Kipps - H. G. Wells (best books to read non fiction .txt) 📗

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 Methuselah’s starry claim to a ripe antiquity vanished in that glamour; two burnt holes and a clamant darn in the tablecloth, 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 whisky. 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 to…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 Methuselah on his third round was busy repairing the temporary eclipse of Kipps’ arterial glow. Then suddenly Chitterlow was seized 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 inspired 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 orfen 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.’…

3

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 ‘really must be getting on,’ and from that point his memory became irregular. Certain things 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 downhill to Tontine Street in order to go uphill 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 and 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 I to do?’

‘Keep out,’ said Chitterlow. ‘You can’t knock ‘em up now— that would give you Right away. You’d better try and sneak in in the morning with the Cat. That’ll do you. You’ll probably get in all right in the morning if nobody gives you away.’

Then for a time—perhaps as the result of that slap on the back—Kipps felt decidedly queer, and, acting on Chitterlow’s advice, went for a bit of a freshener upon the Leas. After a time he threw off the temporary queerness, and found Chitterlow patting him on the shoulder and telling him that he’d be all right now in a minute and all the better for it—which he was. And the wind having dropped and the night being now a really very beautiful moonlight night indeed, and all before Kipps to spend as he liked, and with only a very little tendency to spin round now and again to mar its splendour, they set out to walk the whole length of the Leas to the Sandgate lift and back, and as they walked Chitterlow spoke first of moonlight transfiguring the sea and then of moonlight transfiguring faces, and so at last he came to the topic of Love, and upon that he dwelt a great while, and with a wealth of experience and illustrative anecdote that seemed remarkably pungent and material to Kipps. He forgot his lost Miss Walshingham and his outraged employer again. He became, as it were, a desperado by reflection.

Chitterlow had had adventures, a quite astonishing variety of adventures, in this direction; he was a man with a past, a really opulent past, and he certainly seemed to like to look back and see himself amidst its opulence.

He made no consecutive history, but he gave Kipps vivid momentary pictures of relations and entanglements. One moment he was in flight—only too worthily in flight—before the husband of a Malay woman in Cape Town. At the next he was having passionate complications with the daughter of a clergyman in York. Then he passed to a remarkable grouping at Seaford.

They say you can’t love two women at once,’ said Chitterlow. ‘But I tell you—’ He gesticulated and raised his ample voice. ‘It’s Rot! Rot!’

‘I know that,’ said Kipps.

‘Why, when I was in the smalls with Bessie Hopper’s company there were Three.’ He laughed, and decided to add, ‘not counting Bessie, that is.’

He set out to reveal Life as it is lived in touring companies, a quite amazing jungle of interwoven ‘affairs’ it appeared to be, a mere amorous winepress for the crushing of hearts.

‘People say this sort of thing’s a nuisance and interferes with Work. I tell you it isn’t. The Work couldn’t go on without it. They must do it. They haven’t the Temperament if they don’t. If they hadn’t the Temperament they wouldn’t want to act; if they have—Bif!’

‘You’re right,’ said Kipps. ‘I see that.’

Chitterlow proceeded to a close criticism of certain historical indiscretions of Mr. Clement Scott respecting the morals of the stage. Speaking in confidence, and not as one who addresses the public, he admitted regretfully the general truth of these comments. He proceeded to examine various typical instances that had almost forced themselves upon him personally, and with especial regard to the contrast between his own character towards women and that of the Hon. Thomas Norgate, with whom it appeared he had once been on terms of great intimacy…

Kipps listened with emotion to these extraordinary recollections. They were wonderful to him,