibility was, of course, conclusive in the matter. “No,” he resolved they should not say he failed at that.

  He derived much help from a “manly” sermon delivered in an enormous voice by a large, fat, sun-red clergyman, just home from a colonial bishopric he had resigned on the plea of illhealth, exhorting him that whatever his hand found to do, he was to do with all his might; and the revision of his catechism preparatory to his confirmation reminded him that it behooved him “to do his duty in that state of life unto which it shall please God to call him.”

  After a time, the sorrows of Kipps grew less acute, and save for a miracle the brief tragedy of his life was over. He subdued himself to his position even as his Church required of him, seeing moreover no way out of it.

  The earlies
t mitigation of his lot was that his soles and ankles became indurated to the perpetual standing. The next was an unexpected weekly whiff of freedom that came every Thursday. Mr. Shalford, after a brave stand for what he called “Innyvishal lib’ty” and the “Idea of my System,” a stand which he explained he made chiefly on patriotic grounds, was at last, under pressure of certain of his customers, compelled to fall in line with the rest of the local Early Closing Association, and Mr. Kipps could emerge in daylight and go where he listed for long, long hours. Moreover Minton, the pessimist, reached the end of his appointed time and left—to enlist in a cavalry regiment and go about this planet leading an insubordinate but interesting life, that ended at last in an intimate, vivid and really, you know, by no means painful or tragic night grapple in the Terah Valley. In a little while, Kipps cleaned windows no longer; he was serving customers (of the less important sort) and taking goods out on approval; and presently, he was the third apprentice, and his mustache was visible, and there were three apprentices whom he might legally snub and cuff. But one was (most dishonestly) too big to cuff in spite of his greener years.

  5

  There came still other distractions, the natural distractions of adolescence, to take his mind off the inevitable. His costume, for example, began to interest him more; he began to realize himself as a visible object, to find an interest in the costume room mirrors and the eyes of the girl apprentices.

  In this, he was helped by counsel and example. Pearce, his immediate senior, was by way of being what was called a Masher and preached his cult. During slack times, grave discussions about collars, ties, the cut of trouser legs, and the proper shape of a boot toe, were held in the Manchester department. In due course, Kipps went to a tailor, and his short jacket was replaced by a morning coat with tails. Stirred by this, he purchased at his own expense three stand-up collars to replace his former turn-down ones. They were nearly three inches high, higher than those Pearce wore, and they made his neck quite sore and left a red mark under his ears … So equipped, he found himself fit company even for this fashionable apprentice, who had now succeeded Minton in his seniority.

  Most potent help of all in the business of forgetting his cosmic disaster was this, that so soon as he was in tailcoats, the young ladies of the establishment began to discover that he was no longer a “horrid little boy.” Hitherto they had tossed heads at him and kept him in his place. Now they discovered that he was a “nice boy,” which is next door at least to being a “feller,” and in some ways even preferable. It is painful to record that his fidelity to Ann failed at their first onset. I am fully sensible how entirely better this story would be from a sentimental point of view if he had remained true to that early love. Only then it would have been a different story altogether. And at least Kipps was thus far true, that with none of these later loves was there any of that particular quality that linked Ann’s flushed face and warmth and the inner things of life so inseparably together. Though they were not without emotions of various sorts.

  It was one of the young ladies in the costume room who first showed by her manner that he was a visible object and capable of exciting interest. She talked to him; she encouraged him to talk to her, she lent him a book she possessed, and darned a sock for him, and said she would be his elder sister. She allowed him to escort her to church with a great air of having induced him to go. Then she investigated his eternal welfare, overcame a certain affectation of virile indifference to religion, and extorted a promise that he would undergo “confirmation.” This excited the other young lady in the costumes, her natural rival, and she set herself with great charm and subtlety to the capture of the ripening heart of Kipps. She took a more worldly line. She went for a walk with him to the pier on Sunday afternoon and explained to him how a gentleman must always walk “outside” a lady on a pavement, and how all gentlemen wore or at least carried gloves, and generally the broad beginnings of the British social ideal. Afterward, the ladies exchanged “words” upon Sabbatical grounds. In this way was the toga virilis bestowed on Kipps, and he became recognized as a suitable object for that Platonic Eros whose blunted darts devastate even the very highest-class establishments. In this way, too, did that pervading ambition of the British young man to be, if not a “gentleman,” at least mistakably like one, take root in his heart.

