Kipps quotes

“Lord! ’Ow are they to get shops of their own? They ’aven’t any capital! How’s a draper’s shopman to save up five hundred pounds even? I tell you it can’t be done. You got to stick to cribs until it’s over.

I tell you we’re in a blessed drainpipe, and we’ve got to crawl along it till we die.

”

When Kipps got upstairs safe in his own bedroom, he sat down on the bed and stared at nothing.

They were caught⁠—they were all caught. All life took on the hue of one perpetual, dismal Monday morning.

The Hurons were scattered, the wrecks and the beach had passed away from him, the sun of those warm evenings at Littlestone had set forevermore. …

Hitherto they had tossed heads at him and kept him in his place. Now they discovered that he was a “nice boy,” which is next door at least to being a “feller,” and in some ways even preferable.

It is painful to record that his fidelity to Ann failed at their first onset.

I am fully sensible how entirely better this story would be from a sentimental point of view if he had remained true to that early love. Only then it would have been a different story altogether.

“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.

“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.

He was certain to be in the deuce of a row, the deuce of a row. Why had he done it? Why hadn’t he gone at ten? Because one thing leads to another.

One thing, he generalized, always does lead to another.

…

Boots been inked in some reading rooms—I used to write in a Reading Room in Fleet Street, regular penny club—hat been wetted, collar frayed, tail coat buttoned up, black chest-plaster tie—spread out. Shirt, you know, gone—” Buggins pointed upward with a pious expression.

“Eat it,” said Buggins.

Kipps meditated. “I wonder where old Merton is,” he said at last. “I often wondered about ’im.”

All was lost but politeness. Kipps rushed for the door. He stood at the door bowing with infinite gravity, and she smiled and nodded as she went out. She saw nothing of the struggle within him, nothing but a satisfactory emotion.

She smiled like a satisfied goddess as the incense ascends.

Mrs. Walshingham bowed stiffly and a little awkwardly.

Gone! And he would never see her again—never!

It was as though someone had struck his heart with a whip.

Never! Never! Never! And she didn’t know! He turned back from the window and the department with its two apprentices was impossible. The whole glaring world was insupportable.

And the young man in gaiters to the left of the driver eyed Kipps and his banjo, and especially his banjo, ever and again as if he found it and him, with his rapt face, an insoluble enigma.

And many a King has ridden into a conquered city with a lesser sense of splendour than Kipps.

Their shadows grew long behind them and their faces were transfigured in gold as they rumbled on towards the splendid West. The sun set before they had passed Dymchurch, and as they came lumbering into New Romney past the windmill the dusk had come.

Leastways he didn’t take pains with us. If you didn’t want to learn you needn’t—I don’t believe it was much better than one of these here national schools. We wore mortarboards, o’ course. But what’s that?

“I’m a regular fish out of water with this money. When I got it⁠—it’s a week ago⁠—reely I thought I’d got everything I wanted. But I dunno what to do.”

His voice went up into a squeak. “Practically,” he said, “it’s no good shuttin’ my eyes to things—I’m a gentleman.”

His reach extended over the table, and he troubled nobody. When Mrs. Chitterlow, who for a little while seemed socially self-conscious, reproved him for taking a potato with a jab of his fork, he answered,

“Well, you shouldn’t have married a man of Genius,”

and from a subsequent remark it was perfectly clear that Chitterlow’s standing in this respect was made no secret of in his household.

He felt as a praying hermit might have felt, snatched from the midst of his quiet devotions, his modest sackcloth and ashes, and hurled neck and crop over the glittering gates of Paradise, smack among the iridescent wings, the bright-eyed Cherubim.

He felt like some lowly and righteous man dynamited into Bliss.

…

“You mustn’t be too—too dressy. It’s possible to be over-conventional, over-elaborate. It makes you look like a shop—like a common, well-off person. There’s a sort of easiness that is better.

A real gentleman looks right, without looking as though he had tried to be right.

”

… jar was his sense of the altered behaviour of Sid Pornick, the evident shock to that ancient alliance caused by the fact of his enrichment, the touch of hostility in his “You’ll soon be swelled too big to speak to a poor mechanic like me.”

Kipps was unprepared for the unpleasant truth; that the path of social advancement is and must be strewn with broken friendships.

This first protrusion of that fact caused a painful confusion in his mind. It was speedily to protrude in a far more serious fashion in relation to the “hands” from the Emporium, and Chitterlow.

And there was something in Ann’s quietly friendly eyes, in her frank smile, in the naive pressure of her hand, there was something undefended and welcoming that imparted a flavour to the business upon which he had not counted.

He had learnt about women from her. That refrain ran through his mind and deflected his thoughts, but as a matter of fact he had learnt about nothing but himself.

He wanted very much to see Ann some more and explain. He did not clearly know what it was he wanted to explain.

He did not clearly know anything.

It is the last achievement of the intelligence to get all of one’s life into one coherent scheme, and Kipps was only in a measure more aware of himself as a whole than is a tree.

