Hard Times
by Charles Dickens · English · Gutenberg #786 · 598,756 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: Hard Times
Author: Charles Dickens
Release date: January 1, 1997 [eBook #786]
Most recently updated: December 18, 2023
Language: English
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/786
Credits: Transcribed from the 1905 Chapman and Hall edition by David Price.
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HARD TIMES ***
HARD TIMES
AND
REPRINTED PIECES {0}
* * * * *
By CHARLES DICKENS
* * * * *
_With illustrations by Marcus Stone_, _Maurice_
_Greiffenhagen_, _and F. Walker_
* * * * *
LONDON: CHAPMAN & HALL, LD.
NEW YORK: CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
1905
CONTENTS
_BOOK THE FIRST_. _SOWING_
PAGE
CHAPTER I
_The One Thing Needful_ 3
CHAPTER II
_Murdering the Innocents_ 4
CHAPTER III
_A Loophole_ 8
CHAPTER IV
_Mr. Bounderby_ 12
CHAPTER V
_The Keynote_ 18
CHAPTER VI
_Sleary’s Horsemanship_ 23
CHAPTER VII
_Mrs. Sparsit_ 33
CHAPTER VIII
_Never Wonder_ 38
CHAPTER IX
_Sissy’s Progress_ 43
CHAPTER X
_Stephen Blackpool_ 49
CHAPTER XI
_No Way Out_ 53
CHAPTER XII
_The Old Woman_ 59
CHAPTER XIII
_Rachael_ 63
CHAPTER XIV
_The Great Manufacturer_ 69
CHAPTER XV
_Father and Daughter_ 73
CHAPTER XVI
_Husband and Wife_ 79
_BOOK THE SECOND_. _REAPING_
CHAPTER I
_Effects in the Bank_ 84
CHAPTER II
_Mr. James Harthouse_ 94
CHAPTER III
_The Whelp_ 101
CHAPTER IV
_Men and Brothers_ 111
CHAPTER V
_Men and Masters_ 105
CHAPTER VI
_Fading Away_ 116
CHAPTER VII
_Gunpowder_ 126
CHAPTER VIII
_Explosion_ 136
CHAPTER IX
_Hearing the Last of it_ 146
CHAPTER X
_Mrs. Sparsit’s Staircase_ 152
CHAPTER XI
_Lower and Lower_ 156
CHAPTER XII
_Down_ 163
_BOOK THE THIRD_. _GARNERING_
CHAPTER I
_Another Thing Needful_ 167
CHAPTER II
_Very Ridiculous_ 172
CHAPTER III
_Very Decided_ 179
CHAPTER IV
_Lost_ 186
CHAPTER V
_Found_ 193
CHAPTER VI
_The Starlight_ 200
CHAPTER VII
_Whelp-Hunting_ 208
CHAPTER VIII
_Philosophical_ 216
CHAPTER IX
_Final_ 222
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
PAGE
_Stephen and Rachael in the Sick-room_ 64
_Mr. Harthouse Dining at the Bounderbys’_ 100
_Mr. Harthouse and Tom Gradgrind in the Garden_ 132
_Stephen Blackpool recovered from the Old Hell Shaft_ 206
BOOK THE FIRST
_SOWING_
CHAPTER I
THE ONE THING NEEDFUL
‘NOW, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but
Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out
everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon
Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them. This is the
principle on which I bring up my own children, and this is the principle
on which I bring up these children. Stick to Facts, sir!’
The scene was a plain, bare, monotonous vault of a school-room, and the
speaker’s square forefinger emphasized his observations by underscoring
every sentence with a line on the schoolmaster’s sleeve. The emphasis
was helped by the speaker’s square wall of a forehead, which had his
eyebrows for its base, while his eyes found commodious cellarage in two
dark caves, overshadowed by the wall. The emphasis was helped by the
speaker’s mouth, which was wide, thin, and hard set. The emphasis was
helped by the speaker’s voice, which was inflexible, dry, and
dictatorial. The emphasis was helped by the speaker’s hair, which
bristled on the skirts of his bald head, a plantation of firs to keep the
wind from its shining surface, all covered with knobs, like the crust of
a plum pie, as if the head had scarcely warehouse-room for the hard facts
stored inside. The speaker’s obstinate carriage, square coat, square
legs, square shoulders,—nay, his very neckcloth, trained to take him by
the throat with an unaccommodating grasp, like a stubborn fact, as it
was,—all helped the emphasis.
‘In this life, we want nothing but Facts, sir; nothing but Facts!’
The speaker, and the schoolmaster, and the third grown person present,
all backed a little, and swept with their eyes the inclined plane of
little vessels then and there arranged in order, ready to have imperial
gallons of facts poured into them until they were full to the brim.
CHAPTER II
MURDERING THE INNOCENTS
THOMAS GRADGRIND, sir. A man of realities. A man of facts and
calculations. A man who proceeds upon the principle that two and two are
four, and nothing over, and who is not to be talked into allowing for
anything over. Thomas Gradgrind, sir—peremptorily Thomas—Thomas
Gradgrind. With a rule and a pair of scales, and the multiplication
table always in his pocket, sir, ready to weigh and measure any parcel of
human nature, and tell you exactly what it comes to. It is a mere
question of figures, a case of simple arithmetic. You might hope to get
some other nonsensical belief into the head of George Gradgrind, or
Augustus Gradgrind, or John Gradgrind, or Joseph Gradgrind (all
supposititious, non-existent persons), but into the head of Thomas
Gradgrind—no, sir!
In such terms Mr. Gradgrind always mentally introduced himself, whether
to his private circle of acquaintance, or to the public in general. In
such terms, no doubt, substituting the words ‘boys and girls,’ for ‘sir,’
Thomas Gradgrind now presented Thomas Gradgrind to the little pitchers
before him, who were to be filled so full of facts.
Indeed, as he eagerly sparkled at them from the cellarage before
mentioned, he seemed a kind of cannon loaded to the muzzle with facts,
and prepared to blow them clean out of the regions of childhood at one
discharge. He seemed a galvanizing apparatus, too, charged with a grim
mechanical substitute for the tender young imaginations that were to be
stormed away.
‘Girl number twenty,’ said Mr. Gradgrind, squarely pointing with his
square forefinger, ‘I don’t know that girl. Who is that girl?’
‘Sissy Jupe, sir,’ explained number twenty, blushing, standing up, and
curtseying.
‘Sissy is not a name,’ said Mr. Gradgrind. ‘Don’t call yourself Sissy.
Call yourself Cecilia.’
‘It’s father as calls me Sissy, sir,’ returned the young girl in a
trembling voice, and with another curtsey.
‘Then he has no business to do it,’ said Mr. Gradgrind. ‘Tell him he
mustn’t. Cecilia Jupe. Let me see. What is your father?’
‘He belongs to the horse-riding, if you please, sir.’
Mr. Gradgrind frowned, and waved off the objectionable calling with his
hand.
‘We don’t want to know anything about that, here. You mustn’t tell us
about that, here. Your father breaks horses, don’t he?’
‘If you please, sir, when they can get any to break, they do break horses
in the ring, sir.’
‘You mustn’t tell us about the ring, here. Very well, then. Describe
your father as a horsebreaker. He doctors sick horses, I dare say?’
‘Oh yes, sir.’
‘Very well, then. He is a veterinary surgeon, a farrier, and
horsebreaker. Give me your definition of a horse.’
(Sissy Jupe thrown into the greatest alarm by this demand.)
‘Girl number twenty unable to define a horse!’ said Mr. Gradgrind, for
the general behoof of all the little pitchers. ‘Girl number twenty
possessed of no facts, in reference to one of the commonest of animals!
Some boy’s definition of a horse. Bitzer, yours.’
The square finger, moving here and there, lighted suddenly on Bitzer,
perhaps because he chanced to sit in the same ray of sunlight which,
darting in at one of the bare windows of the intensely white-washed room,
irradiated Sissy. For, the boys and girls sat on the face of the
inclined plane in two compact bodies, divided up the centre by a narrow
interval; and Sissy, being at the corner of a row on the sunny side, came
in for the beginning of a sunbeam, of which Bitzer, being at the corner
of a row on the other side, a few rows in advance, caught the end. But,
whereas the girl was so dark-eyed and dark-haired, that she seemed to
receive a deeper and more lustrous colour from the sun, when it shone
upon her, the boy was so light-eyed and light-haired that the self-same
rays appeared to draw out of him what little colour he ever possessed.
His cold eyes would hardly have been eyes, but for the short ends of
lashes which, by bringing them into immediate contrast with something
paler than themselves, expressed their form. His short-cropped hair
might have been a mere continuation of the sandy freckles on his forehead
and face. His skin was so unwholesomely deficient in the natural tinge,
that he looked as though, if he were cut, he would bleed white.
‘Bitzer,’ said Thomas Gradgrind. ‘Your definition of a horse.’
‘Quadruped. Graminivorous. Forty teeth, namely twenty-four grinders,
four eye-teeth, and twelve incisive. Sheds coat in the spring; in marshy
countries, sheds hoofs, too. Hoofs hard, but requiring to be shod with
iron. Age known by marks in mouth.’ Thus (and much more) Bitzer.
‘Now girl number twenty,’ said Mr. Gradgrind. ‘You know what a horse
is.’
She curtseyed again, and would have blushed deeper, if she could have
blushed deeper than she had blushed all this time. Bitzer, after rapidly
blinking at Thomas Gradgrind with both eyes at once, and so catching the
light upon his quivering ends of lashes that they looked like the antennæ
of busy insects, put his knuckles to his freckled forehead, and sat down
again.
The third gentleman now stepped forth. A mighty man at cutting and
drying, he was; a government officer; in his way (and in most other
people’s too), a professed pugilist; always in training, always with a
system to force down the general throat like a bolus, always to be heard
of at the bar of his little Public-office, ready to fight all England.
To continue in fistic phraseology, he had a genius for coming up to the
scratch, wherever and whatever it was, and proving himself an ugly
customer. He would go in and damage any subject whatever with his right,
follow up with his left, stop, exchange, counter, bore his opponent (he
always fought All England) to the ropes, and fall upon him neatly. He
was certain to knock the wind out of common sense, and render that
unlucky adversary deaf to the call of time. And he had it in charge from
high authority to bring about the great public-office Millennium, when
Commissioners should reign upon earth.
‘Very well,’ said this gentleman, briskly smiling, and folding his arms.
‘That’s a horse. Now, let me ask you girls and boys, Would you paper a
room with representations of horses?’
After a pause, one half of the children cried in chorus, ‘Yes, sir!’
Upon which the other half, seeing in the gentleman’s face that Yes was
wrong, cried out in chorus, ‘No, sir!’—as the custom is, in these
examinations.
‘Of course, No. Why wouldn’t you?’
A pause. One corpulent slow boy, with a wheezy manner of breathing,
ventured the answer, Because he wouldn’t paper a room at all, but would
paint it.
‘You _must_ paper it,’ said the gentleman, rather warmly.
‘You must paper it,’ said Thomas Gradgrind, ‘whether you like it or not.
Don’t tell _us_ you wouldn’t paper it. What do you mean, boy?’
‘I’ll explain to you, then,’ said the gentleman, after another and a
dismal pause, ‘why you wouldn’t paper a room with representations of
horses. Do you ever see horses walking up and down the sides of rooms in
reality—in fact? Do you?’
‘Yes, sir!’ from one half. ‘No, sir!’ from the other.
‘Of course no,’ said the gentleman, with an indignant look at the wrong
half. ‘Why, then, you are not to see anywhere, what you don’t see in
fact; you are not to have anywhere, what you don’t have in fact. What is
called Taste, is only another name for Fact.’ Thomas Gradgrind nodded
his approbation.
‘This is a new principle, a discovery, a great discovery,’ said the
gentleman. ‘Now, I’ll try you again. Suppose you were going to carpet a
room. Would you use a carpet having a representation of flowers upon
it?’
There being a general conviction by this time that ‘No, sir!’ was always
the right answer to this gentleman, the chorus of NO was very strong.
Only a few feeble stragglers said Yes: among them Sissy Jupe.
‘Girl number twenty,’ said the gentleman, smiling in the calm strength of
knowledge.
Sissy blushed, and stood up.
‘So you would carpet your room—or your husband’s room, if you were a
grown woman, and had a husband—with representations of flowers, would
you?’ said the gentleman. ‘Why would you?’
‘If you please, sir, I am very fond of flowers,’ returned the girl.
‘And is that why you would put tables and chairs upon them, and have
people walking over them with heavy boots?’
‘It wouldn’t hurt them, sir. They wouldn’t crush and wither, if you
please, sir. They would be the pictures of what was very pretty and
pleasant, and I would fancy—’
‘Ay, ay, ay! But you mustn’t fancy,’ cried the gentleman, quite elated
by coming so happily to his point. ‘That’s it! You are never to fancy.’
‘You are not, Cecilia Jupe,’ Thomas Gradgrind solemnly repeated, ‘to do
anything of that kind.’
‘Fact, fact, fact!’ said the gentleman. And ‘Fact, fact, fact!’ repeated
Thomas Gradgrind.
‘You are to be in all things regulated and governed,’ said the gentleman,
‘by fact. We hope to have, before long, a board of fact, composed of
commissioners of fact, who will force the people to be a people of fact,
and of nothing but fact. You must discard the word Fancy altogether.
You have nothing to do with it. You are not to have, in any object of
use or ornament, what would be a contradiction in fact. You don’t walk
upon flowers in fact; you cannot be allowed to walk upon flowers in
carpets. You don’t find that foreign birds and butterflies come and
perch upon your crockery; you cannot be permitted to paint foreign birds
and butterflies upon your crockery. You never meet with quadrupeds going
up and down walls; you must not have quadrupeds represented upon walls.
You must use,’ said the gentleman, ‘for all these purposes, combinations
and modifications (in primary colours) of mathematical figures which are
susceptible of proof and demonstration. This is the new discovery. This
is fact. This is taste.’
The girl curtseyed, and sat down. She was very young, and she looked as
if she were frightened by the matter-of-fact prospect the world afforded.
‘Now, if Mr. M’Choakumchild,’ said the gentleman, ‘will proceed to give
his first lesson here, Mr. Gradgrind, I shall be happy, at your request,
to observe his mode of procedure.’
Mr. Gradgrind was much obliged. ‘Mr. M’Choakumchild, we only wait for
you.’
So, Mr. M’Choakumchild began in his best manner. He and some one hundred
and forty other schoolmasters, had been lately turned at the same time,
in the same factory, on the same principles, like so many pianoforte
legs. He had been put through an immense variety of paces, and had
answered volumes of head-breaking questions. Orthography, etymology,
syntax, and prosody, biography, astronomy, geography, and general
cosmography, the sciences of compound proportion, algebra, land-surveying
and levelling, vocal music, and drawing from models, were all at the ends
of his ten chilled fingers. He had worked his stony way into Her
Majesty’s most Honourable Privy Council’s Schedule B, and had taken the
bloom off the higher branches of mathematics and physical science,
French, German, Latin, and Greek. He knew all about all the Water Sheds
of all the world (whatever they are), and all the histories of all the
peoples, and all the names of all the rivers and mountains, and all the
productions, manners, and customs of all the countries, and all their
boundaries and bearings on the two and thirty points of the compass. Ah,
rather overdone, M’Choakumchild. If he had only learnt a little less,
how infinitely better he might have taught much more!
He went to work in this preparatory lesson, not unlike Morgiana in the
Forty Thieves: looking into all the vessels ranged before him, one after
another, to see what they contained. Say, good M’Choakumchild. When
from thy boiling store, thou shalt fill each jar brim full by-and-by,
dost thou think that thou wilt always kill outright the robber Fancy
lurking within—or sometimes only maim him and distort him!
CHAPTER III
A LOOPHOLE
MR. GRADGRIND walked homeward from the school, in a state of considerable
satisfaction. It was his school, and he intended it to be a model. He
intended every child in it to be a model—just as the young Gradgrinds
were all models.
There were five young Gradgrinds, and they were models every one. They
had been lectured at, from their tenderest years; coursed, like little
hares. Almost as soon as they could run alone, they had been made to run
to the lecture-room. The first object with which they had an
association, or of which they had a remembrance, was a large black board
with a dry Ogre chalking ghastly white figures on it.
Not that they knew, by name or nature, anything about an Ogre Fact
forbid! I only use the word to express a monster in a lecturing castle,
with Heaven knows how many heads manipulated into one, taking childhood
captive, and dragging it into gloomy statistical dens by the hair.
No little Gradgrind had ever seen a face in the moon; it was up in the
moon before it could speak distinctly. No little Gradgrind had ever
learnt the silly jingle, Twinkle, twinkle, little star; how I wonder what
you are! No little Gradgrind had ever known wonder on the subject, each
little Gradgrind having at five years old dissected the Great Bear like a
Professor Owen, and driven Charles’s Wain like a locomotive
engine-driver. No little Gradgrind had ever associated a cow in a field
with that famous cow with the crumpled horn who tossed the dog who
worried the cat who killed the rat who ate the malt, or with that yet
more famous cow who swallowed Tom Thumb: it had never heard of those
celebrities, and had only been introduced to a cow as a graminivorous
ruminating quadruped with several stomachs.
To his matter-of-fact home, which was called Stone Lodge, Mr. Gradgrind
directed his steps. He had virtually retired from the wholesale hardware
trade before he built Stone Lodge, and was now looking about for a
suitable opportunity of making an arithmetical figure in Parliament.
Stone Lodge was situated on a moor within a mile or two of a great
town—called Coketown in the present faithful guide-book.
A very regular feature on the face of the country, Stone Lodge was. Not
the least disguise toned down or shaded off that uncompromising fact in
the landscape. A great square house, with a heavy portico darkening the
principal windows, as its master’s heavy brows overshadowed his eyes. A
calculated, cast up, balanced, and proved house. Six windows on this
side of the door, six on that side; a total of twelve in this wing, a
total of twelve in the other wing; four-and-twenty carried over to the
back wings. A lawn and garden and an infant avenue, all ruled straight
like a botanical account-book. Gas and ventilation, drainage and
water-service, all of the primest quality. Iron clamps and girders,
fire-proof from top to bottom; mechanical lifts for the housemaids, with
all their brushes and brooms; everything that heart could desire.
Everything? Well, I suppose so. The little Gradgrinds had cabinets in
various departments of science too. They had a little conchological
cabinet, and a little metallurgical cabinet, and a little mineralogical
cabinet; and the specimens were all arranged and labelled, and the bits
of stone and ore looked as though they might have been broken from the
parent substances by those tremendously hard instruments their own names;
and, to paraphrase the idle legend of Peter Piper, who had never found
his way into their nursery, If the greedy little Gradgrinds grasped at
more than this, what was it for good gracious goodness’ sake, that the
greedy little Gradgrinds grasped it!
Their father walked on in a hopeful and satisfied frame of mind. He was
an affectionate father, after his manner; but he would probably have
described himself (if he had been put, like Sissy Jupe, upon a
definition) as ‘an eminently practical’ father. He had a particular
pride in the phrase eminently practical, which was considered to have a
special application to him. Whatsoever the public meeting held in
Coketown, and whatsoever the subject of such meeting, some Coketowner was
sure to seize the occasion of alluding to his eminently practical friend
Gradgrind. This always pleased the eminently practical friend. He knew
it to be his due, but his due was acceptable.
He had reached the neutral ground upon the outskirts of the town, which
was neither town nor country, and yet was either spoiled, when his ears
were invaded by the sound of music. The clashing and banging band
attached to the horse-riding establishment, which had there set up its
rest in a wooden pavilion, was in full bray. A flag, floating from the
summit of the temple, proclaimed to mankind that it was ‘Sleary’s
Horse-riding’ which claimed their suffrages. Sleary himself, a stout
modern statue with a money-box at its elbow, in an ecclesiastical niche
of early Gothic architecture, took the money. Miss Josephine Sleary, as
some very long and very narrow strips of printed bill announced, was then
inaugurating the entertainments with her graceful equestrian Tyrolean
flower-act. Among the other pleasing but always strictly moral wonders
which must be seen to be believed, Signor Jupe was that afternoon to
‘elucidate the diverting accomplishments of his highly trained performing
dog Merrylegs.’ He was also to exhibit ‘his astounding feat of throwing
seventy-five hundred-weight in rapid succession backhanded over his head,
thus forming a fountain of solid iron in mid-air, a feat never before
attempted in this or any other country, and which having elicited such
rapturous plaudits from enthusiastic throngs it cannot be withdrawn.’
The same Signor Jupe was to ‘enliven the varied performances at frequent
intervals with his chaste Shaksperean quips and retorts.’ Lastly, he was
to wind them up by appearing in his favourite character of Mr. William
Button, of Tooley Street, in ‘the highly novel and laughable
hippo-comedietta of The Tailor’s Journey to Brentford.’
Thomas Gradgrind took no heed of these trivialities of course, but passed
on as a practical man ought to pass on, either brushing the noisy insects
from his thoughts, or consigning them to the House of Correction. But,
the turning of the road took him by the back of the booth, and at the
back of the booth a number of children were congregated in a number of
stealthy attitudes, striving to peep in at the hidden glories of the
place.
This brought him to a stop. ‘Now, to think of these vagabonds,’ said he,
‘attracting the young rabble from a model school.’
A space of stunted grass and dry rubbish being between him and the young
rabble, he took his eyeglass out of his waistcoat to look for any child
he knew by name, and might order off. Phenomenon almost incredible
though distinctly seen, what did he then behold but his own metallurgical
Louisa, peeping with all her might through a hole in a deal board, and
his own mathematical Thomas abasing himself on the ground to catch but a
hoof of the graceful equestrian Tyrolean flower-act!
Dumb with amazement, Mr. Gradgrind crossed to the spot where his family
was thus disgraced, laid his hand upon each erring child, and said:
‘Louisa!! Thomas!!’
