KIPPS Read online

  “We’re not hurting you, are we?” she said.

  “Not a bit,” said Kipps, as he would have said if they had been sawing his arm off.

  “We’re not experts, you know,” said the freckled girl.

  “I’m sure it’s a dreadful cut,” said Miss Walshingham.

  “It ain’t much really,” said Kipps, “and you’re taking a lot of trouble. I’m sorry I broke that window. I can’t think what I could have been doing.”

  “It isn’t so much the cut at the time, it’s the poisoning afterward,” came the voice of the maiden lady.

  “Of course, I’m quite willing to pay for the window,” panted Kipps opulently.

  “We must make it just as tight as possible to stop the bleeding,” said the freckled girl.

  “I don’t think it’s much really,” said Kipps. “I’m awful sorry I broke that window, though.”

  “Put your finger on the knot, dear,” said the freckled girl.

  “Eh?” said Kipps; “I mean—”

  Both the young ladies became very intent on the knot, and Mr. Kipps was very red and very intent upon the two young ladies.

  “Mortified, and had to be sawn off,” said the maiden lady.

  “Sawn off?” said the lodging-house keeper.

  “Sawn right off,” said the maiden lady, and jabbed at her mangled design.

  “There,” said the freckled girl, “I think that ought to do. You’re sure it’s not too tight?”

  “Not a bit,” said Kipps.

  He met Miss Walshingham’s eye and smiled to show how little he cared for wounds and pain. “It’s only a little cut,” he added.

  The maiden lady appeared as an addition to their group. “You should have washed the wound, dear,” she said. “I was just telling Miss Collis.” She peered through her glasses at the bandage. “That doesn’t look quite right,” she remarked critically. “You should have taken the ambulance classes. But I suppose it will have to do. Are you hurting?”

  “Not a bit,” said Kipps, and he smiled at them all with the air of a brave soldier in hospital.

  “I’m sure it must hurt,” said Miss Walshingham.

  “Anyhow, you’re a very good patient,” said the girl with the freckles.

  Mr. Kipps became quite pink. “I’m only sorry I broke the window—that’s all,” he said. “But who would have thought it was going to break like that?”

  Pause.

  “I’m afraid you won’t be able to go on carving tonight,” said Miss Walshingham.

  “I’ll try,” said Kipps. “It really doesn’t hurt—not anything to matter.”

  Presently Miss Walshingham came to him as he carved heroically with his hand bandaged in her handkerchief. There was a touch of a novel interest in her eyes. “I’m afraid you’re not getting on very fast,” she said.

  The freckled girl looked up and regarded Miss Walshingham.

  “I’m doing a little, anyhow,” said Kipps. “I don’t want to waste any time. A feller like me hasn’t much time to spare.”

  It struck the girls that there was a quality of modest disavowal about that “feller like me.” It gave them a light into this obscure person, and Miss Walshingham ventured to commend his work as “promising” and to ask whether he meant to follow it up. Kipps didn’t “altogether know”—“things depended on so much,” but if he was in Folkestone next winter, he certainly should. It did not occur to Miss Walshingham at the time to ask why his progress in art depended upon his presence in Folkestone. There was some more questions and answers—they continued to talk to him for a little time, even when Mr. Chester Coote had come into the room—and when at last the conversation had died out, it dawned upon Kipps just how much his cut wrist had done for him …

  He went to sleep that night revising that conversation for the twentieth time, treasuring this and expanding that, and inserting things he might have said to Miss Walshingham, things he might still say about himself—in relation more or less explicit to her. He wasn’t quite sure if he wouldn’t like his arm to mortify a bit, which would make him interesting, or to heal up absolutely, which would show the exceptional purity of his blood …

  4

  The affair of the broken window happened late in April, and the class came to an end in May. In that interval, there were several small incidents and great developments of emotion. I have done Kipps no justice if I have made it seem that his face was unsightly. It was, as the freckled girl pointed out to Helen Walshingham, an “interesting” face, and that aspect of him which presented chiefly erratic hair and glowing ears ceased to prevail.

  They talked him over, and the freckled girl discovered there was something “wistful” in his manner. They detected a “natural delicacy,” and the freckled girl set herself to draw him out from that time forth. The freckled girl was nineteen, and very wise and motherly and benevolent, and really, she greatly preferred drawing out Kipps to wood carving. It was quite evident to her that Kipps was in love with Helen Walshingham, and it struck her as a queer and romantic and pathetic and extremely interesting phenomenon. And as at that time, she regarded Helen as “simply lovely,” it seemed only right and proper that she should assist Kipps in his modest efforts to place himself in a state of absolute abandon upon her altar.

  Under her sympathetic management, the position of Kipps was presently defined quite clearly. He was unhappy in his position—misunderstood. He told her he “didn’t seem to get on like” with customers, and she translated this for him as “too sensitive.” The discontent with his fate in life, the dreadful feeling that education was slipping by him, troubles that time and usage were glazing over a little, revived to their old acuteness but not to their old hopelessness. As a basis for sympathy, indeed, they were even a source of pleasure.

