Kipps | Page 2

The shop he did not know so
thoroughly; it was a forbidden region to him, yet somehow he managed
to know it very well.
His aunt and uncle were, as it were, the immediate gods of this world,
and, like the gods of the world of old, occasionally descended right into
it, with arbitrary injunctions and disproportionate punishments. And,
unhappily, one rose to their Olympian level at meals. Then one had to
say one's 'grace,' hold one's spoon and fork in mad, unnatural ways
called 'properly,' and refrain from eating even nice, sweet things 'too
fast.' If he 'gobbled' there was trouble, and at the slightest abandon with
knife, fork, and spoon his aunt rapped his knuckles, albeit his uncle

always finished up his gravy with his knife. Sometimes, moreover, his
uncle would come pipe in hand out of a sedentary remoteness in the
most disconcerting way when a little boy was doing the most natural
and attractive things, with 'Drat and drabbit that young rascal! What's
he a-doing of now?' and his aunt would appear at door or window to
interrupt interesting conversation with children who were upon
unknown grounds considered 'low' and undesirable, and call him in.
The pleasantest little noises, however softly you did them, drumming
on tea-trays, trumpeting your fists, whistling on keys, ringing chimes
with a couple of pails, or playing tunes on the window-panes, brought
down the gods in anger. Yet what noise is fainter than your finger on
the window -- gently done? Sometimes, however, these gods gave him
broken toys out of the shop, and then one loved them better -- for the
shop they kept was, among other things, a toy-shop. (The other things
included books to read and books to give away, and local photographs;
it had some pretentions to be a china-shop and the fascia spoke of glass;
it was also a stationer's shop with a touch of haberdashery about it, and
in the windows and odd corners were mats and terra-cotta dishes and
milking-stools for painting, and there was a hint of picture-frames, and
firescreens, and fishing-tackle, and air-guns and bathing-suits, and tents
-- various things, indeed, but all cruelly attractive to a small boy's
fingers.) Once his aunt gave him a trumpet if he would promise
faithfully not to blow it, and afterwards took it away again. And his
aunt made him say his catechism, and something she certainly called
the 'Colic for the Day,' every Sunday in the year.
As the two grew old as he grew up, and as his impression of them
modified insensibly from year to year, it seemed to him at last that they
had always been as they were when in his adolescent days his
impression of things grew fixed; his aunt he thought of as always lean,
rather worried looking, and prone to a certain obliquity of cap, and his
uncle massive, many chinned, and careless about his buttons. They
neither visited nor received visitors. They were always very suspicious
about their neighbours and other people generally; they feared the 'low'
and they hated and despised the 'stuck up' and so they 'kept themselves
to themselves,' according to the English ideal. Consequently Little
Kipps had no playmates, except through the sin of disobedience. By

inherent nature he had a sociable disposition. When he was in the High
Street he made a point of saying 'Hallo!' to passing cyclists, and he
would put his tongue out at the Quodling children whenever their
nursemaid was not looking. And he began a friendship with Sid
Pornick, the son of the haberdasher next door, that, with wide
intermissions, was destined to last his lifetime through.
Pornick, the haberdasher, I may say at once, was, according to old
Kipps, a 'blaring jackass'; he was a teetotaller, a 'nyar, nyar, 'im-singing
Methodis',' and altogether distasteful and detrimental, he and his
together, to true Kipps ideals so far as little Kipps could gather them.
This Pornick certainly possessed an enormous voice, and he annoyed
old Kipps greatly by calling 'You -- Arn' and 'Siddee' up and down his
house. He annoyed old Kipps by private choral services on Sunday, all
his family, 'nyar, nyar'-ing; and by mushroom culture, by behaving as
though the pilaster between the two shops was common property, by
making a noise of hammering in the afternoon when old Kipps wished
to be quiet after his midday meal, by going up and down uncarpeted
stairs in his boots, by having a black beard, by attempting to be friendly,
and by -- all that sort of thing. In fact, he annoyed old Kipps. He
annoyed him especially with his shop-door mat. Old Kipps never beat
his mat, preferring to let sleeping dust lie, and seeking a motive for a
foolish proceeding, he held that Pornick waited until