Both rose, red and disconcerted. But, Louisa looked at her father with
more boldness than Thomas did. Indeed, Thomas did not look at him, but
gave himself up to be taken home like a machine.
‘In the name of wonder, idleness, and folly!’ said Mr. Gradgrind, leading
each away by a hand; ‘what do you do here?’
‘Wanted to see what it was like,’ returned Louisa, shortly.
‘What it was like?’
‘Yes, father.’
There was an air of jaded sullenness in them both, and particularly in
the girl: yet, struggling through the dissatisfaction of her face, there
was a light with nothing to rest upon, a fire with nothing to burn, a
starved imagination keeping life in itself somehow, which brightened its
expression. Not with the brightness natural to cheerful youth, but with
uncertain, eager, doubtful flashes, which had something painful in them,
analogous to the changes on a blind face groping its way.
She was a child now, of fifteen or sixteen; but at no distant day would
seem to become a woman all at once. Her father thought so as he looked
at her. She was pretty. Would have been self-willed (he thought in his
eminently practical way) but for her bringing-up.
‘Thomas, though I have the fact before me, I find it difficult to believe
that you, with your education and resources, should have brought your
sister to a scene like this.’
‘I brought _him_, father,’ said Louisa, quickly. ‘I asked him to come.’
‘I am sorry to hear it. I am very sorry indeed to hear it. It makes
Thomas no better, and it makes you worse, Louisa.’
She looked at her father again, but no tear fell down her cheek.
‘You! Thomas and you, to whom the circle of the sciences is open; Thomas
and you, who may be said to be replete with facts; Thomas and you, who
have been trained to mathematical exactness; Thomas and you, here!’ cried
Mr. Gradgrind. ‘In this degraded position! I am amazed.’
‘I was tired, father. I have been tired a long time,’ said Louisa.
‘Tired? Of what?’ asked the astonished father.
‘I don’t know of what—of everything, I think.’
‘Say not another word,’ returned Mr. Gradgrind. ‘You are childish. I
will hear no more.’ He did not speak again until they had walked some
half-a-mile in silence, when he gravely broke out with: ‘What would your
best friends say, Louisa? Do you attach no value to their good opinion?
What would Mr. Bounderby say?’ At the mention of this name, his daughter
stole a look at him, remarkable for its intense and searching character.
He saw nothing of it, for before he looked at her, she had again cast
down her eyes!
‘What,’ he repeated presently, ‘would Mr. Bounderby say?’ All the way to
Stone Lodge, as with grave indignation he led the two delinquents home,
he repeated at intervals ‘What would Mr. Bounderby say?’—as if Mr.
Bounderby had been Mrs. Grundy.
CHAPTER IV
MR. BOUNDERBY
NOT being Mrs. Grundy, who _was_ Mr. Bounderby?
Why, Mr. Bounderby was as near being Mr. Gradgrind’s bosom friend, as a
man perfectly devoid of sentiment can approach that spiritual
relationship towards another man perfectly devoid of sentiment. So near
was Mr. Bounderby—or, if the reader should prefer it, so far off.
He was a rich man: banker, merchant, manufacturer, and what not. A big,
loud man, with a stare, and a metallic laugh. A man made out of a coarse
material, which seemed to have been stretched to make so much of him. A
man with a great puffed head and forehead, swelled veins in his temples,
and such a strained skin to his face that it seemed to hold his eyes
open, and lift his eyebrows up. A man with a pervading appearance on him
of being inflated like a balloon, and ready to start. A man who could
never sufficiently vaunt himself a self-made man. A man who was always
proclaiming, through that brassy speaking-trumpet of a voice of his, his
old ignorance and his old poverty. A man who was the Bully of humility.
A year or two younger than his eminently practical friend, Mr. Bounderby
looked older; his seven or eight and forty might have had the seven or
eight added to it again, without surprising anybody. He had not much
hair. One might have fancied he had talked it off; and that what was
left, all standing up in disorder, was in that condition from being
constantly blown about by his windy boastfulness.
In the formal drawing-room of Stone Lodge, standing on the hearthrug,
warming himself before the fire, Mr. Bounderby delivered some
observations to Mrs. Gradgrind on the circumstance of its being his
birthday. He stood before the fire, partly because it was a cool spring
afternoon, though the sun shone; partly because the shade of Stone Lodge
was always haunted by the ghost of damp mortar; partly because he thus
took up a commanding position, from which to subdue Mrs. Gradgrind.
‘I hadn’t a shoe to my foot. As to a stocking, I didn’t know such a
thing by name. I passed the day in a ditch, and the night in a pigsty.
That’s the way I spent my tenth birthday. Not that a ditch was new to
me, for I was born in a ditch.’
Mrs. Gradgrind, a little, thin, white, pink-eyed bundle of shawls, of
surpassing feebleness, mental and bodily; who was always taking physic
without any effect, and who, whenever she showed a symptom of coming to
life, was invariably stunned by some weighty piece of fact tumbling on
her; Mrs. Gradgrind hoped it was a dry ditch?
‘No! As wet as a sop. A foot of water in it,’ said Mr. Bounderby.
‘Enough to give a baby cold,’ Mrs. Gradgrind considered.
‘Cold? I was born with inflammation of the lungs, and of everything
else, I believe, that was capable of inflammation,’ returned Mr.
Bounderby. ‘For years, ma’am, I was one of the most miserable little
wretches ever seen. I was so sickly, that I was always moaning and
groaning. I was so ragged and dirty, that you wouldn’t have touched me
with a pair of tongs.’
Mrs. Gradgrind faintly looked at the tongs, as the most appropriate thing
her imbecility could think of doing.
‘How I fought through it, _I_ don’t know,’ said Bounderby. ‘I was
determined, I suppose. I have been a determined character in later life,
and I suppose I was then. Here I am, Mrs. Gradgrind, anyhow, and nobody
to thank for my being here, but myself.’
Mrs. Gradgrind meekly and weakly hoped that his mother—
‘_My_ mother? Bolted, ma’am!’ said Bounderby.
Mrs. Gradgrind, stunned as usual, collapsed and gave it up.
‘My mother left me to my grandmother,’ said Bounderby; ‘and, according to
the best of my remembrance, my grandmother was the wickedest and the
worst old woman that ever lived. If I got a little pair of shoes by any
chance, she would take ’em off and sell ’em for drink. Why, I have known
that grandmother of mine lie in her bed and drink her four-teen glasses
of liquor before breakfast!’
Mrs. Gradgrind, weakly smiling, and giving no other sign of vitality,
looked (as she always did) like an indifferently executed transparency of
a small female figure, without enough light behind it.
‘She kept a chandler’s shop,’ pursued Bounderby, ‘and kept me in an
egg-box. That was the cot of _my_ infancy; an old egg-box. As soon as I
was big enough to run away, of course I ran away. Then I became a young
vagabond; and instead of one old woman knocking me about and starving me,
everybody of all ages knocked me about and starved me. They were right;
they had no business to do anything else. I was a nuisance, an
incumbrance, and a pest. I know that very well.’
His pride in having at any time of his life achieved such a great social
distinction as to be a nuisance, an incumbrance, and a pest, was only to
be satisfied by three sonorous repetitions of the boast.
‘I was to pull through it, I suppose, Mrs. Gradgrind. Whether I was to
do it or not, ma’am, I did it. I pulled through it, though nobody threw
me out a rope. Vagabond, errand-boy, vagabond, labourer, porter, clerk,
chief manager, small partner, Josiah Bounderby of Coketown. Those are
the antecedents, and the culmination. Josiah Bounderby of Coketown
learnt his letters from the outsides of the shops, Mrs. Gradgrind, and
was first able to tell the time upon a dial-plate, from studying the
steeple clock of St. Giles’s Church, London, under the direction of a
drunken cripple, who was a convicted thief, and an incorrigible vagrant.
Tell Josiah Bounderby of Coketown, of your district schools and your
model schools, and your training schools, and your whole kettle-of-fish
of schools; and Josiah Bounderby of Coketown, tells you plainly, all
right, all correct—he hadn’t such advantages—but let us have hard-headed,
solid-fisted people—the education that made him won’t do for everybody,
he knows well—such and such his education was, however, and you may force
him to swallow boiling fat, but you shall never force him to suppress the
facts of his life.’
Being heated when he arrived at this climax, Josiah Bounderby of Coketown
stopped. He stopped just as his eminently practical friend, still
accompanied by the two young culprits, entered the room. His eminently
practical friend, on seeing him, stopped also, and gave Louisa a
reproachful look that plainly said, ‘Behold your Bounderby!’
‘Well!’ blustered Mr. Bounderby, ‘what’s the matter? What is young
Thomas in the dumps about?’
He spoke of young Thomas, but he looked at Louisa.
‘We were peeping at the circus,’ muttered Louisa, haughtily, without
lifting up her eyes, ‘and father caught us.’
‘And, Mrs. Gradgrind,’ said her husband in a lofty manner, ‘I should as
soon have expected to find my children reading poetry.’
‘Dear me,’ whimpered Mrs. Gradgrind. ‘How can you, Louisa and Thomas! I
wonder at you. I declare you’re enough to make one regret ever having
had a family at all. I have a great mind to say I wish I hadn’t. _Then_
what would you have done, I should like to know?’
Mr. Gradgrind did not seem favourably impressed by these cogent remarks.
He frowned impatiently.
‘As if, with my head in its present throbbing state, you couldn’t go and
look at the shells and minerals and things provided for you, instead of
circuses!’ said Mrs. Gradgrind. ‘You know, as well as I do, no young
people have circus masters, or keep circuses in cabinets, or attend
lectures about circuses. What can you possibly want to know of circuses
then? I am sure you have enough to do, if that’s what you want. With my
head in its present state, I couldn’t remember the mere names of half the
facts you have got to attend to.’
‘That’s the reason!’ pouted Louisa.
‘Don’t tell me that’s the reason, because it can’t be nothing of the
sort,’ said Mrs. Gradgrind. ‘Go and be somethingological directly.’
Mrs. Gradgrind was not a scientific character, and usually dismissed her
children to their studies with this general injunction to choose their
pursuit.
In truth, Mrs. Gradgrind’s stock of facts in general was woefully
defective; but Mr. Gradgrind in raising her to her high matrimonial
position, had been influenced by two reasons. Firstly, she was most
satisfactory as a question of figures; and, secondly, she had ‘no
nonsense’ about her. By nonsense he meant fancy; and truly it is
probable she was as free from any alloy of that nature, as any human
being not arrived at the perfection of an absolute idiot, ever was.
The simple circumstance of being left alone with her husband and Mr.
Bounderby, was sufficient to stun this admirable lady again without
collision between herself and any other fact. So, she once more died
away, and nobody minded her.
‘Bounderby,’ said Mr. Gradgrind, drawing a chair to the fireside, ‘you
are always so interested in my young people—particularly in Louisa—that I
make no apology for saying to you, I am very much vexed by this
discovery. I have systematically devoted myself (as you know) to the
education of the reason of my family. The reason is (as you know) the
only faculty to which education should be addressed. ‘And yet,
Bounderby, it would appear from this unexpected circumstance of to-day,
though in itself a trifling one, as if something had crept into Thomas’s
and Louisa’s minds which is—or rather, which is not—I don’t know that I
can express myself better than by saying—which has never been intended to
be developed, and in which their reason has no part.’
‘There certainly is no reason in looking with interest at a parcel of
vagabonds,’ returned Bounderby. ‘When I was a vagabond myself, nobody
looked with any interest at _me_; I know that.’
‘Then comes the question; said the eminently practical father, with his
eyes on the fire, ‘in what has this vulgar curiosity its rise?’
‘I’ll tell you in what. In idle imagination.’
‘I hope not,’ said the eminently practical; ‘I confess, however, that the
misgiving _has_ crossed me on my way home.’
‘In idle imagination, Gradgrind,’ repeated Bounderby. ‘A very bad thing
for anybody, but a cursed bad thing for a girl like Louisa. I should ask
Mrs. Gradgrind’s pardon for strong expressions, but that she knows very
well I am not a refined character. Whoever expects refinement in _me_
will be disappointed. I hadn’t a refined bringing up.’
‘Whether,’ said Gradgrind, pondering with his hands in his pockets, and
his cavernous eyes on the fire, ‘whether any instructor or servant can
have suggested anything? Whether Louisa or Thomas can have been reading
anything? Whether, in spite of all precautions, any idle story-book can
have got into the house? Because, in minds that have been practically
formed by rule and line, from the cradle upwards, this is so curious, so
incomprehensible.’
‘Stop a bit!’ cried Bounderby, who all this time had been standing, as
before, on the hearth, bursting at the very furniture of the room with
explosive humility. ‘You have one of those strollers’ children in the
school.’
‘Cecilia Jupe, by name,’ said Mr. Gradgrind, with something of a stricken
look at his friend.
‘Now, stop a bit!’ cried Bounderby again. ‘How did she come there?’
‘Why, the fact is, I saw the girl myself, for the first time, only just
now. She specially applied here at the house to be admitted, as not
regularly belonging to our town, and—yes, you are right, Bounderby, you
are right.’
‘Now, stop a bit!’ cried Bounderby, once more. ‘Louisa saw her when she
came?’
‘Louisa certainly did see her, for she mentioned the application to me.
But Louisa saw her, I have no doubt, in Mrs. Gradgrind’s presence.’
‘Pray, Mrs. Gradgrind,’ said Bounderby, ‘what passed?’
‘Oh, my poor health!’ returned Mrs. Gradgrind. ‘The girl wanted to come
to the school, and Mr. Gradgrind wanted girls to come to the school, and
Louisa and Thomas both said that the girl wanted to come, and that Mr.
Gradgrind wanted girls to come, and how was it possible to contradict
them when such was the fact!’
‘Now I tell you what, Gradgrind!’ said Mr. Bounderby. ‘Turn this girl to
the right about, and there’s an end of it.’
‘I am much of your opinion.’
‘Do it at once,’ said Bounderby, ‘has always been my motto from a child.
When I thought I would run away from my egg-box and my grandmother, I did
it at once. Do you the same. Do this at once!’
‘Are you walking?’ asked his friend. ‘I have the father’s address.
Perhaps you would not mind walking to town with me?’
‘Not the least in the world,’ said Mr. Bounderby, ‘as long as you do it
at once!’
So, Mr. Bounderby threw on his hat—he always threw it on, as expressing a
man who had been far too busily employed in making himself, to acquire
any fashion of wearing his hat—and with his hands in his pockets,
sauntered out into the hall. ‘I never wear gloves,’ it was his custom to
say. ‘I didn’t climb up the ladder in _them_.—Shouldn’t be so high up,
if I had.’
Being left to saunter in the hall a minute or two while Mr. Gradgrind
went up-stairs for the address, he opened the door of the children’s
study and looked into that serene floor-clothed apartment, which,
notwithstanding its book-cases and its cabinets and its variety of
learned and philosophical appliances, had much of the genial aspect of a
room devoted to hair-cutting. Louisa languidly leaned upon the window
looking out, without looking at anything, while young Thomas stood
sniffing revengefully at the fire. Adam Smith and Malthus, two younger
Gradgrinds, were out at lecture in custody; and little Jane, after
manufacturing a good deal of moist pipe-clay on her face with
slate-pencil and tears, had fallen asleep over vulgar fractions.
‘It’s all right now, Louisa: it’s all right, young Thomas,’ said Mr.
Bounderby; ‘you won’t do so any more. I’ll answer for it’s being all
over with father. Well, Louisa, that’s worth a kiss, isn’t it?’
‘You can take one, Mr. Bounderby,’ returned Louisa, when she had coldly
paused, and slowly walked across the room, and ungraciously raised her
cheek towards him, with her face turned away.
‘Always my pet; ain’t you, Louisa?’ said Mr. Bounderby. ‘Good-bye,
Louisa!’
He went his way, but she stood on the same spot, rubbing the cheek he had
kissed, with her handkerchief, until it was burning red. She was still
doing this, five minutes afterwards.
‘What are you about, Loo?’ her brother sulkily remonstrated. ‘You’ll rub
a hole in your face.’
‘You may cut the piece out with your penknife if you like, Tom. I
wouldn’t cry!’
CHAPTER V
THE KEYNOTE
COKETOWN, to which Messrs. Bounderby and Gradgrind now walked, was a
triumph of fact; it had no greater taint of fancy in it than Mrs.
Gradgrind herself. Let us strike the key-note, Coketown, before pursuing
our tune.
It was a town of red brick, or of brick that would have been red if the
smoke and ashes had allowed it; but as matters stood, it was a town of
unnatural red and black like the painted face of a savage. It was a town
of machinery and tall chimneys, out of which interminable serpents of
smoke trailed themselves for ever and ever, and never got uncoiled. It
had a black canal in it, and a river that ran purple with ill-smelling
dye, and vast piles of building full of windows where there was a
rattling and a trembling all day long, and where the piston of the
steam-engine worked monotonously up and down, like the head of an
elephant in a state of melancholy madness. It contained several large
streets all very like one another, and many small streets still more like
one another, inhabited by people equally like one another, who all went
in and out at the same hours, with the same sound upon the same
pavements, to do the same work, and to whom every day was the same as
yesterday and to-morrow, and every year the counterpart of the last and
the next.
These attributes of Coketown were in the main inseparable from the work
by which it was sustained; against them were to be set off, comforts of
life which found their way all over the world, and elegancies of life
which made, we will not ask how much of the fine lady, who could scarcely
bear to hear the place mentioned. The rest of its features were
voluntary, and they were these.
You saw nothing in Coketown but what was severely workful. If the
members of a religious persuasion built a chapel there—as the members of
eighteen religious persuasions had done—they made it a pious warehouse of
red brick, with sometimes (but this is only in highly ornamental
examples) a bell in a birdcage on the top of it. The solitary exception
was the New Church; a stuccoed edifice with a square steeple over the
door, terminating in four short pinnacles like florid wooden legs. All
the public inscriptions in the town were painted alike, in severe
characters of black and white. The jail might have been the infirmary,
the infirmary might have been the jail, the town-hall might have been
either, or both, or anything else, for anything that appeared to the
contrary in the graces of their construction. Fact, fact, fact,
everywhere in the material aspect of the town; fact, fact, fact,
everywhere in the immaterial. The M’Choakumchild school was all fact,
and the school of design was all fact, and the relations between master
and man were all fact, and everything was fact between the lying-in
hospital and the cemetery, and what you couldn’t state in figures, or
show to be purchaseable in the cheapest market and saleable in the
dearest, was not, and never should be, world without end, Amen.
A town so sacred to fact, and so triumphant in its assertion, of course
got on well? Why no, not quite well. No? Dear me!
No. Coketown did not come out of its own furnaces, in all respects like
gold that had stood the fire. First, the perplexing mystery of the place
was, Who belonged to the eighteen denominations? Because, whoever did,
the labouring people did not. It was very strange to walk through the
streets on a Sunday morning, and note how few of _them_ the barbarous
jangling of bells that was driving the sick and nervous mad, called away
from their own quarter, from their own close rooms, from the corners of
their own streets, where they lounged listlessly, gazing at all the
church and chapel going, as at a thing with which they had no manner of
concern. Nor was it merely the stranger who noticed this, because there
was a native organization in Coketown itself, whose members were to be
heard of in the House of Commons every session, indignantly petitioning
for acts of parliament that should make these people religious by main
force. Then came the Teetotal Society, who complained that these same
people _would_ get drunk, and showed in tabular statements that they did
get drunk, and proved at tea parties that no inducement, human or Divine
(except a medal), would induce them to forego their custom of getting
drunk. Then came the chemist and druggist, with other tabular
statements, showing that when they didn’t get drunk, they took opium.
Then came the experienced chaplain of the jail, with more tabular
statements, outdoing all the previous tabular statements, and showing
that the same people _would_ resort to low haunts, hidden from the public
eye, where they heard low singing and saw low dancing, and mayhap joined
in it; and where A. B., aged twenty-four next birthday, and committed for
eighteen months’ solitary, had himself said (not that he had ever shown
himself particularly worthy of belief) his ruin began, as he was
perfectly sure and confident that otherwise he would have been a tip-top
moral specimen. Then came Mr. Gradgrind and Mr. Bounderby, the two
gentlemen at this present moment walking through Coketown, and both
eminently practical, who could, on occasion, furnish more tabular
statements derived from their own personal experience, and illustrated by
cases they had known and seen, from which it clearly appeared—in short,
it was the only clear thing in the case—that these same people were a bad
lot altogether, gentlemen; that do what you would for them they were
never thankful for it, gentlemen; that they were restless, gentlemen;
that they never knew what they wanted; that they lived upon the best, and
bought fresh butter; and insisted on Mocha coffee, and rejected all but
prime parts of meat, and yet were eternally dissatisfied and
unmanageable. In short, it was the moral of the old nursery fable:
There was an old woman, and what do you think?
She lived upon nothing but victuals and drink;
Victuals and drink were the whole of her diet,
And yet this old woman would NEVER be quiet.
Is it possible, I wonder, that there was any analogy between the case of
the Coketown population and the case of the little Gradgrinds? Surely,
none of us in our sober senses and acquainted with figures, are to be
told at this time of day, that one of the foremost elements in the
existence of the Coketown working-people had been for scores of years,
deliberately set at nought? That there was any Fancy in them demanding
to be brought into healthy existence instead of struggling on in
convulsions? That exactly in the ratio as they worked long and
monotonously, the craving grew within them for some physical relief—some
relaxation, encouraging good humour and good spirits, and giving them a
vent—some recognized holiday, though it were but for an honest dance to a
stirring band of music—some occasional light pie in which even
M’Choakumchild had no finger—which craving must and would be satisfied
aright, or must and would inevitably go wrong, until the laws of the
Creation were repealed?
‘This man lives at Pod’s End, and I don’t quite know Pod’s End,’ said Mr.
Gradgrind. ‘Which is it, Bounderby?’
Mr. Bounderby knew it was somewhere down town, but knew no more
respecting it. So they stopped for a moment, looking about.
