THE PUPIL LOVER
Sec.1
When Kipps came to reflect upon his afternoon's work he had his first
inkling of certain comprehensive incompatibilities lying about the
course of true love in his particular case. He had felt without
understanding the incongruity between the announcement he had failed to
make and the circle of ideas of his Aunt and Uncle. It was this rather
than the want of a specific intention that had silenced him, the
perception that when he travelled from Folkestone to New Romney he
travelled from an atmosphere where his engagement to Helen was sane and
excellent to an atmosphere where it was only to be regarded with
incredulous suspicion. Coupled and associated with this jar was his
sense of the altered behaviour of Sid Pornick, the evident shock to that
ancient alliance caused by the fact of his enrichment, the touch of
hostility in his "You'll soon be swelled too big to speak to a poor
mechanic like me." Kipps was unprepared for the unpleasant truth; that
the path of social advancement is and must be strewn with broken
friendships. This first protrusion of that fact caused a painful
confusion in his mind. It was speedily to protrude in a far more serious
fashion in relation to the "hands" from the Emporium, and Chitterlow.
From the day at Lympne Castle his relations with Helen had entered upon
a new footing. He had prayed for Helen as good souls pray for Heaven,
with as little understanding of what it was he prayed for. And now that
period of standing humbly in the shadows before the shrine was over, and
the Goddess, her veil of mystery flung aside, had come down to him and
taken hold of him, a good, strong, firm hold, and walked by his side....
She liked him. What was singular was that very soon she had kissed him
thrice, whimsically upon the brow, and he had never kissed her at all.
He could not analyse his feelings, only he knew the world was
wonderfully changed about them, but the truth was that, though he still
worshipped and feared her, though his pride in his engagement was
ridiculously vast, he loved her now no more. That subtle something woven
of the most delicate strands of self-love and tenderness and desire, had
vanished imperceptibly; and was gone now for ever. But that she did not
suspect in him, nor as a matter of fact did he.
She took him in hand in perfect good faith. She told him things about
his accent, she told him things about his bearing, about his costume and
his way of looking at things. She thrust the blade of her intelligence
into the tenderest corners of Kipps' secret vanity, she slashed his
most intimate pride to bleeding tatters. He sought very diligently to
anticipate some at least of these informing thrusts by making great use
of Coote. But the unanticipated made a brave number....
She found his simple willingness a very lovable thing.
Indeed she liked him more and more. There was a touch of motherliness in
her feelings towards him. But his upbringing and his associations had
been, she diagnosed, "awful." At New Romney she glanced but little; that
was remote. But in her inventory--she went over him as one might go over
a newly taken house, with impartial thoroughness--she discovered more
proximate influences, surprising intimations of nocturnal
"sing-songs"--she pictured it as almost shocking that Kipps should sing
to the banjo--much low-grade wisdom treasured from a person called
Buggins--"Who _is_ Buggins?" said Helen--vague figures of indisputable
vulgarity, Pierce and Carshot, and more particularly, a very terrible
social phenomenon, Chitterlow.
Chitterlow blazed upon them with unheralded oppressive brilliance the
first time they were abroad together.
They were going along the front of the Leas to see a school play in
Sandgate--at the last moment Mrs. Walshingham had been unable to come
with them--when Chitterlow loomed up into the new world. He was wearing
the suit of striped flannel and the straw hat that had followed Kipps'
payment in advance for his course in elocution, his hands were deep in
his side pockets and animated the corners of his jacket, and his
attentive gaze at the passing loungers, the faint smile under his boldly
drawn nose, showed him engaged in studying character--no doubt for some
forthcoming play.
"What HO!" said he, at the sight of Kipps, and swept off the straw hat
with so ample a clutch of his great, flat hand that it suggested to
Helen's startled mind a conjurer about to palm a half-penny.
"'Ello, Chitt'low," said Kipps a little awkwardly and not saluting.
