Kipps by H. G. Wells (bts books to read TXT) 📕

1

Now in the slack of that same day, after the midday dinner and before the coming of the afternoon customers, this disastrous Chitterlow descended upon Kipps with the most amazing coincidence in the world. He did not call formally, entering and demanding Kipps, but privately, in a confidential and mysterious manner. Kipps was first aware of him as a dark object bobbing about excitedly outside the hosiery window. He was stooping and craning and peering in the endeavour to see into the interior between and over the socks and stockings. Then he transferred his attention to the door, and after a hovering scrutiny, tried the baby-linen display. His movements and gestures suggested a suppressed excitement.

Seen by daylight, Chitterlow was not nearly such a magnificent figure as he had been by the subdued nocturnal lightings and beneath the glamour of his own interpretation. The lines were the same, indeed, but the texture was different. There was a quality about the yachting cap, an indefinable finality of dustiness, a shiny finish on all the salient surfaces of the reefer coat. The red hair and the profile, though still forcible and fine, were less in the quality of Michelangelo and more in that of the merely picturesque. But it was a bright, brown eye still that sought amidst the interstices of the baby-linen.

Kipps was by no means anxious to interview Chitterlow again. If he had felt sure that Chitterlow would not enter the shop, he would have hid in the warehouse until the danger was past, but he had no idea of Chitterlow’s limitations. He decided to keep up the shop in the shadows until Chitterlow reached the side window of the Manchester department, and then to go outside as if to inspect the condition of the window and explain to him that things were unfavourable to immediate intercourse. He might tell him he had already lost his situation…

”Ullo, Chit’low,’ he said, emerging.

‘Very man I want to see,’ said Chitterlow, shaking with vigour. ‘Very man I want to see.’ He laid a hand on Kipps’ arm. ‘How old are you, Kipps?’

‘One-and-twenty,’ said Kipps. ‘Why?’

‘Talk about coincidences! And your name, now? Wait a minute.’ He held out a finger. ‘Is it Arthur?’

‘Yes,’ said Kipps.

‘You’re the man,’ said Chitterlow.

‘What man?’

‘It’s about the thickest coincidence I ever struck,’ said Chitterlow, plunging his extensive hand into his breast coat pocket. ‘Half a jiff and I’ll tell you your mother’s Christian name.’ He laughed and struggled with his coat for a space, produced a washing-book and two pencils, which he deposited in his side pocket, then in one capacious handful, a bent but by no means finally disabled cigar, the rubber proboscis of a bicycle pump, some twine and a lady’s purse, and finally a small pocket-book, and from this after dropping and recovering several visiting-cards, he extracted a carelessly torn piece of newspaper. ‘Euphemia,’ he read, and brought his face close to Kipps’. ‘Eh?’ He laughed noisily. ‘It’s about as fair a Bit of All Right as any one could have—outside a coincidence play. Don’t say her name wasn’t Euphemia, Kipps, and spoil the whole blessed show.’

‘Whose name Euphemia?’ asked Kipps.

‘Your mother’s.’

‘Lemme see what it says on the paper.’

Chitterlow handed him the fragment and turned away.

‘You may say what you like,’ he said, addressing a vast, deep laugh to the street generally.

Kipps attempted to read. ‘WADDY or KIPPS. If Arthur Waddy or Arthur Kipps, the son of Margaret Euphemia Kipps, who—’

Chitterlow’s finger swept over the print. ‘I went down the column, and every blessed name that seemed to fit my play I took. I don’t believe in made-up names. As I told you. I’m all with Zola in that. Documents whenever you can. I like ‘em hot and real. See? Who was Waddy?’

‘Never heard his name.’

‘Not Waddy?’

‘No!’

Kipps tried to read again, and abandoned the attempt. ‘What does it mean?’ he said. ‘I don’t understand.’

‘It means,’ said Chitterlow, with a momentary note of lucid exposition, ‘so far as I can make out, that you’re going to strike it Rich. Never mind about the Waddy—that’s a detail. What does it usually mean? You’ll hear of something to your advantage—very well. I took that newspaper up to get my names by the merest chance. Directly I saw it again and read that—I knew it was you. I believe in coincidences. People say they don’t happen. I say they do. Everything’s a coincidence. Seen properly. Here you are. Here’s one! Incredible? Not a bit of it! See? It’s you! Kipps! Waddy be damned! It’s a Mascot. There’s luck in my play. Bif! You’re there. I’m there. Fair in it! Snap!’ And he discharged his fingers like a pistol. ‘Never you mind about the ‘Waddy.”