Almost as they did so, there came running round the corner of the street
at a quick pace and with a frightened look, a girl whom Mr. Gradgrind
recognized. ‘Halloa!’ said he. ‘Stop! Where are you going! Stop!’
Girl number twenty stopped then, palpitating, and made him a curtsey.
‘Why are you tearing about the streets,’ said Mr. Gradgrind, ‘in this
improper manner?’
‘I was—I was run after, sir,’ the girl panted, ‘and I wanted to get
away.’
‘Run after?’ repeated Mr. Gradgrind. ‘Who would run after _you_?’
The question was unexpectedly and suddenly answered for her, by the
colourless boy, Bitzer, who came round the corner with such blind speed
and so little anticipating a stoppage on the pavement, that he brought
himself up against Mr. Gradgrind’s waistcoat and rebounded into the road.
‘What do you mean, boy?’ said Mr. Gradgrind. ‘What are you doing? How
dare you dash against—everybody—in this manner?’ Bitzer picked up his
cap, which the concussion had knocked off; and backing, and knuckling his
forehead, pleaded that it was an accident.
‘Was this boy running after you, Jupe?’ asked Mr. Gradgrind.
‘Yes, sir,’ said the girl reluctantly.
‘No, I wasn’t, sir!’ cried Bitzer. ‘Not till she run away from me. But
the horse-riders never mind what they say, sir; they’re famous for it.
You know the horse-riders are famous for never minding what they say,’
addressing Sissy. ‘It’s as well known in the town as—please, sir, as the
multiplication table isn’t known to the horse-riders.’ Bitzer tried Mr.
Bounderby with this.
‘He frightened me so,’ said the girl, ‘with his cruel faces!’
‘Oh!’ cried Bitzer. ‘Oh! An’t you one of the rest! An’t you a
horse-rider! I never looked at her, sir. I asked her if she would know
how to define a horse to-morrow, and offered to tell her again, and she
ran away, and I ran after her, sir, that she might know how to answer
when she was asked. You wouldn’t have thought of saying such mischief if
you hadn’t been a horse-rider?’
‘Her calling seems to be pretty well known among ’em,’ observed Mr.
Bounderby. ‘You’d have had the whole school peeping in a row, in a
week.’
‘Truly, I think so,’ returned his friend. ‘Bitzer, turn you about and
take yourself home. Jupe, stay here a moment. Let me hear of your
running in this manner any more, boy, and you will hear of me through the
master of the school. You understand what I mean. Go along.’
The boy stopped in his rapid blinking, knuckled his forehead again,
glanced at Sissy, turned about, and retreated.
‘Now, girl,’ said Mr. Gradgrind, ‘take this gentleman and me to your
father’s; we are going there. What have you got in that bottle you are
carrying?’
‘Gin,’ said Mr. Bounderby.
‘Dear, no, sir! It’s the nine oils.’
‘The what?’ cried Mr. Bounderby.
‘The nine oils, sir, to rub father with.’
‘Then,’ said Mr. Bounderby, with a loud short laugh, ‘what the devil do
you rub your father with nine oils for?’
‘It’s what our people aways use, sir, when they get any hurts in the
ring,’ replied the girl, looking over her shoulder, to assure herself
that her pursuer was gone. ‘They bruise themselves very bad sometimes.’
‘Serve ’em right,’ said Mr. Bounderby, ‘for being idle.’ She glanced up
at his face, with mingled astonishment and dread.
‘By George!’ said Mr. Bounderby, ‘when I was four or five years younger
than you, I had worse bruises upon me than ten oils, twenty oils, forty
oils, would have rubbed off. I didn’t get ’em by posture-making, but by
being banged about. There was no rope-dancing for me; I danced on the
bare ground and was larruped with the rope.’
Mr. Gradgrind, though hard enough, was by no means so rough a man as Mr.
Bounderby. His character was not unkind, all things considered; it might
have been a very kind one indeed, if he had only made some round mistake
in the arithmetic that balanced it, years ago. He said, in what he meant
for a reassuring tone, as they turned down a narrow road, ‘And this is
Pod’s End; is it, Jupe?’
‘This is it, sir, and—if you wouldn’t mind, sir—this is the house.’
She stopped, at twilight, at the door of a mean little public-house, with
dim red lights in it. As haggard and as shabby, as if, for want of
custom, it had itself taken to drinking, and had gone the way all
drunkards go, and was very near the end of it.
‘It’s only crossing the bar, sir, and up the stairs, if you wouldn’t
mind, and waiting there for a moment till I get a candle. If you should
hear a dog, sir, it’s only Merrylegs, and he only barks.’
‘Merrylegs and nine oils, eh!’ said Mr. Bounderby, entering last with his
metallic laugh. ‘Pretty well this, for a self-made man!’
CHAPTER VI
SLEARY’S HORSEMANSHIP
THE name of the public-house was the Pegasus’s Arms. The Pegasus’s legs
might have been more to the purpose; but, underneath the winged horse
upon the sign-board, the Pegasus’s Arms was inscribed in Roman letters.
Beneath that inscription again, in a flowing scroll, the painter had
touched off the lines:
Good malt makes good beer,
Walk in, and they’ll draw it here;
Good wine makes good brandy,
Give us a call, and you’ll find it handy.
Framed and glazed upon the wall behind the dingy little bar, was another
Pegasus—a theatrical one—with real gauze let in for his wings, golden
stars stuck on all over him, and his ethereal harness made of red silk.
As it had grown too dusky without, to see the sign, and as it had not
grown light enough within to see the picture, Mr. Gradgrind and Mr.
Bounderby received no offence from these idealities. They followed the
girl up some steep corner-stairs without meeting any one, and stopped in
the dark while she went on for a candle. They expected every moment to
hear Merrylegs give tongue, but the highly trained performing dog had not
barked when the girl and the candle appeared together.
‘Father is not in our room, sir,’ she said, with a face of great
surprise. ‘If you wouldn’t mind walking in, I’ll find him directly.’
They walked in; and Sissy, having set two chairs for them, sped away with
a quick light step. It was a mean, shabbily furnished room, with a bed
in it. The white night-cap, embellished with two peacock’s feathers and
a pigtail bolt upright, in which Signor Jupe had that very afternoon
enlivened the varied performances with his chaste Shaksperean quips and
retorts, hung upon a nail; but no other portion of his wardrobe, or other
token of himself or his pursuits, was to be seen anywhere. As to
Merrylegs, that respectable ancestor of the highly trained animal who
went aboard the ark, might have been accidentally shut out of it, for any
sign of a dog that was manifest to eye or ear in the Pegasus’s Arms.
They heard the doors of rooms above, opening and shutting as Sissy went
from one to another in quest of her father; and presently they heard
voices expressing surprise. She came bounding down again in a great
hurry, opened a battered and mangy old hair trunk, found it empty, and
looked round with her hands clasped and her face full of terror.
‘Father must have gone down to the Booth, sir. I don’t know why he
should go there, but he must be there; I’ll bring him in a minute!’ She
was gone directly, without her bonnet; with her long, dark, childish hair
streaming behind her.
‘What does she mean!’ said Mr. Gradgrind. ‘Back in a minute? It’s more
than a mile off.’
Before Mr. Bounderby could reply, a young man appeared at the door, and
introducing himself with the words, ‘By your leaves, gentlemen!’ walked
in with his hands in his pockets. His face, close-shaven, thin, and
sallow, was shaded by a great quantity of dark hair, brushed into a roll
all round his head, and parted up the centre. His legs were very robust,
but shorter than legs of good proportions should have been. His chest
and back were as much too broad, as his legs were too short. He was
dressed in a Newmarket coat and tight-fitting trousers; wore a shawl
round his neck; smelt of lamp-oil, straw, orange-peel, horses’ provender,
and sawdust; and looked a most remarkable sort of Centaur, compounded of
the stable and the play-house. Where the one began, and the other ended,
nobody could have told with any precision. This gentleman was mentioned
in the bills of the day as Mr. E. W. B. Childers, so justly celebrated
for his daring vaulting act as the Wild Huntsman of the North American
Prairies; in which popular performance, a diminutive boy with an old
face, who now accompanied him, assisted as his infant son: being carried
upside down over his father’s shoulder, by one foot, and held by the
crown of his head, heels upwards, in the palm of his father’s hand,
according to the violent paternal manner in which wild huntsmen may be
observed to fondle their offspring. Made up with curls, wreaths, wings,
white bismuth, and carmine, this hopeful young person soared into so
pleasing a Cupid as to constitute the chief delight of the maternal part
of the spectators; but in private, where his characteristics were a
precocious cutaway coat and an extremely gruff voice, he became of the
Turf, turfy.
‘By your leaves, gentlemen,’ said Mr. E. W. B. Childers, glancing round
the room. ‘It was you, I believe, that were wishing to see Jupe!’
‘It was,’ said Mr. Gradgrind. ‘His daughter has gone to fetch him, but I
can’t wait; therefore, if you please, I will leave a message for him with
you.’
‘You see, my friend,’ Mr. Bounderby put in, ‘we are the kind of people
who know the value of time, and you are the kind of people who don’t know
the value of time.’
‘I have not,’ retorted Mr. Childers, after surveying him from head to
foot, ‘the honour of knowing _you_,—but if you mean that you can make
more money of your time than I can of mine, I should judge from your
appearance, that you are about right.’
‘And when you have made it, you can keep it too, I should think,’ said
Cupid.
‘Kidderminster, stow that!’ said Mr. Childers. (Master Kidderminster was
Cupid’s mortal name.)
‘What does he come here cheeking us for, then?’ cried Master
Kidderminster, showing a very irascible temperament. ‘If you want to
cheek us, pay your ochre at the doors and take it out.’
‘Kidderminster,’ said Mr. Childers, raising his voice, ‘stow that!—Sir,’
to Mr. Gradgrind, ‘I was addressing myself to you. You may or you may
not be aware (for perhaps you have not been much in the audience), that
Jupe has missed his tip very often, lately.’
‘Has—what has he missed?’ asked Mr. Gradgrind, glancing at the potent
Bounderby for assistance.
‘Missed his tip.’
‘Offered at the Garters four times last night, and never done ’em once,’
said Master Kidderminster. ‘Missed his tip at the banners, too, and was
loose in his ponging.’
‘Didn’t do what he ought to do. Was short in his leaps and bad in his
tumbling,’ Mr. Childers interpreted.
‘Oh!’ said Mr. Gradgrind, ‘that is tip, is it?’
‘In a general way that’s missing his tip,’ Mr. E. W. B. Childers
answered.
‘Nine oils, Merrylegs, missing tips, garters, banners, and Ponging, eh!’
ejaculated Bounderby, with his laugh of laughs. ‘Queer sort of company,
too, for a man who has raised himself!’
‘Lower yourself, then,’ retorted Cupid. ‘Oh Lord! if you’ve raised
yourself so high as all that comes to, let yourself down a bit.’
‘This is a very obtrusive lad!’ said Mr. Gradgrind, turning, and knitting
his brows on him.
‘We’d have had a young gentleman to meet you, if we had known you were
coming,’ retorted Master Kidderminster, nothing abashed. ‘It’s a pity
you don’t have a bespeak, being so particular. You’re on the Tight-Jeff,
ain’t you?’
‘What does this unmannerly boy mean,’ asked Mr. Gradgrind, eyeing him in
a sort of desperation, ‘by Tight-Jeff?’
‘There! Get out, get out!’ said Mr. Childers, thrusting his young friend
from the room, rather in the prairie manner. ‘Tight-Jeff or Slack-Jeff,
it don’t much signify: it’s only tight-rope and slack-rope. You were
going to give me a message for Jupe?’
‘Yes, I was.’
‘Then,’ continued Mr. Childers, quickly, ‘my opinion is, he will never
receive it. Do you know much of him?’
‘I never saw the man in my life.’
‘I doubt if you ever _will_ see him now. It’s pretty plain to me, he’s
off.’
‘Do you mean that he has deserted his daughter?’
‘Ay! I mean,’ said Mr. Childers, with a nod, ‘that he has cut. He was
goosed last night, he was goosed the night before last, he was goosed
to-day. He has lately got in the way of being always goosed, and he
can’t stand it.’
‘Why has he been—so very much—Goosed?’ asked Mr. Gradgrind, forcing the
word out of himself, with great solemnity and reluctance.
‘His joints are turning stiff, and he is getting used up,’ said Childers.
‘He has his points as a Cackler still, but he can’t get a living out of
_them_.’
‘A Cackler!’ Bounderby repeated. ‘Here we go again!’
‘A speaker, if the gentleman likes it better,’ said Mr. E. W. B.
Childers, superciliously throwing the interpretation over his shoulder,
and accompanying it with a shake of his long hair—which all shook at
once. ‘Now, it’s a remarkable fact, sir, that it cut that man deeper, to
know that his daughter knew of his being goosed, than to go through with
it.’
‘Good!’ interrupted Mr. Bounderby. ‘This is good, Gradgrind! A man so
fond of his daughter, that he runs away from her! This is devilish good!
Ha! ha! Now, I’ll tell you what, young man. I haven’t always occupied
my present station of life. I know what these things are. You may be
astonished to hear it, but my mother—ran away from _me_.’
E. W. B. Childers replied pointedly, that he was not at all astonished to
hear it.
‘Very well,’ said Bounderby. ‘I was born in a ditch, and my mother ran
away from me. Do I excuse her for it? No. Have I ever excused her for
it? Not I. What do I call her for it? I call her probably the very
worst woman that ever lived in the world, except my drunken grandmother.
There’s no family pride about me, there’s no imaginative sentimental
humbug about me. I call a spade a spade; and I call the mother of Josiah
Bounderby of Coketown, without any fear or any favour, what I should call
her if she had been the mother of Dick Jones of Wapping. So, with this
man. He is a runaway rogue and a vagabond, that’s what he is, in
English.’
‘It’s all the same to me what he is or what he is not, whether in English
or whether in French,’ retorted Mr. E. W. B. Childers, facing about. ‘I
am telling your friend what’s the fact; if you don’t like to hear it, you
can avail yourself of the open air. You give it mouth enough, you do;
but give it mouth in your own building at least,’ remonstrated E. W. B.
with stern irony. ‘Don’t give it mouth in this building, till you’re
called upon. You have got some building of your own I dare say, now?’
‘Perhaps so,’ replied Mr. Bounderby, rattling his money and laughing.
‘Then give it mouth in your own building, will you, if you please?’ said
Childers. ‘Because this isn’t a strong building, and too much of you
might bring it down!’
Eyeing Mr. Bounderby from head to foot again, he turned from him, as from
a man finally disposed of, to Mr. Gradgrind.
‘Jupe sent his daughter out on an errand not an hour ago, and then was
seen to slip out himself, with his hat over his eyes, and a bundle tied
up in a handkerchief under his arm. She will never believe it of him,
but he has cut away and left her.’
‘Pray,’ said Mr. Gradgrind, ‘why will she never believe it of him?’
‘Because those two were one. Because they were never asunder. Because,
up to this time, he seemed to dote upon her,’ said Childers, taking a
step or two to look into the empty trunk. Both Mr. Childers and Master
Kidderminster walked in a curious manner; with their legs wider apart
than the general run of men, and with a very knowing assumption of being
stiff in the knees. This walk was common to all the male members of
Sleary’s company, and was understood to express, that they were always on
horseback.
‘Poor Sissy! He had better have apprenticed her,’ said Childers, giving
his hair another shake, as he looked up from the empty box. ‘Now, he
leaves her without anything to take to.’
‘It is creditable to you, who have never been apprenticed, to express
that opinion,’ returned Mr. Gradgrind, approvingly.
‘_I_ never apprenticed? I was apprenticed when I was seven year old.’
‘Oh! Indeed?’ said Mr. Gradgrind, rather resentfully, as having been
defrauded of his good opinion. ‘I was not aware of its being the custom
to apprentice young persons to—’
‘Idleness,’ Mr. Bounderby put in with a loud laugh. ‘No, by the Lord
Harry! Nor I!’
‘Her father always had it in his head,’ resumed Childers, feigning
unconsciousness of Mr. Bounderby’s existence, ‘that she was to be taught
the deuce-and-all of education. How it got into his head, I can’t say; I
can only say that it never got out. He has been picking up a bit of
reading for her, here—and a bit of writing for her, there—and a bit of
ciphering for her, somewhere else—these seven years.’
Mr. E. W. B. Childers took one of his hands out of his pockets, stroked
his face and chin, and looked, with a good deal of doubt and a little
hope, at Mr. Gradgrind. From the first he had sought to conciliate that
gentleman, for the sake of the deserted girl.
‘When Sissy got into the school here,’ he pursued, ‘her father was as
pleased as Punch. I couldn’t altogether make out why, myself, as we were
not stationary here, being but comers and goers anywhere. I suppose,
however, he had this move in his mind—he was always half-cracked—and then
considered her provided for. If you should happen to have looked in
to-night, for the purpose of telling him that you were going to do her
any little service,’ said Mr. Childers, stroking his face again, and
repeating his look, ‘it would be very fortunate and well-timed; very
fortunate and well-timed.’
‘On the contrary,’ returned Mr. Gradgrind. ‘I came to tell him that her
connections made her not an object for the school, and that she must not
attend any more. Still, if her father really has left her, without any
connivance on her part—Bounderby, let me have a word with you.’
Upon this, Mr. Childers politely betook himself, with his equestrian
walk, to the landing outside the door, and there stood stroking his face,
and softly whistling. While thus engaged, he overheard such phrases in
Mr. Bounderby’s voice as ‘No. _I_ say no. I advise you not. I say by
no means.’ While, from Mr. Gradgrind, he heard in his much lower tone
the words, ‘But even as an example to Louisa, of what this pursuit which
has been the subject of a vulgar curiosity, leads to and ends in. Think
of it, Bounderby, in that point of view.’
Meanwhile, the various members of Sleary’s company gradually gathered
together from the upper regions, where they were quartered, and, from
standing about, talking in low voices to one another and to Mr. Childers,
gradually insinuated themselves and him into the room. There were two or
three handsome young women among them, with their two or three husbands,
and their two or three mothers, and their eight or nine little children,
who did the fairy business when required. The father of one of the
families was in the habit of balancing the father of another of the
families on the top of a great pole; the father of a third family often
made a pyramid of both those fathers, with Master Kidderminster for the
apex, and himself for the base; all the fathers could dance upon rolling
casks, stand upon bottles, catch knives and balls, twirl hand-basins,
ride upon anything, jump over everything, and stick at nothing. All the
mothers could (and did) dance, upon the slack wire and the tight-rope,
and perform rapid acts on bare-backed steeds; none of them were at all
particular in respect of showing their legs; and one of them, alone in a
Greek chariot, drove six in hand into every town they came to. They all
assumed to be mighty rakish and knowing, they were not very tidy in their
private dresses, they were not at all orderly in their domestic
arrangements, and the combined literature of the whole company would have
produced but a poor letter on any subject. Yet there was a remarkable
gentleness and childishness about these people, a special inaptitude for
any kind of sharp practice, and an untiring readiness to help and pity
one another, deserving often of as much respect, and always of as much
generous construction, as the every-day virtues of any class of people in
the world.
Last of all appeared Mr. Sleary: a stout man as already mentioned, with
one fixed eye, and one loose eye, a voice (if it can be called so) like
the efforts of a broken old pair of bellows, a flabby surface, and a
muddled head which was never sober and never drunk.
‘Thquire!’ said Mr. Sleary, who was troubled with asthma, and whose
breath came far too thick and heavy for the letter s, ‘Your thervant!
Thith ith a bad piethe of bithnith, thith ith. You’ve heard of my Clown
and hith dog being thuppothed to have morrithed?’
He addressed Mr. Gradgrind, who answered ‘Yes.’
‘Well, Thquire,’ he returned, taking off his hat, and rubbing the lining
with his pocket-handkerchief, which he kept inside for the purpose. ‘Ith
it your intenthion to do anything for the poor girl, Thquire?’
‘I shall have something to propose to her when she comes back,’ said Mr.
Gradgrind.
‘Glad to hear it, Thquire. Not that I want to get rid of the child, any
more than I want to thtand in her way. I’m willing to take her prentith,
though at her age ith late. My voithe ith a little huthky, Thquire, and
not eathy heard by them ath don’t know me; but if you’d been chilled and
heated, heated and chilled, chilled and heated in the ring when you wath
young, ath often ath I have been, _your_ voithe wouldn’t have lathted
out, Thquire, no more than mine.’
‘I dare say not,’ said Mr. Gradgrind.
‘What thall it be, Thquire, while you wait? Thall it be Therry? Give it
a name, Thquire!’ said Mr. Sleary, with hospitable ease.
‘Nothing for me, I thank you,’ said Mr. Gradgrind.
‘Don’t thay nothing, Thquire. What doth your friend thay? If you
haven’t took your feed yet, have a glath of bitterth.’
Here his daughter Josephine—a pretty fair-haired girl of eighteen, who
had been tied on a horse at two years old, and had made a will at twelve,
which she always carried about with her, expressive of her dying desire
to be drawn to the grave by the two piebald ponies—cried, ‘Father, hush!
she has come back!’ Then came Sissy Jupe, running into the room as she
had run out of it. And when she saw them all assembled, and saw their
looks, and saw no father there, she broke into a most deplorable cry, and
took refuge on the bosom of the most accomplished tight-rope lady
(herself in the family-way), who knelt down on the floor to nurse her,
and to weep over her.
‘Ith an internal thame, upon my thoul it ith,’ said Sleary.
‘O my dear father, my good kind father, where are you gone? You are gone
to try to do me some good, I know! You are gone away for my sake, I am
sure! And how miserable and helpless you will be without me, poor, poor
father, until you come back!’ It was so pathetic to hear her saying many
things of this kind, with her face turned upward, and her arms stretched
out as if she were trying to stop his departing shadow and embrace it,
that no one spoke a word until Mr. Bounderby (growing impatient) took the
case in hand.
