1

The hour of the class on the following Thursday found Kipps in a state of nearly incredible despondency. He was sitting with his eyes on the reading-room clock, his chin resting on his fists, and his elbows on the accumulated comic papers, that were comic, alas! in vain. He paid no heed to the little man in spectacles glaring opposite to him, famishing for Fun. In this place it was he had sat night after night, each night more blissful than the last, waiting until it should be time to go to Her! and then — bliss! And now the hour had come and there was no class! There would be no class now until next October. It might be there would never be a class, so far as he was concerned, again.

It might be there would never be a class again, for Shalford, taking exception at a certain absent-mindedness that led to mistakes, and more particularly to the ticketing of several articles in Kipps’ Manchester window upside down, had been ‘on to’ him for the past few days in an exceedingly onerous manner —

He sighed profoundly, pushed the comic papers back — they were rent away from him instantly by the little man in spectacles — and tried the old engravings of Folkestone in the pats that hung about the room. But these, too, failed to minister to his bruised heart. He wandered about the corridors for a time and watched the Library Indicator for a while. Wonderful thing that! But it did not hold him for long. People came and laughed near him, and that jarred with him dreadfully. He went out of the building, and a beastly cheerful barrel-organ mocked him in the street. He was moved to a desperate resolve to go down to the beach. There, it might be, he would be alone. The sea might be rough — and attuned to him. It would certainly be dark.

‘If I ‘ad a penny I’m blest if I wouldn’t go and chuck myself off the end of the pier . . . She’d never miss me . . . ’ He followed a deepening vein of thought.

‘Penny, though! It’s tuppence,’ he said, after a space.

He went down Dover Street in a state of profound melancholia — at the pace and mood, as it were, of his own funeral procession — and he crossed at the corner of Tontine Street, heedless of all mundane things. And there it was that Fortune came upon him, in disguise and with a loud shout, the shout of a person endowed with an unusually rich, full voice, followed immediately by a violent blow in the back.

His hat was over his eyes, and an enormous weight rested on his shoulders, and something kicked him in the back of his calf.

Then he was on all fours in some mud that Fortune, in conjunction with the Folkestone corporation and in the pursuit of equally mysterious ends, had heaped together even lavishly for his reception.

He remained in that position for some seconds, awaiting further developments, and believing almost anything broken before his heart. Gathering at last that this temporary violence of things in general was over, and being perhaps assisted by a clutching hand, he arose, and found himself confronting a figure holding a bicycle and thrusting forward a dark face in anxious scrutiny.

‘You aren’t hurt, Matey?’ gasped the figure.

‘Was that you ‘it me?’ said Kipps.

‘It’s these handles, you know,’ said the figure with an air of being a fellow-sufferer. ‘They’re too low. And when I go to turn, if I don’t remember, Bif!—— and I’m in to something.’

‘Well — you give me a oner in the back — anyhow,’ said Kipps, taking stock of his damages.

‘I was coming downhill, you know,’ explained the bicyclist. ‘These little Folkestone hills are a Fair Treat. It isn’t as though I’d been on the level. I came rather a whop.’

‘You did that,’ said Kipps.

‘I was back-pedalling for all I was worth, anyhow,’ said the bicyclist. ‘Not that I’m worth much back-pedalling.’

He glanced round and made a sudden movement almost as if to mount his machine. Then he turned as rapidly to Kipps again, who was now stooping down, pursuing the tale of his injuries.

‘Here’s the back of my trouser-leg all tore down,’ said Kipps, ‘and I believe I’m bleeding. You reely ought to be more careful —’

The stranger investigated the damage with a rapid movement. ‘Holy Smoke, so you are!’ He laid a friendly hand on Kipps’ arm. ‘I say — look here! Come up to my diggings and sew it up. I’m — Of course I’m to blame, and I say —’

His voice sank to a confidential friendliness. ‘Here’s a slop. Don’t let on I ran you down. Haven’t a lamp, you know. Might be at bit awkward, for me.’

