DISCORDS
Sec.1
One day Kipps set out upon his newly-mastered bicycle to New Romney to
break the news of his engagement to his Uncle and Aunt--this time
positively. He was now a finished cyclist, but as yet an unseasoned one;
the southwest wind, even in its summer guise, as one meets it in the
Marsh, is the equivalent of a reasonable hill, and ever and again he got
off and refreshed himself by a spell of walking. He was walking just
outside New Romney preparatory to his triumphal entry (one hand off)
when abruptly he came upon Ann Pornick.
It chanced he was thinking about her at the time. He had been thinking
curious things; whether, after all, the atmosphere of New Romney and the
Marsh had not some difference, some faint impalpable quality that was
missing in the great and fashionable world of Folkestone behind there on
the hill. Here there was a homeliness, a familiarity. He had noted as he
passed that old Mr. Cliffordown's gate had been mended with a fresh
piece of string. In Folkestone he didn't take notice and he didn't care
if they built three hundred houses. Come to think of it, that was odd.
It was fine and grand to have twelve hundred a year; it was fine to go
about on trams and omnibuses and think not a person aboard was as rich
as oneself; it was fine to buy and order this and that and never have
any work to do and to be engaged to a girl distantly related to the Earl
of Beaupres, but yet there had been a zest in the old time out here, a
rare zest in the holidays, in sunlight, on the sea beach and in the High
Street, that failed from these new things. He thought of those bright
windows of holiday that had seemed so glorious to him in the retrospect
from his apprentice days. It was strange that now, amidst his present
splendours, they were glorious still!
All those things were over now--perhaps that was it! Something had
happened to the world and the old light had been turned out. He himself
was changed, and Sid was changed, terribly changed, and Ann no doubt was
changed.
He thought of her with the hair blown about her flushed cheeks as they
stood together after their race....
Certainly she must be changed, and all the magic she had been fraught
with to the very hem of her short petticoats gone no doubt for ever. And
as he thought that, or before and while he thought it, for he came to
all these things in his own vague and stumbling way, he looked up, and
there was Ann!
She was seven years older and greatly altered; yet for the moment it
seemed to him that she had not changed at all. "Ann!" he said, and she,
with a lifting note, "It's Art Kipps!"
Then he became aware of changes--improvements. She was as pretty as she
had promised to be, her blue eyes as dark as his memory of them, and
with a quick, high colour, but now Kipps by several inches was the
taller again. She was dressed in a simple grey dress that showed her
very clearly as a straight and healthy little woman, and her hat was
Sundayfied with pink flowers. She looked soft and warm and welcoming.
Her face was alight to Kipps with her artless gladness at their
encounter.
"It's Art Kipps!" she said.
"Rather," said Kipps.
"You got your holidays?"
It flashed upon Kipps that Sid had not told her of his great fortune.
Much regretful meditation upon Sid's behaviour had convinced him that he
himself was to blame for exasperating boastfulness in that affair, and
this time he took care not to err in that direction. He erred in the
other.
"I'm taking a bit of a 'oliday," he said.
"So'm I," said Ann.
"You been for a walk?" asked Kipps.
Ann showed him a bunch of wayside flowers.
"It's a long time since I seen you, Ann. Why, 'ow long must it be?
Seven--eight years nearly."
"It don't do to count," said Ann.
"It don't look like it," said Kipps, with the slightest emphasis.
"You got a moustache," said Ann, smelling her flowers and looking at him
over them, not without admiration.
Kipps blushed....
Presently they came to the bifurcation of the roads.
"I'm going down this way to mother's cottage," said Ann.
"I'll come a bit your way if I may."
In New Romney social distinctions that are primary realities in
Folkestone are absolutely non-existent, and it seemed quite permissible
for him to walk with Ann, for all that she was no more than a servant.
They talked with remarkable ease to one another, they slipped into a
vein of intimate reminiscence in the easiest manner. In a little while
Kipps was amazed to find Ann and himself at this:
"You r'ember that half sixpence? What you cut for me?"
"Yes."
"I got it still."
She hesitated. "Funny, wasn't it?" she said, and then, "you got yours,
Artie?"
"Rather," said Kipps. "What do you think?" and wondered in his heart of
hearts why he had never looked at that sixpence for so long.
Ann smiled at him frankly.