‘Now, good people all,’ said he, ‘this is wanton waste of time. Let the
girl understand the fact. Let her take it from me, if you like, who have
been run away from, myself. Here, what’s your name! Your father has
absconded—deserted you—and you mustn’t expect to see him again as long as
you live.’
They cared so little for plain Fact, these people, and were in that
advanced state of degeneracy on the subject, that instead of being
impressed by the speaker’s strong common sense, they took it in
extraordinary dudgeon. The men muttered ‘Shame!’ and the women ‘Brute!’
and Sleary, in some haste, communicated the following hint, apart to Mr.
Bounderby.
‘I tell you what, Thquire. To thpeak plain to you, my opinion ith that
you had better cut it thort, and drop it. They’re a very good natur’d
people, my people, but they’re accuthtomed to be quick in their
movementh; and if you don’t act upon my advithe, I’m damned if I don’t
believe they’ll pith you out o’ winder.’
Mr. Bounderby being restrained by this mild suggestion, Mr. Gradgrind
found an opening for his eminently practical exposition of the subject.
‘It is of no moment,’ said he, ‘whether this person is to be expected
back at any time, or the contrary. He is gone away, and there is no
present expectation of his return. That, I believe, is agreed on all
hands.’
‘Thath agreed, Thquire. Thick to that!’ From Sleary.
‘Well then. I, who came here to inform the father of the poor girl,
Jupe, that she could not be received at the school any more, in
consequence of there being practical objections, into which I need not
enter, to the reception there of the children of persons so employed, am
prepared in these altered circumstances to make a proposal. I am willing
to take charge of you, Jupe, and to educate you, and provide for you.
The only condition (over and above your good behaviour) I make is, that
you decide now, at once, whether to accompany me or remain here. Also,
that if you accompany me now, it is understood that you communicate no
more with any of your friends who are here present. These observations
comprise the whole of the case.’
‘At the thame time,’ said Sleary, ‘I mutht put in my word, Thquire, tho
that both thides of the banner may be equally theen. If you like,
Thethilia, to be prentitht, you know the natur of the work and you know
your companionth. Emma Gordon, in whothe lap you’re a lying at prethent,
would be a mother to you, and Joth’phine would be a thithter to you. I
don’t pretend to be of the angel breed myself, and I don’t thay but what,
when you mith’d your tip, you’d find me cut up rough, and thwear an oath
or two at you. But what I thay, Thquire, ith, that good tempered or bad
tempered, I never did a horthe a injury yet, no more than thwearing at
him went, and that I don’t expect I thall begin otherwithe at my time of
life, with a rider. I never wath much of a Cackler, Thquire, and I have
thed my thay.’
The latter part of this speech was addressed to Mr. Gradgrind, who
received it with a grave inclination of his head, and then remarked:
‘The only observation I will make to you, Jupe, in the way of influencing
your decision, is, that it is highly desirable to have a sound practical
education, and that even your father himself (from what I understand)
appears, on your behalf, to have known and felt that much.’
The last words had a visible effect upon her. She stopped in her wild
crying, a little detached herself from Emma Gordon, and turned her face
full upon her patron. The whole company perceived the force of the
change, and drew a long breath together, that plainly said, ‘she will
go!’
‘Be sure you know your own mind, Jupe,’ Mr. Gradgrind cautioned her; ‘I
say no more. Be sure you know your own mind!’
‘When father comes back,’ cried the girl, bursting into tears again after
a minute’s silence, ‘how will he ever find me if I go away!’
‘You may be quite at ease,’ said Mr. Gradgrind, calmly; he worked out the
whole matter like a sum: ‘you may be quite at ease, Jupe, on that score.
In such a case, your father, I apprehend, must find out Mr.—’
‘Thleary. Thath my name, Thquire. Not athamed of it. Known all over
England, and alwayth paythe ith way.’
‘Must find out Mr. Sleary, who would then let him know where you went. I
should have no power of keeping you against his wish, and he would have
no difficulty, at any time, in finding Mr. Thomas Gradgrind of Coketown.
I am well known.’
‘Well known,’ assented Mr. Sleary, rolling his loose eye. ‘You’re one of
the thort, Thquire, that keepth a prethiouth thight of money out of the
houthe. But never mind that at prethent.’
There was another silence; and then she exclaimed, sobbing with her hands
before her face, ‘Oh, give me my clothes, give me my clothes, and let me
go away before I break my heart!’
The women sadly bestirred themselves to get the clothes together—it was
soon done, for they were not many—and to pack them in a basket which had
often travelled with them. Sissy sat all the time upon the ground, still
sobbing, and covering her eyes. Mr. Gradgrind and his friend Bounderby
stood near the door, ready to take her away. Mr. Sleary stood in the
middle of the room, with the male members of the company about him,
exactly as he would have stood in the centre of the ring during his
daughter Josephine’s performance. He wanted nothing but his whip.
The basket packed in silence, they brought her bonnet to her, and
smoothed her disordered hair, and put it on. Then they pressed about
her, and bent over her in very natural attitudes, kissing and embracing
her: and brought the children to take leave of her; and were a
tender-hearted, simple, foolish set of women altogether.
‘Now, Jupe,’ said Mr. Gradgrind. ‘If you are quite determined, come!’
But she had to take her farewell of the male part of the company yet, and
every one of them had to unfold his arms (for they all assumed the
professional attitude when they found themselves near Sleary), and give
her a parting kiss—Master Kidderminster excepted, in whose young nature
there was an original flavour of the misanthrope, who was also known to
have harboured matrimonial views, and who moodily withdrew. Mr. Sleary
was reserved until the last. Opening his arms wide he took her by both
her hands, and would have sprung her up and down, after the riding-master
manner of congratulating young ladies on their dismounting from a rapid
act; but there was no rebound in Sissy, and she only stood before him
crying.
‘Good-bye, my dear!’ said Sleary. ‘You’ll make your fortun, I hope, and
none of our poor folkth will ever trouble you, I’ll pound it. I with
your father hadn’t taken hith dog with him; ith a ill-conwenienth to have
the dog out of the billth. But on thecond thoughth, he wouldn’t have
performed without hith mathter, tho ith ath broad ath ith long!’
With that he regarded her attentively with his fixed eye, surveyed his
company with his loose one, kissed her, shook his head, and handed her to
Mr. Gradgrind as to a horse.
‘There the ith, Thquire,’ he said, sweeping her with a professional
glance as if she were being adjusted in her seat, ‘and the’ll do you
juthtithe. Good-bye, Thethilia!’
‘Good-bye, Cecilia!’ ‘Good-bye, Sissy!’ ‘God bless you, dear!’ In a
variety of voices from all the room.
But the riding-master eye had observed the bottle of the nine oils in her
bosom, and he now interposed with ‘Leave the bottle, my dear; ith large
to carry; it will be of no uthe to you now. Give it to me!’
‘No, no!’ she said, in another burst of tears. ‘Oh, no! Pray let me
keep it for father till he comes back! He will want it when he comes
back. He had never thought of going away, when he sent me for it. I
must keep it for him, if you please!’
‘Tho be it, my dear. (You thee how it ith, Thquire!) Farewell,
Thethilia! My latht wordth to you ith thith, Thtick to the termth of
your engagement, be obedient to the Thquire, and forget uth. But if,
when you’re grown up and married and well off, you come upon any
horthe-riding ever, don’t be hard upon it, don’t be croth with it, give
it a Bethpeak if you can, and think you might do wurth. People mutht be
amuthed, Thquire, thomehow,’ continued Sleary, rendered more pursy than
ever, by so much talking; ‘they can’t be alwayth a working, nor yet they
can’t be alwayth a learning. Make the betht of uth; not the wurtht.
I’ve got my living out of the horthe-riding all my life, I know; but I
conthider that I lay down the philothophy of the thubject when I thay to
you, Thquire, make the betht of uth: not the wurtht!’
The Sleary philosophy was propounded as they went downstairs and the
fixed eye of Philosophy—and its rolling eye, too—soon lost the three
figures and the basket in the darkness of the street.
CHAPTER VII
MRS. SPARSIT
MR. BOUNDERBY being a bachelor, an elderly lady presided over his
establishment, in consideration of a certain annual stipend. Mrs.
Sparsit was this lady’s name; and she was a prominent figure in
attendance on Mr. Bounderby’s car, as it rolled along in triumph with the
Bully of humility inside.
For, Mrs. Sparsit had not only seen different days, but was highly
connected. She had a great aunt living in these very times called Lady
Scadgers. Mr. Sparsit, deceased, of whom she was the relict, had been by
the mother’s side what Mrs. Sparsit still called ‘a Powler.’ Strangers
of limited information and dull apprehension were sometimes observed not
to know what a Powler was, and even to appear uncertain whether it might
be a business, or a political party, or a profession of faith. The
better class of minds, however, did not need to be informed that the
Powlers were an ancient stock, who could trace themselves so exceedingly
far back that it was not surprising if they sometimes lost
themselves—which they had rather frequently done, as respected
horse-flesh, blind-hookey, Hebrew monetary transactions, and the
Insolvent Debtors’ Court.
The late Mr. Sparsit, being by the mother’s side a Powler, married this
lady, being by the father’s side a Scadgers. Lady Scadgers (an immensely
fat old woman, with an inordinate appetite for butcher’s meat, and a
mysterious leg which had now refused to get out of bed for fourteen
years) contrived the marriage, at a period when Sparsit was just of age,
and chiefly noticeable for a slender body, weakly supported on two long
slim props, and surmounted by no head worth mentioning. He inherited a
fair fortune from his uncle, but owed it all before he came into it, and
spent it twice over immediately afterwards. Thus, when he died, at
twenty-four (the scene of his decease, Calais, and the cause, brandy), he
did not leave his widow, from whom he had been separated soon after the
honeymoon, in affluent circumstances. That bereaved lady, fifteen years
older than he, fell presently at deadly feud with her only relative, Lady
Scadgers; and, partly to spite her ladyship, and partly to maintain
herself, went out at a salary. And here she was now, in her elderly
days, with the Coriolanian style of nose and the dense black eyebrows
which had captivated Sparsit, making Mr. Bounderby’s tea as he took his
breakfast.
If Bounderby had been a Conqueror, and Mrs. Sparsit a captive Princess
whom he took about as a feature in his state-processions, he could not
have made a greater flourish with her than he habitually did. Just as it
belonged to his boastfulness to depreciate his own extraction, so it
belonged to it to exalt Mrs. Sparsit’s. In the measure that he would not
allow his own youth to have been attended by a single favourable
circumstance, he brightened Mrs. Sparsit’s juvenile career with every
possible advantage, and showered waggon-loads of early roses all over
that lady’s path. ‘And yet, sir,’ he would say, ‘how does it turn out
after all? Why here she is at a hundred a year (I give her a hundred,
which she is pleased to term handsome), keeping the house of Josiah
Bounderby of Coketown!’
Nay, he made this foil of his so very widely known, that third parties
took it up, and handled it on some occasions with considerable briskness.
It was one of the most exasperating attributes of Bounderby, that he not
only sang his own praises but stimulated other men to sing them. There
was a moral infection of clap-trap in him. Strangers, modest enough
elsewhere, started up at dinners in Coketown, and boasted, in quite a
rampant way, of Bounderby. They made him out to be the Royal arms, the
Union-Jack, Magna Charta, John Bull, Habeas Corpus, the Bill of Rights,
An Englishman’s house is his castle, Church and State, and God save the
Queen, all put together. And as often (and it was very often) as an
orator of this kind brought into his peroration,
‘Princes and lords may flourish or may fade,
A breath can make them, as a breath has made,’
—it was, for certain, more or less understood among the company that he
had heard of Mrs. Sparsit.
‘Mr. Bounderby,’ said Mrs. Sparsit, ‘you are unusually slow, sir, with
your breakfast this morning.’
‘Why, ma’am,’ he returned, ‘I am thinking about Tom Gradgrind’s whim;’
Tom Gradgrind, for a bluff independent manner of speaking—as if somebody
were always endeavouring to bribe him with immense sums to say Thomas,
and he wouldn’t; ‘Tom Gradgrind’s whim, ma’am, of bringing up the
tumbling-girl.’
‘The girl is now waiting to know,’ said Mrs. Sparsit, ‘whether she is to
go straight to the school, or up to the Lodge.’
‘She must wait, ma’am,’ answered Bounderby, ‘till I know myself. We
shall have Tom Gradgrind down here presently, I suppose. If he should
wish her to remain here a day or two longer, of course she can, ma’am.’
‘Of course she can if you wish it, Mr. Bounderby.’
‘I told him I would give her a shake-down here, last night, in order that
he might sleep on it before he decided to let her have any association
with Louisa.’
‘Indeed, Mr. Bounderby? Very thoughtful of you!’ Mrs. Sparsit’s
Coriolanian nose underwent a slight expansion of the nostrils, and her
black eyebrows contracted as she took a sip of tea.
‘It’s tolerably clear to _me_,’ said Bounderby, ‘that the little puss can
get small good out of such companionship.’
‘Are you speaking of young Miss Gradgrind, Mr. Bounderby?’
‘Yes, ma’am, I’m speaking of Louisa.’
‘Your observation being limited to “little puss,”’ said Mrs. Sparsit,
‘and there being two little girls in question, I did not know which might
be indicated by that expression.’
‘Louisa,’ repeated Mr. Bounderby. ‘Louisa, Louisa.’
‘You are quite another father to Louisa, sir.’ Mrs. Sparsit took a
little more tea; and, as she bent her again contracted eyebrows over her
steaming cup, rather looked as if her classical countenance were invoking
the infernal gods.
‘If you had said I was another father to Tom—young Tom, I mean, not my
friend Tom Gradgrind—you might have been nearer the mark. I am going to
take young Tom into my office. Going to have him under my wing, ma’am.’
‘Indeed? Rather young for that, is he not, sir?’ Mrs. Sparsit’s ‘sir,’
in addressing Mr. Bounderby, was a word of ceremony, rather exacting
consideration for herself in the use, than honouring him.
‘I’m not going to take him at once; he is to finish his educational
cramming before then,’ said Bounderby. ‘By the Lord Harry, he’ll have
enough of it, first and last! He’d open his eyes, that boy would, if he
knew how empty of learning _my_ young maw was, at his time of life.’
Which, by the by, he probably did know, for he had heard of it often
enough. ‘But it’s extraordinary the difficulty I have on scores of such
subjects, in speaking to any one on equal terms. Here, for example, I
have been speaking to you this morning about tumblers. Why, what do
_you_ know about tumblers? At the time when, to have been a tumbler in
the mud of the streets, would have been a godsend to me, a prize in the
lottery to me, you were at the Italian Opera. You were coming out of the
Italian Opera, ma’am, in white satin and jewels, a blaze of splendour,
when I hadn’t a penny to buy a link to light you.’
‘I certainly, sir,’ returned Mrs. Sparsit, with a dignity serenely
mournful, ‘was familiar with the Italian Opera at a very early age.’
‘Egad, ma’am, so was I,’ said Bounderby, ‘—with the wrong side of it. A
hard bed the pavement of its Arcade used to make, I assure you. People
like you, ma’am, accustomed from infancy to lie on Down feathers, have no
idea _how_ hard a paving-stone is, without trying it. No, no, it’s of no
use my talking to _you_ about tumblers. I should speak of foreign
dancers, and the West End of London, and May Fair, and lords and ladies
and honourables.’
‘I trust, sir,’ rejoined Mrs. Sparsit, with decent resignation, ‘it is
not necessary that you should do anything of that kind. I hope I have
learnt how to accommodate myself to the changes of life. If I have
acquired an interest in hearing of your instructive experiences, and can
scarcely hear enough of them, I claim no merit for that, since I believe
it is a general sentiment.’
‘Well, ma’am,’ said her patron, ‘perhaps some people may be pleased to
say that they do like to hear, in his own unpolished way, what Josiah
Bounderby, of Coketown, has gone through. But you must confess that you
were born in the lap of luxury, yourself. Come, ma’am, you know you were
born in the lap of luxury.’
‘I do not, sir,’ returned Mrs. Sparsit with a shake of her head, ‘deny
it.’
Mr. Bounderby was obliged to get up from table, and stand with his back
to the fire, looking at her; she was such an enhancement of his position.
‘And you were in crack society. Devilish high society,’ he said, warming
his legs.
‘It is true, sir,’ returned Mrs. Sparsit, with an affectation of humility
the very opposite of his, and therefore in no danger of jostling it.
‘You were in the tiptop fashion, and all the rest of it,’ said Mr.
Bounderby.
‘Yes, sir,’ returned Mrs. Sparsit, with a kind of social widowhood upon
her. ‘It is unquestionably true.’
Mr. Bounderby, bending himself at the knees, literally embraced his legs
in his great satisfaction and laughed aloud. Mr. and Miss Gradgrind
being then announced, he received the former with a shake of the hand,
and the latter with a kiss.
‘Can Jupe be sent here, Bounderby?’ asked Mr. Gradgrind.
Certainly. So Jupe was sent there. On coming in, she curtseyed to Mr.
Bounderby, and to his friend Tom Gradgrind, and also to Louisa; but in
her confusion unluckily omitted Mrs. Sparsit. Observing this, the
blustrous Bounderby had the following remarks to make:
‘Now, I tell you what, my girl. The name of that lady by the teapot, is
Mrs. Sparsit. That lady acts as mistress of this house, and she is a
highly connected lady. Consequently, if ever you come again into any
room in this house, you will make a short stay in it if you don’t behave
towards that lady in your most respectful manner. Now, I don’t care a
button what you do to _me_, because I don’t affect to be anybody. So far
from having high connections I have no connections at all, and I come of
the scum of the earth. But towards that lady, I do care what you do; and
you shall do what is deferential and respectful, or you shall not come
here.’
‘I hope, Bounderby,’ said Mr. Gradgrind, in a conciliatory voice, ‘that
this was merely an oversight.’
‘My friend Tom Gradgrind suggests, Mrs. Sparsit,’ said Bounderby, ‘that
this was merely an oversight. Very likely. However, as you are aware,
ma’am, I don’t allow of even oversights towards you.’
‘You are very good indeed, sir,’ returned Mrs. Sparsit, shaking her head
with her State humility. ‘It is not worth speaking of.’
Sissy, who all this time had been faintly excusing herself with tears in
her eyes, was now waved over by the master of the house to Mr. Gradgrind.
She stood looking intently at him, and Louisa stood coldly by, with her
eyes upon the ground, while he proceeded thus:
‘Jupe, I have made up my mind to take you into my house; and, when you
are not in attendance at the school, to employ you about Mrs. Gradgrind,
who is rather an invalid. I have explained to Miss Louisa—this is Miss
Louisa—the miserable but natural end of your late career; and you are to
expressly understand that the whole of that subject is past, and is not
to be referred to any more. From this time you begin your history. You
are, at present, ignorant, I know.’
‘Yes, sir, very,’ she answered, curtseying.
‘I shall have the satisfaction of causing you to be strictly educated;
and you will be a living proof to all who come into communication with
you, of the advantages of the training you will receive. You will be
reclaimed and formed. You have been in the habit now of reading to your
father, and those people I found you among, I dare say?’ said Mr.
Gradgrind, beckoning her nearer to him before he said so, and dropping
his voice.
‘Only to father and Merrylegs, sir. At least I mean to father, when
Merrylegs was always there.’
‘Never mind Merrylegs, Jupe,’ said Mr. Gradgrind, with a passing frown.
‘I don’t ask about him. I understand you to have been in the habit of
reading to your father?’
‘O, yes, sir, thousands of times. They were the happiest—O, of all the
happy times we had together, sir!’
It was only now when her sorrow broke out, that Louisa looked at her.
‘And what,’ asked Mr. Gradgrind, in a still lower voice, ‘did you read to
your father, Jupe?’
‘About the Fairies, sir, and the Dwarf, and the Hunchback, and the
Genies,’ she sobbed out; ‘and about—’
‘Hush!’ said Mr. Gradgrind, ‘that is enough. Never breathe a word of
such destructive nonsense any more. Bounderby, this is a case for rigid
training, and I shall observe it with interest.’
‘Well,’ returned Mr. Bounderby, ‘I have given you my opinion already, and
I shouldn’t do as you do. But, very well, very well. Since you are bent
upon it, _very_ well!’
So, Mr. Gradgrind and his daughter took Cecilia Jupe off with them to
Stone Lodge, and on the way Louisa never spoke one word, good or bad.
And Mr. Bounderby went about his daily pursuits. And Mrs. Sparsit got
behind her eyebrows and meditated in the gloom of that retreat, all the
evening.
CHAPTER VIII
NEVER WONDER
LET us strike the key-note again, before pursuing the tune.
When she was half a dozen years younger, Louisa had been overheard to
begin a conversation with her brother one day, by saying ‘Tom, I
wonder’—upon which Mr. Gradgrind, who was the person overhearing, stepped
forth into the light and said, ‘Louisa, never wonder!’
Herein lay the spring of the mechanical art and mystery of educating the
reason without stooping to the cultivation of the sentiments and
affections. Never wonder. By means of addition, subtraction,
multiplication, and division, settle everything somehow, and never
wonder. Bring to me, says M’Choakumchild, yonder baby just able to walk,
and I will engage that it shall never wonder.
Now, besides very many babies just able to walk, there happened to be in
Coketown a considerable population of babies who had been walking against
time towards the infinite world, twenty, thirty, forty, fifty years and
more. These portentous infants being alarming creatures to stalk about
in any human society, the eighteen denominations incessantly scratched
one another’s faces and pulled one another’s hair by way of agreeing on
the steps to be taken for their improvement—which they never did; a
surprising circumstance, when the happy adaptation of the means to the
end is considered. Still, although they differed in every other
particular, conceivable and inconceivable (especially inconceivable),
they were pretty well united on the point that these unlucky infants were
never to wonder. Body number one, said they must take everything on
trust. Body number two, said they must take everything on political
economy. Body number three, wrote leaden little books for them, showing
how the good grown-up baby invariably got to the Savings-bank, and the
bad grown-up baby invariably got transported. Body number four, under
dreary pretences of being droll (when it was very melancholy indeed),
made the shallowest pretences of concealing pitfalls of knowledge, into
which it was the duty of these babies to be smuggled and inveigled. But,
all the bodies agreed that they were never to wonder.
