Kipps | Page 8

and,
indeed, had had all the morning. They read for a time, and presently Sid
talked again. The conception of love, Sid made evident, was compact
of devotion and much spirited fighting and a touch of mystery, but
through all that cloud of talk there floated before Kipps a face that was
flushed and hair that was tossed aside.
So they budded, sitting on the blackening old wreck in which men had
lived and died, looking out to sea, talking of that other sea upon which
they must presently embark.
They ceased to talk, and Sid read; but Kipps, falling behind with the
reading, and not wishing to admit that he read slowlier than Sid, whose
education was of the inferior Elementary School brand, 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