A vague self-disgust, that shaped itself as an intense hate of Shalford and all his fellow-creatures, filled the soul of Kipps during these periods of storm and stress. He felt that the whole business was unjust and idiotic, but the why and the wherefore was too much for his unfortunate brain. His mind was a welter. One desire, the desire to dodge some at least of a pelting storm of disagreeable comment, guided him through a fumbling performance of his duties. His disgust was infinite! It was not decreased by the inflamed ankles and sore feet that form a normal incident in the business of making an English draper; and the senior apprentice, Minton, a gaunt, sullen-faced youngster with close-cropped, wiry, black hair, a loose, ugly mouth, and a moustache like a smudge of ink, directed his attention to deeper aspects of the question and sealed his misery.
“When you get too old to work they chuck you away,” said Minton. “Lor! you find old drapers everywhere—tramps, beggars, dock labourers, bus conductors—Quod. Anywhere but in a crib.”
“Don’t they get shops of their own?”
“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.”
The idea that fermented perpetually in the mind of Minton was to “hit the little beggar slap in the eye”—the little beggar being Mr. Shalford—“and see how his blessed System met that.”
The threat filled Kipps with splendid anticipations whenever Shalford went marking off in Minton’s department. He would look at Minton and look at Shalford, and decide where he would best like Shalford hit. … But for reasons known to himself Shalford never pished and tushed with Minton, as he did at the harmless Carshot, and this interesting experiment upon the System was never attempted.
There were times when Kipps would lie awake, all others in the dormitory asleep and snoring, and think dismally of the outlook Minton pictured. Dimly he perceived the thing that had happened to him—how the great, stupid machine of retail trade had caught his life into its wheels, a vast, irresistible force which he had neither strength of will nor knowledge to escape. This was to be his life until his days should end. No adventures, no glory, no change, no freedom. Neither—though the force of that came home to him later—might he dream of effectual love and marriage. And there was a terrible something called the “swap,” or “the key of the street,” and “crib hunting,” of which the talk was scanty but sufficient. Night after night he would resolve to enlist, to run away to sea, to set fire to the warehouse, or drown himself; and morning after morning he rose up and hurried downstairs in fear of a sixpenny fine. He would compare his dismal round of servile drudgery with those windy, sunlit days at Littlestone, those windows of happiness shining ever brighter as they receded. The little figure of Ann seemed in all these windows now.
She, too, had happened on evil things. When Kipps went home for the first Christmas after he was bound, that great suspended resolve of his to kiss her flared up to hot determination, and he hurried out and whistled in the yard. There was a still silence, and then old Kipps appeared behind him.
“It’s no good your whistling there, my boy,” said Old Kipps in a loud, clear tone, designed to be audible over the wall. “They’ve cleared out all you ’ad any truck with. She’s gone as help to Ashford, my boy. Help! Slavey is what we used to call ’em, but times are changed. Wonder they didn’t say lady-’elp while they was about it. It ’ud be like ’em.”
And Sid? Sid had gone, too. “Arrand boy or somethink,” said Old Kipps. “To one of these here brasted cicycle shops.”
“Has ’e!” said Kipps, with a feeling that he had been gripped about the chest, and he turned quickly and went indoors.
Old Kipps, still supposing him present, went on to further observations of an anti-Pornick hue. …
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 for evermore. …
The only pleasure left for the brief remainder of his holiday after that was to think he was not in the shop. Even that was transient. Two more days—one more day—half a day. When he went back there were one or two very dismal nights indeed. He went so far as to write home some vague intimation of his feelings about business and his prospects, quoting Minton. But Mrs. Kipps answered him, “Did he want the Pornicks to say he wasn’t good enough to be a draper?” This dreadful possibility was of course conclusive in the matter. “No,” he resolved they should not say he failed at that.
He derived much help from a “manly” sermon delivered in an enormous voice by a large, fat, sun-red clergyman, just home from a colonial bishopric he had resigned on the plea of ill-health, exhorting him that whatever his hand found to do, he was to do with all his might; and the revision of his Catechism preparatory to his confirmation reminded him that it behooved him “to do his duty in that state of life unto which it shall please God to call him. …”
After a time the sorrows of Kipps grew less acute, and save for a