"I didn't expect you'd keep it," she said. "I thought often--it was
silly to keep mine. Besides," she reflected, "it didn't mean anything
really."
She glanced at him as she spoke and met his eye.
"Oh, didn't it!" said Kipps, a little late with his response, and
realising his infidelity to Helen even as he spoke.
"It didn't mean much anyhow," said Ann. "You still in the drapery?"
"I'm living at Folkestone," began Kipps and decided that that sufficed.
"Didn't Sid tell you he met me?"
"No! Here?"
"Yes. The other day. 'Bout a week or more ago."
"That was before I came."
"Ah! that was it," said Kipps.
"'E's got on," said Ann. "Got 'is own shop now, Artie."
"'E tole me."
They found themselves outside Muggett's cottages. "You going in?" said
Kipps.
"I s'pose so," said Ann.
They both hung upon the pause. Ann took a plunge.
"D'you often come to New Romney?" she said.
"I ride over a bit at times," said Kipps.
Another pause. Ann held out her hand.
"I'm glad I seen you," she said.
Extraordinary impulses arose in neglected parts of Kipps' being. "Ann,"
he said and stopped.
"Yes," said she, and was bright to him.
They looked at one another.
All and more than all of those first emotions of his adolescence had
come back to him. Her presence banished a multitude of countervaling
considerations. It was Ann more than ever. She stood breathing close to
him, with her soft-looking lips a little apart and gladness in her eyes.
"I'm awful glad to see you again," he said; "it brings back old times."
"Doesn't it?"
Another pause. He would have liked to have had a long talk to her, to
have gone for a walk with her or something, to have drawn nearer to her
in any conceivable way, and, above all, to have had some more of the
appreciation that shone in her eyes, but a vestige of Folkestone still
clinging to him told him it "wouldn't do." "Well," he said, "I must be
getting on," and turned away reluctantly, with a will under
compulsion....
When he looked back from the corner she was still at the gate. She was
perhaps a little disconcerted by his retreat. He felt that. He hesitated
for a moment, half turned, stood and suddenly did great things with his
hat. That hat! The wonderful hat of our civilisation!...
In another minute he was engaged in a singularly absent-minded
conversation with his Uncle about the usual topics.
His Uncle was very anxious to buy him a few upright clocks as an
investment for subsequent sale. And there were also some very nice
globes, one terrestrial and the other celestial, in a shop at Lydd that
would look well in a drawing-room and inevitably increase in value....
Kipps either did or did not agree to this purchase; he was unable to
recollect.
The southwest wind perhaps helped him back, at any rate he found himself
through Dymchurch without having noticed the place. There came an odd
effect as he drew near Hythe. The hills on the left and the trees on the
right seemed to draw together and close in upon him until his way was
straight and narrow. He could not turn around on that treacherous,
half-tamed machine, but he knew that behind him, he knew so well, spread
the wide, vast flatness of the Marsh shining under the afternoon sky. In
some way this was material to his thoughts. And as he rode through Hythe
he came upon the idea that there was a considerable amount of
incompatibility between the existence of one who was practically a
gentleman and of Ann.
In the neighbourhood of Seabrook he began to think he had, in some
subtle way, lowered himself by walking along by the side of Ann....
After all, she was only a servant.
Ann!
She called out all the least gentlemanly instincts of his nature. There
had been a moment in their conversation when he had quite distinctly
thought it would really be an extremely nice thing for someone to kiss
her lips.... There was something warming about Ann--at least for Kipps.
She impressed him as having somewhen during their vast interval of
separation contrived to make herself in some distinctive way his.
Fancy keeping that half sixpence all this time!
It was the most flattering thing that had ever happened to Kipps.
Sec.2
He found himself presently sitting over "The Art of Conversing," lost in
the strangest musings. He got up, walked about, became stagnant at the
window for a space, roused himself and by way of something lighter tried
"Sesame and Lilies." From that, too, his attention wandered. He sat
back. Anon he smiled, anon sighed. He arose, pulled his keys from his
pocket, looked at them, decided and went upstairs. He opened the little
yellow box that had been the nucleus of all his possessions in the
world, and took out a small "Escritoire," the very humblest sort of
present, and opened it--kneeling. And there, in the corner, was a little
packet of paper, sealed as a last defence against any prying invader,
with red sealing wax. It had gone untouched for years. He held this
little packet between finger and thumb for a moment, regarding it, and
then put down the escritoire and broke the seal....