Chitterlow hesitated. "Half a mo', my boy," he said, and arrested Kipps
by extending a large hand over his chest. "Excuse me, my dear," he said,
bowing like his Russian count by way of apology to Helen and with a
smile that would have killed at a hundred yards. He affected a
semi-confidential grouping of himself and Kipps while Helen stood in
white amazement.
"About that play," he said.
"'Ow about it?" asked Kipps, acutely aware of Helen.
"It's all right," said Chitterlow. "There's a strong smell of syndicate
in the air, I may tell you--Strong."
"That's aw right," said Kipps.
"You needn't tell everybody," said Chitterlow with a transitory,
confidential hand to his mouth, which pointed the application of the
"everybody" just a trifle too strongly. "But I think it's coming off.
However----. I mustn't detain you now. So long. You'll come 'round, eh?"
"Right you are," said Kipps.
"To-night?"
"At eight."
And then, and more in the manner of a Russian prince than any common
count, Chitterlow bowed and withdrew. Just for a moment he allowed a
conquering eye to challenge Helen's and noted her for a girl of
quality....
There was a silence between our lovers for a space.
"That," said Kipps with an allusive movement of the head, "was
Chitterlow."
"Is he--a friend of yours?"
"In a way.... You see--I met 'im. Leastways 'e met me. Run into me with
a bicycle, 'e did, and so we got talking together."
He tried to appear at his ease. The young lady scrutinised his profile.
"What is he?"
"'E's a Nacter chap," said Kipps. "Leastways 'e writes plays."
"And sells them?"
"Partly."
"Whom to?"
"Different people. Shares he sells.... It's all right, reely--I meant to
tell you about him before."
Helen looked over her shoulder to catch a view of Chitterlow's
retreating aspect. It did not compel her complete confidence.
She turned to her lover and said in a tone of quiet authority, "You must
tell me all about Chitterlow. Now."
The explanation began....
The School Play came almost as a relief to Kipps. In the flusterment of
going in he could almost forget for a time his Laocoon struggle to
explain, and in the intervals he did his best to keep forgetting. But
Helen, with a gentle insistence, resumed the explanation of Chitterlow
as they returned towards Folkestone.
Chitterlow was confoundedly difficult to explain. You could hardly
imagine!
There was an almost motherly anxiety in Helen's manner, blended with the
resolution of a schoolmistress to get to the bottom of the affair.
Kipps' ears were soon quite brightly red.
"Have you seen one of his plays?"
"'E's tole me about one."
"But on the stage."
"No. He 'asn't 'ad any on the stage yet. That's all coming...."
"Promise me," she said in conclusion, "you won't do anything without
consulting me."
And of course Kipps promised. "Oo--no!"
They went on their way in silence.
"One can't know everybody," said Helen in general.
"Of course," said Kipps; "in a sort of way it was him that helped me to
my money." And he indicated in a confused manner the story of the
advertisement. "I don't like to drop 'im all at once," he added.
Helen was silent for a space, and when she spoke she went off at a
tangent. "We shall live in London--soon," she remarked. "It's only while
we are here."
It was the first intimation she gave him of their post-nuptial
prospects.
"We shall have a nice little flat somewhere, not too far west, and there
we shall build up a circle of our own."
Sec.2
All that declining summer Kipps was the pupil lover. He made an
extraordinarily open secret of his desire for self-improvement; indeed
Helen had to hint once or twice that his modest frankness was excessive,
and all this new circle of friends did, each after his or her manner,
everything that was possible to supplement Helen's efforts and help him
to ease and skill in the more cultivated circles to which he had come.