Kipps looked up towards the advancing policeman. The appeal to his generosity was not misplaced. He immediately took sides with his assailant. He stood as the representative of the law drew nearer. He assumed an air which he considered highly suggestive of an accident not having happened.

‘All right,’ he said, ‘go on!’

‘Right you are,’ said the cyclist, promptly, and led the way; and then, apparently with some idea of deception, called over his shoulder, ‘I’m tremendous glad to have met you, old chap.’

‘It really isn’t a hundred yards,’ he said, after they had passed the policeman; ‘it’s just round the corner.’

‘Of course,’ said Kipps, limping slightly. ‘I don’t want to get a chap into trouble. Accidents will happen. Still —’

‘Oh, rather! I believe you. Accidents will happen. Especially when you get me on a bicycle.’ He laughed. ‘You aren’t the first I’ve run down, not by any manner of means! I don’t think you can be hurt much, either. It isn’t as though I was scorching. You didn’t see me coming. I was back-pedalling like anything. Only naturally it seems to you I must have been coming fast. And I did all I could to ease off the bump as I hit you. It was just the treadle, I think, came against your calf. But it was All Right of you about that policeman, you know. That was a Fair Bit of All Right. Under the Circs., if you’d told him I was riding, it might have been forty bob! Forty bob! I’d have had to tell ’em Time is Money just now for Mr. H. C.’

‘I shouldn’t have blamed you either, you know. Most men, after a bump like that, might have been spiteful. The least I can do is to stand you a needle and thread. And a clothes’ brush. It isn’t every one who’d have taken it like you.’

‘Scorching! Why, if I’d been scorching you’d have — coming as we did — you’d have been knocked silly.’

‘But, I tell you, the way you caught on about that slop was something worth seeing. When I asked you — I didn’t half expect it. Bif! Right off. Cool as a cucumber. Had your line at once. I tell you that there isn’t many men would have acted as you have done, I will say that. You acted like a gentleman over that slop.’

Kipps’ first sense of injury disappeared. He limped along a pace or so behind, making depreciatory noises in response to these flattering remarks, and taking stock of the very appreciative person who uttered them.

As they passed the lamps he was visible as a figure with a slight anterior plumpness, progressing buoyantly on knicker-bockered legs, with quite enormous calves, legs that, contrasting with Kipps’ own narrow practice, were even exuberantly turned out at the knees and toes. A cycling cap was worn very much on one side, and from beneath it protruded carelessly straight wisps of dark-red hair, and ever and again an ample nose came into momentary view round the corner. The muscular cheeks of this person and a certain generosity of chin he possessed were blue shaven, and he had no moustache. His carriage was spacious and confident, his gestures up and down the narrow, deserted back street they traversed were irresistibly suggestive of ownership; a succession of broadly gesticulating shadows were born squatting on his feet, and grew and took possession of the road and reunited at least with the shadows of the infinite, as lamp after lamp was passed. Kipps saw by the flickering light of one of them that they were in Little Fenchurch Street, and then they came around a corner sharply into a dark court and stopped at the door of a particularly ramshackle-looking little house, held up between two larger ones, like a drunken man between policemen.

The cyclist propped his machine carefully against the window, produced a key and blew down it sharply. ‘The lock’s a bit tricky,’ he said, and devoted himself for same moments to the task of opening the door. Some mechanical catastrophe ensued, and the door was open.

‘You’d better wait here a bit while I get the lamp,’ he remarked to Kipps; ‘very likely it isn’t filled,’ and vanished into the blackness of the passage. ‘Thank God for matches!’ he said; and Kipps had an impression of a passage in the transitory pink flare and the bicyclist disappearing into a farther room. Kipps was so much interested by these things that for the time he forgot his injuries altogether.