As he was getting into bed that night he remembered something for the
first time!
"Dash it!" he said. "Dashed if I told 'em _this_ time.... _Well!_ I
shall 'ave to go over to New Romney again!"
He got into bed and remained sitting pensively on the pillow for a
space.
"It's a rum world," he reflected after a vast interval.
Then he recalled that she had noticed his moustache and embarked upon a
sea of egotistical musings.
He imagined himself telling Ann how rich he was. What a surprise that
would be for her!
Finally he sighed profoundly, blew out his candle and snuggled down, and
in a little while he was asleep....
But the next morning and at intervals afterwards he found himself
thinking of Ann--Ann, the bright, the desirable, the welcoming, and with
an extraordinary streakiness he wanted quite badly to go and then as
badly not to go over to New Romney again.
Sitting on the Leas in the afternoon, he had an idea. "I ought to 'ave
told 'er, I suppose, about my being engaged.
"Ann!"
All sorts of dreams and impressions that had gone clean out of his
mental existence came back to him, changed and brought up to date to fit
her altered presence. He thought of how he had gone back to New Romney
for his Christmas holidays, determined to kiss her, and of the awful
blankness of the discovery that she had gone away.
It seemed incredible now, and yet not wholly incredible, that he had
cried real tears for her--how many years was it ago?
Sec.3
Daily I should thank my Maker that He did not appoint me Censor of the
world of men. I should temper a fierce injustice with a spasmodic
indecision that would prolong rather than mitigate the bitterness of the
Day. For human dignity, for all conscious human superiority I should
lack the beginnings of charity, for bishops, prosperous schoolmasters,
judges and all large respect-pampered souls. And more especially
bishops, towards whom I bear an atavistic, Viking grudge, dreaming not
infrequently and with invariable zest of galleys and landings and well
known living ornaments of the episcopal bench sprinting inland on
twinkling gaiters before my thirsty blade--all these people, I say,
should treat below their deserts, but, on the other hand, for such as
Kipps----. There the exasperating indecisions would come in. The
Judgment would be arrested at Kipps. Everyone and everything would wait.
_You_ would wait. The balance would sway and sway, and whenever it
heeled towards an adverse decision, my finger would set it swaying
again. Kings, warriors, statesmen, brilliant women of our first
families, personalities, gallants, panting with indignation, headline
humanity in general, would stand undamned, unheeded, or be damned in the
most casual manner for their importunity, while my eye went about for
anything possible that could be said on behalf of Kipps.... Albeit I
fear nothing can save him from condemnation upon this present score,
that within two days he was talking to Ann again.
One seeks excuses. Overnight there had been an encounter of Chitterlow
and young Walshingham in his presence, that had certainly warped his
standards. They had called within a few minutes of each other, and the
two swayed by virile attentions to Old Methuselah Four Stars, had talked
against each other, over and at the hospitable presence of Kipps.
Walshingham had seemed to win at the beginning, but finally Chitterlow
had made a magnificent display of vociferation and swept him out of
existence. At the beginning Chitterlow had opened upon the great profits
of playwrights and young Walshingham had capped him at once with a
cynical, but impressive, display of knowledge of the High Finance. If
Chitterlow boasted his thousands, young Walshingham boasted his hundreds
of thousands, and was for a space left in sole possession of the stage,
juggling with the wealth of nations. He was going on by way of Financial
Politics to the Overman, before Chitterlow recovered from his first
check, and came back to victory. "Talking of Women," said Chitterlow,
coming in abruptly upon some things not generally known, beyond
Walshingham's more immediate circle, about a recently departed
Empire-builder; "Talking of Women and the way they Get at a man----"
[Though as a matter of fact they had been talking of the Corruption of
Society by Speculation.]
Upon this new topic Chitterlow was soon manifestly invincible. He knew
so much, he had known so many. Young Walshingham did his best with
epigrams and reservations, but even to Kipps it was evident that this
was a book-learned depravity. One felt Walshingham had never known the
inner realities of passion. But Chitterlow convinced and amazed. He had
run away with girls, he had been run away with by girls, he had been in
love with several at a time--"not counting Bessie"--he had loved and
lost, he had loved and refrained, and he had loved and failed. He threw
remarkable lights upon the moral state of America--in which country he
had toured with great success. He set his talk to the tune of one of Mr.
