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

with laughter and had to leave off sewing to tell Kipps that the scene wouldn’t make a bad bit of business in a farcical comedy, and then he began to sketch out the farcical comedy and that led him to a digression about another farcical comedy of which he had written a ripping opening scene which wouldn’t take ten minutes to read. It had something in it that had never been done on the stage before, and was yet perfectly legitimate, namely, a man with a live beetle down the back of his neck trying to seem at his ease in a roomful of people.⁠ ⁠…

“They won’t lock you out,” he said, in a singularly reassuring tone, and began to read and act what he explained to be (not because he had written it, but simply because he knew it was so on account of his exceptional experience of the stage) and what Kipps also quite clearly saw to be, one of the best opening scenes that had ever been written.

When it was over Kipps, who rarely swore, was inspired to say the scene was “damned fine” about six times over, whereupon as if by way of recognition, Chitterlow took a simply enormous portion of the inspiring antediluvian, declaring at the same time that he had rarely met a “finer” intelligence than Kipps’ (stronger there might be, that he couldn’t say with certainty as yet, seeing how little after all they had seen of each other, but a finer never); that it was a shame such a gallant and discriminating intelligence should be nightly either locked up or locked out at ten⁠—well, ten thirty then⁠—and that he had half a mind to recommend old somebody or other (apparently the editor of a London daily paper) to put on Kipps forthwith as a dramatic critic in the place of the current incapable.

“I don’t think I’ve ever made up anything for print,” said Kipps; “⁠—ever. I’d have a thundering good try, though, if ever I got a chance. I would that! I’ve written window tickets often enough. Made ’em up and everything. But that’s different.”

“You’d come to it all the fresher for not having done it before. And the way you picked up every point in that scene, my boy, was a Fair Treat! I tell you, you’d knock William Archer into fits. Not so literary, of course, you’d be, but I don’t believe in literary critics any more than in literary playwrights. Plays aren’t literature⁠—that’s just the point they miss. Plays are plays. No! That won’t hamper you anyhow. You’re wasted down here, I tell you. Just as I was, before I took to acting. I’m hanged if I wouldn’t like your opinion on these first two acts of that tragedy I’m on to. I haven’t told you about that. It wouldn’t take me more than an hour to read.⁠ ⁠…”

Then so far as he could subsequently remember, Kipps had “another,” and then it would seem that suddenly, regardless of the tragedy, he insisted that he “reelly must be getting on,” and from that point his memory became irregular. Certain things have remained quite clearly, and as it is a matter of common knowledge that intoxicated people forget what happens to them, it follows that he was not intoxicated. Chitterlow came with him partly to see him home and partly for a freshener before turning in. Kipps recalled afterwards very distinctly how in Little Fenchurch Street he discovered that he could not walk straight and also that Chitterlow’s needle and thread in his still unmended trouser leg was making an annoying little noise on the pavement behind him. He tried to pick up the needle suddenly by surprise and somehow tripped and fell and then Chitterlow, laughing uproariously, helped him up. “It wasn’t a bicycle this time, old boy,” said Chitterlow, and that appeared to them both at the time as being a quite extraordinarily good joke indeed. They punched each other about on the strength of it.

For a time after that Kipps certainly pretended to be quite desperately drunk and unable to walk and Chitterlow entered into the pretence and supported him. After that Kipps remembered being struck with the extremely laughable absurdity of going down hill to Tontine Street in order to go up hill again to the Emporium, and trying to get that idea into Chitterlow’s head and being unable to do so on account of his own merriment or Chitterlow’s evident intoxication, and his next memory after that was of the exterior of the Emporium, shut and darkened, and, as it were, frowning at him with all its stripes of yellow and green. The chilly way in which “Shalford” glittered in the moonlight printed itself with particular vividness on his mind. It appeared to Kipps that that establishment was closed to him for evermore. Those gilded letters, in spite of appearances, spelt finis for him and exile from Folkestone. He would never do woodcarving, never see Miss Walshingham again. Not that he had ever hoped to see her again. But this was the knife, this was final. He had stayed out, he had got drunk, there had been that row about the Manchester window dressing only three days ago.⁠ ⁠… In the retrospect he was quite sure that he was perfectly sober then and at bottom extremely unhappy, but he kept a brave face on the matter nevertheless, and declared stoutly he didn’t care if he was locked out.

Whereupon Chitterlow slapped him on the back very hard and told him that was a “Bit of All Right,” and assured him that when he himself had been a clerk in Sheffield before he took to acting he had been locked out sometimes for six nights running.

“What’s the result?” said Chitterlow. “I could go back to that place now, and they’d be glad to have me.⁠ ⁠… Glad to have me,” he repeated, and then added, “that is to say, if they remember me⁠—which isn’t very likely.”

Kipps asked a little weakly, “What am