Kipps Part 64

--5

Amidst all this bustle and interest, all this going to and fro before they "moved in" to the High Street, came the great crisis that hung over the Kippses, and one morning in the small hours Ann's child was born....

Kipps was coming to manhood swiftly now. The once rabbit-like soul that had been so amazed by the discovery of "chubes" in the human interior and so shocked by the sight of a woman's shoulder-blades, that had found shame and anguish in a mislaid Gibus and terror in an Anagram Tea, was at last facing the greater realities. He came suddenly upon the master thing in life, birth. He pa.s.sed through hours of listening, hours of impotent fear in the night and in the dawn, and then there was put into his arms something most wonderful, a weak and wailing creature, incredibly, heart-stirringly soft and pitiful, with minute appealing hands that it wrung his heart to see. He held this miracle in his arms and touched its tender cheek as if he feared his lips might injure it.

And this marvel was his Son!

And there was Ann, with a greater strangeness and a greater familiarity in her quality than he had ever found before. There were little beads of perspiration on her temples and her lips, and her face was flushed, not pale as he had feared to see it. She had the look of one who emerges from some strenuous and invigorating act. He bent down and kissed her, and he had no words to say. She wasn't to speak much yet, but she stroked his arm with her hand and had to tell him one thing:

"He's over nine pounds, Artie," she whispered. "Bessie's--Bessie's wasn't no more than eight."

To have given Kipps a pound of triumph over Sid seemed to her almost to justify Nunc Dimittis. She watched his face for a moment, then closed her eyes in a kind of blissful exhaustion as the nurse, with something motherly in her manner, pushed Kipps out of the room.

--6

Kipps was far too much preoccupied with his own life to worry about the further exploits of Chitterlow. The man had got his two thousand; on the whole Kipps was glad he had had it rather than young Wals.h.i.+ngham, and there was an end to the matter. As for the complicated transactions he achieved and proclaimed by mainly illegible and always incomprehensible postcards, they were like pa.s.sing voices heard in the street as one goes about one's urgent concerns. Kipps put them aside and they got in between the pages of the stock and were lost forever and sold in with the goods to customers who puzzled over them mightily.

Then one morning as he was dusting round before breakfast, Chitterlow returned, appeared suddenly in the shop doorway.

Kipps was overcome with amazement.

It was the most unexpected thing in the world. The man was in evening dress, evening dress in that singularly crumpled state it a.s.sumes after the hour of dawn, and above his dishevelled red hair, a smallish Gibus hat 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 astonis.h.i.+ng spectacle.

It was amazing beyond the powers of Kipps. The bell jangled for a bit and then gave it up and was silent. For a long, great 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 excitable and extraordinary person, still in an incredibly expanded att.i.tude, 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 extraordinary 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 att.i.tude, a merely life-size creature. "My play, boo-hoo!" 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--boo-hoo!--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 a.s.sociated 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 s.p.a.ce 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 m.u.f.fled voice, and so remained for a s.p.a.ce--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 someone. Muriel--she'll be firstrate, 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. Then 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 word 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 s.p.a.ce. "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 ba.s.sinette 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 sitting down, Mrs. Kipps. I couldn't sit down for anyone, or I'd do it for you. It's you I'm thinking of more than anyone, 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 a.s.sociations 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 cla.s.ses of drink were especially noxious to a man of his const.i.tution. 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 awakened many a.s.sociations, of the turpitude of young Wals.h.i.+ngham, nor the distaste Chitterlow had always felt for young Wals.h.i.+ngham 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 a.s.suaged 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 s.p.a.ce, and then in a sort of hushed silence resumed his daily routine....

Ann and Kipps watched that receding happiness in silence, until he 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."