Kipling's best known songs. He told an incident of simple, romantic
passion, a delirious dream of love and beauty in a Saturday to Monday
steamboat trip up the Hudson, and tagged his end with, "I learnt about
women from 'er!" After that he adopted the refrain and then lapsed into
the praises of Kipling. "Little Kipling," said Chitterlow, with the
familiarity of affection, "_he_ knows," and broke into quotation:
"I've taken my fun where I found it;
I've rogued and I've ranged in my time;
I've 'ad my picking of sweet'earts,
An' four of the lot was Prime."
(These things, I say, affect the moral standards of the best of us.)
"_I'd_ have liked to have written that," said Chitterlow. "That's Life,
that is! But go and put it on the Stage, put even a bit of the Realities
of Life on the Stage, and see what they'll do to you! Only Kipling could
venture on a job like that. That Poem KNOCKED me! I don't say Kipling
hasn't knocked me before and since, but that was a Fair Knock Out. And
yet--you know--there's one thing in it ... this:
"I've taken my fun where I've found it,
And now I must pay for my fun,
For the more you 'ave known o' the others,
The less will you settle to one----"
Well. In my case anyhow--I don't know how much that proves, seeing I'm
exceptional in so many things and there's no good denying it--but so far
as I'm concerned--I tell you two, but of course you needn't let it go
any farther--I've been perfectly faithful to Muriel ever since I married
her--ever since.... Not once. Not even by accident have I ever said or
done anything in the slightest----." His little, brown eye became
pensive after this flattering intimacy and the gorgeous draperies of his
abundant voice fell into graver folds. "_I learnt about women from
'er_," he said impressively.
"Yes," said Walshingham, getting into the hinder spaces of that splendid
pause, "a man must know about women. And the only sound way of learning
is the experimental method."
"If you want to know about the experimental method, my boy," said
Chitterlow, resuming....
So they talked. _Ex pede Herculem_, as Coote, that cultivated polyglot,
would have put it. And in the small hours Kipps went to bed, with his
brain whirling with words and whiskey, and sat for an unconscionable
time upon his bed edge, musing sadly upon the unmanly monogamy of soul
that had cast its shadow upon his career, musing with his thoughts
pointing around more and more certainly to the possibility of at least
duplicity with Ann.
Sec.4
For some days he had been refraining with some insistence from going off
to New Romney again....
I do not know if this may count in palliation of his misconduct. Men,
real Strong-Souled, Healthy Men, should be, I suppose, impervious to
conversational atmospheres, but I have never claimed for Kipps a place
at these high levels. The unquenchable fact remains that the next day he
spent the afternoon with Ann and found no scruple in displaying himself
a budding lover.
He had met her in the High Street, had stopped her, and almost on the
spur of the moment had boldly proposed a walk, "for the sake of old
times."
"_I_ don't mind," said Ann.
Her consent almost frightened Kipps. His imagination had not carried him
to that. "It would be a lark," said Kipps, and looked up the street and
down. "Now?" he said.
"I don't mind a bit, Artie. I was just going for a walk along towards
St. Mary's."
"Let's go that way be'ind the church," said Kipps, and presently they
found themselves drifting seaward in a mood of pleasant commonplace. For
a while they talked of Sid. It went clean out of Kipps' head at that
early stage even that Ann was a "girl" according to the exposition of
Chitterlow, and for a time he remembered only that she was Ann. But
afterwards, with the reek of that talk in his head, he lapsed a little
from that personal relation. They came out upon the beach and sat down
in a tumbled, pebbly place, where a meagre grass and patches of sea
poppy were growing, and Kipps reclined on his elbow and tossed pebbles
in his hand, and Ann sat up, sunlit, regarding him. They talked in
fragments. They exhausted Sid, they exhausted Ann, and Kipps was chary
of his riches.
He declined to a faint love-making. "I got that 'arf sixpence still," he
said.
"Reely?"
That changed the key. "I always kept mine, some'ow," said Ann, and there
was a pause.
They spoke of how often they had thought of each other during those
intervening years. Kipps may have been untruthful, but Ann perhaps was
not. "I met people here and there," said Ann; "but I never met anyone
quite like you, Artie."
"It's jolly our meeting again, anyhow," said Kipps. "Look at that ship
out there. She's pretty close in...."
