Part 11 (1/2)

He would never do wood-carving, never see Miss Wals.h.i.+ngham again. Not that he had ever hoped to see her again. But this was the knife, this was final. He had stayed out, he had got drunk, there had been that row about the Manchester window dressing only three days ago.... In the retrospect he was quite sure that he was perfectly sober then and at bottom extremely unhappy, but he kept a brave face on the matter nevertheless, and declared stoutly he didn't care if he _was_ locked out.

Whereupon Chitterlow slapped him on the back very hard and told him that was a ”Bit of All Right,” and a.s.sured him that when he himself had been a clerk in Sheffield before he took to acting he had been locked out sometimes for six nights running.

”What's the result?” said Chitterlow. ”I could go back to that place now, and they'd be glad to have me.... Glad to have me,” he repeated, and then added, ”that is to say, if they remember me--which isn't very likely.”

Kipps asked a little weakly, ”What am I to do?”

”Keep out,” said Chitterlow. ”You can't knock 'em up now--that would give you Right away. You'd better try and sneak in in the morning with the Cat. That'll do you. You'll probably get in all right in the morning if n.o.body gives you away.”

Then for a time--perhaps as the result of that slap in the back--Kipps felt decidedly queer, and acting on Chitterlow's advice went for a bit of a freshener upon the Leas. After a time he threw off the temporary queerness and found Chitterlow patting him on the shoulder and telling him that he'd be all right now in a minute and all the better for it--which he was. And the wind having dropped and the night being now a really very beautiful moonlight night indeed, and all before Kipps to spend as he liked and with only a very little tendency to spin round now and again to mar its splendour, they set out to walk the whole length of the Leas to the Sandgate lift and back, and as they walked Chitterlow spoke first of moonlight transfiguring the sea and then of moonlight transfiguring faces, and so at last he came to the topic of Love, and upon that he dwelt a great while, and with a wealth of experience and ill.u.s.trative anecdote that seemed remarkably pungent and material to Kipps. He forgot his lost Miss Wals.h.i.+ngham and his outraged employer again. He became as it were a desperado by reflection.

Chitterlow had had adventures, a quite astonis.h.i.+ng variety of adventures in this direction; he was a man with a past, a really opulent past, and he certainly seemed to like to look back and see himself amidst its opulence.

He made no consecutive history, but he gave Kipps vivid, momentary pictures of relations and entanglements. One moment he was in flight--only too worthily in flight--before the husband of a Malay woman in Cape Town. At the next he was having pa.s.sionate complications with the daughter of a clergyman in York. Then he pa.s.sed to a remarkable grouping at Seaford.

”They say you can't love two women at once,” said Chitterlow. ”But I tell you----” He gesticulated and raised his ample voice. ”It's _Rot_!

_Rot!_”

”I know that,” said Kipps.

”Why, when I was in the smalls with Bessie Hopper's company there were three.” He laughed and decided to add, ”Not counting Bessie, that is.”

He set out to reveal Life as it is lived in touring companies, a quite amazing jungle of interwoven ”affairs” it appeared to be, a mere amorous winepress for the crus.h.i.+ng of hearts.

”People say this sort of thing's a nuisance and interferes with Work. I tell you it isn't. The Work couldn't go on without it. They _must_ do it. They haven't the Temperament if they don't. If they hadn't the Temperament they wouldn't want to act, if they have--Bif!”

”You're right,” said Kipps. ”I see that.”

Chitterlow proceeded to a close criticism of certain historical indiscretions of Mr. Clement Scott respecting the morals of the stage.

Speaking in confidence and not as one who addresses the public, he admitted regretfully the general truth of these comments. He proceeded to examine various typical instances that had almost forced themselves upon him personally, and with especial regard to the contrast between his own character towards women and that of the Hon. Thomas Norgate, with whom it appeared he had once been on terms of great intimacy....

Kipps listened with emotion to these extraordinary recollections. They were wonderful to him, they were incredibly credible. Of course the tumultuous, pa.s.sionate course was the way life ran--except in high-cla.s.s establishments! Such things happened in novels, in plays--only he had been fool enough not to understand they happened. His share in the conversation was now indeed no more than faint writing in the margin; Chitterlow was talking quite continuously. He expanded his magnificent voice into huge guffaws, he drew it together into a confidential intensity, it became drawlingly reminiscent, he was frank, frank with the effect of a revelation, reticent also with the effect of a revelation, a stupendously gesticulating, moonlit black figure, wallowing in itself, preaching Adventure and the Flesh to Kipps. Yet withal shot with something of sentiment, with a sort of sentimental refinement very coa.r.s.ely and egotistically done. The Times he had had!--even before he was as old as Kipps he had had innumerable times.

Well, he said with a sudden transition, he had sown his wild oats--one had to somewhen--and now he fancied he had mentioned it earlier in the evening, he was happily married. She was, he indicated, a ”born lady.”

Her father was a prominent lawyer, a solicitor in Kentish Town, ”done a lot of public house business”; her mother was second cousin to the wife of Abel Jones, the fas.h.i.+onable portrait painter--”almost Society people in a way.” That didn't count with Chitterlow. He was no sn.o.b. What _did_ count was that she possessed, what he ventured to a.s.sert without much fear of contradiction, was the very finest, completely untrained contralto voice in all the world. (”But to hear it properly,” said Chitterlow, ”you want a Big Hall.”) He became rather vague and jerked his head about to indicate when and how he had entered matrimony. She was, it seemed, ”away with her people.” It was clear that Chitterlow did not get on with these people very well. It would seem they failed to appreciate his playwright, regarding it as an unremunerative pursuit, whereas as he and Kipps knew, wealth beyond the dreams of avarice would presently accrue. Only patience and persistence were needful.

He went off at a tangent to hospitality. Kipps must come down home with him. They couldn't wander about all night, with a bottle of the right sort pining at home for them. ”You can sleep on the sofa. You won't be worried by broken springs anyhow, for I took 'em all out myself two or three weeks ago. I don't see what they even put 'em in for. It's a point I know about. I took particular notice of it when I was with Bessie Hopper. Three months we were and all over England, North Wales and the Isle of Man, and I never struck a sofa in diggings anywhere that hadn't a broken spring. Not once--all the time.”

He added almost absently: ”It happens like that at times.”

They descended the slant road towards Harbour Street and went on past the Pavilion Hotel.

--4

They came into the presence of old Methusaleh again, and that worthy under Chitterlow's direction at once resumed the illumination of Kipps'

interior with the conscientious thoroughness that distinguished him.

Chitterlow took a tall portion to himself with an air of asbestos, lit the bulldog pipe again, and lapsed for a s.p.a.ce into meditation, from which Kipps roused him by remarking that he expected ”an acter 'as a lot of ups and downs like, now and then.”

At which Chitterlow seemed to bestir himself. ”Ra-ther,” he said. ”And sometimes it's his own fault and sometimes it isn't. Usually it is. If it isn't one thing it's another. If it isn't the manager's wife it's bar-bragging. I tell you things happen at times. I'm a fatalist. The fact is Character has you. You can't get away from it. You may think you do, but you don't.”