Kipps · Book II · Chapter 2 7 (3/4)

“I got out at last⁠—somehow,” he said, quietly, suddenly plumping back in his chair. He went on after a pause. “For a bit. Some of us get out by luck, some by cunning, and crawl on to the grass, exhausted and crippled to die. That’s a poor man’s success, Kipps. Most of us don’t get out at all. I worked all day and studied half the night, and here I am with the common consequences. Beaten! And never once have I had a fair chance, never once!” His lean, clenched fist flew out in a gust of tremulous anger. “These Skunks shut up all the university scholarships at nineteen for fear of men like me. And then⁠—do nothin’.⁠ ⁠… We’re wasted for nothing. By the time I’d learnt something the doors were locked. I thought knowledge would do it⁠—I did think that! I’ve fought for knowledge as other men fight for bread. I’ve starved for knowledge. I’ve turned my back on women; I’ve done even that. I’ve burst my accursed lung.⁠ ⁠…” His voice rose with impotent anger. “I’m a better man than any ten princes alive! And I’m beaten and wasted. I’ve been crushed, trampled and defiled by a drove of hogs. I’m no use to myself or the world. I’ve thrown my life away to make myself too good for use in this huckster’s scramble. If I had gone in for business, if I had gone in for plotting to cheat my fellow men⁠—ah, well! It’s too late. It’s too late for that, anyhow. It’s too late for anything now! And I couldn’t have done it.⁠ ⁠… And over in New York now there’s a pet of society making a corner in wheat!

“By God!” he cried hoarsely, with a clutch of the lean hand. “By God! If I had his throat! Even now I might do something for the world.”

He glared at Kipps, his face flushed deep, his sunken eyes glowing with passion, and then suddenly he changed altogether.

There was a sound of tea things rattling upon a tray outside the door, and Sid rose to open it.

“All of which amounts to this,” said Masterman, suddenly quiet and again talking against time. “The world is out of joint, and there isn’t a soul alive who isn’t half waste or more. You’ll find it the same with you in the end, wherever your luck may take you.⁠ ⁠… I suppose you won’t mind my having another cigarette?”

He took Kipps’ cigarette with a hand that trembled so violently it almost missed its object, and stood up, with something of guilt in his manner as Mrs. Sid came into the room.

Her eye met his and marked the flush upon his face.

“Been talking Socialism?” said Mrs. Sid, a little severely.

Six o’clock that day found Kipps drifting eastward along the southward margin of Rotten Row. You figure him a small, respectably attired figure going slowly through a sometimes immensely difficult and always immense world. At times he becomes pensive and whistles softly. At times he looks about him. There are a few riders in the Row, a carriage flashes by every now and then along the roadway, and among the great rhododendrons and laurels and upon the greensward there are a few groups and isolated people dressed in the style Kipps adopted to call upon the Walshinghams when first he was engaged. Amid the complicated confusion of Kipps’ mind was a regret that he had not worn his other things.⁠ ⁠…

Presently he perceived that he would like to sit down; a green chair tempted him. He hesitated at it, took possession of it, and leant back and crossed one leg over the other.

He rubbed his under lip with his umbrella handle and reflected upon Masterman and his denunciation of the world.

“Bit orf ’is ’ead, poor chap,” said Kipps, and added: “I wonder.”

He thought intently for a space.

“I wonder what he meant by the lean years?”

The world seemed a very solid and prosperous concern just here, and well out of reach of Masterman’s dying clutch. And yet⁠—

It was curious he should have been reminded of Minton.

His mind turned to a far more important matter. Just at the end Sid had said to him, “Seen Ann?” and as he was about to answer, “You’ll see a bit more of her now. She’s got a place in Folkestone.”

It had brought him back from any concern about the world being out of joint or anything of that sort.

Ann!

One might run against her any day.

He tugged at his little moustache.

He would like to run against Ann very much.⁠ ⁠…

“And it would be juiced awkward if I did!”

In Folkestone! It was a jolly sight too close.⁠ ⁠…

Then, at the thought that he might run against Ann in his beautiful evening dress on the way to the band, he fluttered into a momentary dream, that jumped abruptly into a nightmare.

Suppose he met her when he was out with Helen! “Oh, Lor’!” said Kipps. Life had developed a new complication that would go on and go on. For some time he wished with the utmost fervour that he had not kissed Ann, that he had not gone to New Romney the second time. He marvelled at his amazing forgetfulness of Helen on that occasion. Helen took possession of his mind. He would have to write to Helen, an easy, offhand letter, to say that he had come to London for a day or so. He tried to imagine her reading it. He would write just such another letter to the old people, and say he had had to come up on business. That might do for them all right, but Helen was different. She would insist on explanations.