He had a dull period, became indeed almost pensive, and then he was
enterprising for a while. He tossed up his pebbles so that as if by
accident they fell on Ann's hand. Then, very penitently, he stroked the
place. That would have led to all sorts of coquetries on the part of Flo
Banks, for example, but it disconcerted and checked Kipps to find Ann
made no objection, smiled pleasantly down on him, with eyes half shut
because of the sun. She was taking things very much for granted.
He began to talk, and Chitterlow standards resuming possession of him he
said he had never forgotten her.
"I never forgotten you either, Artie," she said. "Funny, isn't it?"
It impressed Kipps also as funny.
He became reminiscent, and suddenly a warm summer's evening came back to
him. "Remember them cockchafers, Ann?" he said. But the reality of the
evening he recalled was not the chase of cockchafers. The great reality
that had suddenly arisen between them was that he had never kissed Ann
in his life. He looked up and there were her lips.
He had wanted to very badly, and his memory leaped and annihilated an
interval. That old resolution came back to him and all sorts of new
resolutions passed out of mind. And he had learnt something since those
boyish days. This time he did not ask. He went on talking, his nerves
began very faintly to quiver and his mind grew bright.
Presently, having satisfied himself that there was no one to see, he sat
up beside her and remarked upon the clearness of the air, and how close
Dungeness seemed to them. Then they came upon a pause again.
"Ann," he whispered, and put an arm that quivered about her.
She was mute and unresisting, and, as he was to remember, solemn.
He turned her face towards him, and kissed her lips, and she kissed him
back again--kisses frank and tender as a child's.
Sec.5
It was curious that in the retrospect he did not find nearly the
satisfaction in this infidelity he had imagined was there. It was no
doubt desperately doggish, doggish to an almost Chitterlowesque degree
to recline on the beach at Littlestone with a "girl," to make love to
her and to achieve the triumph of kissing her, when he was engaged to
another "girl" at Folkestone, but somehow these two people were not
"girls," they were Ann and Helen. Particularly Helen declined to be
considered as a "girl." And there was something in Ann's quietly
friendly eyes, in her frank smile, in the naive pressure of her hand,
there was something undefended and welcoming that imparted a flavour to
the business upon which he had not counted. He had learnt about women
from her. That refrain ran through his mind and deflected his thoughts,
but as a matter of fact he had learnt about nothing but himself.
He wanted very much to see Ann some more and explain. He did not clearly
know what it was he wanted to explain.
He did not clearly know anything. It is the last achievement of the
intelligence to get all of one's life into one coherent scheme, and
Kipps was only in a measure more aware of himself as a whole than is a
tree. His existence was an affair of dissolving and recurring moods.
When he thought of Helen or Ann or any of his friends, he thought
sometimes of this aspect and sometimes of that--and often one aspect was
finally incongruous with another. He loved Helen, he revered Helen. He
was also beginning to hate her with some intensity. When he thought of
that expedition to Lympne, profound, vague, beautiful emotions flooded
his being; when he thought of paying calls with her perforce, or of her
latest comment on his bearing, he found himself rebelliously composing
fierce and pungent insults, couched in the vernacular. But Ann, whom he
had seen so much less of, was a simpler memory. She was pretty, she was
almost softly feminine, and she was possible to his imagination just
exactly where Helen was impossible. More than anything else, she carried
the charm of respect for him, the slightest glance of her eyes was balm
for his perpetually wounded self-conceit.
Chance suggestions it was set the tune of his thoughts, and his state
of health and repletion gave the colour. Yet somehow he had this at
least almost clear in his mind, that to have gone to see Ann a second
time, to have implied that she had been in possession of his thoughts
through all this interval, and, above all, to have kissed her, was
shabby and wrong. Only unhappily this much of lucidity had come now just
a few hours after it was needed.
Sec.6
Four days after this it was that Kipps got up so late. He got up late,
cut his chin while shaving, kicked a slipper into his sponge bath and
said, "Desh!"
Perhaps you know those intolerable mornings, dear Reader, when you seem
to have neither the heart nor the strength to rise, and your nervous
adjustments are all wrong and your fingers thumbs, and you hate the very
birds for singing. You feel inadequate to any demand whatever. Often
such awakenings follow a poor night's rest, and commonly they mean
indiscriminate eating, or those subtle mental influences old Kipps
ascribed to "Foozle Ile" in the system, or worry. And with Kipps--albeit
Chitterlow had again been his guest overnight--assuredly worry had
played a leading role. Troubles had been gathering upon him for days,
there had been a sort of concentration of these hosts of Midian
overnight, and in the grey small hours Kipps had held his review.
