Part 14 (2/2)

Eh?”

Kipps was trembling slightly. ”But----” he said, and thought. ”If you was me----” he began. ”About that Waddy----?”

He glanced up and saw the second apprentice disappear with amazing swiftness from behind the goods in the window.

”_What?_” asked Chitterlow, but he never had an answer.

”Lor'! There's the guv'nor!” said Kipps, and made a prompt dive for the door.

He dashed in only to discover that Shalford, with the junior apprentice in attendance, had come to mark off remnants of Kipps' cotton dresses and was demanding him. ”Hullo, Kipps,” he said, ”outside----?”

”Seein' if the window was straight, Sir,” said Kipps.

”Umph!” said Shalford.

For a s.p.a.ce Kipps was too busily employed to think at all of Chitterlow or the crumpled bit of paper in his trouser pocket. He was, however, painfully aware of a suddenly disconcerted excitement at large in the street. There came one awful moment when Chitterlow's nose loomed interrogatively over the ground gla.s.s of the department door, and his bright, little, red-brown eye sought for the reason of Kipps'

disappearance, and then it became evident that he saw the high light of Shalford's baldness and grasped the situation and went away. And then Kipps (with that advertis.e.m.e.nt in his pocket) was able to come back to the business in hand.

He became aware that Shalford had asked a question. ”Yessir, nosir, rightsir. I'm sorting up zephyrs to-morrow, Sir,” said Kipps.

Presently he had a moment to himself again, and, taking up a safe position behind a newly unpacked pile of summer lace curtains, he straightened out the piece of paper and reperused it. It was a little perplexing. That ”Arthur Waddy or Arthur Kipps”--did that imply two persons or one? He would ask Pierce or Buggins. Only----

It had always been impressed upon him that there was something demanding secrecy about his mother.

”Don't you answer no questions about your mother,” his aunt had been wont to say. ”Tell them you don't know, whatever it is they ask you.”

”Now this----?”

Kipps' face became portentously careful and he tugged at his moustache, such as it was, hard.

He had always represented his father as being a ”gentleman farmer.” ”It didn't pay,” he used to say with a picture in his own mind of a penny magazine aristocrat prematurely worn out by worry. ”I'm a Norfan, both sides,” he would explain, with the air of one who had seen trouble. He said he lived with his uncle and aunt, but he did not say that they kept a toy shop, and to tell anyone that his uncle had been a butler--_a servant!_--would have seemed the maddest of indiscretions. Almost all the a.s.sistants in the Emporium were equally reticent and vague, so great is their horror of ”Lowness” of any sort. To ask about this ”Waddy or Kipps” would upset all these little fictions. He was not, as a matter of fact, perfectly clear about his real status in the world (he was not, as a matter of fact, perfectly clear about anything), but he knew that there was a quality about his status that was--detrimental.

Under the circ.u.mstances----?

It occurred to him that it would save a lot of trouble to destroy the advertis.e.m.e.nt there and then.

In which case he would have to explain to Chitterlow!

”Eng!” said Mr. Kipps.

”Kipps,” cried Carshot, who was shopwalking; ”Kipps, Forward!”

He thrust back the crumpled paper into his pocket and sallied forth to the customers.

”I want,” said the customer, looking vaguely about her through gla.s.ses, ”a little bit of something to cover a little stool I have. Anything would do--a remnant or anything----”

The matter of the advertis.e.m.e.nt remained in abeyance for half an hour, and at the end the little stool was still a candidate for covering and Kipps had a thoroughly representative collection of the textile fabrics in his department to clear away. He was so angry about the little stool that the crumpled advertis.e.m.e.nt lay for a s.p.a.ce in his pocket, absolutely forgotten.

--2

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