‘Eh?’ said Kipps, with a nervous eye on Chitterlow’s fingers.

‘You’re all right,’ said Chitterlow, ‘you may bet the seat of your only breeches on that! Don’t you worry about the Waddy —that’s as clear as day. You’re about as right side up as a billiard ball… whatever you do. Don’t stand there gaping, man! Read the paper if you don’t believe me. Read it!’

He shook it under Kipps’ nose.

Kipps became aware of the second apprentice watching them from the shop. His air of perplexity gave place to a more confident bearing.

‘—‘who was born at East Grinstead.’ I certainly was born there. I’ve ‘eard my Aunt say—’

‘I knew it,’ said Chitterlow, taking hold of one edge of the paper and bringing his face close alongside Kipps’.

‘—on September the first, eighteen hundred and seventy-eight—’

‘That’s all right,’ said Chitterlow. ‘It’s all, all right, and all you have to do is to write to Watson and Bean and get it—’

‘Get what?’

‘Whatever it is.’

Kipps sought his moustache. ‘You’d write?’ he asked.

‘Ra-ther.’

‘But what do you think it is?’

‘That’s the fun of it!’ said Chitterlow, taking three steps in some as yet uninvented dance. ‘That’s where the joke comes in. It may be anything—it may be a million. If so! Where does little Harry come in? Eh?’

Kipps was trembling slightly. ‘But—’ he said, and thought.

‘If you was me—’ he began. ‘About that Waddy—?’

He glanced up and saw the second apprentice disappear with amazing swiftness from behind the goods in the window.

‘What?’ asked Chitterlow, but he never had an answer.

‘Lor! There’s the guv’nor!’ said Kipps, and made a prompt dive for the door.

He dashed in, only to discover that Shalford, with the junior apprentice in attendance, had come to mark off remnants of Kipps’ cotton dresses, and was demanding him. ‘Hallo, Kipps,’ he said, ‘outside—?’

‘Seein’ if the window was straight, Sir,’ said Kipps.

‘Umph!’ said Shalford.

For a space Kipps was too busily employed to think at all of Chitterlow or the crumpled bit of paper in his trouser pocket. He was, however, painfully aware of a suddenly disconnected excitement at large in the street. There came one awful moment when Chitterlow’s nose loomed interrogatively over the ground glass of the department door, and his bright little red-brown eye sought for the reason of Kipps’ disappearance, and then it became evident that he saw the high light of Shalford’s baldness, and grasped the situation and went away. And then Kipps (with that advertisement in his pocket) was able to come back to the business in hand.

He became aware that Shalford had asked a question. ‘Yessir, nosir, rightsir. I’m sorting up zephyrs tomorrow, Sir,’ said Kipps.

Presently he had a moment to himself again, and, taking up a safe position behind a newly unpacked pile of summer lace curtains, he straightened out the piece of paper and re-perused it. It was a little perplexing. That ‘Arthur Waddy or Arthur Kipps’—did that imply two persons or one? He would ask Pearce or Buggins. Only—

It had always been impressed upon him that there was something demanding secrecy about his mother.

‘Don’t you answer no questions about your mother,’ his aunt had been wont to say. ‘Tell them you don’t know, whatever it is they ask you.’

Now, this—?

Kipps’ face became portentously careful, and he rugged at his moustache, such as it was, hard.

He had always represented his father as being a ‘gentleman farmer.’ ‘It didn’t pay,’ he used to say, with a picture in his own mind of a penny magazine aristocrat prematurely worn out by worry. ‘I’m a Norfan, both sides,’ he would explain, with the air of one who had seen trouble. He said he lived with his uncle and aunt, but he did not say that they kept a toyshop, and to tell any one that his uncle had been a butler—a servant! —would have seemed the maddest of indiscretions. Almost all the assistants in the Emporium were equally reticent and vague, so great is their horror of ‘Lowness’ of any sort. To ask about this ‘Waddy or Kipps’ would upset all these little fictions. He was not, as a matter of fact, perfectly clear about his real status in the world (he was not, as a matter of fact, perfectly clear about anything), but he knew that there was a quality about his status that was—detrimental.

Under the circumstances—?

It occurred to him that it would save a lot of trouble to destroy the advertisement there and then.

In which case he would have to explain to Chitterlow!

‘Eng!’ said Mr. Kipps.

‘Kipps!’ cried Carshot, who was shopwalking. ‘Kipps Forward!’

He thrust back the crumpled paper into his pocket, and sallied forth to the customer.

‘I want,’ said the customer, looking vaguely about her through glasses, ‘a little bit of something to cover a little