There was a library in Coketown, to which general access was easy. Mr.
Gradgrind greatly tormented his mind about what the people read in this
library: a point whereon little rivers of tabular statements periodically
flowed into the howling ocean of tabular statements, which no diver ever
got to any depth in and came up sane. It was a disheartening
circumstance, but a melancholy fact, that even these readers persisted in
wondering. They wondered about human nature, human passions, human hopes
and fears, the struggles, triumphs and defeats, the cares and joys and
sorrows, the lives and deaths of common men and women! They sometimes,
after fifteen hours’ work, sat down to read mere fables about men and
women, more or less like themselves, and about children, more or less
like their own. They took De Foe to their bosoms, instead of Euclid, and
seemed to be on the whole more comforted by Goldsmith than by Cocker.
Mr. Gradgrind was for ever working, in print and out of print, at this
eccentric sum, and he never could make out how it yielded this
unaccountable product.
‘I am sick of my life, Loo. I, hate it altogether, and I hate everybody
except you,’ said the unnatural young Thomas Gradgrind in the
hair-cutting chamber at twilight.
‘You don’t hate Sissy, Tom?’
‘I hate to be obliged to call her Jupe. And she hates me,’ said Tom,
moodily.
‘No, she does not, Tom, I am sure!’
‘She must,’ said Tom. ‘She must just hate and detest the whole set-out
of us. They’ll bother her head off, I think, before they have done with
her. Already she’s getting as pale as wax, and as heavy as—I am.’
Young Thomas expressed these sentiments sitting astride of a chair before
the fire, with his arms on the back, and his sulky face on his arms. His
sister sat in the darker corner by the fireside, now looking at him, now
looking at the bright sparks as they dropped upon the hearth.
‘As to me,’ said Tom, tumbling his hair all manner of ways with his sulky
hands, ‘I am a Donkey, that’s what _I_ am. I am as obstinate as one, I
am more stupid than one, I get as much pleasure as one, and I should like
to kick like one.’
‘Not me, I hope, Tom?’
‘No, Loo; I wouldn’t hurt _you_. I made an exception of you at first. I
don’t know what this—jolly old—Jaundiced Jail,’ Tom had paused to find a
sufficiently complimentary and expressive name for the parental roof, and
seemed to relieve his mind for a moment by the strong alliteration of
this one, ‘would be without you.’
‘Indeed, Tom? Do you really and truly say so?’
‘Why, of course I do. What’s the use of talking about it!’ returned Tom,
chafing his face on his coat-sleeve, as if to mortify his flesh, and have
it in unison with his spirit.
‘Because, Tom,’ said his sister, after silently watching the sparks
awhile, ‘as I get older, and nearer growing up, I often sit wondering
here, and think how unfortunate it is for me that I can’t reconcile you
to home better than I am able to do. I don’t know what other girls know.
I can’t play to you, or sing to you. I can’t talk to you so as to
lighten your mind, for I never see any amusing sights or read any amusing
books that it would be a pleasure or a relief to you to talk about, when
you are tired.’
‘Well, no more do I. I am as bad as you in that respect; and I am a Mule
too, which you’re not. If father was determined to make me either a Prig
or a Mule, and I am not a Prig, why, it stands to reason, I must be a
Mule. And so I am,’ said Tom, desperately.
‘It’s a great pity,’ said Louisa, after another pause, and speaking
thoughtfully out of her dark corner: ‘it’s a great pity, Tom. It’s very
unfortunate for both of us.’
‘Oh! You,’ said Tom; ‘you are a girl, Loo, and a girl comes out of it
better than a boy does. I don’t miss anything in you. You are the only
pleasure I have—you can brighten even this place—and you can always lead
me as you like.’
‘You are a dear brother, Tom; and while you think I can do such things, I
don’t so much mind knowing better. Though I do know better, Tom, and am
very sorry for it.’ She came and kissed him, and went back into her
corner again.
‘I wish I could collect all the Facts we hear so much about,’ said Tom,
spitefully setting his teeth, ‘and all the Figures, and all the people
who found them out: and I wish I could put a thousand barrels of
gunpowder under them, and blow them all up together! However, when I go
to live with old Bounderby, I’ll have my revenge.’
‘Your revenge, Tom?’
‘I mean, I’ll enjoy myself a little, and go about and see something, and
hear something. I’ll recompense myself for the way in which I have been
brought up.’
‘But don’t disappoint yourself beforehand, Tom. Mr. Bounderby thinks as
father thinks, and is a great deal rougher, and not half so kind.’
‘Oh!’ said Tom, laughing; ‘I don’t mind that. I shall very well know how
to manage and smooth old Bounderby!’
Their shadows were defined upon the wall, but those of the high presses
in the room were all blended together on the wall and on the ceiling, as
if the brother and sister were overhung by a dark cavern. Or, a fanciful
imagination—if such treason could have been there—might have made it out
to be the shadow of their subject, and of its lowering association with
their future.
‘What is your great mode of smoothing and managing, Tom? Is it a
secret?’
‘Oh!’ said Tom, ‘if it is a secret, it’s not far off. It’s you. You are
his little pet, you are his favourite; he’ll do anything for you. When
he says to me what I don’t like, I shall say to him, “My sister Loo will
be hurt and disappointed, Mr. Bounderby. She always used to tell me she
was sure you would be easier with me than this.” That’ll bring him
about, or nothing will.’
After waiting for some answering remark, and getting none, Tom wearily
relapsed into the present time, and twined himself yawning round and
about the rails of his chair, and rumpled his head more and more, until
he suddenly looked up, and asked:
‘Have you gone to sleep, Loo?’
‘No, Tom. I am looking at the fire.’
‘You seem to find more to look at in it than ever I could find,’ said
Tom. ‘Another of the advantages, I suppose, of being a girl.’
‘Tom,’ enquired his sister, slowly, and in a curious tone, as if she were
reading what she asked in the fire, and it was not quite plainly written
there, ‘do you look forward with any satisfaction to this change to Mr.
Bounderby’s?’
‘Why, there’s one thing to be said of it,’ returned Tom, pushing his
chair from him, and standing up; ‘it will be getting away from home.’
‘There is one thing to be said of it,’ Louisa repeated in her former
curious tone; ‘it will be getting away from home. Yes.’
‘Not but what I shall be very unwilling, both to leave you, Loo, and to
leave you here. But I must go, you know, whether I like it or not; and I
had better go where I can take with me some advantage of your influence,
than where I should lose it altogether. Don’t you see?’
‘Yes, Tom.’
The answer was so long in coming, though there was no indecision in it,
that Tom went and leaned on the back of her chair, to contemplate the
fire which so engrossed her, from her point of view, and see what he
could make of it.
‘Except that it is a fire,’ said Tom, ‘it looks to me as stupid and blank
as everything else looks. What do you see in it? Not a circus?’
‘I don’t see anything in it, Tom, particularly. But since I have been
looking at it, I have been wondering about you and me, grown up.’
‘Wondering again!’ said Tom.
‘I have such unmanageable thoughts,’ returned his sister, ‘that they
_will_ wonder.’
‘Then I beg of you, Louisa,’ said Mrs. Gradgrind, who had opened the door
without being heard, ‘to do nothing of that description, for goodness’
sake, you inconsiderate girl, or I shall never hear the last of it from
your father. And, Thomas, it is really shameful, with my poor head
continually wearing me out, that a boy brought up as you have been, and
whose education has cost what yours has, should be found encouraging his
sister to wonder, when he knows his father has expressly said that she is
not to do it.’
Louisa denied Tom’s participation in the offence; but her mother stopped
her with the conclusive answer, ‘Louisa, don’t tell me, in my state of
health; for unless you had been encouraged, it is morally and physically
impossible that you could have done it.’
‘I was encouraged by nothing, mother, but by looking at the red sparks
dropping out of the fire, and whitening and dying. It made me think,
after all, how short my life would be, and how little I could hope to do
in it.’
‘Nonsense!’ said Mrs. Gradgrind, rendered almost energetic. ‘Nonsense!
Don’t stand there and tell me such stuff, Louisa, to my face, when you
know very well that if it was ever to reach your father’s ears I should
never hear the last of it. After all the trouble that has been taken
with you! After the lectures you have attended, and the experiments you
have seen! After I have heard you myself, when the whole of my right
side has been benumbed, going on with your master about combustion, and
calcination, and calorification, and I may say every kind of ation that
could drive a poor invalid distracted, to hear you talking in this absurd
way about sparks and ashes! I wish,’ whimpered Mrs. Gradgrind, taking a
chair, and discharging her strongest point before succumbing under these
mere shadows of facts, ‘yes, I really _do_ wish that I had never had a
family, and then you would have known what it was to do without me!’
CHAPTER IX
SISSY’S PROGRESS
SISSY JUPE had not an easy time of it, between Mr. M’Choakumchild and
Mrs. Gradgrind, and was not without strong impulses, in the first months
of her probation, to run away. It hailed facts all day long so very
hard, and life in general was opened to her as such a closely ruled
ciphering-book, that assuredly she would have run away, but for only one
restraint.
It is lamentable to think of; but this restraint was the result of no
arithmetical process, was self-imposed in defiance of all calculation,
and went dead against any table of probabilities that any Actuary would
have drawn up from the premises. The girl believed that her father had
not deserted her; she lived in the hope that he would come back, and in
the faith that he would be made the happier by her remaining where she
was.
The wretched ignorance with which Jupe clung to this consolation,
rejecting the superior comfort of knowing, on a sound arithmetical basis,
that her father was an unnatural vagabond, filled Mr. Gradgrind with
pity. Yet, what was to be done? M’Choakumchild reported that she had a
very dense head for figures; that, once possessed with a general idea of
the globe, she took the smallest conceivable interest in its exact
measurements; that she was extremely slow in the acquisition of dates,
unless some pitiful incident happened to be connected therewith; that she
would burst into tears on being required (by the mental process)
immediately to name the cost of two hundred and forty-seven muslin caps
at fourteen-pence halfpenny; that she was as low down, in the school, as
low could be; that after eight weeks of induction into the elements of
Political Economy, she had only yesterday been set right by a prattler
three feet high, for returning to the question, ‘What is the first
principle of this science?’ the absurd answer, ‘To do unto others as I
would that they should do unto me.’
Mr. Gradgrind observed, shaking his head, that all this was very bad;
that it showed the necessity of infinite grinding at the mill of
knowledge, as per system, schedule, blue book, report, and tabular
statements A to Z; and that Jupe ‘must be kept to it.’ So Jupe was kept
to it, and became low-spirited, but no wiser.
‘It would be a fine thing to be you, Miss Louisa!’ she said, one night,
when Louisa had endeavoured to make her perplexities for next day
something clearer to her.
‘Do you think so?’
‘I should know so much, Miss Louisa. All that is difficult to me now,
would be so easy then.’
‘You might not be the better for it, Sissy.’
Sissy submitted, after a little hesitation, ‘I should not be the worse,
Miss Louisa.’ To which Miss Louisa answered, ‘I don’t know that.’
There had been so little communication between these two—both because
life at Stone Lodge went monotonously round like a piece of machinery
which discouraged human interference, and because of the prohibition
relative to Sissy’s past career—that they were still almost strangers.
Sissy, with her dark eyes wonderingly directed to Louisa’s face, was
uncertain whether to say more or to remain silent.
‘You are more useful to my mother, and more pleasant with her than I can
ever be,’ Louisa resumed. ‘You are pleasanter to yourself, than _I_ am
to _my_self.’
‘But, if you please, Miss Louisa,’ Sissy pleaded, ‘I am—O so stupid!’
Louisa, with a brighter laugh than usual, told her she would be wiser
by-and-by.
‘You don’t know,’ said Sissy, half crying, ‘what a stupid girl I am. All
through school hours I make mistakes. Mr. and Mrs. M’Choakumchild call
me up, over and over again, regularly to make mistakes. I can’t help
them. They seem to come natural to me.’
‘Mr. and Mrs. M’Choakumchild never make any mistakes themselves, I
suppose, Sissy?’
‘O no!’ she eagerly returned. ‘They know everything.’
‘Tell me some of your mistakes.’
‘I am almost ashamed,’ said Sissy, with reluctance. ‘But to-day, for
instance, Mr. M’Choakumchild was explaining to us about Natural
Prosperity.’
‘National, I think it must have been,’ observed Louisa.
‘Yes, it was.—But isn’t it the same?’ she timidly asked.
‘You had better say, National, as he said so,’ returned Louisa, with her
dry reserve.
‘National Prosperity. And he said, Now, this schoolroom is a Nation.
And in this nation, there are fifty millions of money. Isn’t this a
prosperous nation? Girl number twenty, isn’t this a prosperous nation,
and a’n’t you in a thriving state?’
‘What did you say?’ asked Louisa.
‘Miss Louisa, I said I didn’t know. I thought I couldn’t know whether it
was a prosperous nation or not, and whether I was in a thriving state or
not, unless I knew who had got the money, and whether any of it was mine.
But that had nothing to do with it. It was not in the figures at all,’
said Sissy, wiping her eyes.
‘That was a great mistake of yours,’ observed Louisa.
‘Yes, Miss Louisa, I know it was, now. Then Mr. M’Choakumchild said he
would try me again. And he said, This schoolroom is an immense town, and
in it there are a million of inhabitants, and only five-and-twenty are
starved to death in the streets, in the course of a year. What is your
remark on that proportion? And my remark was—for I couldn’t think of a
better one—that I thought it must be just as hard upon those who were
starved, whether the others were a million, or a million million. And
that was wrong, too.’
‘Of course it was.’
‘Then Mr. M’Choakumchild said he would try me once more. And he said,
Here are the stutterings—’
‘Statistics,’ said Louisa.
‘Yes, Miss Louisa—they always remind me of stutterings, and that’s
another of my mistakes—of accidents upon the sea. And I find (Mr.
M’Choakumchild said) that in a given time a hundred thousand persons went
to sea on long voyages, and only five hundred of them were drowned or
burnt to death. What is the percentage? And I said, Miss;’ here Sissy
fairly sobbed as confessing with extreme contrition to her greatest
error; ‘I said it was nothing.’
‘Nothing, Sissy?’
‘Nothing, Miss—to the relations and friends of the people who were
killed. I shall never learn,’ said Sissy. ‘And the worst of all is,
that although my poor father wished me so much to learn, and although I
am so anxious to learn, because he wished me to, I am afraid I don’t like
it.’
Louisa stood looking at the pretty modest head, as it drooped abashed
before her, until it was raised again to glance at her face. Then she
asked:
‘Did your father know so much himself, that he wished you to be well
taught too, Sissy?’
Sissy hesitated before replying, and so plainly showed her sense that
they were entering on forbidden ground, that Louisa added, ‘No one hears
us; and if any one did, I am sure no harm could be found in such an
innocent question.’
‘No, Miss Louisa,’ answered Sissy, upon this encouragement, shaking her
head; ‘father knows very little indeed. It’s as much as he can do to
write; and it’s more than people in general can do to read his writing.
Though it’s plain to _me_.’
‘Your mother?’
‘Father says she was quite a scholar. She died when I was born. She
was;’ Sissy made the terrible communication nervously; ‘she was a
dancer.’
‘Did your father love her?’ Louisa asked these questions with a strong,
wild, wandering interest peculiar to her; an interest gone astray like a
banished creature, and hiding in solitary places.
‘O yes! As dearly as he loves me. Father loved me, first, for her sake.
He carried me about with him when I was quite a baby. We have never been
asunder from that time.’
‘Yet he leaves you now, Sissy?’
‘Only for my good. Nobody understands him as I do; nobody knows him as I
do. When he left me for my good—he never would have left me for his
own—I know he was almost broken-hearted with the trial. He will not be
happy for a single minute, till he comes back.’
‘Tell me more about him,’ said Louisa, ‘I will never ask you again.
Where did you live?’
‘We travelled about the country, and had no fixed place to live in.
Father’s a;’ Sissy whispered the awful word, ‘a clown.’
‘To make the people laugh?’ said Louisa, with a nod of intelligence.
‘Yes. But they wouldn’t laugh sometimes, and then father cried. Lately,
they very often wouldn’t laugh, and he used to come home despairing.
Father’s not like most. Those who didn’t know him as well as I do, and
didn’t love him as dearly as I do, might believe he was not quite right.
Sometimes they played tricks upon him; but they never knew how he felt
them, and shrunk up, when he was alone with me. He was far, far timider
than they thought!’
‘And you were his comfort through everything?’
She nodded, with the tears rolling down her face. ‘I hope so, and father
said I was. It was because he grew so scared and trembling, and because
he felt himself to be a poor, weak, ignorant, helpless man (those used to
be his words), that he wanted me so much to know a great deal, and be
different from him. I used to read to him to cheer his courage, and he
was very fond of that. They were wrong books—I am never to speak of them
here—but we didn’t know there was any harm in them.’
‘And he liked them?’ said Louisa, with a searching gaze on Sissy all this
time.
‘O very much! They kept him, many times, from what did him real harm.
And often and often of a night, he used to forget all his troubles in
wondering whether the Sultan would let the lady go on with the story, or
would have her head cut off before it was finished.’
‘And your father was always kind? To the last?’ asked Louisa
contravening the great principle, and wondering very much.
‘Always, always!’ returned Sissy, clasping her hands. ‘Kinder and kinder
than I can tell. He was angry only one night, and that was not to me,
but Merrylegs. Merrylegs;’ she whispered the awful fact; ‘is his
performing dog.’
‘Why was he angry with the dog?’ Louisa demanded.
‘Father, soon after they came home from performing, told Merrylegs to
jump up on the backs of the two chairs and stand across them—which is one
of his tricks. He looked at father, and didn’t do it at once.
Everything of father’s had gone wrong that night, and he hadn’t pleased
the public at all. He cried out that the very dog knew he was failing,
and had no compassion on him. Then he beat the dog, and I was
frightened, and said, “Father, father! Pray don’t hurt the creature who
is so fond of you! O Heaven forgive you, father, stop!” And he stopped,
and the dog was bloody, and father lay down crying on the floor with the
dog in his arms, and the dog licked his face.’
Louisa saw that she was sobbing; and going to her, kissed her, took her
hand, and sat down beside her.
‘Finish by telling me how your father left you, Sissy. Now that I have
asked you so much, tell me the end. The blame, if there is any blame, is
mine, not yours.’
‘Dear Miss Louisa,’ said Sissy, covering her eyes, and sobbing yet; ‘I
came home from the school that afternoon, and found poor father just come
home too, from the booth. And he sat rocking himself over the fire, as
if he was in pain. And I said, “Have you hurt yourself, father?” (as he
did sometimes, like they all did), and he said, “A little, my darling.”
And when I came to stoop down and look up at his face, I saw that he was
crying. The more I spoke to him, the more he hid his face; and at first
he shook all over, and said nothing but “My darling;” and “My love!”’
Here Tom came lounging in, and stared at the two with a coolness not
particularly savouring of interest in anything but himself, and not much
of that at present.
‘I am asking Sissy a few questions, Tom,’ observed his sister. ‘You have
no occasion to go away; but don’t interrupt us for a moment, Tom dear.’
‘Oh! very well!’ returned Tom. ‘Only father has brought old Bounderby
home, and I want you to come into the drawing-room. Because if you come,
there’s a good chance of old Bounderby’s asking me to dinner; and if you
don’t, there’s none.’
‘I’ll come directly.’
‘I’ll wait for you,’ said Tom, ‘to make sure.’
Sissy resumed in a lower voice. ‘At last poor father said that he had
given no satisfaction again, and never did give any satisfaction now, and
that he was a shame and disgrace, and I should have done better without
him all along. I said all the affectionate things to him that came into
my heart, and presently he was quiet and I sat down by him, and told him
all about the school and everything that had been said and done there.
When I had no more left to tell, he put his arms round my neck, and
kissed me a great many times. Then he asked me to fetch some of the
stuff he used, for the little hurt he had had, and to get it at the best
place, which was at the other end of town from there; and then, after
kissing me again, he let me go. When I had gone down-stairs, I turned
back that I might be a little bit more company to him yet, and looked in
at the door, and said, “Father dear, shall I take Merrylegs?” Father
shook his head and said, “No, Sissy, no; take nothing that’s known to be
mine, my darling;” and I left him sitting by the fire. Then the thought
must have come upon him, poor, poor father! of going away to try
something for my sake; for when I came back, he was gone.’
‘I say! Look sharp for old Bounderby, Loo!’ Tom remonstrated.
‘There’s no more to tell, Miss Louisa. I keep the nine oils ready for
him, and I know he will come back. Every letter that I see in Mr.
Gradgrind’s hand takes my breath away and blinds my eyes, for I think it
comes from father, or from Mr. Sleary about father. Mr. Sleary promised
to write as soon as ever father should be heard of, and I trust to him to
keep his word.’
‘Do look sharp for old Bounderby, Loo!’ said Tom, with an impatient
whistle. ‘He’ll be off if you don’t look sharp!’
After this, whenever Sissy dropped a curtsey to Mr. Gradgrind in the
presence of his family, and said in a faltering way, ‘I beg your pardon,
sir, for being troublesome—but—have you had any letter yet about me?’
Louisa would suspend the occupation of the moment, whatever it was, and
look for the reply as earnestly as Sissy did. And when Mr. Gradgrind
regularly answered, ‘No, Jupe, nothing of the sort,’ the trembling of
Sissy’s lip would be repeated in Louisa’s face, and her eyes would follow
Sissy with compassion to the door. Mr. Gradgrind usually improved these
occasions by remarking, when she was gone, that if Jupe had been properly
trained from an early age she would have remonstrated to herself on sound
principles the baselessness of these fantastic hopes. Yet it did seem
(though not to him, for he saw nothing of it) as if fantastic hope could
take as strong a hold as Fact.
