Part 3 (1/2)

I'd do anything for you, Ann. Reely--I would.”

He paused for breath. She answered nothing, but she was no doubt enjoying herself. He came yet closer to her--his shoulder touched hers.

”Ann, I wish you'd----”

He stopped.

”What?” said Ann.

”Ann--lemme kiss you.”

Things seemed to hang for a s.p.a.ce; his tone, the drop of his courage, made the thing incredible as he spoke. Kipps was not of that bold order of wooers who impose conditions.

Ann perceived that she was not prepared for kissing after all. Kissing, she said, was silly, and when Kipps would have displayed a belated enterprise, she flung away from him. He essayed argument. He stood afar off, as it were--the better part of a yard--and said she _might_ let him kiss her, and then that he didn't see what good it was for her to be his girl if he couldn't kiss her.

She repeated that kissing was silly. A certain estrangement took them homeward. They arrived in the dusky High Street not exactly together, and not exactly apart, but struggling. They had not kissed, but all the guilt of kissing was between them. When Kipps saw the portly contours of his uncle standing dimly in the shop doorway, his footsteps faltered, and the s.p.a.ce between our young couple increased. Above, the window over p.o.r.nick's shop was open, and Mrs. p.o.r.nick was visible, taking the air.

Kipps a.s.sumed an expression of extreme innocence. He found himself face to face with his uncle's advanced outposts of waistcoat b.u.t.tons.

”Where ye bin, my boy?”

”Bin for a walk, uncle.”

”Not along of that brat of p.o.r.nick's?”

”Along of who?”

”That gell”--indicating Ann with his pipe.

”Oh, no, uncle!”--very faintly.

”Run in, my boy.”

Old Kipps stood aside, with an oblique glance upward, and his nephew brushed clumsily by him and vanished out of sight of the street, into the vague obscurity of the little shop. The door closed behind old Kipps with a nervous jangle of its bell, and he set himself to light the single oil lamp that illuminated his shop at nights. It was an operation requiring care and watching, or else it flared and ”smelt.”

Often it smelt after all. Kipps for some reason found the dusky living-room with his aunt in it too populous for his feelings, and went upstairs.

”That brat of p.o.r.nick's!” It seemed to him that a horrible catastrophe had occurred. He felt he had identified himself inextricably with his uncle, and cut himself off from her for ever by saying ”Oh, no!” At supper he was so visibly depressed that his aunt asked him if he wasn't feeling well. Under this imminent threat of medicine he a.s.sumed an unnatural cheerfulness.

He lay awake for nearly half an hour that night, groaning because things had all gone wrong--because Ann wouldn't let him kiss her, and because his uncle had called her a brat. It seemed to Kipps almost as though he himself had called her a brat....

There came an interval during which Ann was altogether inaccessible.

One, two, three days pa.s.sed, and he did not see her. Sid he met several times; they went fis.h.i.+ng, and twice they bathed; but though Sid lent and received back two further love stories, they talked no more of love.

They kept themselves in accord, however, agreeing that the most flagrantly sentimental story was ”proper.” Kipps was always wanting to speak of Ann, but never daring to do so. He saw her on Sunday evening going off to chapel. She was more beautiful than ever in her Sunday clothes, but she pretended not to see him because her mother was with her. But he thought she pretended not to see him because she had given him up for ever. Brat!--who could be expected ever to forgive that? He abandoned himself to despair, he ceased even to haunt the places where she might be found.

--6

With paralysing unexpectedness came the end.