Kipps · Book II · Chapter 2 5 (2/2)

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 sangfroid.”

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.

“I got mixed up with this lot ’ere,” said Kipps. “That’s what’s so harkward⁠—I mean awkward.”

“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?”

“Rather. 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.

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 Mi-di-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 forever.

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.⁠ ⁠…