This observation must be limited exclusively to his daughter. As to Tom,
he was becoming that not unprecedented triumph of calculation which is
usually at work on number one. As to Mrs. Gradgrind, if she said
anything on the subject, she would come a little way out of her wrappers,
like a feminine dormouse, and say:
‘Good gracious bless me, how my poor head is vexed and worried by that
girl Jupe’s so perseveringly asking, over and over again, about her
tiresome letters! Upon my word and honour I seem to be fated, and
destined, and ordained, to live in the midst of things that I am never to
hear the last of. It really is a most extraordinary circumstance that it
appears as if I never was to hear the last of anything!’
At about this point, Mr. Gradgrind’s eye would fall upon her; and under
the influence of that wintry piece of fact, she would become torpid
again.
CHAPTER X
STEPHEN BLACKPOOL
I ENTERTAIN a weak idea that the English people are as hard-worked as any
people upon whom the sun shines. I acknowledge to this ridiculous
idiosyncrasy, as a reason why I would give them a little more play.
In the hardest working part of Coketown; in the innermost fortifications
of that ugly citadel, where Nature was as strongly bricked out as killing
airs and gases were bricked in; at the heart of the labyrinth of narrow
courts upon courts, and close streets upon streets, which had come into
existence piecemeal, every piece in a violent hurry for some one man’s
purpose, and the whole an unnatural family, shouldering, and trampling,
and pressing one another to death; in the last close nook of this great
exhausted receiver, where the chimneys, for want of air to make a
draught, were built in an immense variety of stunted and crooked shapes,
as though every house put out a sign of the kind of people who might be
expected to be born in it; among the multitude of Coketown, generically
called ‘the Hands,’—a race who would have found more favour with some
people, if Providence had seen fit to make them only hands, or, like the
lower creatures of the seashore, only hands and stomachs—lived a certain
Stephen Blackpool, forty years of age.
Stephen looked older, but he had had a hard life. It is said that every
life has its roses and thorns; there seemed, however, to have been a
misadventure or mistake in Stephen’s case, whereby somebody else had
become possessed of his roses, and he had become possessed of the same
somebody else’s thorns in addition to his own. He had known, to use his
words, a peck of trouble. He was usually called Old Stephen, in a kind
of rough homage to the fact.
A rather stooping man, with a knitted brow, a pondering expression of
face, and a hard-looking head sufficiently capacious, on which his
iron-grey hair lay long and thin, Old Stephen might have passed for a
particularly intelligent man in his condition. Yet he was not. He took
no place among those remarkable ‘Hands,’ who, piecing together their
broken intervals of leisure through many years, had mastered difficult
sciences, and acquired a knowledge of most unlikely things. He held no
station among the Hands who could make speeches and carry on debates.
Thousands of his compeers could talk much better than he, at any time.
He was a good power-loom weaver, and a man of perfect integrity. What
more he was, or what else he had in him, if anything, let him show for
himself.
The lights in the great factories, which looked, when they were
illuminated, like Fairy palaces—or the travellers by express-train said
so—were all extinguished; and the bells had rung for knocking off for the
night, and had ceased again; and the Hands, men and women, boy and girl,
were clattering home. Old Stephen was standing in the street, with the
old sensation upon him which the stoppage of the machinery always
produced—the sensation of its having worked and stopped in his own head.
‘Yet I don’t see Rachael, still!’ said he.
It was a wet night, and many groups of young women passed him, with their
shawls drawn over their bare heads and held close under their chins to
keep the rain out. He knew Rachael well, for a glance at any one of
these groups was sufficient to show him that she was not there. At last,
there were no more to come; and then he turned away, saying in a tone of
disappointment, ‘Why, then, ha’ missed her!’
But, he had not gone the length of three streets, when he saw another of
the shawled figures in advance of him, at which he looked so keenly that
perhaps its mere shadow indistinctly reflected on the wet pavement—if he
could have seen it without the figure itself moving along from lamp to
lamp, brightening and fading as it went—would have been enough to tell
him who was there. Making his pace at once much quicker and much softer,
he darted on until he was very near this figure, then fell into his
former walk, and called ‘Rachael!’
She turned, being then in the brightness of a lamp; and raising her hood
a little, showed a quiet oval face, dark and rather delicate, irradiated
by a pair of very gentle eyes, and further set off by the perfect order
of her shining black hair. It was not a face in its first bloom; she was
a woman five and thirty years of age.
‘Ah, lad! ’Tis thou?’ When she had said this, with a smile which would
have been quite expressed, though nothing of her had been seen but her
pleasant eyes, she replaced her hood again, and they went on together.
‘I thought thou wast ahind me, Rachael?’
‘No.’
‘Early t’night, lass?’
‘’Times I’m a little early, Stephen! ’times a little late. I’m never to
be counted on, going home.’
‘Nor going t’other way, neither, ’t seems to me, Rachael?’
‘No, Stephen.’
He looked at her with some disappointment in his face, but with a
respectful and patient conviction that she must be right in whatever she
did. The expression was not lost upon her; she laid her hand lightly on
his arm a moment as if to thank him for it.
‘We are such true friends, lad, and such old friends, and getting to be
such old folk, now.’
‘No, Rachael, thou’rt as young as ever thou wast.’
‘One of us would be puzzled how to get old, Stephen, without ’t other
getting so too, both being alive,’ she answered, laughing; ‘but, anyways,
we’re such old friends, and t’ hide a word of honest truth fro’ one
another would be a sin and a pity. ’Tis better not to walk too much
together. ’Times, yes! ’Twould be hard, indeed, if ’twas not to be at
all,’ she said, with a cheerfulness she sought to communicate to him.
‘’Tis hard, anyways, Rachael.’
‘Try to think not; and ’twill seem better.’
‘I’ve tried a long time, and ’ta’nt got better. But thou’rt right; ’t
might mak fok talk, even of thee. Thou hast been that to me, Rachael,
through so many year: thou hast done me so much good, and heartened of me
in that cheering way, that thy word is a law to me. Ah, lass, and a
bright good law! Better than some real ones.’
‘Never fret about them, Stephen,’ she answered quickly, and not without
an anxious glance at his face. ‘Let the laws be.’
‘Yes,’ he said, with a slow nod or two. ‘Let ’em be. Let everything be.
Let all sorts alone. ’Tis a muddle, and that’s aw.’
‘Always a muddle?’ said Rachael, with another gentle touch upon his arm,
as if to recall him out of the thoughtfulness, in which he was biting the
long ends of his loose neckerchief as he walked along. The touch had its
instantaneous effect. He let them fall, turned a smiling face upon her,
and said, as he broke into a good-humoured laugh, ‘Ay, Rachael, lass,
awlus a muddle. That’s where I stick. I come to the muddle many times
and agen, and I never get beyond it.’
They had walked some distance, and were near their own homes. The
woman’s was the first reached. It was in one of the many small streets
for which the favourite undertaker (who turned a handsome sum out of the
one poor ghastly pomp of the neighbourhood) kept a black ladder, in order
that those who had done their daily groping up and down the narrow stairs
might slide out of this working world by the windows. She stopped at the
corner, and putting her hand in his, wished him good night.
‘Good night, dear lass; good night!’
She went, with her neat figure and her sober womanly step, down the dark
street, and he stood looking after her until she turned into one of the
small houses. There was not a flutter of her coarse shawl, perhaps, but
had its interest in this man’s eyes; not a tone of her voice but had its
echo in his innermost heart.
When she was lost to his view, he pursued his homeward way, glancing up
sometimes at the sky, where the clouds were sailing fast and wildly.
But, they were broken now, and the rain had ceased, and the moon
shone,—looking down the high chimneys of Coketown on the deep furnaces
below, and casting Titanic shadows of the steam-engines at rest, upon the
walls where they were lodged. The man seemed to have brightened with the
night, as he went on.
His home, in such another street as the first, saving that it was
narrower, was over a little shop. How it came to pass that any people
found it worth their while to sell or buy the wretched little toys, mixed
up in its window with cheap newspapers and pork (there was a leg to be
raffled for to-morrow-night), matters not here. He took his end of
candle from a shelf, lighted it at another end of candle on the counter,
without disturbing the mistress of the shop who was asleep in her little
room, and went upstairs into his lodging.
It was a room, not unacquainted with the black ladder under various
tenants; but as neat, at present, as such a room could be. A few books
and writings were on an old bureau in a corner, the furniture was decent
and sufficient, and, though the atmosphere was tainted, the room was
clean.
Going to the hearth to set the candle down upon a round three-legged
table standing there, he stumbled against something. As he recoiled,
looking down at it, it raised itself up into the form of a woman in a
sitting attitude.
‘Heaven’s mercy, woman!’ he cried, falling farther off from the figure.
‘Hast thou come back again!’
Such a woman! A disabled, drunken creature, barely able to preserve her
sitting posture by steadying herself with one begrimed hand on the floor,
while the other was so purposeless in trying to push away her tangled
hair from her face, that it only blinded her the more with the dirt upon
it. A creature so foul to look at, in her tatters, stains and splashes,
but so much fouler than that in her moral infamy, that it was a shameful
thing even to see her.
After an impatient oath or two, and some stupid clawing of herself with
the hand not necessary to her support, she got her hair away from her
eyes sufficiently to obtain a sight of him. Then she sat swaying her
body to and fro, and making gestures with her unnerved arm, which seemed
intended as the accompaniment to a fit of laughter, though her face was
stolid and drowsy.
‘Eigh, lad? What, yo’r there?’ Some hoarse sounds meant for this, came
mockingly out of her at last; and her head dropped forward on her breast.
‘Back agen?’ she screeched, after some minutes, as if he had that moment
said it. ‘Yes! And back agen. Back agen ever and ever so often. Back?
Yes, back. Why not?’
Roused by the unmeaning violence with which she cried it out, she
scrambled up, and stood supporting herself with her shoulders against the
wall; dangling in one hand by the string, a dunghill-fragment of a
bonnet, and trying to look scornfully at him.
‘I’ll sell thee off again, and I’ll sell thee off again, and I’ll sell
thee off a score of times!’ she cried, with something between a furious
menace and an effort at a defiant dance. ‘Come awa’ from th’ bed!’ He
was sitting on the side of it, with his face hidden in his hands. ‘Come
awa! from ’t. ’Tis mine, and I’ve a right to t’!’
As she staggered to it, he avoided her with a shudder, and passed—his
face still hidden—to the opposite end of the room. She threw herself
upon the bed heavily, and soon was snoring hard. He sunk into a chair,
and moved but once all that night. It was to throw a covering over her;
as if his hands were not enough to hide her, even in the darkness.
CHAPTER XI
NO WAY OUT
THE Fairy palaces burst into illumination, before pale morning showed the
monstrous serpents of smoke trailing themselves over Coketown. A
clattering of clogs upon the pavement; a rapid ringing of bells; and all
the melancholy mad elephants, polished and oiled up for the day’s
monotony, were at their heavy exercise again.
Stephen bent over his loom, quiet, watchful, and steady. A special
contrast, as every man was in the forest of looms where Stephen worked,
to the crashing, smashing, tearing piece of mechanism at which he
laboured. Never fear, good people of an anxious turn of mind, that Art
will consign Nature to oblivion. Set anywhere, side by side, the work of
GOD and the work of man; and the former, even though it be a troop of
Hands of very small account, will gain in dignity from the comparison.
So many hundred Hands in this Mill; so many hundred horse Steam Power.
It is known, to the force of a single pound weight, what the engine will
do; but, not all the calculators of the National Debt can tell me the
capacity for good or evil, for love or hatred, for patriotism or
discontent, for the decomposition of virtue into vice, or the reverse, at
any single moment in the soul of one of these its quiet servants, with
the composed faces and the regulated actions. There is no mystery in it;
there is an unfathomable mystery in the meanest of them, for
ever.—Supposing we were to reverse our arithmetic for material objects,
and to govern these awful unknown quantities by other means!
The day grew strong, and showed itself outside, even against the flaming
lights within. The lights were turned out, and the work went on. The
rain fell, and the Smoke-serpents, submissive to the curse of all that
tribe, trailed themselves upon the earth. In the waste-yard outside, the
steam from the escape pipe, the litter of barrels and old iron, the
shining heaps of coals, the ashes everywhere, were shrouded in a veil of
mist and rain.
The work went on, until the noon-bell rang. More clattering upon the
pavements. The looms, and wheels, and Hands all out of gear for an hour.
Stephen came out of the hot mill into the damp wind and cold wet streets,
haggard and worn. He turned from his own class and his own quarter,
taking nothing but a little bread as he walked along, towards the hill on
which his principal employer lived, in a red house with black outside
shutters, green inside blinds, a black street door, up two white steps,
BOUNDERBY (in letters very like himself) upon a brazen plate, and a round
brazen door-handle underneath it, like a brazen full-stop.
Mr. Bounderby was at his lunch. So Stephen had expected. Would his
servant say that one of the Hands begged leave to speak to him? Message
in return, requiring name of such Hand. Stephen Blackpool. There was
nothing troublesome against Stephen Blackpool; yes, he might come in.
Stephen Blackpool in the parlour. Mr. Bounderby (whom he just knew by
sight), at lunch on chop and sherry. Mrs. Sparsit netting at the
fireside, in a side-saddle attitude, with one foot in a cotton stirrup.
It was a part, at once of Mrs. Sparsit’s dignity and service, not to
lunch. She supervised the meal officially, but implied that in her own
stately person she considered lunch a weakness.
‘Now, Stephen,’ said Mr. Bounderby, ‘what’s the matter with _you_?’
Stephen made a bow. Not a servile one—these Hands will never do that!
Lord bless you, sir, you’ll never catch them at that, if they have been
with you twenty years!—and, as a complimentary toilet for Mrs. Sparsit,
tucked his neckerchief ends into his waistcoat.
‘Now, you know,’ said Mr. Bounderby, taking some sherry, ‘we have never
had any difficulty with you, and you have never been one of the
unreasonable ones. You don’t expect to be set up in a coach and six, and
to be fed on turtle soup and venison, with a gold spoon, as a good many
of ’em do!’ Mr. Bounderby always represented this to be the sole,
immediate, and direct object of any Hand who was not entirely satisfied;
‘and therefore I know already that you have not come here to make a
complaint. Now, you know, I am certain of that, beforehand.’
‘No, sir, sure I ha’ not coom for nowt o’ th’ kind.’
Mr. Bounderby seemed agreeably surprised, notwithstanding his previous
strong conviction. ‘Very well,’ he returned. ‘You’re a steady Hand, and
I was not mistaken. Now, let me hear what it’s all about. As it’s not
that, let me hear what it is. What have you got to say? Out with it,
lad!’
Stephen happened to glance towards Mrs. Sparsit. ‘I can go, Mr.
Bounderby, if you wish it,’ said that self-sacrificing lady, making a
feint of taking her foot out of the stirrup.
Mr. Bounderby stayed her, by holding a mouthful of chop in suspension
before swallowing it, and putting out his left hand. Then, withdrawing
his hand and swallowing his mouthful of chop, he said to Stephen:
‘Now you know, this good lady is a born lady, a high lady. You are not
to suppose because she keeps my house for me, that she hasn’t been very
high up the tree—ah, up at the top of the tree! Now, if you have got
anything to say that can’t be said before a born lady, this lady will
leave the room. If what you have got to say _can_ be said before a born
lady, this lady will stay where she is.’
‘Sir, I hope I never had nowt to say, not fitten for a born lady to year,
sin’ I were born mysen’,’ was the reply, accompanied with a slight flush.
‘Very well,’ said Mr. Bounderby, pushing away his plate, and leaning
back. ‘Fire away!’
‘I ha’ coom,’ Stephen began, raising his eyes from the floor, after a
moment’s consideration, ‘to ask yo yor advice. I need ’t overmuch. I
were married on Eas’r Monday nineteen year sin, long and dree. She were
a young lass—pretty enow—wi’ good accounts of herseln. Well! She went
bad—soon. Not along of me. Gonnows I were not a unkind husband to her.’
‘I have heard all this before,’ said Mr. Bounderby. ‘She took to
drinking, left off working, sold the furniture, pawned the clothes, and
played old Gooseberry.’
‘I were patient wi’ her.’
(‘The more fool you, I think,’ said Mr. Bounderby, in confidence to his
wine-glass.)
‘I were very patient wi’ her. I tried to wean her fra ’t ower and ower
agen. I tried this, I tried that, I tried t’other. I ha’ gone home,
many’s the time, and found all vanished as I had in the world, and her
without a sense left to bless herseln lying on bare ground. I ha’ dun ’t
not once, not twice—twenty time!’
Every line in his face deepened as he said it, and put in its affecting
evidence of the suffering he had undergone.
‘From bad to worse, from worse to worsen. She left me. She disgraced
herseln everyways, bitter and bad. She coom back, she coom back, she
coom back. What could I do t’ hinder her? I ha’ walked the streets
nights long, ere ever I’d go home. I ha’ gone t’ th’ brigg, minded to
fling myseln ower, and ha’ no more on’t. I ha’ bore that much, that I
were owd when I were young.’
Mrs. Sparsit, easily ambling along with her netting-needles, raised the
Coriolanian eyebrows and shook her head, as much as to say, ‘The great
know trouble as well as the small. Please to turn your humble eye in My
direction.’
‘I ha’ paid her to keep awa’ fra’ me. These five year I ha’ paid her. I
ha’ gotten decent fewtrils about me agen. I ha’ lived hard and sad, but
not ashamed and fearfo’ a’ the minnits o’ my life. Last night, I went
home. There she lay upon my har-stone! There she is!’
In the strength of his misfortune, and the energy of his distress, he
fired for the moment like a proud man. In another moment, he stood as he
had stood all the time—his usual stoop upon him; his pondering face
addressed to Mr. Bounderby, with a curious expression on it, half shrewd,
half perplexed, as if his mind were set upon unravelling something very
difficult; his hat held tight in his left hand, which rested on his hip;
his right arm, with a rugged propriety and force of action, very
earnestly emphasizing what he said: not least so when it always paused, a
little bent, but not withdrawn, as he paused.
‘I was acquainted with all this, you know,’ said Mr. Bounderby, ‘except
the last clause, long ago. It’s a bad job; that’s what it is. You had
better have been satisfied as you were, and not have got married.
However, it’s too late to say that.’
‘Was it an unequal marriage, sir, in point of years?’ asked Mrs. Sparsit.
‘You hear what this lady asks. Was it an unequal marriage in point of
years, this unlucky job of yours?’ said Mr. Bounderby.
‘Not e’en so. I were one-and-twenty myseln; she were twenty nighbut.’
‘Indeed, sir?’ said Mrs. Sparsit to her Chief, with great placidity. ‘I
inferred, from its being so miserable a marriage, that it was probably an
unequal one in point of years.’
Mr. Bounderby looked very hard at the good lady in a side-long way that
had an odd sheepishness about it. He fortified himself with a little
more sherry.
‘Well? Why don’t you go on?’ he then asked, turning rather irritably on
Stephen Blackpool.
‘I ha’ coom to ask yo, sir, how I am to be ridded o’ this woman.’
Stephen infused a yet deeper gravity into the mixed expression of his
attentive face. Mrs. Sparsit uttered a gentle ejaculation, as having
received a moral shock.
‘What do you mean?’ said Bounderby, getting up to lean his back against
the chimney-piece. ‘What are you talking about? You took her for better
for worse.’
‘I mun’ be ridden o’ her. I cannot bear ’t nommore. I ha’ lived under
’t so long, for that I ha’ had’n the pity and comforting words o’ th’
best lass living or dead. Haply, but for her, I should ha’ gone
battering mad.’
‘He wishes to be free, to marry the female of whom he speaks, I fear,
sir,’ observed Mrs. Sparsit in an undertone, and much dejected by the
immorality of the people.
‘I do. The lady says what’s right. I do. I were a coming to ’t. I ha’
read i’ th’ papers that great folk (fair faw ’em a’! I wishes ’em no
hurt!) are not bonded together for better for worst so fast, but that
they can be set free fro’ _their_ misfortnet marriages, an’ marry ower
agen. When they dunnot agree, for that their tempers is ill-sorted, they
has rooms o’ one kind an’ another in their houses, above a bit, and they
can live asunders. We fok ha’ only one room, and we can’t. When that
won’t do, they ha’ gowd an’ other cash, an’ they can say “This for yo’
an’ that for me,” an’ they can go their separate ways. We can’t. Spite
o’ all that, they can be set free for smaller wrongs than mine. So, I
mun be ridden o’ this woman, and I want t’ know how?’
‘No how,’ returned Mr. Bounderby.
‘If I do her any hurt, sir, there’s a law to punish me?’
‘Of course there is.’
‘If I flee from her, there’s a law to punish me?’
‘Of course there is.’
‘If I marry t’oother dear lass, there’s a law to punish me?’
‘Of course there is.’
‘If I was to live wi’ her an’ not marry her—saying such a thing could be,
which it never could or would, an’ her so good—there’s a law to punish
me, in every innocent child belonging to me?’
‘Of course there is.’
‘Now, a’ God’s name,’ said Stephen Blackpool, ‘show me the law to help
me!’
‘Hem! There’s a sanctity in this relation of life,’ said Mr. Bounderby,
‘and—and—it must be kept up.’
‘No no, dunnot say that, sir. ’Tan’t kep’ up that way. Not that way.
’Tis kep’ down that way. I’m a weaver, I were in a fact’ry when a chilt,
but I ha’ gotten een to see wi’ and eern to year wi’. I read in th’
papers every ’Sizes, every Sessions—and you read too—I know it!—with
dismay—how th’ supposed unpossibility o’ ever getting unchained from one
another, at any price, on any terms, brings blood upon this land, and
brings many common married fok to battle, murder, and sudden death. Let
us ha’ this, right understood. Mine’s a grievous case, an’ I want—if yo
will be so good—t’ know the law that helps me.’