Coote was still the chief teacher, the tutor--there are so many little
difficulties that a man may take to another man that he would not care
to propound to the woman he loves--but they were all, so to speak, upon
the staff. Even the freckled girl said to him once in a pleasant way,
"You mustn't say "contre temps," you must say "contraytom,"" when he
borrowed that expression from "Manners and Rules," and she tried at his
own suggestion to give him clear ideas upon the subject of "as" and
"has." A certain confusion between these words was becoming evident, the
first fruits of a lesson from Chitterlow on the aspirate. Hitherto he
had discarded that dangerous letter almost altogether, but now he would
pull up at words beginning with "h" and draw a sawing breath--rather
like a startled kitten--and then aspirate with vigour.
Said Kipps one day, "_As_ 'e?--I should say, ah--Has 'e? Ye know I got a
lot of difficulty over them two words, which is which?"
"Well, 'as' is a conjunction and 'has' is a verb."
"I know," said Kipps, "but when is 'has' a conjunction and when is 'as'
a verb?"
"Well," said the freckled girl, preparing to be very lucid. "It's _has_
when it means one has, meaning having, but if it isn't it's _as_. As for
instance one says 'e--I mean _he_--He has. But one says 'as he has.'"
"I see," said Kipps. "So I ought to say 'as 'e?'"
"No, if you are asking a question you say _has_ 'e--I mean he--'as he?"
She blushed quite brightly, but still clung to her air of lucidity.
"I see," said Kipps. He was about to say something further, but he
desisted. "I got it much clearer now. _Has_ 'e? _Has_ 'e as. Yes."
"If you remember about having."
"Oo I will," said Kipps.
Miss Coote specialised in Kipps' artistic development. She had early
found an opinion that he had considerable artistic sensibility, his
remarks on her work had struck her as decidedly intelligent, and
whenever he called around to see them she would show him some work of
art, now an illustrated book, now perhaps a colour print of a
Botticelli, now the Hundred Best Paintings, now "Academy Pictures," now
a German art handbook and now some magazine of furniture and design. "I
know you like these things," she used to say, and Kipps said, "Oo I
_do_." He soon acquired a little armoury of appreciative sayings. When
presently the Walshinghams took him up to the Arts and Crafts, his
deportment was intelligent in the extreme. For a time he kept a wary
silence and suddenly pitched upon a colour print. "That's rather nace,"
he said to Mrs. Walshingham. "That lill' thing. There." He always said
things like that by preference to the mother rather than the daughter
unless he was perfectly sure.
He quite took to Mrs. Walshingham. He was impressed by her conspicuous
tact and refinement; it seemed to him that the ladylike could go no
further. She was always dressed with a delicate fussiness that was never
disarranged and even a sort of faded quality about her hair and face and
bearing and emotions contributed to her effect. Kipps was not a big man,
and commonly he did not feel a big man, but with Mrs. Walshingham he
always felt enormous and distended, as though he was a navvy who had
taken some disagreeable poison which puffed him up inside his skin as a
preliminary to bursting. He felt, too, as though he had been rolled in
clay and his hair dressed with gum. And he felt that his voice was
strident and his accent like somebody swinging a crowded pig's pail in a
free and careless manner. All this increased and enforced his respect
for her. Her hand, which flitted often and again to his hand and arm,
was singularly well shaped and cool. "Arthur," she called him from the
very beginning.
She did not so much positively teach and tell him as tactfully guide and
infect him. Her conversation was not so much didactic as exemplary. She
would say, "I _do_ like people to do" so and so. She would tell him
anecdotes of nice things done, of gentlemanly feats of graceful
consideration; she would record her neat observations of people in
trains and omnibuses; how, for example, a man had passed her change to
the conductor, "quite a common man he looked," but he had lifted his
hat. She stamped Kipps so deeply with the hat-raising habit that he
would uncover if he found himself in the same railway ticket office with
a lady had to stand ceremoniously until the difficulties of change drove
him to an apologetic provisional oblique resumption of his headgear....
And robbing these things of any air of personal application, she threw
about them an abundant talk about her two children--she called them her
Twin Jewels quite frequently--about their gifts, their temperaments,
their ambition, their need of opportunity. They needed opportunity, she
would say, as other people needed air....