  He took to these new interests with quite natural and personal zest. He became initiated into the mysteries of “flirting” and—at a slightly later stage, and with some leading hints from Pearce, who was of a communicative disposition in these matters—of the milder forms of “spooning.” Very soon, he was engaged. Before two years were out, he had been engaged six times and was beginning to be rather a desperate fellow, so far as he could make out. Desperate, but quite gentlemanly, be it understood, and without let or hindrance to the fact that he was, in four brief lessons, “prepared” by a distant-mannered and gloomy young curate, and “confirmed” a member of the Established Church.

  The engagements in drapery establishments do not necessarily involve a subsequent marriage. They are essentially more refined, less coarsely practical, and altogether less binding than the engagements of the vulgar rich. These young ladies do not like not to be engaged—it is so unnatural, and Mr. Kipps was as easy to get engaged to as one could wish. There are, from the young lady’s point of view, many conveniences in being engaged. You get an escort for church and walks and so forth. It is not quite the thing to walk abroad with a “feller,” much more to “spoon” with him when he is neither one’s fiancé nor an adopted brother; it is considered either a little fast, or else as savoring of the “walking-out” habits of the servant girls. Now, such is the sweetness of human charity, that the shop young lady in England has just the same horror of doing anything that savors of the servant girl as the lady journalist, let us say, has of anything savoring of the shop girl, or the really quite nice young lady has of anything savoring of any sort of girl who has gone down into the economic battlefield to earn herself a living … But the very deepest of these affairs was still among the shallow places of love; at best, it was paddling where it is decreed that men must sink or swim. Of the deep and dangerous places, and of the huge buoyant lift of its waves, he tasted nothing. Affairs of clothes and vanities they were, jealousies about a thing said, flatteries and mutual boastings, climaxes in the answering grasp of hands, the temerarious use of Christian names, culminations in a walk, or a near confidence, or a little pressure more or less. Close-sitting on a seat after twilight, with some little fondling, was indeed the boldest of a lover’s adventures, the utmost limit of his enterprises in the service of that stark Great Lady, who is the daughter of Uranus and the sea. The “young ladies” who reigned in his heart came and went like people in an omnibus: there was the vehicle, so to speak, upon the road, and they entered and left it without any cataclysm of emotion. For all that, this development of the sex interest was continuously very interesting to Kipps, and kept him going as much as anything through all these servile years …

  6

  For a tailpiece to this chapter, on e may vignette one of those little affairs.

  It is a bright Sunday afternoon; the scene is a secluded little seat halfway down the front of the leas, and Kipps is four years older than when he parted from Ann. There is a quite perceptible down upon his upper lip, and his costume is just as tremendous a “mash” as lies within his means. His collar is so high that it scars his inaggressive jawbone, and his hat has a curly brim, his tie shows taste, his trousers are modestly brilliant, and his boots have light cloth uppers and button at the side. He jabs at the gravel before him with a cheap cane and glances sideways at Flo Bates, the young lady from the cash desk. She is wearing a brilliant blouse and a gaily trimmed hat. There is an air of fashion about her that might disappear under the analysis of a woman of the world, but which is quite sufficient to make Kipps very proud to be distinguished as her particular “feller,” and to be allowed at temperate intervals to use her Christian name.
/>   The conversation is light and gay in the modern style, and Flo keeps on smiling, good temper being her special charm.

  “Ye see, you don’ mean what I mean,” he is saying.

  “Well, what do you mean?”

  “Not what you mean!”

  “Well, tell me.”

  “Ah! That’s another story.”

  Pause. They look meaningly at one another.

  “You are a one for being roundabout,” says the lady.

  “Well, you’re not so plain, you know.”

  “Not plain?”

  “No.”

  “You don’t mean to say I’m roundabout?”

  “No. I mean to say … though—” Pause.

  “Well?”

  “You’re not a bit plain—you’re” (his voice jumps up to a squeak) “pretty. See?”

  “Oh, get out!”—her voice lifts also—with pleasure.

  She strikes at him with her glove, then glances suddenly at a ring upon her finger. Her smile disappears momentarily. Another pause. Eyes meet, and the smile returns.

  “I wish I knew—” says Kipps.

  “Knew—?”

  “Where you got that ring.”

  She lifts the hand with the ring until her eyes just show (very prettily) over it. “You’d just like to know,” she says slowly and smiles still more brightly with the sense of successful effect.

  “I dessay I could guess.”

  “I dessay you couldn’t.”

  “Couldn’t I?”

  “No!”

  “Guess it in three.”

  “Not the name.”

  “Ah!”

  “Ah!”

  “Well, anyhow lemme look at it.”

  He looks at it. Pause. Giggles, slight struggle, and a slap on Kipps’ coat sleeve. A passerby appears down the path, and she hastily withdraws her hand.