The predominating trouble marched under this banner:
MR. KIPPS
MRS. BINDON BOTTING
At Home
Thursday, September 16th
Anagrams, 4 to 6:30 R. S. V. P.
a banner that was the fac-simile of a card upon his looking glass in the
room below. And in relation to this terribly significant document things
had come to a pass with Helen that he could only describe in his own
expressive idiom as "words."
It had long been a smouldering issue between them that Kipps was not
availing himself with any energy or freedom of the opportunities he had
of social exercises, much less was he seeking additional opportunities.
He had, it was evident, a peculiar dread of that universal afternoon
enjoyment, the Call, and Helen made it unambiguously evident that this
dread was "silly" and had to be overcome. His first display of this
unmanly weakness occurred at the Coote's on the day before he kissed
Ann. They were all there, chatting very pleasantly, when the little
servant with the big cap announced the younger Miss Wace.
Whereupon Kipps manifested a lively horror and rose partially from his
chair. "O Gum!" he protested. "Carn't I go upstairs?"
Then he sank back, for it was too late. Very probably the younger Miss
Wace had heard him as she came in.
Helen said nothing of that, though her manner may have shown her
surprise, but afterwards she told Kipps he must get used to seeing
people, and suggested that he should pay a series of calls with Mrs.
Walshingham and herself. Kipps gave a reluctant assent at the time and
afterwards displayed a talent for evasion that she had not suspected in
him. At last she did succeed in securing him for a call upon Miss
Punchafer, of Radnor Park--a particularly easy call because Miss
Punchafer being so deaf one could say practically what one liked--and
then outside the gate he shirked again. "I can't go in," he said in a
faded voice.
"You _must_," said Helen, beautiful as ever, but even more than a little
hard and forbidding.
"I can't."
He produced his handkerchief hastily, thrust it to his face, and
regarded her over it with rounded, hostile eyes.
"'Possible," he said in a hoarse, strange voice out of the handkerchief.
"Nozzez bleedin'."
But that was the end of his power of resistance, and when the rally for
the Anagram Tea occurred she bore down his feeble protests altogether.
She insisted. She said frankly, "I am going to give you a good talking
to about this," and she did....
From Coote he gathered something of the nature of Anagrams and Anagram
parties. An anagram, Coote explained, was a word spelt the same way as
another, only differently arranged, as, for instance, T. O. C. O. E.
would be an anagram for his own name, Coote.
"T. O. C. O. E.," repeated Kipps very carefully.
"Or T. O. E. C. O.," said Coote.
"Or T. O. E. C. O.," said Kipps, assisting his poor head by nodding it
at each letter.
"Toe Company like," he said in his efforts to comprehend.
When Kipps was clear what an anagram meant, Coote came to the second
heading, the Tea. Kipps gathered there might be from thirty to sixty
people present, and that each one would have an anagram pinned on. "They
give you a card to put your guesses on, rather like a dance programme,
and then, you know, you go around and guess," said Coote. "It's rather
good fun."
"Oo rather!" said Kipps, with simulated gusto.
"It shakes everybody up together," said Coote.
Kipps smiled and nodded....
In the small hours all his painful meditations were threaded by the
vision of that Anagram Tea; it kept marching to and fro and in and out
of all his other troubles, from thirty to sixty people, mostly ladies
and callers, and a great number of the letters of the alphabet, and
more particularly P. I. K. P. S. and T. O. E. C. O., and he was trying
to make one word out of the whole interminable procession....
This word, as he finally gave it with some emphasis to the silence of
the night, was _"Demn!"_
Then, wreathed as it were in this lettered procession, was the figure of
Helen as she had appeared at the moment of "words"; her face a little
hard, a little irritated, a little disappointed. He imagined himself
going around and guessing under her eye....
