Kipps, H. G. Wells [uplifting book club books TXT] 📗

by a traction engine going through the town, and his aunt had got some sprats for supper. When he was in bed, however, sentiment came upon him again in a torrent quite abruptly and abundantly, and he put his head under the pillow and whispered very softly, “I love Ann Pornick,” as a sort of supplementary devotion.

In his subsequent dreams he ran races with Ann, and they lived in a wreck together, and always her face was flushed and her hair about her face. They just lived in a wreck and ran races, and were very, very fond of one another. And their favourite food was rock-chocolate, dates, such as one buys off barrows, and sprats⁠—fried sprats.⁠ ⁠…

In the morning he could hear Ann singing in the scullery next door. He listened to her for some time, and it was clear to him that he must put things before her.

Towards dusk that evening they chanced on one another at the gate by the church; but though there was much in his mind, it stopped there with a resolute shyness until he and Ann were out of breath catching cockchafers, and were sitting on that gate of theirs again. Ann sat up upon the gate, dark against vast masses of flaming crimson and darkling purple, and her eyes looked at Kipps from a shadowed face. There came a stillness between them, and quite abruptly he was moved to tell his love.

“Ann,” he said, “I do like you. I wish you was my girl.⁠ ⁠… I say, Ann: will you be my girl?”

Ann made no pretence of astonishment. She weighed the proposal for a moment with her eyes on Kipps. “If you like, Artie,” she said lightly. “I don’t mind if I am.”

“All right,” said Kipps, breathless with excitement, “then you are.”

“All right,” said Ann.

Something seemed to fall between them, and they no longer looked openly at one another. “Lor’!” cried Ann suddenly, “see that one!” and jumped down and darted after a cockchafer that had boomed within a yard of her face. And with that they were girl and boy again.⁠ ⁠…

They avoided their new relationship painfully.

They did not recur to it for several days, though they met twice. Both felt that there remained something before this great experience was complete, but there was an infinite diffidence about the next step. Kipps talked in fragments of all sorts of matters, telling particularly of the great things that were being done to make a man and a draper of him, how he had two new pairs of trousers and a black coat and four new shirts. And all the while his imagination was urging him to that unknown next step, and when he was alone and in the dark he became even an enterprising wooer. It became evident to him that it would be nice to take Ann by the hand; even the decorous novelettes Sid affected egged him on to that greater nearness of intimacy.

Then a great idea came to him, in a paragraph called “Lovers’ Tokens” that he read in a torn fragment of Tit Bits. It fell in to the measure of his courage⁠—a divided sixpence! He secured his aunt’s best scissors, fished a sixpence out of his jejune tin money-box, and jabbed his finger in a varied series of attempts to get it in half. When they met again the sixpence was still undivided. He had not intended to mention the matter to her at that stage, but it came up spontaneously. He endeavoured to explain the theory of broken sixpences and his unexpected failure to break one.

“But what you break it for?” said Ann. “It’s no good if it’s broke.”

“It’s a Token,” said Kipps.

“Like⁠ ⁠… ?”

“Oh, you keep half and I keep half, and when we’re sep’rated you look at your half and I look at mine⁠—see! Then we think of each other.”

“Oh!” said Ann, and appeared to assimilate this information.

“Only I can’t get it in ’arf nohow,” said Kipps.

They discussed this difficulty for some time without illumination. Then Ann had a happy thought. “Tell you what,” she said, starting away from him abruptly and laying a hand on his arm, “you let me ’ave it, Artie. I know where father keeps his file.”

Kipps handed her the sixpence, and they came upon a pause.

“I’ll easy do it,” said Ann.

In considering the sixpence side by side, his head had come near her cheek. Quite abruptly he was moved to take his next step into the unknown mysteries of love.

“Ann,” he said, and gulped at his temerity, “I do love you. Straight. I’d do anything for you, Ann. Reely⁠—I would.”

He paused for breath. She answered nothing, but she was no doubt enjoying herself. He came yet closer to her⁠—his shoulder touched hers. “Ann, I wish you’d⁠—”

He stopped.

“What?” said Ann.

“Ann⁠—lemme kiss you.”

Things seemed to hang for a space; his tone, the drop of his courage, made the thing incredible as he spoke. Kipps was not of that bold order of wooers who impose conditions.

Ann perceived that she was not prepared for kissing after all. Kissing, she said, was silly, and when Kipps would have displayed a belated enterprise, she flung away from him. He essayed argument. He stood afar off, as it were⁠—the better part of a yard⁠—and said she might let him kiss her, and then that he didn’t see what good it was for her to be his girl if he couldn’t kiss her.

She repeated that kissing was silly. A certain estrangement took them homeward. They arrived in the dusky High Street not exactly together, and not exactly apart, but struggling. They had not kissed, but all the guilt of kissing was between them. When Kipps saw the portly contours of his uncle standing dimly in the shop doorway, his footsteps faltered, and the space between our young couple increased. Above, the window over Pornick’s shop was open, and Mrs. Pornick was visible, taking the air. Kipps assumed an expression of extreme innocence. He found himself face to face with his uncle’s advanced