‘Now, I tell you what!’ said Mr. Bounderby, putting his hands in his
pockets. ‘There _is_ such a law.’
Stephen, subsiding into his quiet manner, and never wandering in his
attention, gave a nod.
‘But it’s not for you at all. It costs money. It costs a mint of
money.’
‘How much might that be?’ Stephen calmly asked.
‘Why, you’d have to go to Doctors’ Commons with a suit, and you’d have to
go to a court of Common Law with a suit, and you’d have to go to the
House of Lords with a suit, and you’d have to get an Act of Parliament to
enable you to marry again, and it would cost you (if it was a case of
very plain sailing), I suppose from a thousand to fifteen hundred pound,’
said Mr. Bounderby. ‘Perhaps twice the money.’
‘There’s no other law?’
‘Certainly not.’
‘Why then, sir,’ said Stephen, turning white, and motioning with that
right hand of his, as if he gave everything to the four winds, ‘’_tis_ a
muddle. ’Tis just a muddle a’toogether, an’ the sooner I am dead, the
better.’
(Mrs. Sparsit again dejected by the impiety of the people.)
‘Pooh, pooh! Don’t you talk nonsense, my good fellow,’ said Mr.
Bounderby, ‘about things you don’t understand; and don’t you call the
Institutions of your country a muddle, or you’ll get yourself into a real
muddle one of these fine mornings. The institutions of your country are
not your piece-work, and the only thing you have got to do, is, to mind
your piece-work. You didn’t take your wife for fast and for loose; but
for better for worse. If she has turned out worse—why, all we have got
to say is, she might have turned out better.’
‘’Tis a muddle,’ said Stephen, shaking his head as he moved to the door.
‘’Tis a’ a muddle!’
‘Now, I’ll tell you what!’ Mr. Bounderby resumed, as a valedictory
address. ‘With what I shall call your unhallowed opinions, you have been
quite shocking this lady: who, as I have already told you, is a born
lady, and who, as I have not already told you, has had her own marriage
misfortunes to the tune of tens of thousands of pounds—tens of Thousands
of Pounds!’ (he repeated it with great relish). ‘Now, you have always
been a steady Hand hitherto; but my opinion is, and so I tell you
plainly, that you are turning into the wrong road. You have been
listening to some mischievous stranger or other—they’re always about—and
the best thing you can do is, to come out of that. Now you know;’ here
his countenance expressed marvellous acuteness; ‘I can see as far into a
grindstone as another man; farther than a good many, perhaps, because I
had my nose well kept to it when I was young. I see traces of the turtle
soup, and venison, and gold spoon in this. Yes, I do!’ cried Mr.
Bounderby, shaking his head with obstinate cunning. ‘By the Lord Harry,
I do!’
With a very different shake of the head and deep sigh, Stephen said,
‘Thank you, sir, I wish you good day.’ So he left Mr. Bounderby swelling
at his own portrait on the wall, as if he were going to explode himself
into it; and Mrs. Sparsit still ambling on with her foot in her stirrup,
looking quite cast down by the popular vices.
CHAPTER XII
THE OLD WOMAN
OLD STEPHEN descended the two white steps, shutting the black door with
the brazen door-plate, by the aid of the brazen full-stop, to which he
gave a parting polish with the sleeve of his coat, observing that his hot
hand clouded it. He crossed the street with his eyes bent upon the
ground, and thus was walking sorrowfully away, when he felt a touch upon
his arm.
It was not the touch he needed most at such a moment—the touch that could
calm the wild waters of his soul, as the uplifted hand of the sublimest
love and patience could abate the raging of the sea—yet it was a woman’s
hand too. It was an old woman, tall and shapely still, though withered
by time, on whom his eyes fell when he stopped and turned. She was very
cleanly and plainly dressed, had country mud upon her shoes, and was
newly come from a journey. The flutter of her manner, in the unwonted
noise of the streets; the spare shawl, carried unfolded on her arm; the
heavy umbrella, and little basket; the loose long-fingered gloves, to
which her hands were unused; all bespoke an old woman from the country,
in her plain holiday clothes, come into Coketown on an expedition of rare
occurrence. Remarking this at a glance, with the quick observation of
his class, Stephen Blackpool bent his attentive face—his face, which,
like the faces of many of his order, by dint of long working with eyes
and hands in the midst of a prodigious noise, had acquired the
concentrated look with which we are familiar in the countenances of the
deaf—the better to hear what she asked him.
‘Pray, sir,’ said the old woman, ‘didn’t I see you come out of that
gentleman’s house?’ pointing back to Mr. Bounderby’s. ‘I believe it was
you, unless I have had the bad luck to mistake the person in following?’
‘Yes, missus,’ returned Stephen, ‘it were me.’
‘Have you—you’ll excuse an old woman’s curiosity—have you seen the
gentleman?’
‘Yes, missus.’
‘And how did he look, sir? Was he portly, bold, outspoken, and hearty?’
As she straightened her own figure, and held up her head in adapting her
action to her words, the idea crossed Stephen that he had seen this old
woman before, and had not quite liked her.
‘O yes,’ he returned, observing her more attentively, ‘he were all that.’
‘And healthy,’ said the old woman, ‘as the fresh wind?’
‘Yes,’ returned Stephen. ‘He were ett’n and drinking—as large and as
loud as a Hummobee.’
‘Thank you!’ said the old woman, with infinite content. ‘Thank you!’
He certainly never had seen this old woman before. Yet there was a vague
remembrance in his mind, as if he had more than once dreamed of some old
woman like her.
She walked along at his side, and, gently accommodating himself to her
humour, he said Coketown was a busy place, was it not? To which she
answered ‘Eigh sure! Dreadful busy!’ Then he said, she came from the
country, he saw? To which she answered in the affirmative.
‘By Parliamentary, this morning. I came forty mile by Parliamentary this
morning, and I’m going back the same forty mile this afternoon. I walked
nine mile to the station this morning, and if I find nobody on the road
to give me a lift, I shall walk the nine mile back to-night. That’s
pretty well, sir, at my age!’ said the chatty old woman, her eye
brightening with exultation.
‘’Deed ’tis. Don’t do’t too often, missus.’
‘No, no. Once a year,’ she answered, shaking her head. ‘I spend my
savings so, once every year. I come regular, to tramp about the streets,
and see the gentlemen.’
‘Only to see ’em?’ returned Stephen.
‘That’s enough for me,’ she replied, with great earnestness and interest
of manner. ‘I ask no more! I have been standing about, on this side of
the way, to see that gentleman,’ turning her head back towards Mr.
Bounderby’s again, ‘come out. But, he’s late this year, and I have not
seen him. You came out instead. Now, if I am obliged to go back without
a glimpse of him—I only want a glimpse—well! I have seen you, and you
have seen him, and I must make that do.’ Saying this, she looked at
Stephen as if to fix his features in her mind, and her eye was not so
bright as it had been.
With a large allowance for difference of tastes, and with all submission
to the patricians of Coketown, this seemed so extraordinary a source of
interest to take so much trouble about, that it perplexed him. But they
were passing the church now, and as his eye caught the clock, he
quickened his pace.
He was going to his work? the old woman said, quickening hers, too, quite
easily. Yes, time was nearly out. On his telling her where he worked,
the old woman became a more singular old woman than before.
‘An’t you happy?’ she asked him.
‘Why—there’s awmost nobbody but has their troubles, missus.’ He answered
evasively, because the old woman appeared to take it for granted that he
would be very happy indeed, and he had not the heart to disappoint her.
He knew that there was trouble enough in the world; and if the old woman
had lived so long, and could count upon his having so little, why so much
the better for her, and none the worse for him.
‘Ay, ay! You have your troubles at home, you mean?’ she said.
‘Times. Just now and then,’ he answered, slightly.
‘But, working under such a gentleman, they don’t follow you to the
Factory?’
No, no; they didn’t follow him there, said Stephen. All correct there.
Everything accordant there. (He did not go so far as to say, for her
pleasure, that there was a sort of Divine Right there; but, I have heard
claims almost as magnificent of late years.)
They were now in the black by-road near the place, and the Hands were
crowding in. The bell was ringing, and the Serpent was a Serpent of many
coils, and the Elephant was getting ready. The strange old woman was
delighted with the very bell. It was the beautifullest bell she had ever
heard, she said, and sounded grand!
She asked him, when he stopped good-naturedly to shake hands with her
before going in, how long he had worked there?
‘A dozen year,’ he told her.
‘I must kiss the hand,’ said she, ‘that has worked in this fine factory
for a dozen year!’ And she lifted it, though he would have prevented
her, and put it to her lips. What harmony, besides her age and her
simplicity, surrounded her, he did not know, but even in this fantastic
action there was a something neither out of time nor place: a something
which it seemed as if nobody else could have made as serious, or done
with such a natural and touching air.
He had been at his loom full half an hour, thinking about this old woman,
when, having occasion to move round the loom for its adjustment, he
glanced through a window which was in his corner, and saw her still
looking up at the pile of building, lost in admiration. Heedless of the
smoke and mud and wet, and of her two long journeys, she was gazing at
it, as if the heavy thrum that issued from its many stories were proud
music to her.
She was gone by and by, and the day went after her, and the lights sprung
up again, and the Express whirled in full sight of the Fairy Palace over
the arches near: little felt amid the jarring of the machinery, and
scarcely heard above its crash and rattle. Long before then his thoughts
had gone back to the dreary room above the little shop, and to the
shameful figure heavy on the bed, but heavier on his heart.
Machinery slackened; throbbing feebly like a fainting pulse; stopped.
The bell again; the glare of light and heat dispelled; the factories,
looming heavy in the black wet night—their tall chimneys rising up into
the air like competing Towers of Babel.
He had spoken to Rachael only last night, it was true, and had walked
with her a little way; but he had his new misfortune on him, in which no
one else could give him a moment’s relief, and, for the sake of it, and
because he knew himself to want that softening of his anger which no
voice but hers could effect, he felt he might so far disregard what she
had said as to wait for her again. He waited, but she had eluded him.
She was gone. On no other night in the year could he so ill have spared
her patient face.
O! Better to have no home in which to lay his head, than to have a home
and dread to go to it, through such a cause. He ate and drank, for he
was exhausted—but he little knew or cared what; and he wandered about in
the chill rain, thinking and thinking, and brooding and brooding.
No word of a new marriage had ever passed between them; but Rachael had
taken great pity on him years ago, and to her alone he had opened his
closed heart all this time, on the subject of his miseries; and he knew
very well that if he were free to ask her, she would take him. He
thought of the home he might at that moment have been seeking with
pleasure and pride; of the different man he might have been that night;
of the lightness then in his now heavy-laden breast; of the then restored
honour, self-respect, and tranquillity all torn to pieces. He thought of
the waste of the best part of his life, of the change it made in his
character for the worse every day, of the dreadful nature of his
existence, bound hand and foot, to a dead woman, and tormented by a demon
in her shape. He thought of Rachael, how young when they were first
brought together in these circumstances, how mature now, how soon to grow
old. He thought of the number of girls and women she had seen marry, how
many homes with children in them she had seen grow up around her, how she
had contentedly pursued her own lone quiet path—for him—and how he had
sometimes seen a shade of melancholy on her blessed face, that smote him
with remorse and despair. He set the picture of her up, beside the
infamous image of last night; and thought, Could it be, that the whole
earthly course of one so gentle, good, and self-denying, was subjugate to
such a wretch as that!
Filled with these thoughts—so filled that he had an unwholesome sense of
growing larger, of being placed in some new and diseased relation towards
the objects among which he passed, of seeing the iris round every misty
light turn red—he went home for shelter.
CHAPTER XIII
RACHAEL
A CANDLE faintly burned in the window, to which the black ladder had
often been raised for the sliding away of all that was most precious in
this world to a striving wife and a brood of hungry babies; and Stephen
added to his other thoughts the stern reflection, that of all the
casualties of this existence upon earth, not one was dealt out with so
unequal a hand as Death. The inequality of Birth was nothing to it.
For, say that the child of a King and the child of a Weaver were born
to-night in the same moment, what was that disparity, to the death of any
human creature who was serviceable to, or beloved by, another, while this
abandoned woman lived on!
From the outside of his home he gloomily passed to the inside, with
suspended breath and with a slow footstep. He went up to his door,
opened it, and so into the room.
Quiet and peace were there. Rachael was there, sitting by the bed.
She turned her head, and the light of her face shone in upon the midnight
of his mind. She sat by the bed, watching and tending his wife. That is
to say, he saw that some one lay there, and he knew too well it must be
she; but Rachael’s hands had put a curtain up, so that she was screened
from his eyes. Her disgraceful garments were removed, and some of
Rachael’s were in the room. Everything was in its place and order as he
had always kept it, the little fire was newly trimmed, and the hearth was
freshly swept. It appeared to him that he saw all this in Rachael’s
face, and looked at nothing besides. While looking at it, it was shut
out from his view by the softened tears that filled his eyes; but not
before he had seen how earnestly she looked at him, and how her own eyes
were filled too.
She turned again towards the bed, and satisfying herself that all was
quiet there, spoke in a low, calm, cheerful voice.
‘I am glad you have come at last, Stephen. You are very late.’
‘I ha’ been walking up an’ down.’
‘I thought so. But ’tis too bad a night for that. The rain falls very
heavy, and the wind has risen.’
The wind? True. It was blowing hard. Hark to the thundering in the
chimney, and the surging noise! To have been out in such a wind, and not
to have known it was blowing!
‘I have been here once before, to-day, Stephen. Landlady came round for
me at dinner-time. There was some one here that needed looking to, she
said. And ‘deed she was right. All wandering and lost, Stephen.
Wounded too, and bruised.’
He slowly moved to a chair and sat down, drooping his head before her.
‘I came to do what little I could, Stephen; first, for that she worked
with me when we were girls both, and for that you courted her and married
her when I was her friend—’
He laid his furrowed forehead on his hand, with a low groan.
‘And next, for that I know your heart, and am right sure and certain that
’tis far too merciful to let her die, or even so much as suffer, for want
of aid. Thou knowest who said, “Let him who is without sin among you
cast the first stone at her!” There have been plenty to do that. Thou
art not the man to cast the last stone, Stephen, when she is brought so
low.’
‘O Rachael, Rachael!’
‘Thou hast been a cruel sufferer, Heaven reward thee!’ she said, in
compassionate accents. ‘I am thy poor friend, with all my heart and
mind.’
[Picture: Stephen and Rachael in the sick room]
The wounds of which she had spoken, seemed to be about the neck of the
self-made outcast. She dressed them now, still without showing her. She
steeped a piece of linen in a basin, into which she poured some liquid
from a bottle, and laid it with a gentle hand upon the sore. The
three-legged table had been drawn close to the bedside, and on it there
were two bottles. This was one.
It was not so far off, but that Stephen, following her hands with his
eyes, could read what was printed on it in large letters. He turned of a
deadly hue, and a sudden horror seemed to fall upon him.
‘I will stay here, Stephen,’ said Rachael, quietly resuming her seat,
‘till the bells go Three. ’Tis to be done again at three, and then she
may be left till morning.’
‘But thy rest agen to-morrow’s work, my dear.’
‘I slept sound last night. I can wake many nights, when I am put to it.
’Tis thou who art in need of rest—so white and tired. Try to sleep in
the chair there, while I watch. Thou hadst no sleep last night, I can
well believe. To-morrow’s work is far harder for thee than for me.’
He heard the thundering and surging out of doors, and it seemed to him as
if his late angry mood were going about trying to get at him. She had
cast it out; she would keep it out; he trusted to her to defend him from
himself.
‘She don’t know me, Stephen; she just drowsily mutters and stares. I
have spoken to her times and again, but she don’t notice! ’Tis as well
so. When she comes to her right mind once more, I shall have done what I
can, and she never the wiser.’
‘How long, Rachael, is ’t looked for, that she’ll be so?’
‘Doctor said she would haply come to her mind to-morrow.’
His eyes fell again on the bottle, and a tremble passed over him, causing
him to shiver in every limb. She thought he was chilled with the wet.
‘No,’ he said, ‘it was not that. He had had a fright.’
‘A fright?’
‘Ay, ay! coming in. When I were walking. When I were thinking. When
I—’ It seized him again; and he stood up, holding by the mantel-shelf,
as he pressed his dank cold hair down with a hand that shook as if it
were palsied.
‘Stephen!’
She was coming to him, but he stretched out his arm to stop her.
‘No! Don’t, please; don’t. Let me see thee setten by the bed. Let me
see thee, a’ so good, and so forgiving. Let me see thee as I see thee
when I coom in. I can never see thee better than so. Never, never,
never!’
He had a violent fit of trembling, and then sunk into his chair. After a
time he controlled himself, and, resting with an elbow on one knee, and
his head upon that hand, could look towards Rachael. Seen across the dim
candle with his moistened eyes, she looked as if she had a glory shining
round her head. He could have believed she had. He did believe it, as
the noise without shook the window, rattled at the door below, and went
about the house clamouring and lamenting.
‘When she gets better, Stephen, ’tis to be hoped she’ll leave thee to
thyself again, and do thee no more hurt. Anyways we will hope so now.
And now I shall keep silence, for I want thee to sleep.’
He closed his eyes, more to please her than to rest his weary head; but,
by slow degrees as he listened to the great noise of the wind, he ceased
to hear it, or it changed into the working of his loom, or even into the
voices of the day (his own included) saying what had been really said.
Even this imperfect consciousness faded away at last, and he dreamed a
long, troubled dream.
He thought that he, and some one on whom his heart had long been set—but
she was not Rachael, and that surprised him, even in the midst of his
imaginary happiness—stood in the church being married. While the
ceremony was performing, and while he recognized among the witnesses some
whom he knew to be living, and many whom he knew to be dead, darkness
came on, succeeded by the shining of a tremendous light. It broke from
one line in the table of commandments at the altar, and illuminated the
building with the words. They were sounded through the church, too, as
if there were voices in the fiery letters. Upon this, the whole
appearance before him and around him changed, and nothing was left as it
had been, but himself and the clergyman. They stood in the daylight
before a crowd so vast, that if all the people in the world could have
been brought together into one space, they could not have looked, he
thought, more numerous; and they all abhorred him, and there was not one
pitying or friendly eye among the millions that were fastened on his
face. He stood on a raised stage, under his own loom; and, looking up at
the shape the loom took, and hearing the burial service distinctly read,
he knew that he was there to suffer death. In an instant what he stood
on fell below him, and he was gone.
—Out of what mystery he came back to his usual life, and to places that
he knew, he was unable to consider; but he was back in those places by
some means, and with this condemnation upon him, that he was never, in
this world or the next, through all the unimaginable ages of eternity, to
look on Rachael’s face or hear her voice. Wandering to and fro,
unceasingly, without hope, and in search of he knew not what (he only
knew that he was doomed to seek it), he was the subject of a nameless,
horrible dread, a mortal fear of one particular shape which everything
took. Whatsoever he looked at, grew into that form sooner or later. The
object of his miserable existence was to prevent its recognition by any
one among the various people he encountered. Hopeless labour! If he led
them out of rooms where it was, if he shut up drawers and closets where
it stood, if he drew the curious from places where he knew it to be
secreted, and got them out into the streets, the very chimneys of the
mills assumed that shape, and round them was the printed word.
The wind was blowing again, the rain was beating on the house-tops, and
the larger spaces through which he had strayed contracted to the four
walls of his room. Saving that the fire had died out, it was as his eyes
had closed upon it. Rachael seemed to have fallen into a doze, in the
chair by the bed. She sat wrapped in her shawl, perfectly still. The
table stood in the same place, close by the bedside, and on it, in its
real proportions and appearance, was the shape so often repeated.
He thought he saw the curtain move. He looked again, and he was sure it
moved. He saw a hand come forth and grope about a little. Then the
curtain moved more perceptibly, and the woman in the bed put it back, and
sat up.
With her woful eyes, so haggard and wild, so heavy and large, she looked
all round the room, and passed the corner where he slept in his chair.
Her eyes returned to that corner, and she put her hand over them as a
shade, while she looked into it. Again they went all round the room,
scarcely heeding Rachael if at all, and returned to that corner. He
thought, as she once more shaded them—not so much looking at him, as
looking for him with a brutish instinct that he was there—that no single
trace was left in those debauched features, or in the mind that went
along with them, of the woman he had married eighteen years before. But
that he had seen her come to this by inches, he never could have believed
her to be the same.
All this time, as if a spell were on him, he was motionless and
powerless, except to watch her.
Stupidly dozing, or communing with her incapable self about nothing, she
sat for a little while with her hands at her ears, and her head resting
on them. Presently, she resumed her staring round the room. And now,
for the first time, her eyes stopped at the table with the bottles on it.
Straightway she turned her eyes back to his corner, with the defiance of
last night, and moving very cautiously and softly, stretched out her
greedy hand. She drew a mug into the bed, and sat for a while
considering which of the two bottles she should choose. Finally, she
laid her insensate grasp upon the bottle that had swift and certain death
in it, and, before his eyes, pulled out the cork with her teeth.
Dream or reality, he had no voice, nor had he power to stir. If this be
real, and her allotted time be not yet come, wake, Rachael, wake!
She thought of that, too. She looked at Rachael, and very slowly, very
cautiously, poured out the contents. The draught was at her lips. A
moment and she would be past all help, let the whole world wake and come
about her with its utmost power. But in that moment Rachael started up
with a suppressed cry. The creature struggled, struck her, seized her by
the hair; but Rachael had the cup.
Stephen broke out of his chair. ‘Rachael, am I wakin’ or dreamin’ this
dreadfo’ night?’
‘’Tis all well, Stephen. I have been asleep, myself. ’Tis near three.
Hush! I hear the bells.’