In his conversations with her Kipps always assumed, and she seemed to
assume, that she was to join that home in London Helen foreshadowed, but
he was surprised one day to gather that this was not to be the case. "It
wouldn't do," said Helen, with decision. "We want to make a circle of
our own."
"But won't she be a bit lonely down here?" asked Kipps.
"There's the Waces, and Mrs. Prebble and Mrs. Bindon Botting and--lots
of people she knows." And Helen dismissed this possibility....
Young Walshingham's share in the educational syndicate was smaller. But
he shone out when they went to London on that Arts and Crafts
expedition. Then this rising man of affairs showed Kipps how to buy the
more theatrical weeklies for consumption in the train, how to buy and
what to buy in the way of cigarettes with gold tips and shilling cigars,
and how to order hock for lunch and sparkling Moselle for dinner, how to
calculate the fare of a hansom cab--penny a minute while he goes--how to
look intelligently at an hotel tape, and how to sit still in a train
like a thoughtful man instead of talking like a fool and giving yourself
away. And he, too, would glance at the good time coming when they were
to be in London for good and all.
That prospect expanded and developed particulars. It presently took up a
large part of Helen's conversation. Her conversations with Kipps were
never of a grossly sentimental sort; there was a shyness of speech in
that matter with both of them, but these new adumbrations were at least
as interesting and not so directly disagreeable as the clear-cut
intimations of personal defect that for a time had so greatly chastened
Kipps' delight in her presence. The future presented itself with an
almost perfect frankness as a joint campaign of Mrs. Walshingham's Twin
Jewels upon the Great World, with Kipps in the capacity of baggage and
supply. They would still be dreadfully poor, of course--this amazed
Kipps, but he said nothing--until "Brudderkins" began to succeed, but if
they were clever and lucky they might do a great deal.
When Helen spoke of London a brooding look, as of one who contemplates a
distant country, came into her eyes. Already it seemed they had the
nucleus of a set. Brudderkins was a member of the Theatrical Judges, an
excellent and influential little club of journalists and literary
people, and he knew Shimer and Stargate and Whiffle, of the "Red
Dragon," and besides these were the Revels. They knew the Revels quite
well. Sidney Revel before his rapid rise to prominence as a writer of
epigrammatic essays that were quite above the ordinary public, had been
an assistant master at one of the best Folkestone schools, Brudderkins
had brought him home to tea several times, and it was he had first
suggested Helen should try and write. "It's perfectly easy," Sidney had
said. He had been writing occasional things for the evening papers, and
for the weekly reviews even at that time. Then he had gone up to London
and had almost unavoidedly become a dramatic critic. Those brilliant
essays had followed, and then "Red Hearts a-Beating," the romance that
had made him. It was a tale of spirited adventure, full of youth and
beauty and naive passion and generous devotion, bold, as the _Bookman_
said, and frank in places, but never in the slightest degree morbid. He
had met and married an American widow with quite a lot of money, and
they had made a very distinct place for themselves, Kipps learnt, in the
literary and artistic society of London. Helen seemed to dwell on the
Revels a great deal; it was her exemplary story, and when she spoke of
Sidney--she often called him Sidney--she would become thoughtful. She
spoke most of him naturally because she had still to meet Mrs. Revel....
Certainly they would be in the world in no time, even if the distant
connection with the Beaupres family came to nothing.
Kipps gathered that with his marriage and the movement to London they
were to undergo that subtle change of name Coote had first adumbrated.
They were to become "Cuyps," Mr. and Mrs. Cuyps. Or, was it Cuyp?
"It'll be rum at first," said Kipps. "I dessay I shall soon get into
it."...
So in their several ways they all contributed to enlarge and refine and
exercise the intelligence of Kipps. And behind all these other
influences, and, as it were, presiding over and correcting these
influences, was Kipps' nearest friend, Coote, a sort of master of the
ceremonies. You figure his face, blowing slightly with solicitude, his
slate coloured, projecting but not unkindly eye intent upon our hero.
