Kipps | Page 8

lapsed into meditation.
'I would like to 'ave a girl,' said Kipps.
'I mean just to talk to, and all that--'
A floating sack distracted them at last from this obscure topic. They abandoned the wreck, and followed the new interest a mile along the beach, bombarding it with stones until it came to land. They had inclined to a view that it would contain romantic mysteries, but it was simply an ill-preserved kitten--too much even for them. And at last they were drawn dinner-ward, and went home hungry and pensive side by side.

5
But Kipps' imagination had been warmed by that talk of love, and in the afternoon when he saw Ann Pornick in the High Street and said 'Hallo!' it was a different 'hallo' from that of their previous intercourse. And when they had passed they both looked back and caught each other doing so. Yes, he did want a girl badly--
Afterwards he was distracted 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 out by 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, 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 to be regarded as 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 'Lover's 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,