Kipps · Book II · Chapter 2 7 (1/4)

VII

London

London was Kipps’ third world. There were no doubt other worlds, but Kipps knew only these three; firstly, New Romney and the Emporium, constituting his primary world, his world of origin, which also contained Ann; secondly, the world of culture and refinement, the world of which Coote was chaperon, and into which Kipps was presently to marry, a world it was fast becoming evident absolutely incompatible with the first, and, thirdly, a world still to a large extent unexplored, London. London presented itself as a place of great, grey spaces and incredible multitudes of people, centring about Charing Cross station and the Royal Grand Hotel, and containing at unexpected arbitrary points shops of the most amazing sort, statuary, Squares, Restaurants⁠—where it was possible for clever people like Walshingham to order a lunch item by item, to the waiters’ evident respect and sympathy⁠—exhibitions of incredible things⁠—the Walshinghams had taken him to the Arts and Crafts and to a picture gallery⁠—and theatres. London, moreover, is rendered habitable by hansom cabs. Young Walshingham was a natural cab taker, he was an all-round large minded young man, and he had in the course of their two days’ stay taken Kipps into no less than nine, so that Kipps was singularly not afraid of these vehicles. He knew that whereever you were, so soon as you were thoroughly lost you said “Hi!” to a cab, and then “Royal Grand Hotel.” Day and night these trusty conveyances are returning the strayed Londoner back to his point of departure, and were it not for their activity in a little while the whole population, so vast and incomprehensible is the intricate complexity of this great city, would be hopelessly lost forever. At any rate, that is how the thing presented itself to Kipps, and I have heard much the same from visitors from America.

His train was composed of corridor carriages, and he forgot his trouble for a time in the wonders of this modern substitute for railway compartments. He went from the non-smoking to the smoking carriage and smoked a cigarette, and strayed from his second-class carriage to a first and back. But presently Black Care got aboard the train and came and sat beside him. The exhilaration of escape had evaporated now, and he was presented with a terrible picture of his Aunt and Uncle arriving at his lodgings and finding him fled. He had left a hasty message that he was called away suddenly on business, “ver’ important business,” and they were to be sumptuously entertained. His immediate motive had been his passionate dread of an encounter between these excellent but unrefined old people and the Walshinghams, but now that end was secured, he could see how thwarted and exasperated they would be.

How to explain to them?

He ought never to have written to tell them!

He ought to have got married and told them afterwards.

He ought to have consulted Helen.

“Promise me,” she had said.

“Oh, desh!” said Kipps, and got up and walked back into the smoking car and began to consume cigarettes.

Suppose, after all, they found out the Walshingham’s address and went there!

At Charing Cross, however, there were distractions again. He took a cab in an entirely Walshingham manner, and was pleased to note the enhanced respect of the cabman when he mentioned the Royal Grand. He followed Walshingham’s routine on their previous visit with perfect success. They were very nice in the office, and gave him an excellent room at fourteen shillings the night.

He went up and spent a considerable time in examining the furniture of his room, scrutinising himself in its various mirrors and sitting on the edge of the bed whistling. It was a vast and splendid apartment, and cheap at fourteen shillings. But, finding the figure of Ann inclined to resume possession of his mind, he roused himself and descended by the staircase after a momentary hesitation before the lift. He had thought of lunch, but he drifted into the great drawing-room and read a guide to the Hotels of Europe for a space, until a doubt whether he was entitled to use this palatial apartment without extra charge arose in his mind. He would have liked something to eat very much now, but his inbred terror of the table was very strong. He did at last get by a porter in uniform towards the dining-room, but at the sight of a number of waiters and tables, with remarkable complications of knives and glasses, terror seized him, and he backed out again, with a mumbled remark to the waiter in the doorway about this not being the way.

He hovered in the hall and lounge until he thought the presiding porter regarded him with suspicion, and then went up to his room again by the staircase, got his hat and umbrella and struck boldly across the courtyard. He would go to a restaurant instead.

He had a moment of elation in the gateway. He felt all the Strand must notice him as he emerged through the great gate of the Hotel. “One of these here rich swells,” they would say. “Don’t they do it just!” A cabman touched his hat. “No fear,” said Kipps, pleasantly.

Then he remembered he was hungry again.

