Kipps

by H. G. Wells

  Kipps reduced the hither end of his cigarette to a pulp as he sat ‘dessaying’ and ‘quite believing’ Chitterlow in the sagest manner, and admiring the easy way in which he was getting on with this very novel and entertaining personage. He had another cigarette made for him, and then Chitterlow, assuming by insensible degrees more and more of the manner of a rich and successful playwright being interviewed by a young admirer, set himself to answer questions which sometimes Kipps asked and sometimes Chitterlow, about the particulars and methods of his career. He undertook this self-imposed task with great earnestness and vigour, treating the matter, indeed, with such fulness that at times it seemed lost altogether under a thicket of parentheses, footnotes, and episodes that branched and budded from its stem. But it always emerged again, usually by way of illustration to its own digressions. Practically it was a mass of material for the biography of a man who had been everywhere and done everything (including the Hon. 11 Thomas Norgate, which was a Record), and in particular had acted with great distinction and profit (he dated various anecdotes, ‘when I was getting thirty, or forty, or fifty dollars a week‘) throughout America and the entire civilized world.

  And as he talked on and on in that full, rich, satisfying voice he had, and as old Methuselah, indisputably a most drunken old reprobate of a whiskey, busied himself throughout Kipps, lighting lamp after lamp until the entire framework of the little draper was illuminated and glowing like some public building on a festival, behold Chitterlow, and Kipps with him, and the room in which they sat were transfigured! Chitterlow became in very truth that ripe full man of infinite experience and humour and genius, fellow of Shakespeare and Ibsen and Maeterlinck 12 (three names he placed 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 claimant darn in the table-cloth, 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 13 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 whiskey. 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 too… . 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, 14 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 15 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 wer
e, 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 16 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 moonlit 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! 17 Rot!’

  ‘I know that,’ said Kipps.

  ‘Why, when I was in the smalls 18 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 19 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 Nor-gate, 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, they were incredibly credible. This tumultuous passionate irregular course was the way life ran – except in high-class establishments! Such things happened in novels, in plays – only he had been fool enough not to understand they happened. His share in the conversation was now, indeed, no more than faint writing in the margin; Chitterlow was talking quite continuously. He expanded his magnificent voice into huge guffaws, he drew it together into a confidential intensity, it became drawlingly reminiscent, he was frank, frank with the effect of a revelation, reticent also with the effect of a revelation, a stupendously gesticulating moonlit black figure, wallowing in itself, preaching Adventure and the Flesh to Kipps. Yet withal shot with something of sentiment, with a sort of sentimental refinement very coarsely and egotistically done. The Times he had had! – even before he was as old as Kipps he had had innumerable Times.

  Well, he said with a sudden transition, he had sown his wild oats – one had to somewhen – and now, he fancied he had mentioned it earlier in the evening, he was happily married. She was, he indicated, a ‘born lady.’ Her father was a prominent lawyer, a solicitor in Kentish Town, ‘done a lot of public-house business;’ her mother was second cousin to the wife of Abel Jones, the fashionable portrait painter – ‘almost Society people in a way.’ That didn't count with Chitterlow. He was no snob. What did count was that she possessed what he ventured to assert, without much fear of contradiction, was the very finest completely untrained contralto voice in all the world. (‘But to hear it properly,’ said Chitterlow, ‘you want a Big Hall.’) He became rather vague, and jerked his head about to indicate when and how he had entered matrimony. She was, it seemed, ‘away with her people.’ It was clear that Chitterlow did not get on with these people very well. It would seem they failed to appreciate his playwriting, regarding it as an unremunerative pursuit, whereas, as he and Kipps knew, wealth beyond the dreams of avarice would presently accrue. Only patience and persistence were needful.

  He went off at a tangent to hospitality. Kipps must come down home with him. They couldn't wander about all night, with a bottle of the right sort pining at home for them. ‘You can sleep on the sofa. You won't be worried by broken springs, anyhow, for I took ‘em all out myself two or three weeks ago. I don't see what they ever put ‘em in for. It's a point I know about. I took particular notice of it when I was with Bessie Hopper. Three months we were, and all over England, North Wales, and the Isle of Man, and I never struck a sofa in diggings anywhere that hadn't a broken spring. Not once – all the time.’

  He added, almost absently, ‘It happens like that at times.’

  They descended the slant road towards Harbour Street and went on past the Pavilion Hotel.

  § 4

  They came into the presence of old Methuselah again, and that worthy, under Chitterlow's direction, at once resumed the illumination of Kipps' interior with the conscientious thoroughness that distinguished him. Chitterlow took a tall portion to himself with an air of asbestos, 20 lit the bulldog pipe again, and lapsed for a space into meditation, from which Kipps roused him by remarking that he expected ‘a nacter ‘as a lot of ups and downs like, now and then.’

  At which Chitterlow seemed to bestir himself. ‘Ra-ther,’ he said. ‘And sometimes it's his own fault and sometimes it isn't. Usually it is. If it isn't one thing it's another. If it isn't the manager's wife it's bar-bragging. I tell you things happen at times. I'm a fatalist. The fact is, Character has you. Y
ou can't get away from it. You may think you do, but you don't.’

  He reflected for a moment. ‘It's that what makes tragedy. Psychology really. It's the Greek irony – Ibsen and – all that. Up to date.’

  He emitted this exhaustive summary of high-toned modern criticism as if he was repeating a lesson while thinking of something else; but it seemed to rouse him as it passed his lips, by including the name of Ibsen.

  He became interested in telling Kipps, who was, indeed, open to any information whatever about this quite novel name, exactly where he thought Ibsen fell short, points where it happened that Ibsen was defective just where it chanced that he, Chitterlow, was strong. Of course, he had no desire to place himself in any way on an equality with Ibsen; still, the fact remained that his own experience in England and America and the colonies was altogether more extensive than Ibsen could have had. Ibsen had probably never seen ‘one decent bar scrap’ in his life. That, of course, was not Ibsen's fault, or his own merit, but there the thing was. Genius, he knew, was supposed to be able to do anything or to do without anything; still, he was now inclined to doubt that. He had a play in hand that might perhaps not please William Archer – whose opinion, after all, he did not value as he valued Kipps' opinion – but which, he thought, was, at any rate, as well constructed as anything Ibsen ever did.