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

our bookseller was dusting round before breakfast, Chitterlow returned, appeared suddenly in the shop doorway.

It was the most unexpected thing in the world. The man was in evening dress, evening dress in that singularly crumpled state it assumes after the hour of dawn, and above his dishevelled red hair a smallish Gibus had tilted remarkably forward. He opened the door and stood tall and spread, with one vast white glove flung out, as if to display how burst a glove might be, his eyes bright, such wrinkling of brow and mouth as only an experienced actor can produce, and a singular radiance of emotion upon his whole being—an altogether astonishing spectacle.

The bell jangled for a bit, and then gave it up and was silent. For a long, long second everything was quietly attentive. Kipps was amazed to his uttermost; had he had ten times the capacity, he would still have been fully amazed. ‘It’s Chit’low!’ he said at last, standing duster in hand.

But he doubted whether it was not a dream.

‘Tzit!’ gasped that most extraordinary person, still in an incredibly expanded attitude, and then with a slight forward jerk of the starry split glove, ‘Bif!’

He could say no more. The tremendous speech he had had ready vanished from his mind. Kipps stared at his facial changes, vaguely conscious of the truth of the teachings of Nisbet and Lombroso concerning men of genius.

Then suddenly Chitterlow’s features were convulsed, the histrionic fell from him like a garment, and he was weeping. He said something indistinct about ‘Old Kipps! Good old Kipps! Oh, old Kipps!’ and somehow he managed to mix a chuckle and a sob in the most remarkable way. He emerged from somewhere near the middle of his original attitude, a merely lifesize creature. ‘My play, boohoo!’ he sobbed, clutching at his friend’s arm. ‘My play, Kipps! (sob). You know?’

‘Well?’ cried Kipps, with his heart sinking in sympathy. ‘It ain’t—?’

‘No,’ howled Chitterlow. ‘No. It’s a Success! My dear chap! my dear boy! Oh! It’s a—Bu—boohoo!—a Big Success!’ He turned away and wiped streaming tears with the back of his hand. He walked a pace or so and turned. He sat down on one of the specially designed artistic chairs of the Associated Booksellers’ Trading Union and produced an exiguous lady’s handkerchief, extraordinarily belaced. He choked. ‘My play,’ and covered his face here and there.

He made an unsuccessful effort to control himself, and shrank for a space to the dimensions of a small and pathetic creature. His great nose suddenly came through a careless place in the handkerchief.

I’m knocked,’ he said in a muffled voice, and so remained for a space—wonderful—veiled.

He made a gallant effort to wipe his tears away. ‘I had to tell you,’ he said, gulping.

‘Be all right in a minute,’ he added, ‘Calm!’ and sat still—

Kipps stared in commiseration of such success. Then he heard footsteps, and went quickly to the house doorway. ‘Jest a minute,’ he said. ‘Don’t go in the shop, Ann, for a minute. It’s Chitterlow. He’s a bit essited. But he’ll be better in a minute. It’s knocked him over a bit. You see’—his voice sank to a hushed note as one who announces death—”e’s made a success with his play.’

He pushed her back, lest she should see the scandal of another male’s tears…

Soon Chitterlow felt better, but for a little while his manner was even alarmingly subdued. ‘I had to come and tell you,’ he said. ‘I had to astonish some one. Muriel—she’ll be first-rate, of course. But she’s over at Dymchurch.’ He blew his nose with enormous noise, and emerged instantly, a merely garrulous optimist.

‘I expect she’ll be precious glad.’

‘She doesn’t know yet, my dear boy. She’s at Dymchurch —with a friend. She’s seen some of my first nights before… Better out of it… I’m going to her now. I’ve been up all night—talking to the Boys and all that. I’m a bit off it just for a bit. But —it Knocked ‘em. It Knocked everybody.’

He stared at the floor and went on in a monotone. ‘They laughed a bit at the beginning—but nothing like a settled laugh —not until the second act—you know—the chap with the beetle down his neck. Little Chisholme did that bit to rights. Than they began—to rights.’ His voice warmed and increased. ‘Laughing! It made me laugh! We jumped ‘em into the third act before they had time to cool. Everybody was on it. I never saw a first night go so fast. Laugh, laugh, laugh, LAUGH, LAUGH, LAUGH’ (he howled the last repetition with stupendous violence). ‘Everything they laughed at. They laughed at things that we hadn’t meant to be funny—not for one moment. Bif! Bizz! Curtain. A Fair Knock Out!—I went on—but I didn’t say a word. Chisholme did the patter. Shouting! It was like walking under Niagara—going across that stage. It was like never having seen an audience before—

‘Then afterwards—the Boys!’

His emotion held him for a space. ‘Dear old Boys!’ he murmured.

His words multiplied, his importance increased. In a little while he was restored to something of his old self. He was enormously excited. He seemed unable to sit down anywhere. He came into the breakfast-room so soon as Kipps was sure of him, shook hands with Mrs. Kipps parenthetically, sat down and immediately got up again. He went to the bassinet in the corner and looked absentmindedly at Kipps junior, and said he was glad if only for the youngster’s sake. He immediately resumed the thread of his discourse… He drank a cup of coffee noisily and walked up and down the room talking, while they attempted breakfast amidst the gale of his excitement. The infant slept marvellously through it all.