He wished he could never go back to Folkestone again. That would settle the whole affair.

A passing group attracted his attention, two faultlessly dressed gentlemen and a radiantly expensive lady. They were talking, no doubt, very brilliantly. His eyes followed them. The lady tapped the arm of the left hand gentleman with a daintily tinted glove. Swells! No end.⁠ ⁠…

His soul looked out upon life in general as a very small nestling might peep out of its nest. What an extraordinary thing life was, to be sure, and what a remarkable variety of people there were in it!

He lit a cigarette and speculated upon that receding group of three, and blew smoke and watched them. They seemed to do it all right. Probably they all had incomes of very much over twelve hundred a year. Perhaps not. Probably none of them suspected, as they went past, that he, too, was a gentleman of independent means, dressed, as he was, without distinction. Of course things were easier for them. They were brought up always to dress well and do the right thing from their very earliest years; they started clear of all his perplexities; they had never got mixed up with all sorts of different people who didn’t go together. If, for example, that lady there got engaged to that gentleman, she would be quite safe from any encounter from a corpulent, osculatory Uncle, or Chitterlow, or the dangerously insignificant eye of Pierce.

His thoughts came round to Helen.

When they were married and Cuyps, or Cuyp⁠—Coote had failed to justify his s⁠—and in that west end flat and shaken free of all these low class associations, would he and she parade here of an afternoon dressed like that? It would be rather fine to do so. If one’s dress was all right.

Helen!

She was difficult to understand at times.

He blew extensive clouds of cigarette smoke.

There would be teas, there would be dinners, there would be calls. Of course he would get into the way of it.

But Anagrams were a bit stiff to begin with!

It was beastly confusing at first to know when to use your fork at dinner, and all that. Still⁠—

He felt an extraordinary doubt whether he would get into the way of it. He was interested for a space by a girl and groom on horseback, and then he came back to his personal preoccupations.

He would have to write to Helen. What could he say to explain his absence from the Anagram Tea? She had been pretty clear she wanted him to come. He recalled her resolute face without any great tenderness. He knew he would look like a silly ass at that confounded tea! Suppose he shirked it and went back in time for the dinner! Dinners were beastly difficult, too, but not as bad as Anagrams. The very first thing that might happen when he got back to Folkestone would be to run against Ann. Suppose, after all, he did meet Ann when he was with Helen!

What queer encounters were possible in the world!

Thank goodness, they were going to live in London!

But that brought him around to Chitterlow. The Chitterlows were coming to London, too. If they didn’t get money they’d come after it; they weren’t the sort of people to be choked off easily, and if they did they’d come to London to produce their play. He tried to imagine some seemly social occasion invaded by Chitterlow and his rhetoric, by his torrential thunder of self-assertion, the whole company flattened thereunder like wheat under a hurricane.

Confound and hang Chitterlow! Yet, somehow, somewhen, one would have to settle accounts with him! And there was Sid! Sid was Ann’s brother. He realised with sudden horror the social indiscretion of accepting Sid’s invitation to dinner.

Sid wasn’t the sort of chap one could snub or cut, and besides⁠—Ann’s brother! He didn’t want to cut him. It would be worse than cutting Buggins and Pierce⁠—a sight worse. And after that lunch!

It would be the next thing to cutting Ann herself. And even as to Ann!

Suppose he was with Helen or Coote!⁠ ⁠…

“Oh, Blow!” he said, at last, and then, viciously, “Blow!” and so rose and flung away his cigarette end, and pursued his reluctant, dubiating way towards the really quite uncongenial splendours of the Royal Grand.⁠ ⁠…

And it is vulgarly imagined that to have money is to have no troubles at all!

Kipps endured splendour at the Royal Grand Hotel for three nights and days, and then he retreated in disorder. The Royal Grand defeated and overcame and routed Kipps, not of intention, but by sheer royal grandeur, grandeur combined with an organisation for his comfort carried to excess. On his return he came upon a difficulty; he had lost his circular piece of cardboard with the number of his room, and he drifted about the hall and passages in a state of perplexity for some time, until he thought all the porters and officials in gold lace caps must be watching him and jesting to one another about him. Finally, in a quiet corner, down below the hairdresser’s shop, he found a kindly looking personage in bottle green, to whom he broached his difficulty. “I say,” he said, with a pleasant smile, “I can’t find my room nohow.” The personage in bottle green, instead of laughing in a nasty way, as he might well have done, became extremely helpful, showed Kipps what to do, got his key, and conducted him by lift and passage to his chamber. Kipps tipped him half a crown.

