Kipps by H. G. Wells (distant reading txt) 📕

until the second act⁠—you know⁠—the chap with the beetle down his neck. Little Chisholme did that bit to rights. Then they began⁠—to rights.” His voice warmed and increased. “Laughing! It made me laugh! We jumped ’em into the third act before they had time to cool. Everybody was on it. I never saw a first night go so fast. Laugh, laugh, laugh, laugh, laugh, laugh (he howled the last word with stupendous violence). Everything they laughed at. They laughed at things that we hadn’t meant to be funny⁠—not for one moment. Bif! Bizz! Curtain. A fair knockout!⁠ ⁠… I went on⁠—but I didn’t say a word. Chisholme did the patter. Shouting! It was like walking under Niagara⁠—going across that stage. It was like never having seen an audience before.⁠ ⁠…

“Then afterwards⁠—the Boys!”

His emotion held him for a space. “Dear old Boys!” he murmured.

His words multiplied, his importance increased. In a little while he was restored to something of his old self. He was enormously excited. He seemed unable to sit down anywhere. He came into the breakfast-room so soon as Kipps was sure of him, shook hands with Mrs. Kipps parenthetically, sat down and immediately got up again. He went to the bassinette in the corner and looked absentmindedly at Kipps, junior, and said he was glad if only for the youngster’s sake. He immediately resumed the thread of his discourse.⁠ ⁠… He drank a cup of coffee noisily and walked up and down the room talking, while they attempted breakfast amidst the gale of his excitement. The infant slept marvellously through it all.

“You won’t mind my sitting down, Mrs. Kipps. I couldn’t sit down for anyone, or I’d do it for you. It’s you I’m thinking of more than anyone, you and Muriel, and all Old Pals and Good Friends. It means wealth, it means money⁠—hundreds and thousands.⁠ ⁠… If you’d heard ’em, you’d know.”

He was silent through a portentous moment while topics battled for him and finally he burst and talked of them all together. It was like the rush of water when a dam bursts and washes out a fair-sized provincial town; all sorts of things floated along on the swirl. For example, he was discussing his future behaviour. “I’m glad it’s come now. Not before. I’ve had my lesson. I shall be very discreet now, trust me. We’ve learnt the value of money.” He discussed the possibility of a country house, of taking a Martello tower as a swimming-box (as one might say a shooting-box) of living in Venice because of its artistic associations and scenic possibilities, of a flat in Westminster or a house in the West End. He also raised the question of giving up smoking and drinking, and what classes of drink were especially noxious to a man of his constitution. But discourses on all this did not prevent a parenthetical computation of the probable profits on the supposition of a thousand nights here and in America, nor did it ignore the share Kipps was to have, nor the gladness with which Chitterlow would pay that share, nor the surprise and regret with which he had learnt, through an indirect source which awakened many associations, of the turpitude of young Walshingham, nor the distaste Chitterlow had always felt for young Walshingham and men of his type. An excursus upon Napoleon had got into the torrent somehow and kept bobbing up and down. The whole thing was thrown into the form of a single complex sentence, with parenthetical and subordinate clauses fitting one into the other like Chinese boxes, and from first to last it never even had an air of approaching anything in the remotest degree partaking of the nature of a full stop.

Into this deluge came the Daily News, like the gleam of light in Watts’ picture, the waters were assuaged while its sheet was opened, and it had a column, a whole column, of praise. Chitterlow held the paper and Kipps read over his left hand, and Ann under his right. It made the affair more real to Kipps; it seemed even to confirm Chitterlow against lurking doubts he had been concealing. But it took him away. He departed in a whirl, to secure a copy of every morning paper, every blessed rag there is, and take them all to Dymchurch and Muriel forthwith. It had been the send-off the Boys had given him that had prevented his doing as much at Charing Cross⁠—let alone that he only caught it by the skin of his teeth.⁠ ⁠… Besides which the bookstall wasn’t open. His white face, lit by a vast excitement, bid them a tremendous farewell, and he departed through the sunlight, with his buoyant walk, buoyant almost to the tottering pitch. His hair, as one got it sunlit in the street, seemed to have grown in the night.

They saw him stop a newsboy.

“Every blessed rag,” floated to them on the notes of that gorgeous voice.

The newsboy, too, had happened on luck. Something like a faint cheer from the newsboy came down the air to terminate that transaction.

Chitterlow went on his way swinging a great budget of papers, a figure of merited success. The newsboy recovered from his emotion with a jerk, examined something in his hand again, transferred it to his pocket, watched Chitterlow for a space, and then in a sort of hushed silence resumed his daily routine.⁠ ⁠…

Ann and Kipps watched that receding happiness in silence, until he vanished round the bend of the road.

“I am glad,” said Ann at last, speaking with a little sigh.

“So’m I,” said Kipps, with emphasis. “For if ever a feller ’as worked and waited⁠—it’s ’im.”⁠ ⁠…

They went back through the shop rather thoughtfully, and after a peep at the sleeping baby, resumed their interrupted breakfast. “If ever a feller ’as worked and waited, it’s ’im,” said Kipps, cutting bread.

“Very likely it’s true,” said Ann, a little wistfully.

“What’s true?”

“About all that money coming.”

Kipps meditated. “I don’t see why it shouldn’t be,” he decided, and handed Ann a piece of bread on