1

He awoke on the thoroughly comfortable sofa that had had all its springs removed, and although he had certainly not been intoxicated, he awoke with what Chitterlow pronounced to be, quite indisputably, a Head and a Mouth. He had slept in his clothes, and he felt stiff and uncomfortable all over, but the head and mouth insisted that he must not bother over little things like that. In the head was one large, angular idea that it was physically painful to have there. If he moved his head, the angular idea shifted about in the most agonising away. This idea was that he had lost his situation and was utterly ruined, and that it really mattered very little. Shalford was certain to hear of his escapade, and that, coupled with that row about the Manchester window —!

He raised himself into a sitting position under Chitterlow’s urgent encouragement.

He submitted apathetically to his host’s attentions. Chitterlow, who admitted being a ‘bit off it’ himself and in need of an egg-cupful of brandy, just an egg-cupful neat, dealt with that Head and Mouth as a mother might deal with the fall of an only child. He compared it with other Heads and Mouths that he had met, and in particular to certain experienced by the Hon. Thomas Norgate. ‘Right up to the last,’ said Chitterlow, ‘he couldn’t stand his liquor. It happens like that at times.’ And after Chitterlow had pumped on the young beginner’s head and given him some anchovy paste piping hot on buttered toast, which he preferred to all the other remedies he had encountered, Kipps resumed his crumpled collar, brushed his clothes, tacked up his knee, and prepared to face Mr. Shalford and the reckoning for this wild, unprecedented night — the first ‘night out’ that ever he had taken.

Acting on Chitterlow’s advice to have a bit of a freshner before returning to the Emporium, Kipps walked some way along the Leas and back, and then went down to a shop near the Harbour to get a cup of coffee. He found that extremely reinvigorating, and he went on up the High Street to face the inevitable terrors of the office, a faint touch of pride in his depravity tempering his extreme self-abasement. After all, it was not an unmanly headache; he had been out all night, and he had been drinking, and his physical disorder was there to witness the fact. If it wasn’t for the thought of Shalford, he would have been even a proud man to discover himself at last in such a condition. But the thought of Shalford was very dreadful. He met two of the apprentices snatching a walk before shop began. At the sight of them he pulled his spirits together, put his hat back from his pallid brow, thrust his hands into his trousers pockets, and adopted an altogether more dissipated carriage; he met their innocent faces with a wan smile. Just for a moment he was glad that his patch at the knee was, after all, visible, and that some, at least, of the mud on his clothes had refused to move at Chitterlow’s brushing. What wouldn’t they think he had been up to? He passed them without speaking. He could imagine how they regarded his back. Then he recollected Mr. Shalford . . .

The deuce of a row certainly, and perhaps —! He tried to think of plausible versions of the affair. He could explain he had been run down by rather a wild sort of fellow who was riding a bicycle, almost stunned for the moment (even now he felt the effects of the concussion in his head), and had been given whisky to restore him, and ‘the fact is, Sir,’— with an upward inflection of the voice, an upward inflection of the eyebrows, and an air of its being the last thing one would have expected whisky to do, the manifestation, indeed, of a practically unique physiological weakness —‘it got into my ‘ed! ‘ . . .

Put like that it didn’t look so bad.

He got to the Emporium a little before eight, and the housekeeper, with whom he was something of a favourite (‘There’s no harm in Mr. Kipps,’ she used to say), seemed to like him, if anything, better for having broken the rules, and gave him a piece of dry toast and a hot cup of tea.

‘I suppose the G. V.—’ began Kipps.

‘He knows,’ said the housekeeper.

He went down to the shop a little before time, and presently Booch summoned him to the presence. He emerged from the private office after an interval of ten minutes.

The junior clerk scrutinised his visage. Buggins put the frank question.

Kipps answered with one word.

‘Swapped!’ said Kipps.
2

Kipps leant against the fixtures with his hands in his pockets and talked to the two apprentices under him. ‘I don’t care if I am swapped,’ said Kipps. ‘I been sick of Teddy and his System some time.’

‘I was a good mind to chuck it when my time was up,’ said Kipps. ‘Wish I ‘ad now.’

Afterwards Pearce came round, and Kipps repeated this.

‘What’s it for?’ said Pearce. ‘That row about the window tickets?’

‘No fear!’ said Kipps, and sought to convey a perspective of splendid depravity. ‘I wasn’t in las’ night,’ he said, and made even Pearce, ‘man about town’ Pearce, open his eyes.

‘Why, where did you get to?’ asked Pearce.

He conveyed that he had been ‘fair all round the town, with a Nactor chap’ he knew. ‘One can’t always be living like a curit,’ he said.

‘No fear,’ said Pearce, trying to play up to him.

But Kipps had the top place in that conversation.

‘My lor!’ said Kipps, when Pearce had gone, ‘but wasn’t my mouth and ‘ed bad this morning before I ‘ad a pick-me-up!’

‘Whad jer ‘ave?’

‘Anchovy on ‘ot buttered toast. It’s the very best pick-me-up there is. You trust me, Rodgers. I never take no other, and I don’t advise you to. See?’

And when pressed for further particulars, he said again he had been ‘fair all round the town, with a Nactor chap’ he knew. They asked curiously all he had done, and he said, ‘Well, what do you think?’ And when they pressed for still further details, he said there were things little boys ought not to know, and laughed darkly and found them some huckaback to roll.

And in this manner for a space did Kipps fend off the contemplation of the ‘key of the street’ that Shalford had presented him.
3

This sort of thing was all very well when junior apprentices were about, but when Kipps was alone with himself it served him not at all. He was uncomfortable inside, and his skin was uncomfortable, and the Head and Mouth, palliated, perhaps, but certainly not cured, were still with him. He felt, to tell the truth, nasty and dirty, and extremely disgusted with himself. To work was dreadful, and to stand still and think still more dreadful. His patched knee reproached him. These were the second best of his three pairs of trousers, and they had cost him thirteen and sixpence. Practically ruined they were. His dusting pair was unfit for shop, and he would have to degrade his best, when he was under inspection he affected the slouch of a desperado, but directly he found himself alone, this passed insensibly into the droop.

The financial aspect of things grew large before him. His whole capital in the world was the sum of five pounds in the Post Office Savings Bank, and four and sixpence cash. Besides, there would be two months’ ‘screw.’ His little tin box upstairs was no longer big enough for his belongings, he would have to buy another, let alone that it was not calculated to make a good impression ............