Kipps Part 9

"I hope you will," said Miss Wals.h.i.+ngham.

He turned back towards her. "Reelly?" he said.

"I hope everybody will come back."

"I will--anyhow," said Kipps. "You may count on that," and he tried to make his tones significant.

They looked at one another through a little pause.

"Good-bye," she said.

Kipps lifted his hat. She turned towards the cla.s.s-room.

"Well?" said the freckled girl, coming back towards her.

"Nothing," said Helen. "At least--presently." And she became very energetic about some scattered tools on a desk.

The freckled girl went out and stood for a moment at the head of the stairs. When she came back she looked very hard at her friend. The incident struck her as important--wonderfully important. It was una.s.similable, of course, and absurd, but there it was, the thing that is so cardinal to a girl, the emotion, the subservience, the crowning triumph of her s.e.x. She could not help feeling that Helen took it, on the whole, a little too hardly.

CHAPTER IV

CHITTERLOW

--1

The hour of the cla.s.s 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 acc.u.mulated comic papers that were comic alas! in vain! He paid no heed to the little man in spectacles glaring opposite to him, famis.h.i.+ng 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 cla.s.s!

There would be no cla.s.s now until next October; it might be there would never be a cla.s.s so far as he was concerned again.

It might be there would never be a cla.s.s 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 past, that hang 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 awhile.

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 s.p.a.ce.

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 a.s.sisted 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 down hill, 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 _am_ 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 a 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 a.s.sailant. He stood up as the representative of the law drew nearer. He a.s.sumed 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 pa.s.sed 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 b.u.mp 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 b.u.mp 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 everyone 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 cuc.u.mber. 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 pa.s.sed the lamps he was visible as a figure with a slight anterior plumpness, progressing buoyantly on knickerbockered 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 s.p.a.cious and confident, his gestures up and down the narrow deserted back street they traversed, were irresistibly suggestive of owners.h.i.+p; a suggestion of broadly gesticulating shadows were born squatting on his feet and grew and took possession of the road and reunited at last with the shadows of the infinite, as lamp after lamp was pa.s.sed. Kipps saw by the flickering light of one of them that they were in Little Fenchurch Street, and then they came round 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.