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

Meanwhile Chitterlow explained that he was a playwright, and the tongue of Kipps was unloosened to respond that he knew a chap, or rather one of their fellows knew a chap, or at least to be perfectly correct this fellow’s brother did, who had written a play. In response to Chitterlow’s enquiries he could not recall the title of the play, nor where it had appeared nor the name of the manager who produced it, though he thought the title was something about “Love’s Ransom” or something like that.

“He made five ’undred pounds by it, though,” said Kipps. “I know that.”

“That’s nothing,” said Chitterlow, with an air of experience that was extremely convincing. “Nothing. May seem a big sum to you, but I can assure you it’s just what one gets any day. There’s any amount of money, an-ny amount, in a good play.”

“I dessay,” said Kipps, drinking.

“Any amount of money!”

Chitterlow began a series of illustrative instances. He was clearly a person of quite unequalled gift for monologue. It was as though some conversational dam had burst upon Kipps, and in a little while he was drifting along upon a copious rapid of talk about all sorts of theatrical things by one who knows all about them, and quite incapable of anticipating whither that rapid meant to carry him. Presently somehow they had got to anecdotes about well-known theatrical managers, little Teddy Bletherskite, artful old Chumps, and the magnificent Behemoth, “petted to death, you know, fair sickened, by all these society women.” Chitterlow described various personal encounters with these personages, always with modest self-depreciation, and gave Kipps a very amusing imitation of old Chumps in a state of intoxication. Then he took two more stiff doses of old Methusaleh in rapid succession.

Kipps reduced the hither end of his cigarette to a pulp as he sat “dessaying” and “quite believing” Chitterlow in the sagest manner and admiring the easy way in which he was getting on with this very novel and entertaining personage. He had another cigarette made for him, and then Chitterlow, assuming by insensible degrees more and more of the manner of a rich and successful playwright being interviewed by a young admirer, set himself to answer questions which sometimes Kipps asked and sometimes Chitterlow, about the particulars and methods of his career. He undertook this self-imposed task with great earnestness and vigour, treating the matter indeed with such fullness that at times it seemed lost altogether under a thicket of parentheses, footnotes and episodes that branched and budded from its stem. But it always emerged again, usually by way of illustration to its own degressions. Practically it was a mass of material for the biography of a man who had been everywhere and done everything (including the Hon. Thomas Norgate, which was a Record), and in particular had acted with great distinction and profit (he dated various anecdotes, “when I was getting thirty, or forty or fifty, dollars a week”) throughout America and the entire civilised world.

And as he talked on and on in that full, rich, satisfying voice he had, and as old Methusaleh, indisputably a most drunken old reprobate of a whiskey, busied himself throughout Kipps, lighting lamp after lamp until the entire framework of the little draper was illuminated and glowing like some public building on a festival, behold Chitterlow and Kipps with him and the room in which they sat, were transfigured! Chitterlow became in very truth that ripe, full man of infinite experience and humour and genius, fellow of Shakespeare and Ibsen and Maeterlinck (three names he placed together quite modestly far above his own) and no longer ambiguously dressed in a sort of yachting costume with cycling knickerbockers, but elegantly if unconventionally attired, and the room ceased to be a small and shabby room in a Folkestone slum, and grew larger and more richly furnished, and the flyblown photographs were curious old pictures, and the rubbish on the walls the most rare and costly bric-a-brac, and the indisputable paraffin lamp, a soft and splendid light. A certain youthful heat that to many minds might have weakened old Methusaleh’s starry claim to a ripe antiquity, vanished in that glamour, two burnt holes and a claimant darn in the table cloth, moreover, became no more than the pleasing contradictions natural in the house of genius, and as for Kipps!⁠—Kipps was a bright young man of promise, distinguished by recent quick, courageous proceedings not too definitely insisted upon, and he had been rewarded by admission to a sanctum and confidences, for which the common prosperous, for which “society women” even, were notoriously sighing in vain. “Don’t want them, my boy; they’d simply play old Harry with the work, you know! Chaps outside, bank clerks and university fellows, think the life’s all that sort of thing. Don’t you believe ’em. Don’t you believe ’em.”

And then⁠—!

“Boom.⁠ ⁠… Boom.⁠ ⁠… Boom.⁠ ⁠… Boom⁠ ⁠…” right in the middle of a most entertaining digression on flats who join touring companies under the impression that they are actors, Kipps much amused at their flatness as exposed by Chitterlow.

“Lor’!” said Kipps like one who awakens, “that’s not eleven!”

“Must be,” said Chitterlow. “It was nearly ten when I got that whiskey. It’s early yet⁠—”

“All the same I must be going,” said Kipps, and stood up. “Even now⁠—maybe. Fact is⁠—I ’ad no idea. The ’ouse door shuts at ’arf past ten, you know. I ought to ’ave thought before.”

“Well, if you must go! I tell you what. I’ll come, too.⁠ ⁠… Why! There’s your leg, old man! Clean forgot it! You can’t go through the streets like that. I’ll sew up the tear. And meanwhile have another whiskey.”

“I ought to be getting on now,” protested Kipps feebly, and then Chitterlow was showing him how to kneel on a chair in order that the rent trouser leg should be attainable and old Methusaleh on his third round was busy repairing the temporary eclipse of Kipps’ arterial glow. Then suddenly Chitterlow was seized