And there was Ann, with a greater strangeness and a greater familiarity in her quality than he had ever found before. There were little beads of perspiration on her temples and her lips, and her face was flushed, not pale as he had feared to see it. She had the look of one who emerges from some strenuous and invigorating act. He bent down and kissed her, and he had no words to say. She wasn’t to speak much yet, but she stroked his arm with her hand and had to tell him one thing:
“He’s over nine pounds, Artie,” she whispered. “Bessie’s—Bessie’s wasn’t no more than eight.”
To have given Kipps a pound of triumph over Sid seemed to her almost to justify Nunc Dimittis. She watched his face for a moment, then closed her eyes in a kind of blissful exhaustion as the nurse, with something motherly in her manner, pushed Kipps out of the room.
Kipps was far too much preoccupied with his own life to worry about the further exploits of Chitterlow. The man had got his two thousand; on the whole Kipps was glad he had had it rather than young Walshingham, and there was an end to the matter. As for the complicated transactions he achieved and proclaimed by mainly illegible and always incomprehensible postcards, they were like passing voices heard in the street as one goes about one’s urgent concerns. Kipps put them aside and they got in between the pages of the stock and were lost forever and sold in with the goods to customers who puzzled over them mightily.
Then one morning as he was dusting round before breakfast, Chitterlow returned, appeared suddenly in the shop doorway.
Kipps was overcome with amazement.
It was the most unexpected thing in the world. The man was in evening dress, evening dress in that singularly crumpled state it assumes after the hour of dawn, and above his dishevelled red hair, a smallish Gibus hat tilted remarkably forward. He opened the door and stood, tall and spread, with one vast white glove flung out as if to display how burst a glove might be, his eyes bright, such wrinkling of brow and mouth as only an experienced actor can produce, and a singular radiance of emotion upon his whole being, an altogether astonishing spectacle.
It was amazing beyond the powers of Kipps. The bell jangled for a bit and then gave it up and was silent. For a long, great second everything was quietly attentive. Kipps was amazed to his uttermost; had he had ten times the capacity he would still have been fully amazed. “It’s Chit’low!” he said at last, standing duster in hand.
But he doubted whether it was not a dream.
“Tzit!” gasped that most excitable and extraordinary person, still in an incredibly expanded attitude, and then with a slight forward jerk of the starry split glove, “Bif!”
He could say no more. The tremendous speech he had had ready vanished from his mind. Kipps stared at his extraordinary facial changes, vaguely conscious of the truth of the teachings of Nisbet and Lombroso concerning men of genius.
Then suddenly Chitterlow’s features were convulsed, the histrionic fell from him like a garment, and he was weeping. He said something indistinct about “Old Kipps! Good old Kipps! Oh, old Kipps!” and somehow he managed to mix a chuckle and a sob in the most remarkable way. He emerged from somewhere near the middle of his original attitude, a merely life-size creature. “My play, boo-hoo!” he sobbed, clutching at his friend’s arm. “My play, Kipps! (sob) You know?”
“Well?” cried Kipps, with his heart sinking in sympathy, “it ain’t—”
“No,” howled Chitterlow; “no. It’s a success! My dear chap! my dear boy! oh! it’s a—bu—boo-hoo!—a big success!” He turned away and wiped streaming tears with the back of his hand. He walked a pace or so and turned. He sat down on one of the specially designed artistic chairs of the Associated Booksellers’ Trading Union and produced an exiguous lady’s handkerchief, extraordinarily belaced. He choked. “My play,” and covered his face here and there.
He made an unsuccessful effort to control himself, and shrank for a space to the dimensions of a small and pathetic creature. His great nose suddenly came through a careless place in the handkerchief.
“I’m knocked,” he said in a muffled voice, and so remained for a space—wonderful—veiled.
He made a gallant effort to wipe his tears away. “I had to tell you,” he said, gulping.
“Be all right in a minute,” he added, “calm,” and sat still. …
Kipps stared in commiseration of such success. Then he heard footsteps and went quickly to the house doorway. “Jest a minute,” he said. “Don’t go in the shop, Ann, for a minute. It’s Chitterlow. He’s a bit essited. But he’ll be better in a minute. It’s knocked him over a bit. You see”—his voice sank to a hushed note as one who announces death—“ ’e’s made a success with his play.”
He pushed her back lest she should see the scandal of another male’s tears. …
Soon Chitterlow felt better, but for a little while his manner was even alarmingly subdued. “I had to come and tell you,” he said. “I had to astonish someone. Muriel—she’ll be firstrate, of course. But she’s over at Dymchurch.” He blew his nose with enormous noise, and emerged instantly a merely garrulous optimist.
“I expect she’ll be precious glad.”
“She doesn’t know yet, my dear boy. She’s at Dymchurch—with a friend. She’s seen some of my first nights before. … Better out of it. … I’m going to her now. I’ve been up all night—talking to the boys and all that. I’m a bit off it just for a bit. But—it Knocked ’em. It Knocked everybody.”
He stared at the floor and went on in a monotone. “They laughed a bit at the beginning—but nothing like a settled laugh—not
