Kipps | Page 9

'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, 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 straggling. 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 outposts of waistcoat
buttons.
'Where ye bin, my boy?'
'Bin for a walk, uncle.'
'Not along of that brat of Pornick's?'
'Along of who?'
'That gell'--indicating Ann with his pipe.
'Oh, no, uncle!'--very faintly.
'Run in, my boy.' Old Kipps stood aside, with an oblique glance upward,
and his nephew brushed clumsily by him and vanished out of sight of
the street into the vague obscurity of the little shop. The door closed
behind old Kipps with a nervous jangle of its bell, and he set himself to
light the single oil-lamp that illuminated his shop at nights. It was an

operation requiring care and watching, or else it flared and 'smelt.'
Often it smelt after all. Kipps, for some reason, found the dusky
living-room with his aunt in it too populous for his feelings, and went
upstairs.
'That brat of Pornick's!' It seemed to him that a horrible catastrophe had
occurred. He felt he had identified himself inextricably with his uncle
and cut himself off from her for ever by saying 'Oh, no!' At supper he
was so visibly depressed that his aunt asked him if he wasn't feeling
well. Under this imminent threat of medicine he assumed an unnatural
cheerfulness...
He lay awake for nearly half an hour that night, groaning because
things had all gone wrong, because Ann wouldn't let him kiss her, and
because his uncle had called her a brat. It seemed to Kipps almost as
though he himself had called her a brat...
There came an interval during which Ann was altogether inaccessible.
One, two, three days passed and he did not see her. Sid he met several
times; they went fishing and twice they bathed, but though Sid lent