Yet he decided he was in no great hurry for lunch, in spite of an internal protest, and turned eastward along the Strand in a leisurely manner. He tried to find a place to suit him soon enough. He tried to remember the sort of things Walshingham had ordered. Before all things he didn’t want to go into a place and look like a fool. Some of these places rook you dreadful, besides making fun of you. There was a place near Essex Street where there was a window brightly full of chops, tomatoes and lettuce. He stopped at this and reflected for a time, and then it occurred to him that you were expected to buy these things raw and cook them at home. Anyhow, there was sufficient doubt in the matter to stop him. He drifted on to a neat window with champagne bottles, a dish of asparagus and a framed menu of a two shilling lunch. He was about to enter, when fortunately he perceived two waiters looking at him over the back screen of the window with a most ironical expression, and he sheered off at once. There was a wonderful smell of hot food halfway down Fleet Street and a nice looking Tavern with several doors, but he could not decide which door. His nerve was going under the strain.

He hesitated at Farringdon Street and drifted up to St. Paul’s and round the church yard, full chiefly of dead bargains in the shop windows, to Cheapside. But now Kipps was getting demoralised, and each house of refreshment seemed to promise still more complicated obstacles to food. He didn’t know how you went in and what was the correct thing to do with your hat, he didn’t know what you said to the waiter or what you called the different things; he was convinced absolutely he would “fumble,” as Shalford would have said, and look like a fool. Somebody might laugh at him! The hungrier he got the more unendurable was the thought that anyone should laugh at him. For a time he considered an extraordinary expedient to account for his ignorance. He would go in and pretend to be a foreigner and not know English. Then they might understand.⁠ ⁠… Presently he had drifted into a part of London where there did not seem to be any refreshment places at all.

“Oh, desh!” said Kipps, in a sort of agony of indecisiveness. “The very nex’ place I see, in I go.”

The next place was a fried fish shop in a little side street, where there were also sausages on a gas-lit grill.

He would have gone in, but suddenly a new scruple came to him, that he was too well dressed for the company he could see dimly through the steam sitting at the counter and eating with a sort of nonchalant speed.

He was half minded to resort to a hansom and brave the terrors of the dining-room of the Royal Grand⁠—they wouldn’t know why he had gone out really⁠—when the only person he knew in London appeared (as the only person one does know will do in London) and slapped him on the shoulder. Kipps was hovering at a window at a few yards from the fish shop, pretending to examine some really strikingly cheap pink baby linen, and trying to settle finally about those sausages.

“Hullo, Kipps!” cried Sid; “spending the millions?”

Kipps turned, and was glad to perceive no lingering vestige of the chagrin that had been so painful at New Romney. Sid looked grave and important, and he wore a quite new silk hat that gave a commercial touch to a generally socialistic costume. For a moment the sight of Sid uplifted Kipps wonderfully. He saw him as a friend and helper, and only presently did it come clearly into his mind that this was the brother of Ann.

He made amiable noises.

“I’ve just been up this way,” Sid explained, “buying a secondhand ’namelling stove.⁠ ⁠… I’m going to ’namel myself.”

“Lor’!” said Kipps.

“Yes. Do me a lot of good. Let the customer choose his colour. See? What brings you up?”

Kipps had a momentary vision of his foiled Uncle and Aunt. “Jest a bit of a change,” he said.

Sid came to a swift decision. “Come down to my little show. I got someone I’d like to see talking to you.”

Even then Kipps did not think of Ann in this connection.

“Well,” he said, trying to invent an excuse on the spur of the moment. “Fact is,” he explained, “I was jest looking ’round to get a bit of lunch.”

“Dinner, we call it,” said Sid. “But that’s all right. You can’t get anything to eat hereabout. If you’re not too haughty to do a bit of slumming, there’s some mutton spoiling for me now⁠—”

The word “mutton” affected Kipps greatly.

“It won’t take us ’arf an hour,” said Sid, and Kipps was carried.

He discovered another means of London locomotion in the Underground Railway, and recovered his self-possession in that interest. “You don’t mind going third?” asked Sid, and Kipps said, “Nort a bit of it.” They were silent in the train for a time, on account of strangers in the carriage, and then Sid began to explain who it was that he wanted Kipps to meet. “It’s a chap named Masterman⁠—do you no end of good.

“He occupies our first floor front room, you know. It isn’t so much for gain I let as company. We don’t want the whole ’ouse, and another, I knew the man before. Met him at our Sociological, and after a bit he said he wasn’t comfortable where he was. That’s how it came about. He’s a first-class chap⁠—first-class. Science! You should see his books!

“Properly he’s a sort of journalist. He’s written a lot of things, but he’s been too ill lately to do very much. Poetry he’s written, all sorts. He writes for the Commonweal sometimes, and sometimes he reviews books. ’E’s got ’eaps of books⁠—’eaps. Besides selling a lot.

“He knows a regular lot of people, and all sorts of things. He’s been a dentist, and he’s a qualified chemist, an’ I seen him often reading German and French. Taught ’imself. He was here⁠—”

Sid indicated South Kensington, which had come opportunely outside the carriage windows, with a nod of his head, “⁠—three years. Studying science. But you’ll see ’im. When he really gets to talking⁠—he pours it out.”