His existence was an affair of dissolving and recurring moods. When he thought of Helen or Ann or any of his friends, he thought sometimes of this aspect and sometimes of that—and often one aspect was finally incongruous with another.

Kipps at once rolled back to his former position, and for a space lay quite still.

He felt like a very young rabbit in a trap.

Then suddenly, with extraordinary distinctness, his heart cried out for Ann, and he saw her as he had seen her at New Romney, sitting amidst the yellow sea poppies with the sunlight on her face.

he was convinced absolutely he would “fumble,” as Shalford would have said, and look like a fool. Somebody might laugh at him!

The hungrier he got the more unendurable was the thought that anyone should laugh at him.

For a time he considered an extraordinary expedient to account for his ignorance. He would go in and pretend to be a foreigner and not know English. Then they might understand.

And it was as if something had been lit in Masterman. His languor passed. He enforced his words by gestures of his long, thin hands. And as he passed swiftly from point to point of his argument it was evident he grew angry.

“Today,” he said, “the world is ruled by rich men; they may do almost anything they like with the world. And what are they doing? Laying it waste!”

“Hear, hear!” said Sid, very sternly.

“Oh, Blow!” he said, at last, and then, viciously, “Blow!” and so rose and flung away his cigarette end, and pursued his reluctant, dubiating way towards the really quite uncongenial splendours of the Royal Grand. …

And it is vulgarly imagined that to have money is to have no troubles at all!

Kipps endured splendour at the Royal Grand Hotel for three nights and days, and then he retreated in disorder.

And then, when they got him there doing his best, what must they do but glance and sneer and nudge one another. He tried to catch them at it, and then took refuge in a second glass of wine.

Suddenly and extraordinarily he found himself a socialist.

He did not care how close it was to the lean years when all these things would end.

He stepped carefully over the prostrate ice, kicked the napkin under the table, thrust his hands deep into his pockets, and marched out—shaking the dust of the place, as it were, from his feet.

He left behind him a melting fragment of ice upon the floor, his gibus hat, warm and compressed in his chair, and in addition every social ambition he had ever entertained in the world.

Kipps went back to Folkestone in time for the Anagram Tea. But you must not imagine that the change of heart that came to him in the dining-room of the Royal Grand Hotel involved any change of attitude toward this promised social and intellectual treat.

Ann’s last words when, an hour later, they parted, Mrs. and Miss Bindon Botting having returned very audibly upstairs, deserve a section to themselves.

“I wouldn’t do this for everyone, mind you,” whispered Ann.

It’s ’ouses like this wear girls out.

“It’s ’aving ’ouses built by men, I believe, makes all the work and trouble,” said Ann.

…

He did that out of an extraordinary animosity for house agents he had conceived.

Everybody hates house agents just as everybody loves sailors.

It is no doubt a very wicked and unjust hatred, but the business of a novelist is not ethical principle but facts. Everybody hates house agents because they have everybody at a disadvantage. All other callings have a certain amount of give and take;

“Demn!” said Kipps. His mackintosh swished against his leggings, his leggings piped and whistled over his boot-tops.

“Why do I never get anything right?” Kipps asked of a bright implacable universe.

Nice old ladies passed him, refined people with tidy umbrellas, bright, beautiful, supercilious-looking children. Of course! the right thing for such a day as this was a light overcoat and an umbrella. A child might have known that.

He hardened his heart; resolutely he hardened his heart.

The stupid little tragedies of these clipped and limited lives!

What is the good of keeping up the idyllic sham and pretending that ill-educated, misdirected people “get along very well,” and that all this is harmlessly funny and nothing more?

… a monster, a lumpish monster, like some great, clumsy griffin thing, like the Crystal Palace labyrinthodon, like Coote, like the leaden goddess Dullness Pope Abhorred, like some fat, proud flunkey, like pride, like indolence, like all that is darkening and heavy and obstructive in life.

It is matter and darkness, it is the anti-soul, Stupidity.

My Kippses live in its shadow. Shalford and his apprenticeship system, the Hastings Academy, the ideas of Coote, the ideas of the old Kippses, all the ideas that have made Kipps what he is, all these are its shadow.

And with that he and then she fell into a passion of weeping. They clung very tightly together—closer than they had been since ever the first brightness of their married days turned to the grey of common life again.

All the disaster in the world could not prevent their going to sleep at last with their poor little troubled heads close together on one pillow.

There was nothing more to be done, there was nothing more to be thought; Time might go on with his mischiefs, but for a little while at least they still had one another.

A certain added brightness came into Ann’s face.

“Nobody won’t be able to come leaving cards on us, Artie, now, any more. We are out of that!”

“There isn’t no necessity for us to be stuck up,” said Kipps, “any more forever! ’Ere we are, Ann, common people, with jest no position at all, as you might say, to keep up. No sev’nts, not if you don’t like.