He tried to think of other things, without lapsing upon a still deeper
uneasiness that was wreathed with yellow sea poppies, and the figures of
Buggins, Pierce and Carshot, three murdered Friendships, rose
reproachfully in the stillness and changed horrible apprehensions into
unspeakable remorse. Last night had been their customary night for the
banjo, and Kipps, with a certain tremulous uncertainty, had put old
Methuselah amidst a retinue of glasses on the table and opened a box of
choice cigars. In vain. They were in no need, it seemed, of _his_
society. But instead Chitterlow had come, anxious to know if it was all
right about that syndicate plan. He had declined anything but a very
weak whiskey and soda, "just to drink," at least until business was
settled, and had then opened the whole affair with an effect of great
orderliness to Kipps. Soon he was taking another whiskey by sheer
inadvertency, and the complex fabric of his conversation was running
more easily from the broad loom of his mind. Into that pattern had
interwoven a narrative of extensive alterations in the Pestered
Butterfly--the neck and beetle business was to be restored--the story of
a grave difference of opinion with Mrs. Chitterlow, where and how to
live after the play had succeeded, the reasons why the Hon. Thomas
Norgate had never financed a syndicate, and much matter also about the
syndicate now under discussion. But if the current of their conversation
had been vortical and crowded, the outcome was perfectly clear. Kipps
was to be the chief participator in the syndicate, and his contribution
was to be two thousand pounds. Kipps groaned and rolled over and found
Helen, as it were, on the other side. "Promise me," she had said, "you
won't do anything without consulting me."
Kipps at once rolled back to his former position, and for a space lay
quite still. He felt like a very young rabbit in a trap.
Then suddenly, with extraordinary distinctness, his heart cried out for
Ann, and he saw her as he had seen her at New Romney, sitting amidst the
yellow sea poppies with the sunlight on her face. His heart called out
for her in the darkness as one calls for rescue. He knew, as though he
had known it always, that he loved Helen no more. He wanted Ann, he
wanted to hold her and be held by her, to kiss her again and again, to
turn his back forever on all these other things....
He rose late, but this terrible discovery was still there, undispelled
by cockcrow or the day. He rose in a shattered condition, and he cut
himself while shaving, but at last he got into his dining-room and could
pull the bell for the hot constituents of his multifarious breakfast.
And then he turned to his letters. There were two real letters in
addition to the customary electric belt advertisement, continental
lottery circular and betting tout's card. One was in a slight mourning
envelope and addressed in an unfamiliar hand. This he opened first and
discovered a note:
MRS. RAYMOND WACE
Requests the pleasure of
MR. KIPPS'
Company at Dinner
on Tuesday, September 21st, at 8 o'clock
With a hasty movement Kipps turned his mind to the second letter. It was
an unusually long one from his Uncle, and ran as follows:
"MY DEAR NEPHEW:
"We are considerably startled by your letter though expecting something
of the sort and disposed to hope for the best. If the young lady is a
relation to the Earl of Beaupres well and good but take care you are not
being imposed upon for there are many who will be glad enough to snap
you up now your circumstances are altered--I waited on the old Earl
once while in service and he was remarkably close with his tips and
suffered from corns. A hasty old gent and hard to please--I daresay he
has forgotten me altogether--and anyhow there is no need to rake up
bygones. To-morrow is bus day and as you say the young lady is living
near by we shall shut up shop for there is really nothing doing now what
with all the visitors bringing everything with them down to their very
children's pails and say how de do to her and give her a bit of a kiss
and encouragement if we think her suitable--she will be pleased to see
your old uncle--We wish we could have had a look at her first but still
there is not much mischief done and hoping that all will turn out well
yet I am
"Your affectionate Uncle
"EDWARD GEORGE KIPPS.
"My heartburn still very bad. I shall bring over a few bits of rhubub I
picked up, a sort you won't get in Folkestone and if possible a good
bunch of flowers for the young lady."
"Comin' over to-day," said Kipps, standing helplessly with the letter in
his hand.
"'Ow, the Juice----?
"I carn't.
"Kiss 'er!"
"I carn't even face 'er----!"
A terrible anticipation of that gathering framed itself in his mind--a
hideous, impossible disaster.
His voice went up to a note of despair, "And it's too late to telegrarf
and stop 'em!"
About twenty minutes after this, an outporter in Castle Hill Avenue was
accosted by a young man, with a pale, desperate face, an exquisitely
rolled umbrella and a heavy Gladstone bag.
"Carry this to the station, will you?" said the young man. "I want to
ketch the nex' train to London.... You'll 'ave to look sharp--I 'aven't
very much time."