“Tcha!” said Kipps, with his mental state developing.
“I don’t see it’s any use getting in a state about it now,” said Ann.
“Don’t you? I do. See? ’Ere’s these people, good people, want to ’sociate with us, and ’ere you go and slap ’em in the face!”
“I didn’t slap ’em in the face.”
“You do—practically. You slams the door in their face, and that’s all we see of ’em ever. I wouldn’t ’ave ’ad this ’appen not for a ten-pound note.”
He rounded his regrets with a grunt. For a while there was silence, save for the little stir of Ann’s movements preparing the tea.
“Tea, Artie,” said Ann, handing him a cup.
Kipps took it.
“I put sugar once,” said Ann.
“Oo, dash it! Oo cares?” said Kipps, taking an extraordinarily large additional lump with fury quivering fingers, and putting his cup with a slight excess of force on the recess cupboard. “Oo cares?
“I wouldn’t ’ave ’ad that ’appen,” he said, bidding steadily against accomplished things, “for twenty pounds.”
He gloomed in silence through a long minute or so. Then Ann said the fatal thing that exploded him. “Artie!” she said.
“What?”
“There’s Buttud Toce down there! By your foot!” There was a pause, husband and wife regarded one another.
“Buttud Toce!” he said. “You go and mess up them callers and then you try and stuff me up with Buttud Toce! Buttud Toce indeed! ’Ere’s our first chance of knowing anyone that’s at all fit to ’sociate with—. Look ’ere, Ann! Tell you what it is—you got to return that call.”
“Return that call!”
“Yes, you got to return that call. That’s what you got to do! I know—” He waved his arm vaguely towards the miscellany of books in the recess. “It’s in Manners and Rools of Good S’ity. You got to find jest ’ow many cards to leave and you got to go and leave ’em. See?”
Ann’s face expressed terror. “But, Artie, ’ow can I?”
“ ’Ow can you? ’Ow could you? You got to do it, any’ow. They won’t know you—not in your Bond Street ’at! If they do, they won’t say nothing.”
His voice assumed a note of entreaty. “You mus’, Ann.”
“I can’t.”
“You mus’.”
“I can’t and I won’t. Anything in reason I’ll do, but face those people again I can’t—after what ’as ’appened.”
“You won’t?”
“No!” …
“So there they go—orf! And we never see them again! And so it goes on! So it goes on! We don’t know nobody and we shan’t know anybody! And you won’t put yourself out not a little bit, or take the trouble to find out anything ’ow it ought to be done.”
Terrible pause.
“I never ought to ’ave merried you, Artie, that’s the troof.”
“Oh! don’t go into that.”
“I never ought to ’ave merried you, Artie. I’m not equal to the position. If you ’adn’t said you’d drown yourself—” She choked.
“I don’ see why you shouldn’t try, Ann. I’ve improved. Why don’t you? ’Stead of which you go sending out the servant and ’namelling floors, and then when visitors come—”
“ ’Ow was I to know about y’r old visitors?” cried Ann in a wail, and suddenly got up and fled from amidst their ruined tea, the tea of which “toce, all buttery,” was to be the crown and glory.
Kipps watched her with a momentary consternation. Then he hardened his heart. “Ought to ’ave known better,” he said, “goin’ on like that!” He remained for a space rubbing his knees and muttering. He emitted scornfully: “I carn’t an’ I won’t.” He saw her as the source of all his shames.
Presently, quite mechanically, he stooped down and lifted the flowery china cover. “Ter dash ’er Buttud Toce!” he shouted at the sight of it, and clapped the cover down again hard. …
When Gwendolen came back she perceived things were in a slightly unusual poise. Kipps sat by the fire in a rigid attitude reading a casually selected volume of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and Ann was upstairs and inaccessible—to reappear at a later stage with reddened eyes. Before the fire and still in a perfectly assimilable condition was what was evidently an untouched supply of richly buttered toast under a cracked cover.
“They’ve ’ad a bit of a tiff,” said Gwendolen, attending to her duties in the kitchen, with her outdoor hat still on and her mouth full. “They’re rummuns—if ever! My eye!”
And she took another piece of Ann’s generously buttered toast.
The Kippses spoke no more that day to one another.
The squabble about cards and buttered toast was as serious to them as the most rational of differences. It was all rational to them. Their sense of wrong burnt within them; their sense of what was owing to themselves, the duty of implacability, the obstinacy of pride. In the small hours Kipps lay awake at the nadir of unhappiness and came near groaning. He saw life as an extraordinarily desolating muddle; his futile house, his social discredit, his bad behaviour to Helen, his low marriage to Ann. …
He became aware of something irregular in Ann’s breathing. …
He listened. She was awake and quietly and privately sobbing!
He hardened his heart; resolutely he hardened his heart.
The stupid little tragedies of these clipped and limited lives!
What is the good of keeping up the idyllic sham and pretending that ill-educated, misdirected people “get along very well,” and that all this is harmlessly funny and nothing more? You think I’m going to write fat, silly, grinning novels about half-educated, under-trained people and keep it up all the time, that the whole thing’s nothing but funny!
As I think of them lying unhappily there in the darkness, my vision pierces the night. See what I can see! Above them, brooding over them, I tell you there is a monster, a lumpish monster, like some great, clumsy griffin thing, like the Crystal Palace labyrinthodon, like Coote, like