Safe in his room, Kipps pulled himself together for dinner. He had learnt enough from young Walshingham to bring his dress clothes, and now he began to assume them. Unfortunately, in the excitement of his flight from his Aunt and Uncle, he had forgotten to put in his other boots, and he was some time deciding between his purple cloth slippers, with a golden marigold, and the prospect of cleaning the boots he was wearing with the towel, but finally, being a little footsore, he took the slippers.

Afterwards, when he saw the porters and waiters and the other guests catch a sight of the slippers, he was sorry he had not chosen the boots. However, to make up for any want of style at that end, he had his crush hat under his arm.

He found the dining-room without excessive trouble. It was a vast and splendidly decorated place, and a number of people, evidently quite au fait, were dining there at little tables lit with electric, red shaded candles, gentlemen in evening dress, and ladies with dazzling, astonishing necks. Kipps had never seen evening dress in full vigour before, and he doubted his eyes. And there were also people not in evening dress who, no doubt, wondered what noble family Kipps represented. There was a band in a decorated recess, and the band looked collectively at the purple slippers, and so lost any chance they may have had of a collection, so far as Kipps was concerned. The chief drawback to this magnificent place was the excessive space of floor that had to be crossed before you got your purple slippers hid in under a table.

He selected a little table⁠—not the one where a rather impudent looking waiter held a chair, but another⁠—sat down, and finding his gibus in his hand, decided after a moment of thought to rise slightly and sit on it. (It was discovered in his abandoned chair at a late hour by a supper party, and restored to him next day.)

He put the napkin carefully on one side, selected his soup without difficulty, “Clear, please,” but he was rather floored by the presentation of a quite splendidly bound wine card. He turned it over, discovered a section devoted to whiskey, and had a bright idea.

“ ’Ere,” he said to the waiter, with an encouraging movement of his head, and then in a confidential manner, “you haven’t any Old Methuselah Three Stars, ’ave you?”

The waiter went away to enquire, and Kipps went on with his soup with an enhanced self-respect. Finally, Old Methuselah being unobtainable, he ordered a claret from about the middle of the list. “Let’s ’ave some of this,” he said. He knew claret was a good sort of wine.

“A half bottle?” said the waiter.

“Right you are,” said Kipps.

He felt he was getting on. He leant back after his soup, a man of the world, and then slowly brought his eyes around to the ladies in evening dress on his right.⁠ ⁠…

He couldn’t have thought it!

They were scorchers. Jest a bit of black velvet over the shoulders!

He looked again. One of them was laughing with a glass of wine half raised⁠—wicked-looking woman she was⁠—the other, the black velvet one, was eating bits of bread with nervous quickness and talking fast.

He wished old Buggins could see them.

He found a waiter regarding him and blushed deeply. He did not look again for some time, and became confused about his knife and fork over the fish. Presently he remarked a lady in pink to the left of him eating the fish with an entirely different implement.

It was over the vol au vent that he began to go to pieces. He took a knife to it; then saw the lady in pink was using a fork only, and hastily put down his knife, with a considerable amount of rich creaminess on the blade, upon the cloth. Then he found that a fork in his inexperienced hand was an instrument of chase rather than capture. His ears became violently red, and then he looked up, to discover the lady in pink glancing at him and then smiling as she spoke to the man beside her.

He hated the lady in pink very much.

He stabbed a large piece of the vol au vent at last, and was too glad of his luck not to take a mouthful of it. But it was an extensive fragment, and pieces escaped him. Shirt front! “Desh it!” he said, and had resort to his spoon. His waiter went and spoke to two other waiters, no doubt jeering at him. He became very fierce suddenly. “Ere!” he said, gesticulating, and then, “clear this away!”

The entire dinner party on his right, the party of the ladies in advanced evening dress, looked at him.⁠ ⁠… He felt that everyone was watching him and making fun of him, and the injustice of this angered him. After all, they had every advantage he hadn’t. And then, when they got him there doing his best, what must they do but glance and sneer and nudge one another. He tried to catch them at it, and then took refuge in a second glass of wine.

Suddenly and extraordinarily he found himself a socialist. He did not care how close it was to the lean years when all these things would end.