An interval, and Kipps was dazzled by a pink-shaded kerosene lamp. ‘You go in,’ said the red-haired man, ‘and I’ll bring in the bike,’ and for a moment Kipps was alone in the lamp-lit room. He took in rather vaguely the shabby ensemble of the little apartment, the round table covered with a torn, red, glass-stained cover on which the lamp stood, a mottled looking-glass over the fireplace reflecting this, a disused gas-bracket, an extinct fire, a number of dusty postcards and memoranda stuck round the glass, a dusty, crowded paper-rack on the mantel with a number of cabinet photographs, a table littered with papers and cigarette ash, and a siphon of soda-water. Then the cyclist reappeared, and Kipps saw his blue-shaved, rather animated face, and bright, reddish-brown eyes for the first time. He was a man, perhaps, ten years older than Kipps, but his beardless face made them in a way contemporary.

‘You behaved all right about that policeman, anyhow,’ he repeated as he came forward.

‘I don’t see ‘ow else I could ‘ave done,’ said Kipps, quite modestly. The cyclist scanned his guest for the first time, and decided upon hospitable details.

‘We’d better let that mud dry a bit before we brush it. Whisky there is, good old Methuselah, Canadian Rye; and there’s some brandy that’s all right. Which’ll you have?’

‘I dunno,’ said Kipps, taken by surprise; and then seeing no other course but acceptance, ‘Well, whisky, then.’

‘Right you are, old boy; and if you’ll take my advice you’ll take it neat. I may not be a particular judge of this sort of thing, but I do know old Methuselah pretty well. Old Methuselah — four stars. That’s me! Good old Harry Chitterlow, and good old Methuselah. Leave ’em together. Bif! He’s gone!’

He laughed loudly, looked about him, hesitated, and retired, leaving Kipps in possession of the room, and free to make a more precise examination of its contents.
2

He particularly remarked the photographs that adorned the apartment. They were chiefly photographs of ladies, in one case in tights, which Kipps thought a ‘bit ‘ot’; but one represented the bicyclist in the costume of some remote epoch. It did not take Kipps long to infer that the others were probably actresses, and that his host was an actor, and the presence of the half of a large coloured playbill seemed to confirm this. A note in an Oxford frame that was a little too large for it he presently demeaned himself to read. ‘Dear Mr. Chitterlow,’ it ran its brief course, ‘if, after all, you will send the play you spoke of, I will endeavour to read it,’ followed by a stylish but absolutely illegible signature, and across this was written in pencil, ‘What price Harry now?’ And in the shadow by the window was a rough and rather able sketch of the bicyclist in chalk on brown paper, calling particular attention to the curvature of the forward lines of his hull and calves and the jaunty carriage of his nose, and labelled unmistakably ‘Chitterlow.’ Kipps thought it ‘rather a take-off.’ The papers on the table by the siphon were in manuscript, Kipps observed, manuscript of a particularly convulsive and blottesque sort, and running obliquely across the page.

Presently he heard the metallic clamour as if of a series of irreparable breakages with which the lock of the front door discharged its function, and then Chitterlow reappeared, a little out of breath, and with a starry-labelled bottle in his large, freckled hand.

‘Sit down, old chap,’ he said, ‘sit down. I had to get out for it after all. Wasn’t a solitary bottle left. However, it’s all right now we’re here. No, don’t sit on that chair, there’s sheets of my play on that. That’s the one — with the broken arm. I think this glass is clean, but, anyhow, wash it out with a squizz of siphon and shy it in the fireplace. Here, I’ll do it! Lend it here!’

As he spoke Mr. Chitterlow produced a corkscrew from a table drawer, attacked and overcame good old Methuselah’s cork in a style a bar-tender might envy, washed out two tumblers in his simple, effectual manner, and poured a couple of inches of the ancient fluid into each. Kipps took his tumbler, said ‘Thenks’ in an off-hand way, and, after a momentary hesitation whether he should say ‘Here’s to you!’ or not, put it to his lips without that ceremony. For a space fire in his throat occupied his attention to the exclusion of other matters, and then he discovered Mr. Chitterlow with an intensely bulldog pipe alight, seated on the opposite side of the empty fireplace, and pouring himself out a second dose of whisky.

