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

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 recognised 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’ 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 were also a copper kettle, a pair of candle-snuffers, a brass shoe-horn, 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. ‘Chubes,’ he whispered. ‘Chubes.’

This anatomised 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

”Ullo!’ 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 round 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, Chitlow?’

‘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 own 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, centre!’ 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. Every one’s on to it after that. Butterfly can’t get out of the 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 goldmine 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, whisky’ll do. Better!’

Kipps hesitated for a moment, then turned and fumbled in the cupboard of his sideboard. Presently he disinterred a bottle of whisky 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 Methuselah,’ 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 a 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 whiskies, ‘You know a decent whisky,’ 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 round 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 re-written. 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 talked of his great obsession, of plays and playwriting and that empty absurdity that is so serious to its 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 Honourable Thomas Norgate came in here—who had interested themselves in the practical realisation 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 a few details. It was clear he had bought the quarter of a farcical comedy—practically a goldmine—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 revolutionise 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 centre 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-moulded arms came and vanished from the sleeves—and she had large expressive 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 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; she had obviously heard of Kipps before, and he 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 selfconscious, 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