The thing he thought was going off admirably. He studied Kipps'
character immensely. He would discuss him with his sister, with Mrs.
Walshingham, with the freckled girl, with anyone who would stand it. "He
is an interesting character," he would say, "likable--a sort of
gentleman by instinct. He takes to all these things. He improves every
day. He'll soon get Sang Froid. We took him up just in time. He wants
now--well----. Next year, perhaps, if there is a good Extension
Literature course, he might go in for it. He wants to go in for
something like that."
"He's going in for his bicycle now," said Mrs. Walshingham.
"That's all right for summer," said Coote, "but he wants to go in for
some serious, intellectual interest, something to take him out of
himself a little more. Savoir Faire and self-forgetfulness is more than
half the secret of Sang Froid."
Sec.3
The world as Coote presented it was in part an endorsement, in part an
amplification and in part a rectification of the world of Kipps, the
world that derived from the old couple in New Romney and had been
developed in the Emporium; the world, in fact, of common British life.
There was the same subtle sense of social graduation that had moved Mrs.
Kipps to prohibit intercourse with labourers' children and the same
dread of anything "common" that had kept the personal quality of Mr.
Shalford's establishment so high. But now a certain disagreeable doubt
about Kipps' own position was removed and he stood with Coote inside the
sphere of gentlemen assured. Within the sphere of gentlemen there are
distinctions of rank indeed, but none of class; there are the Big People
and the modest, refined, gentlemanly little people like Coote, who may
even dabble in the professions and counterless trades; there are lords
and magnificences, and there are gentle folk who have to manage, but
they can all call on one another, they preserve a general equality of
deportment throughout, they constitute that great state within the
state, Society, or at any rate they make believe they do.
"But reely," said the Pupil, "not what you call being in Society?"
"Yes," said Coote. "Of course, down here one doesn't see much of it, but
there's local society. It has the same rules."
"Calling and all that?"
"Precisely," said Coote.
Kipps thought, whistled a bar, and suddenly broached a question of
conscience. "I often wonder," he said, "whether I oughtn't to dress for
dinner--when I'm alone 'ere."
Coote protruded his lips and reflected. "Not full dress," he
adjudicated; "that would be a little excessive. But you should _change_,
you know. Put on a mess jacket and that sort of thing--easy dress. That
is what _I_ should do, certainly, if I wasn't in harness--and poor."
He coughed modestly and patted his hair behind.
And after that the washing bill of Kipps quadrupled, and he was to be
seen at times by the bandstand with his light summer overcoat unbuttoned
to give a glimpse of his nice white tie. He and Coote would be smoking
the gold-tipped cigarettes young Walshingham had prescribed as _chic_,
and appreciating the music highly. "That's--puff--a very nice bit,"
Kipps would say, or better, "That's nace." And at the first grunts of
the loyal anthem up they stood with religiously uplifted hats. Whatever
else you might call them, you could never call them disloyal.
The boundary of Society was admittedly very close to Coote and Kipps,
and a leading solicitude of the true gentleman was to detect clearly
those "beneath" him, and to behave towards them in a proper spirit.
"It's jest there it's so 'ard for me," said Kipps. He had to cultivate a
certain "distance," to acquire altogether the art of checking the
presumption of bounders and old friends. It was difficult, Coote
admitted. "That's what, so harkward--I mean awkward."
"I got mixed up with this lot 'ere," said Kipps.
"You could give them a hint," said Coote.
"'Ow?"
"Oh!--the occasion will suggest something."
The occasion came one early closing night when Kipps was sitting in a
canopy chair near the bandstand, with his summer overcoat fully open and
a new Gibus pulled slightly forward over his brow, waiting for Coote.