  And one day at dinner it happened that Carshot and Buggins fell talking of “these here writers,” and how Dickens had been a labeler of blacking and Thackeray “an artis’ who couldn’t sell a drawing,” and how Samuel Johnson had walked to London without any boots, having thrown away his only pair “out of pride.” “It’s luck,” said Buggins, “to a very large extent. They just happen to hit on something that catches on, and there you are!”

  “Nice easy life they have of it, too,” said Miss Mergle. “Write just an hour or so, and done for the day! Almost like gentlefolks.”

  “There’s more work in it than you’d think,” said Carshot, stooping to a mouthful.

  “I wouldn’t mind changing, for all that,” said Buggins. “I’d like to see one of these here authors marking off with Jimmy.”

  “I think they copy from each other a good deal,” said Miss Mergle.

  “Even then (chup, chup, chup),” said Carshot, “there’s writing it out in their own hands.”

  They proceeded to enlarge upon the literary life, on its ease and dignity, on the social recognition accorded to those who led it, and on the ample gratifications their vanity achieved. “Pictures everywhere—never get a new suit without being photographed—almost like Royalty,” said Miss Mergle. And all this talk impressed the imagination of Kipps very greatly. Here was a class that seemed to bridge the gulf. On the one hand essentially low, but by factitious circumstances capable of entering upon those levels of social superiority to which all true Englishmen aspire, those levels from which one may tip a butler, scorn a tailor, and even commune with those who lead “men” into battle. “Almost like gentlefolks”—that was it! He brooded over these things in the afternoon, until they blossomed into daydreams. Suppose, for example, he had chanced to write a book, a well-known book, under an assumed name, and yet kept on being a draper all the time … Impossible, of course, but suppose—it made quite a long dream.

  And at the next wood carving class he let it be drawn from him that his real choice in life was to be a Nawther—“only one doesn’t get a chance.”

  After that there were times when Kipps had that pleasant sense that comes of attracting interest. He was a mute, inglorious Dickens, or at a
ny rate something of that sort, and they were all taking him at that. The discovery of this indefinable “something in” him, the development of which was now painfully restricted and impossible, did much to bridge the gulf between himself and Miss Walshingham. He was unfortunate, he was futile, but he was not “common.” Even now, with help…? The two girls, and the freckled girl in particular, tried to “stir him up” to some effort to do his imputed potentialities justice. They were still young enough to believe that to nice and nice-ish members of the male sex—more especially when under the stimulus of feminine encouragement—nothing is finally impossible.

  The freckled girl was, I say, the stage manager of this affair, but Miss Walshingham was the presiding divinity. A touch of proprietorship came in her eyes at times when she looked at him. He was hers—unconditionally—and she knew it.

  To her directly Kipps scarcely ever made a speech. The enterprising things that he was continually devising to say to her, he usually did not say, or he said them in a suitably modified form to the girl with the freckles. And one day the girl with the freckles smote him to the heart. She said to him, with the faintest indication of her head across the classroom to where her friend reached a cast from the shelf, “I do think Helen Walshingham is sometimes the loveliest person in the world. Look at her now!”

  Kipps gasped for a moment. The moment lengthened, and she regarded him as an intelligent young surgeon might regard an operation without anesthetics.

  “You’re right,” he said, and then looked at her with an entire abandonment of visage.

  She colored under his glare of silent avowal, and he blushed brightly. “I think so, too,” he said hoarsely, cleared his throat, and after a meditative moment proceeded sacramentally with his wood carving.

  “You are wonderful,” said the freckled girl to Miss Walshingham, apropos of nothing, as they went on their way home together. “He simply adores you.”

  “But, my dear, what have I done?” said Helen.

  “That’s just it,” said the freckled girl. “What have you done?”

  And then with a terrible swiftness came the last class of the course, to terminate this relationship altogether. Kipps was careless of dates, and the thing came upon him with an effect of abrupt surprise. Just as his petals were expanding so hopefully, “Finis,” and the thing was at an end. But Kipps did not fully appreciate that the end was indeed and really and truly the end until he was back in the Emporium after the end was over.

  The end began practically in the middle of the last class, when the freckled girl broached the topic of terminations. She developed the question of just how he was going on after the class ended. She hoped he would stick to certain resolutions of self-improvement he had breathed. She said quite honestly that he owed it to himself to develop his possibilities. He expressed firm resolve but dwelt on difficulties. He had no books. She instructed him how to get books from the public library. He was to get a form of application for a ticket signed by a ratepayer; and he said “of course,” when she said Mr. Shalford would do that, though all the time he knew perfectly well, it would “never do” to ask Mr. Shalford for anything of the sort. She explained that she was going to North Wales for the summer, information he received without immediate regret. At intervals, he expressed his intention of going on with wood carving when the summer was over, and once he added “If—”

  She considered herself extremely delicate not to press for the completion of that “if—”

  After that talk, there was an interval of languid wood carving and watching Miss Walshingham.