“Ah!” said Kipps, nodding sympathetically, with his two hands on his umbrella knob.

“He’ll do big things some day,” said Sid. “He’s written a book on science already. Physiography, it’s called. Elementary Physiography! Some day he’ll write an Advanced⁠—when he gets time.”

He let this soak into Kipps.

“I can’t introduce you to Lords and swells,” he went on, “but I can show you a Famous Man, that’s going to be. I can do that. Leastways⁠—unless⁠—”

Sid hesitated.

“He’s got a frightful cough,” he said.

“He won’t care to talk with me,” weighed Kipps.

“That’s all right; he won’t mind. He’s fond of talking. He’d talk to anyone,” said Sid, reassuringly, and added a perplexing bit of Londonized Latin. “He doesn’t pute anything, non alienum. You know.”

“I know,” said Kipps, intelligently, over his umbrella knob, though of course that was altogether untrue.

Kipps found Sid’s shop a practical looking establishment, stocked with the most remarkable collection of bicycles and pieces of bicycle that he had ever beheld. “My hiring stock,” said Sid, with a wave to this ironmongery, “and there’s the best machine at a democratic price in London, The Red-Flag, built by me. See?”

He indicated a graceful, grey-brown framework in the window. “And there’s my stock of accessories⁠—store prices.

“Go in for motors a bit,” added Sid.

“Mutton?” said Kipps, not hearing him distinctly.

“Motors, I said.⁠ ⁠… ’Owever, Mutton Department ’ere,” and he opened a door that had a curtain guarded window in its upper panel, to reveal a little room with red walls and green furniture, with a white clothed table and the generous promise of a meal. “Fanny!” he shouted. “Here’s Art Kipps.”

A bright-eyed young woman of five or six and twenty in a pink print appeared, a little flushed from cooking, and wiped a hand on an apron and shook hands and smiled, and said it would all be ready in a minute. She went on to say she had heard of Kipps and his luck, and meanwhile Sid vanished to draw the beer, and returned with two glasses for himself and Kipps.

“Drink that,” said Sid, and Kipps felt all the better for it.

“I give Mr. Masterman ’is upstairs a hour ago,” said Mrs. Sid. “I didn’t think ’e ought to wait.”

A rapid succession of brisk movements on the part of everyone, and they were all four at dinner⁠—the fourth person being Master Walt Whitman Pornick, a cheerful young gentleman of one and a half, who was given a spoon to hammer on the table with to keep him quiet, and who got “Kipps” right at the first effort and kept it all through the meal, combining it first with this previous acquisition, and then that. “Peacock Kipps” said Master Walt, at which there was great laughter, and also “More Mutton, Kipps.”

“He’s a regular oner,” said Mrs. Sid, “for catching up words. You can’t say a word but what ’e’s on to it.”

There were no serviettes and less ceremony, and Kipps thought he had never enjoyed a meal so much. Everyone was a little excited by the meeting and chatting, and disposed to laugh, and things went off easily from the very beginning. If there was a pause Master Walt filled it in. Mrs. Sid, who tempered her enormous admiration for Sid’s intellect and his socialism and his severe business methods by a motherly sense of her sex and seniority, spoke of them both as “you boys,” and dilated⁠—when she was not urging Kipps to have some more of this or that⁠—on the disparity between herself and her husband.

“Shouldn’t ha’ thought there was a year between you,” said Kipps; “you seem jest a match.”

“I’m his match, anyhow,” said Mrs. Sid, and no epigram of young Walshingham’s was ever better received.

“Match,” said young Walt, coming in on the trail of the joke and getting a round for himself.

Any sense of superior fortune had long vanished from Kipps’ mind, and he found himself looking at host and hostess with enormous respect. Really, old Sid was a wonderful chap, here in his own house at two and twenty, carving his own mutton and lording it over wife and child. No legacies needed by him! And Mrs. Sid, so kind and bright and hearty! And the child, old Sid’s child! Old Sid had jumped round a bit. It needed the sense of his fortune at the back of his mind to keep Kipps from feeling abject. He resolved he’d buy young Walt something tremendous in toys at the first opportunity.

“Drop more beer, Art?”

“Right you are, old man.”

“Cut Mr. Kipps a bit more bread, Sid.”

“Can’t I pass you a bit?”

Sid was all right, Sid was, and there was no mistake about that.

It was growing up in his mind that Sid was the brother of Ann, but he said nothing about her for excellent reasons. After all, because he remembered Sid’s irritation at her name when they had met in New Romney seemed to show a certain separation. They didn’t tell each other much.⁠ ⁠… He didn’t know how things might be between Ann and Sid, either.