They were to hear the band for an hour and then go down to assist Miss
Coote and the freckled girl in trying over some of Beethoven's duets, if
they remembered them, that is, sufficiently well. And as Kipps lounged
back in his chair and occupied his mind with his favourite amusement on
such evenings, which consisted chiefly in supposing that everyone about
him was wondering who he was, came a rude rap at the canvas back and the
voice of Pierce.
"It's nice to be a gentleman," said Pierce, and swung a penny chair into
position while Buggins appeared smiling agreeably on the other side and
leant upon his stick. _He was smoking a common briar pipe!_
Two real ladies, very fashionably dressed and sitting close at hand,
glanced quickly at Pierce, and then away again, and it was evident
_their_ wonder was at an end.
"_He's_ all right," said Buggins, removing his pipe and surveying Kipps.
"'Ello, Buggins!" said Kipps, not too cordially. "'Ow goes it?"
"All right. Holiday's next week. If you don't look out, Kipps, I shall
be on the Continong before you. Eh?"
"You going t' Boologne?"
"Ra-ther. Parley vous Francey. You bet."
"_I_ shall 'ave a bit of a run over there one of these days," said
Kipps.
There came a pause. Pierce applied the top of his stick to his mouth for
a space and regarded Kipps. Then he glanced at the people about them.
"I say, Kipps," he said in a distinct, loud voice, "see 'er Ladyship
lately?"
Kipps perceived the audience was to be impressed, but he responded
half-heartedly, "No, I 'aven't," he said.
"She was along of Sir William the other night," said Pierce, still loud
and clear, "and she asked to be remembered to you."
It seemed to Kipps that one of the two ladies smiled faintly and said
something to the other, and then certainly they glanced at Pierce. Kipps
flushed scarlet. "_Did_ she?" he answered.
Buggins laughed good-humouredly over his pipe.
"Sir William suffers a lot from his gout," Pierce continued unabashed.
(Buggins much amused with his pipe between his teeth.)
Kipps became aware of Coote at hand.
Coote nodded rather distantly to Pierce. "Hope I haven't kept you
waiting, Kipps," he said.
"I kep' a chair for you," said Kipps and removed a guardian foot.
"But you've got your friends," said Coote.
"Oh! _we_ don't mind," said Pierce cordially, "the more the merrier,"
and, "why don't you get a chair, Buggins?" Buggins shook his head in a
sort of aside to Pierce and Coote coughed behind his hand.
"Been kep' late at business?" asked Pierce.
Coote turned quite pale and pretended not to hear. His eyes sought in
space for a time and with a convulsive movement he recognised a distant
acquaintance and raised his hat.
Pierce had also become a little pale. He addressed himself to Kipps in
an undertone.
"Mr. Coote, isn't he?" he asked.
Coote addressed himself to Kipps directly and exclusively. His manner
had the calm of extreme tension.
"I'm rather late," he said. "I think we ought almost to be going on
_now_."
Kipps stood up. "That's all right," he said.
"Which way are you going?" said Pierce, standing also, and brushing some
crumbs of cigarette ash from his sleeve.
For a moment Coote was breathless. "Thank you," he said, and gasped.
Then he delivered the necessary blow; "I don't think we're in need of
your society, you know," and turned away.
Kipps found himself falling over chairs and things in the wake of Coote,
and then they were clear of the crowd.
For a space Coote said nothing; then he remarked abruptly and quite
angrily for him, "I think that was _awful_ Cheek!"
Kipps made no reply....
The whole thing was an interesting little object lesson in distance, and
it stuck in the front of Kipps' mind for a long time. He had
particularly vivid the face of Pierce, with an expression between
astonishment and anger. He felt as though he had struck Pierce in the
face under circumstances that gave Pierce no power to reply. He did not
attend very much to the duets and even forgot at the end of one of them
to say how perfectly lovely it was.