  Then presently there came a bustle of packing, a great ceremony of handshaking all round by Miss Collis and the maiden lady of ripe years, and then Kipps found himself outside the classroom, on the landing with his two friends. It seemed to him he had only just learned that this was the last class of all. There came a little pause, and the freckled girl suddenly went back into the classroom and left Kipps and Miss Walshingham alone together for the first time. Kipps was instantly breathless. She looked at his face with a glance that mingled sympathy and curiosity, and held out her white hand.

  “Well, good-bye, Mr. Kipps,” she said.

  He took her hand and held it. “I’d do anything,” said Kipps, and had not the temerity to add, “for you.” He stopped awkwardly. He shook her hand and said, “Good-bye.”

  There was a little pause. “I hope you will have a pleasant holiday,” she said.

  “I shall come back to the class next year, anyhow,” said Kipps valiantly, and turned abruptly to the stairs.

  “I hope you will,” said Miss Walshingham.

  He turned back towards her. “Really?” he said.

  “I hope everybody will come back.”

  “I will—anyhow,” said Kipps. “You may count on that,” and he tried to make his tones significant.

  They looked at one another through a little pause.

  “Good-bye,” she said.

  Kipps lifted his hat. She turned towards the classroom.

  “Well?” said the freckled girl, coming back towards her.

  “Nothing,” said Helen. “At least—presently.” And she became very energetic about some scattered tools on a desk. The freckled girl went out and stood for a moment at the head of the stairs. When she came back, she looked very hard at her friend. The incident struck her as important—wonderfully important. It was unassimilable, of course, and absurd, but there it was, the thing that is so cardinal to a girl, the emotion, the subservience, the crowning triumph of her sex. She could not help feeling that Helen took it, on the whole, a little too hard.

  Chapter the Fourth

  Chitterlow

  The hour of the class on the following Thursday found Kipps in a state of nearly incredible despondency. He was sitting with his eyes on the reading room clock, his chin resting on his fists and his elbows on the accumulated comic papers that were comic alas! In vain! He paid no heed to the little man in spectacles glaring opposite to him, famishing for Fun. In this place it was he had sat night after night, each night more blissful than the last, waiting until it should be time to go to Her! And then—bliss! And now the hour had come and there was no class! There would be no class now until next October; it might be there would never be a class so far as he was concerned again.

  It might be there would never be a class again, for Shalford, taking exception at a certain absent-mindedness that led to mistakes and more particularly to the ticketing of several articles in Kipps’ Manchester window upside down, had been “on to” him for the past few days in an exceedingly onerous manner …

  He sighed profoundly, pushed the comic papers back—they were rent away from him instantly by the little man in spectacles—and tried the old engravings of Folkestone in the past, that hung about the room. But these, too, failed to minister to his bruised heart. He wandered about the corridors for a time and watched the library indicator for a while. Wonderful thing that! But it did not hold him for long. People came and laughed near him, and that jarred with him dreadfully. He went out of the building, and a beastly cheerful barrel organ mocked him in the street. He was moved to a desperate resolve to go down to the beach. There, it might be, he would be alone. The sea might be rough—and attuned to him. It would certainly be dark.

  “If I ’ad a penny, I’m blest if I wouldn’t go and chuck myself off the end of the pier … She’d never miss me …” He followed a deepening vein of thought.

  “Penny, though! It’s tuppence,” he said after a space.

  He went down Dover Street in a state of profound melancholia—at the pace and mood, as it were, of his own funeral procession—and he crossed at the corner of Tontine Street heedless of all mundane things. And there it was that fortune came upon him, in disguise and with a loud shout, the shout of a person endowed with an unusually rich, full voice, followed immediately by a violent blow in the back.

  His hat was over his eyes, and an enormous weight rested on his shoulders, and something kicked him in the b
ack of his calf.

  Then he was on all fours in some mud that fortune, in conjunction with the Folkestone corporation and in the pursuit of equally mysterious ends, had heaped together even lavishly for his reception.

  He remained in that position for some seconds, awaiting further developments and believing almost anything broken before his heart. Gathering at last that this temporary violence of things, in general, was over, and being perhaps assisted by a clutching hand, he arose and found himself confronting a figure holding a bicycle and thrusting forward a dark face in anxious scrutiny.

  “You aren’t hurt, Matey?” gasped the figure.

  “Was that you ’it me?” said Kipps.

  “It’s these handles, you know,” said the figure, with an air of being a fellow sufferer. “They’re too low. And when I go to turn, if I don’t remember, Bif!—and I’m into something.”

  “Well—you give me a oner in the back—anyhow,” said Kipps, taking stock of his damages.

  “I was coming downhill, you know,” explained the bicyclist. “These little Folkestone hills are a fair treat. It isn’t as though I’d been on the level. I came rather a whop.”

  “You did that,” said Kipps.

  “I was backpedaling for all I was worth anyhow,” said the bicyclist. “Not that I am worth much backpedaling.”

  He glanced round and made a sudden movement almost as if to mount his machine. Then he turned as rapidly to Kipps again, who was now stooping down, pursuing the tale of his injuries.

  “Here’s the back of my trouser leg all tore down,” said Kipps, “and I believe I’m bleeding. You really ought to be more careful—”