‘After all,’ said Mr. Chitterlow, with his eye on the bottle and a little smile wandering to hide amidst his larger features, ‘this accident might have been worse. I wanted some one to talk to a bit, and I didn’t want to go to a pub, leastways not a Folkestone pub, because, as a matter of fact, I’d promised Mrs. Chitterlow, who’s away, not to, for various reasons, though, of course, if I’d wanted to, I’m just that sort, I should have all the same — and here we are! It’s curious how one runs up against people out bicycling!’

‘Isn’t it!’ said Kipps, feeling that the time had come for him to say something.

‘Here we are, sitting and talking like old friends, and half an hour ago we didn’t know we existed. Leastways we didn’t know each other existed. I might have passed you in the street, perhaps, and you might have passed me, and how was I to tell that, put to the test, you would have behaved as decently as you have behaved. Only it happened otherwise, that’s all. You’re not smoking!’ he said. ‘Have a cigarette?’

Kipps made a confused reply that took the form of not minding if he did, and drank another sip of old Methuselah in his confusion. He was able to follow the subsequent course of that sip for quite a long way. It was as though the old gentleman was brandishing a burning torch through his vitals, lighting him here and lighting him there, until at last his whole being was in a glow. Chitterlow produced a tobacco-pouch and cigarette-papers, and, with an interesting parenthesis that was a little difficult to follow about some lady, named Kitty something or other, who had taught him the art when he was as yet only what you might call a nice boy, made Kipps a cigarette, and, with a consideration that won Kipps’ gratitude, suggested that, after all, he might find a little soda-water an improvement with the whisky. ‘Some people like it that way,’ said Chitterlow; and then with voluminous emphasis, ‘I don’t.’ Emboldened by the weakened state of his enemy, Kipps promptly swallowed the rest of him, and had his glass at once hospitably replenished. He began to feel he was of a firmer consistency than he commonly believed, and turned his mind to what Chitterlow was saying with the resolve to play a larger part in the conversation than he had hitherto done. Also he smoked through his nose quite successfully, an art he had only very recently acquired.

Meanwhile, Chitterlow explained that he was a playwright, and the tongue of Kipps was unloosened to respond that he knew a chap or rather one of their fellows knew a chap, or at least, to be perfectly, correct this fellow’s brother did, who had written a play. In response to Chitterlow’s inquiries, he could not recall the title of the play, nor where it had appeared, nor the name of the manager who produced it, though he thought the title was something about ‘Love’s Ransom,’ or something like that.

‘He made five ‘undred pounds by it, though,’ said Kipps. ‘I know that.’

‘That’s nothing,’ said Chitterlow, with an air of experience that was extremely convincing. ‘Nothing. May seem a big sum to you, but I can assure you it’s just what one gets any day. There’s any amount of money, an-ny amount, in a good play.’

‘I dessay,’ said Kipps, drinking. ‘Any amount of money!’

Chitterlow began a series of illustrative instances. He was clearly a person of quite unequalled gift for monologue. It was as though some conversational dam had burst upon Kipps, and in a little while he was drifting along upon a copious rapid of talk about all sorts of theatrical things by one who knew all about them, and quite incapable of anticipating whither that rapid meant to carry him. Presently, somehow, they had got to anecdotes about well-known theatrical managers — little Teddy Bletherskite, artful old Chumps and the magnificent Behemoth, ‘petted to death, you know, fair sickened, by all these society women.’ Chitterlow described various personal encounters with these personages, always with modest self-depreciation, and gave Kipps a very amusing imitation of old Chumps in a state of intoxication. Then he took two more stiff doses of old Methuselah in rapid succession.

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 fullness 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. 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 civilised 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 whisky, 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 (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 clamant 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!’
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