Sec.4
But you must not imagine that the national ideal of a gentleman, as
Coote developed it, was all a matter of deportment and selectness, a
mere isolation from debasing associations. There is a Serious Side, a
deeper aspect of the true, True Gentleman. The True Gentleman does not
wear his heart on his sleeve. He is a polished surface above deeps. For
example, he is deeply religious, as Coote was, as Mrs. Walshingham was,
but outside the walls of a church it never appears, except perhaps now
and then in a pause, in a profound look, in a sudden avoidance. In quite
a little while Kipps also had learnt the pause, the profound look, the
sudden avoidance, that final refinement of spirituality, impressionistic
piety.
And the True Gentleman is patriotic also. When one saw Coote lifting
his hat to the National Anthem, then perhaps one got a glimpse of what
patriotic emotions, what worship, the polish of a gentleman may hide. Or
singing out his deep notes against the Hosts of Midian, in the St.
Stylites choir; then indeed you plumbed his spiritual side.
Christian, dost thou heed them,
On the holy ground,
How the hosts of Mid-i-an,
Prowl and prowl around!
Christian, up and smai-it them....
But these were but gleams. For the rest, Religion, Nationality, Passion,
Money, Politics; much more so those cardinal issues, Birth and Death,
the True Gentleman skirted about, and became facially rigid towards and
ceased to speak and panted and blew.
"One doesn't talk of that sort of thing," Coote would say with a gesture
of the knuckly hand.
"O' course," Kipps would reply, with an equal significance.
Profundities. Deep as it were, blowing to deep.
One does not talk, but on the other hand one is punctilious to do.
Actions speak. Kipps--in spite of the fact that the Walshinghams were
more than a little lax--Kipps, who had formerly flitted Sunday after
Sunday from one Folkestone church to another, had now a sitting of his
own, paid for duly at Saint Stylites. There he was to be seen, always at
the surplice evening service, and sometimes of a morning, dressed with
a sober precision, and with an eye on Coote in the chancel. No
difficulties now about finding the place in his book. He became a
communicant again--he had lapsed soon after his confirmation when the
young lady in the costume-room, who was his adopted sister, left the
Emporium--and he would sometimes go around to the Vestry for Coote after
the service. One evening he was introduced to the Hon. and Rev.
Densemore. He was much too confused to say anything, and the noble
cleric had nothing to say, but indisputably they were introduced....
No! you must not imagine our national ideal of a gentleman is without
its "serious side," without even its stern and uncompromising side. The
imagination no doubt refuses to see Coote displaying extraordinary
refinements of courage upon the stricken field, but in the walks of
peace there is sometimes sore need of sternness. Charitable as one may
be, one must admit there are people who _do_ things, impossible things;
people who place themselves "out of it" in countless ways; people,
moreover, who are by a sort of predestination out of it from the
beginning, and against these Society has invented a terrible protection
for its Cootery, the Cut. The cut is no joke for anyone. It is
excommunication. You may be cut by an individual, you may be cut by a
set or you may be--and this is so tragic that beautiful romances have
been written about it--"Cut by the County." One figures Coote
discharging this last duty and cutting somebody--Coote, erect and pale,
never speaking, going past with eyes of pitiless slate, lower jaw
protruding a little, face pursed up and cold and stiff....
It never dawned upon Kipps that he would one day have to face this
terrible front, to be to Coote not only as one dead, but as one gone
more than a stage or so in decay, cut and passed, banned and outcast for
ever.
Yet so it was to be!
One cannot hide any longer that all this fine progress of Kipps is
doomed to end in collapse. So far indeed you have seen him ascend. You
have seen him becoming more refined and careful day by day, more
carefully dressed, less clumsy in the ways and methods of social life.
You have seen the gulf widening between himself and his former low
associates. I have brought you at last to the vision of him, faultlessly
dressed and posed, in an atmosphere of candlelight and chanting, in his
own sitting in one of the most fashionable churches in Folkestone....
All the time I have refrained from the lightest touch upon the tragic
note that must now creep into my tale. Yet the net of his low
connections has been about his feet, and moreover there was something
interwoven in his being....