‘You won’t mind my not sitting down, Mrs Kipps—I couldn’t sit down for any one, or I’d do it for you. It’s you I’m thinking of more than any one, you and Muriel, and all Old Pals and Good Friends. It means wealth, it means money—hundreds and thousands… If you’d heard ‘em you’d know.’

He was silent through a portentous moment, while topics battled for him, and finally he burst and talked of them all together. It was like the rush of water when a dam bursts and washes out a fair-sized provincial town; all sorts of things floated along on the swirl. For example, he was discussing his future behaviour. ‘I’m glad it’s come now. Not before. I’ve had my lesson. I shall be very discreet now, trust me. We’ve learnt the value of money.’ He discussed the possibility of a country house, of taking a Martello tower as a swimming-box (as one might say a shooting-box), of living in Venice because of its artistic associations and scenic possibilities, of a flat in Westminster or a house in the West End. He also raised the question of giving up smoking and drinking, and what classes of drink were especially noxious to a man of his constitution. But discourses on all this did not prevent a parenthetical computation of the probable profits on the supposition of a thousand nights here and in America, nor did it ignore the share Kipps was to have, nor the gladness with which Chitterlow would pay that share, nor the surprise and regret with which he had learnt, through an indirect source which had awakened many associations, of the turpitude of young Walshingham, nor the distaste Chitterlow had always felt for young Walshingham, and men of his type. An excursus upon Napoleon had got into the torrent somehow, and kept bobbing up and down. The whole thing was thrown into the form of a single complex sentence, with parenthetical and subordinate clauses fitting one into the other like Chinese boxes, and from first to last it never even had an air of approaching anything in the remotest degree partaking of the nature of a full stop.

Into this deluge came the Daily News, like the gleam of light in Watts’ picture, the waters were assuaged while its sheet was opened, and it had a column, a whole column of praise. Chitterlow held the paper, and Kipps read over his left hand, and Ann under his right. It made the affair more real to Kipps; it seemed even to confirm Chitterlow against lurking doubts he had been concealing. But it took him away. He departed in a whirl, to secure a copy of every morning paper, every blessed rag there is, and take them all to Dymchurch and Muriel forthwith. It had been the send-off the Boys had given him that had prevented his doing as much at Charing Cross—let alone that he only caught it by the skin of his teeth… Besides which, the bookstall wasn’t open. His white face, lit by a vast excitement, bid them a tremendous farewell, and he departed through the sunlight, with his buoyant walk, buoyant almost to the tottering pitch. His hair, as one got it sunlit in the street, seemed to have grown in the night.

They saw him stop a newsboy.

‘Every blessed rag,’ floated to them on the notes of that gorgeous voice.

The newsboy, too, had happened on luck. Something like a faint cheer from the newsboy came down the air to terminate that transaction.

Chitterlow went on his way swinging a great budget of papers, a figure of merited success. The newsboy recovered from his emotion with a jerk, examined something in his hand again, transferred it to his pocket, watched Chitterlow for a space, and then in a sort of hushed silence resumed his daily routine…

Ann and Kipps regarded that receding happiness in silence, until it vanished round the bend of the road.

‘I am glad,’ said Ann at last, speaking with a little sigh.

‘So’m I,’ said Kipps, with emphasis. ‘For if ever a feller ‘as worked and waited—it’s ‘im…’

They went back through the shop rather thoughtfully and, after a peep at the sleeping baby, resumed their interrupted breakfast. ‘If ever a feller ‘as worked and waited, it’s ‘im,’ said Kipps, cutting bread.

‘Very likely it’s true,’ said Ann, a little wistfully.

‘What’s true?’

‘About all that money coming.’

Kipps meditated. ‘I don’t see why it shouldn’t be,’ he decided, and handed Ann a piece of bread on the tip of his knife.

‘But we’ll keep on the shop,’ he said, after an interval for further reflection, ‘all the same… I ‘aven’t much trust in money after the things we’ve seen.’

7

That was two years ago, and, as the whole world knows, the Pestered Butterfly is running still. It was true. It has made the fortune of a once declining little theatre in the Strand; night after night the great beetle scene draws happy tears from a house packed to repletion, and Kipps—for all that Chitterlow is not what one might call a business man—is almost as rich as he was in the beginning. People in Australia, people in Lancashire, Scotland, Ireland, in New Orleans, in Jamaica, in New York, and Montreal, have crowded through doorways to Kipps’ enrichment, lured by the hitherto unsuspected humours of the entomological drama. Wealth rises like an exhalation all over our little planet, and condenses, or at least some of it does, in the pockets of Kipps.

‘It’s rum,’ said Kipps.

He sat in the little kitchen out behind the bookshop and philosophised and smiled while Ann gave Arthur Waddy Kipps his evening tub before the fire. Kipps was always present at this ceremony, unless customers prevented; there was something in the mixture of the odours of tobacco, soap, and domesticity that charmed him unspeakably.

‘Chuckerdee, o’ man,’ he said affably, wagging his pipe at his son, and thought incidentally, after the manner of all parents, that very few children could have so straight and clean a body.

‘Dadda’s got a cheque,’ said Arthur Waddy Kipps, emerging for a moment from the towel.

”E gets