The wind brought the sounds of the church clock to the window. They
listened, and it struck three. Stephen looked at her, saw how pale she
was, noted the disorder of her hair, and the red marks of fingers on her
forehead, and felt assured that his senses of sight and hearing had been
awake. She held the cup in her hand even now.
‘I thought it must be near three,’ she said, calmly pouring from the cup
into the basin, and steeping the linen as before. ‘I am thankful I
stayed! ’Tis done now, when I have put this on. There! And now she’s
quiet again. The few drops in the basin I’ll pour away, for ’tis bad
stuff to leave about, though ever so little of it.’ As she spoke, she
drained the basin into the ashes of the fire, and broke the bottle on the
hearth.
She had nothing to do, then, but to cover herself with her shawl before
going out into the wind and rain.
‘Thou’lt let me walk wi’ thee at this hour, Rachael?’
‘No, Stephen. ’Tis but a minute, and I’m home.’
‘Thou’rt not fearfo’;’ he said it in a low voice, as they went out at the
door; ‘to leave me alone wi’ her!’
As she looked at him, saying, ‘Stephen?’ he went down on his knee before
her, on the poor mean stairs, and put an end of her shawl to his lips.
‘Thou art an Angel. Bless thee, bless thee!’
‘I am, as I have told thee, Stephen, thy poor friend. Angels are not
like me. Between them, and a working woman fu’ of faults, there is a
deep gulf set. My little sister is among them, but she is changed.’
She raised her eyes for a moment as she said the words; and then they
fell again, in all their gentleness and mildness, on his face.
‘Thou changest me from bad to good. Thou mak’st me humbly wishfo’ to be
more like thee, and fearfo’ to lose thee when this life is ower, and a’
the muddle cleared awa’. Thou’rt an Angel; it may be, thou hast saved my
soul alive!’
She looked at him, on his knee at her feet, with her shawl still in his
hand, and the reproof on her lips died away when she saw the working of
his face.
‘I coom home desp’rate. I coom home wi’out a hope, and mad wi’ thinking
that when I said a word o’ complaint I was reckoned a unreasonable Hand.
I told thee I had had a fright. It were the Poison-bottle on table. I
never hurt a livin’ creetur; but happenin’ so suddenly upon ’t, I thowt,
“How can _I_ say what I might ha’ done to myseln, or her, or both!”’
She put her two hands on his mouth, with a face of terror, to stop him
from saying more. He caught them in his unoccupied hand, and holding
them, and still clasping the border of her shawl, said hurriedly:
‘But I see thee, Rachael, setten by the bed. I ha’ seen thee, aw this
night. In my troublous sleep I ha’ known thee still to be there.
Evermore I will see thee there. I nevermore will see her or think o’
her, but thou shalt be beside her. I nevermore will see or think o’
anything that angers me, but thou, so much better than me, shalt be by
th’ side on’t. And so I will try t’ look t’ th’ time, and so I will try
t’ trust t’ th’ time, when thou and me at last shall walk together far
awa’, beyond the deep gulf, in th’ country where thy little sister is.’
He kissed the border of her shawl again, and let her go. She bade him
good night in a broken voice, and went out into the street.
The wind blew from the quarter where the day would soon appear, and still
blew strongly. It had cleared the sky before it, and the rain had spent
itself or travelled elsewhere, and the stars were bright. He stood
bare-headed in the road, watching her quick disappearance. As the
shining stars were to the heavy candle in the window, so was Rachael, in
the rugged fancy of this man, to the common experiences of his life.
CHAPTER XIV
THE GREAT MANUFACTURER
TIME went on in Coketown like its own machinery: so much material wrought
up, so much fuel consumed, so many powers worn out, so much money made.
But, less inexorable than iron, steel, and brass, it brought its varying
seasons even into that wilderness of smoke and brick, and made the only
stand that ever _was_ made in the place against its direful uniformity.
‘Louisa is becoming,’ said Mr. Gradgrind, ‘almost a young woman.’
Time, with his innumerable horse-power, worked away, not minding what
anybody said, and presently turned out young Thomas a foot taller than
when his father had last taken particular notice of him.
‘Thomas is becoming,’ said Mr. Gradgrind, ‘almost a young man.’
Time passed Thomas on in the mill, while his father was thinking about
it, and there he stood in a long-tailed coat and a stiff shirt-collar.
‘Really,’ said Mr. Gradgrind, ‘the period has arrived when Thomas ought
to go to Bounderby.’
Time, sticking to him, passed him on into Bounderby’s Bank, made him an
inmate of Bounderby’s house, necessitated the purchase of his first
razor, and exercised him diligently in his calculations relative to
number one.
The same great manufacturer, always with an immense variety of work on
hand, in every stage of development, passed Sissy onward in his mill, and
worked her up into a very pretty article indeed.
‘I fear, Jupe,’ said Mr. Gradgrind, ‘that your continuance at the school
any longer would be useless.’
‘I am afraid it would, sir,’ Sissy answered with a curtsey.
‘I cannot disguise from you, Jupe,’ said Mr. Gradgrind, knitting his
brow, ‘that the result of your probation there has disappointed me; has
greatly disappointed me. You have not acquired, under Mr. and Mrs.
M’Choakumchild, anything like that amount of exact knowledge which I
looked for. You are extremely deficient in your facts. Your
acquaintance with figures is very limited. You are altogether backward,
and below the mark.’
‘I am sorry, sir,’ she returned; ‘but I know it is quite true. Yet I
have tried hard, sir.’
‘Yes,’ said Mr. Gradgrind, ‘yes, I believe you have tried hard; I have
observed you, and I can find no fault in that respect.’
‘Thank you, sir. I have thought sometimes;’ Sissy very timid here; ‘that
perhaps I tried to learn too much, and that if I had asked to be allowed
to try a little less, I might have—’
‘No, Jupe, no,’ said Mr. Gradgrind, shaking his head in his profoundest
and most eminently practical way. ‘No. The course you pursued, you
pursued according to the system—the system—and there is no more to be
said about it. I can only suppose that the circumstances of your early
life were too unfavourable to the development of your reasoning powers,
and that we began too late. Still, as I have said already, I am
disappointed.’
‘I wish I could have made a better acknowledgment, sir, of your kindness
to a poor forlorn girl who had no claim upon you, and of your protection
of her.’
‘Don’t shed tears,’ said Mr. Gradgrind. ‘Don’t shed tears. I don’t
complain of you. You are an affectionate, earnest, good young
woman—and—and we must make that do.’
‘Thank you, sir, very much,’ said Sissy, with a grateful curtsey.
‘You are useful to Mrs. Gradgrind, and (in a generally pervading way) you
are serviceable in the family also; so I understand from Miss Louisa,
and, indeed, so I have observed myself. I therefore hope,’ said Mr.
Gradgrind, ‘that you can make yourself happy in those relations.’
‘I should have nothing to wish, sir, if—’
‘I understand you,’ said Mr. Gradgrind; ‘you still refer to your father.
I have heard from Miss Louisa that you still preserve that bottle. Well!
If your training in the science of arriving at exact results had been
more successful, you would have been wiser on these points. I will say
no more.’
He really liked Sissy too well to have a contempt for her; otherwise he
held her calculating powers in such very slight estimation that he must
have fallen upon that conclusion. Somehow or other, he had become
possessed by an idea that there was something in this girl which could
hardly be set forth in a tabular form. Her capacity of definition might
be easily stated at a very low figure, her mathematical knowledge at
nothing; yet he was not sure that if he had been required, for example,
to tick her off into columns in a parliamentary return, he would have
quite known how to divide her.
In some stages of his manufacture of the human fabric, the processes of
Time are very rapid. Young Thomas and Sissy being both at such a stage
of their working up, these changes were effected in a year or two; while
Mr. Gradgrind himself seemed stationary in his course, and underwent no
alteration.
Except one, which was apart from his necessary progress through the mill.
Time hustled him into a little noisy and rather dirty machinery, in a
by-comer, and made him Member of Parliament for Coketown: one of the
respected members for ounce weights and measures, one of the
representatives of the multiplication table, one of the deaf honourable
gentlemen, dumb honourable gentlemen, blind honourable gentlemen, lame
honourable gentlemen, dead honourable gentlemen, to every other
consideration. Else wherefore live we in a Christian land, eighteen
hundred and odd years after our Master?
All this while, Louisa had been passing on, so quiet and reserved, and so
much given to watching the bright ashes at twilight as they fell into the
grate, and became extinct, that from the period when her father had said
she was almost a young woman—which seemed but yesterday—she had scarcely
attracted his notice again, when he found her quite a young woman.
‘Quite a young woman,’ said Mr. Gradgrind, musing. ‘Dear me!’
Soon after this discovery, he became more thoughtful than usual for
several days, and seemed much engrossed by one subject. On a certain
night, when he was going out, and Louisa came to bid him good-bye before
his departure—as he was not to be home until late and she would not see
him again until the morning—he held her in his arms, looking at her in
his kindest manner, and said:
‘My dear Louisa, you are a woman!’
She answered with the old, quick, searching look of the night when she
was found at the Circus; then cast down her eyes. ‘Yes, father.’
‘My dear,’ said Mr. Gradgrind, ‘I must speak with you alone and
seriously. Come to me in my room after breakfast to-morrow, will you?’
‘Yes, father.’
‘Your hands are rather cold, Louisa. Are you not well?’
‘Quite well, father.’
‘And cheerful?’
She looked at him again, and smiled in her peculiar manner. ‘I am as
cheerful, father, as I usually am, or usually have been.’
‘That’s well,’ said Mr. Gradgrind. So, he kissed her and went away; and
Louisa returned to the serene apartment of the hair-cutting character,
and leaning her elbow on her hand, looked again at the short-lived sparks
that so soon subsided into ashes.
‘Are you there, Loo?’ said her brother, looking in at the door. He was
quite a young gentleman of pleasure now, and not quite a prepossessing
one.
‘Dear Tom,’ she answered, rising and embracing him, ‘how long it is since
you have been to see me!’
‘Why, I have been otherwise engaged, Loo, in the evenings; and in the
daytime old Bounderby has been keeping me at it rather. But I touch him
up with you when he comes it too strong, and so we preserve an
understanding. I say! Has father said anything particular to you to-day
or yesterday, Loo?’
‘No, Tom. But he told me to-night that he wished to do so in the
morning.’
‘Ah! That’s what I mean,’ said Tom. ‘Do you know where he is
to-night?’—with a very deep expression.
‘No.’
‘Then I’ll tell you. He’s with old Bounderby. They are having a regular
confab together up at the Bank. Why at the Bank, do you think? Well,
I’ll tell you again. To keep Mrs. Sparsit’s ears as far off as possible,
I expect.’
With her hand upon her brother’s shoulder, Louisa still stood looking at
the fire. Her brother glanced at her face with greater interest than
usual, and, encircling her waist with his arm, drew her coaxingly to him.
‘You are very fond of me, an’t you, Loo?’
‘Indeed I am, Tom, though you do let such long intervals go by without
coming to see me.’
‘Well, sister of mine,’ said Tom, ‘when you say that, you are near my
thoughts. We might be so much oftener together—mightn’t we? Always
together, almost—mightn’t we? It would do me a great deal of good if you
were to make up your mind to I know what, Loo. It would be a splendid
thing for me. It would be uncommonly jolly!’
Her thoughtfulness baffled his cunning scrutiny. He could make nothing
of her face. He pressed her in his arm, and kissed her cheek. She
returned the kiss, but still looked at the fire.
‘I say, Loo! I thought I’d come, and just hint to you what was going on:
though I supposed you’d most likely guess, even if you didn’t know. I
can’t stay, because I’m engaged to some fellows to-night. You won’t
forget how fond you are of me?’
‘No, dear Tom, I won’t forget.’
‘That’s a capital girl,’ said Tom. ‘Good-bye, Loo.’
She gave him an affectionate good-night, and went out with him to the
door, whence the fires of Coketown could be seen, making the distance
lurid. She stood there, looking steadfastly towards them, and listening
to his departing steps. They retreated quickly, as glad to get away from
Stone Lodge; and she stood there yet, when he was gone and all was quiet.
It seemed as if, first in her own fire within the house, and then in the
fiery haze without, she tried to discover what kind of woof Old Time,
that greatest and longest-established Spinner of all, would weave from
the threads he had already spun into a woman. But his factory is a
secret place, his work is noiseless, and his Hands are mutes.
CHAPTER XV
FATHER AND DAUGHTER
ALTHOUGH Mr. Gradgrind did not take after Blue Beard, his room was quite
a blue chamber in its abundance of blue books. Whatever they could prove
(which is usually anything you like), they proved there, in an army
constantly strengthening by the arrival of new recruits. In that charmed
apartment, the most complicated social questions were cast up, got into
exact totals, and finally settled—if those concerned could only have been
brought to know it. As if an astronomical observatory should be made
without any windows, and the astronomer within should arrange the starry
universe solely by pen, ink, and paper, so Mr. Gradgrind, in _his_
Observatory (and there are many like it), had no need to cast an eye upon
the teeming myriads of human beings around him, but could settle all
their destinies on a slate, and wipe out all their tears with one dirty
little bit of sponge.
To this Observatory, then: a stern room, with a deadly statistical clock
in it, which measured every second with a beat like a rap upon a
coffin-lid; Louisa repaired on the appointed morning. A window looked
towards Coketown; and when she sat down near her father’s table, she saw
the high chimneys and the long tracts of smoke looming in the heavy
distance gloomily.
‘My dear Louisa,’ said her father, ‘I prepared you last night to give me
your serious attention in the conversation we are now going to have
together. You have been so well trained, and you do, I am happy to say,
so much justice to the education you have received, that I have perfect
confidence in your good sense. You are not impulsive, you are not
romantic, you are accustomed to view everything from the strong
dispassionate ground of reason and calculation. From that ground alone,
I know you will view and consider what I am going to communicate.’
He waited, as if he would have been glad that she said something. But
she said never a word.
‘Louisa, my dear, you are the subject of a proposal of marriage that has
been made to me.’
Again he waited, and again she answered not one word. This so far
surprised him, as to induce him gently to repeat, ‘a proposal of
marriage, my dear.’ To which she returned, without any visible emotion
whatever:
‘I hear you, father. I am attending, I assure you.’
‘Well!’ said Mr. Gradgrind, breaking into a smile, after being for the
moment at a loss, ‘you are even more dispassionate than I expected,
Louisa. Or, perhaps, you are not unprepared for the announcement I have
it in charge to make?’
‘I cannot say that, father, until I hear it. Prepared or unprepared, I
wish to hear it all from you. I wish to hear you state it to me,
father.’
Strange to relate, Mr. Gradgrind was not so collected at this moment as
his daughter was. He took a paper-knife in his hand, turned it over,
laid it down, took it up again, and even then had to look along the blade
of it, considering how to go on.
‘What you say, my dear Louisa, is perfectly reasonable. I have
undertaken then to let you know that—in short, that Mr. Bounderby has
informed me that he has long watched your progress with particular
interest and pleasure, and has long hoped that the time might ultimately
arrive when he should offer you his hand in marriage. That time, to
which he has so long, and certainly with great constancy, looked forward,
is now come. Mr. Bounderby has made his proposal of marriage to me, and
has entreated me to make it known to you, and to express his hope that
you will take it into your favourable consideration.’
Silence between them. The deadly statistical clock very hollow. The
distant smoke very black and heavy.
‘Father,’ said Louisa, ‘do you think I love Mr. Bounderby?’
Mr. Gradgrind was extremely discomfited by this unexpected question.
‘Well, my child,’ he returned, ‘I—really—cannot take upon myself to say.’
‘Father,’ pursued Louisa in exactly the same voice as before, ‘do you ask
me to love Mr. Bounderby?’
‘My dear Louisa, no. No. I ask nothing.’
‘Father,’ she still pursued, ‘does Mr. Bounderby ask me to love him?’
‘Really, my dear,’ said Mr. Gradgrind, ‘it is difficult to answer your
question—’
‘Difficult to answer it, Yes or No, father?
‘Certainly, my dear. Because;’ here was something to demonstrate, and it
set him up again; ‘because the reply depends so materially, Louisa, on
the sense in which we use the expression. Now, Mr. Bounderby does not do
you the injustice, and does not do himself the injustice, of pretending
to anything fanciful, fantastic, or (I am using synonymous terms)
sentimental. Mr. Bounderby would have seen you grow up under his eyes,
to very little purpose, if he could so far forget what is due to your
good sense, not to say to his, as to address you from any such ground.
Therefore, perhaps the expression itself—I merely suggest this to you, my
dear—may be a little misplaced.’
‘What would you advise me to use in its stead, father?’
‘Why, my dear Louisa,’ said Mr. Gradgrind, completely recovered by this
time, ‘I would advise you (since you ask me) to consider this question,
as you have been accustomed to consider every other question, simply as
one of tangible Fact. The ignorant and the giddy may embarrass such
subjects with irrelevant fancies, and other absurdities that have no
existence, properly viewed—really no existence—but it is no compliment to
you to say, that you know better. Now, what are the Facts of this case?
You are, we will say in round numbers, twenty years of age; Mr. Bounderby
is, we will say in round numbers, fifty. There is some disparity in your
respective years, but in your means and positions there is none; on the
contrary, there is a great suitability. Then the question arises, Is
this one disparity sufficient to operate as a bar to such a marriage? In
considering this question, it is not unimportant to take into account the
statistics of marriage, so far as they have yet been obtained, in England
and Wales. I find, on reference to the figures, that a large proportion
of these marriages are contracted between parties of very unequal ages,
and that the elder of these contracting parties is, in rather more than
three-fourths of these instances, the bridegroom. It is remarkable as
showing the wide prevalence of this law, that among the natives of the
British possessions in India, also in a considerable part of China, and
among the Calmucks of Tartary, the best means of computation yet
furnished us by travellers, yield similar results. The disparity I have
mentioned, therefore, almost ceases to be disparity, and (virtually) all
but disappears.’
‘What do you recommend, father,’ asked Louisa, her reserved composure not
in the least affected by these gratifying results, ‘that I should
substitute for the term I used just now? For the misplaced expression?’
‘Louisa,’ returned her father, ‘it appears to me that nothing can be
plainer. Confining yourself rigidly to Fact, the question of Fact you
state to yourself is: Does Mr. Bounderby ask me to marry him? Yes, he
does. The sole remaining question then is: Shall I marry him? I think
nothing can be plainer than that?’
‘Shall I marry him?’ repeated Louisa, with great deliberation.
‘Precisely. And it is satisfactory to me, as your father, my dear
Louisa, to know that you do not come to the consideration of that
question with the previous habits of mind, and habits of life, that
belong to many young women.’
‘No, father,’ she returned, ‘I do not.’
‘I now leave you to judge for yourself,’ said Mr. Gradgrind. ‘I have
stated the case, as such cases are usually stated among practical minds;
I have stated it, as the case of your mother and myself was stated in its
time. The rest, my dear Louisa, is for you to decide.’
From the beginning, she had sat looking at him fixedly. As he now leaned
back in his chair, and bent his deep-set eyes upon her in his turn,
perhaps he might have seen one wavering moment in her, when she was
impelled to throw herself upon his breast, and give him the pent-up
confidences of her heart. But, to see it, he must have overleaped at a
bound the artificial barriers he had for many years been erecting,
between himself and all those subtle essences of humanity which will
elude the utmost cunning of algebra until the last trumpet ever to be
sounded shall blow even algebra to wreck. The barriers were too many and
too high for such a leap. With his unbending, utilitarian,
matter-of-fact face, he hardened her again; and the moment shot away into
the plumbless depths of the past, to mingle with all the lost
opportunities that are drowned there.
Removing her eyes from him, she sat so long looking silently towards the
town, that he said, at length: ‘Are you consulting the chimneys of the
Coketown works, Louisa?’
‘There seems to be nothing there but languid and monotonous smoke. Yet
when the night comes, Fire bursts out, father!’ she answered, turning
quickly.
‘Of course I know that, Louisa. I do not see the application of the
remark.’ To do him justice he did not, at all.
She passed it away with a slight motion of her hand, and concentrating
her attention upon him again, said, ‘Father, I have often thought that
life is very short.’—This was so distinctly one of his subjects that he
interposed.
‘It is short, no doubt, my dear. Still, the average duration of human
life is proved to have increased of late years. The calculations of
various life assurance and annuity offices, among other figures which
cannot go wrong, have established the fact.’
‘I speak of my own life, father.’
‘O indeed? Still,’ said Mr. Gradgrind, ‘I need not point out to you,
Louisa, that it is governed by the laws which govern lives in the
aggregate.’
‘While it lasts, I would wish to do the little I can, and the little I am
fit for. What does it matter?’
Mr. Gradgrind seemed rather at a loss to understand the last four words;
replying, ‘How, matter? What matter, my dear?’
‘Mr. Bounderby,’ she went on in a steady, straight way, without regarding
this, ‘asks me to marry him. The question I have to ask myself is, shall
I marry him? That is so, father, is it not? You have told me so,
father. Have you not?’
‘Certainly, my dear.’
‘Let it be so. Since Mr. Bounderby likes to take me thus, I am satisfied
to accept his proposal. Tell him, father, as soon as you please, that
this was my answer. Repeat it, word for word, if you can, because I
should wish him to know what I said.’
‘It is quite right, my dear,’ retorted her father approvingly, ‘to be
exact. I will observe your very proper request. Have you any wish in
reference to the period of your marriage, my child?’
‘None, father. What does it matter!’
Mr. Gradgrind had drawn his chair a little nearer to her, and taken her
hand. But, her repetition of these words seemed to strike with some
little discord on his ear. He paused to look at her, and, still holding
her hand, said:
‘Louisa, I have not considered it essential to ask you one question,
because the possibility implied in it appeared to me to be too remote.
But perhaps I ought to do so. You have never entertained in secret any
other proposal?’
‘Father,’ she returned, almost scornfully, ‘what other proposal can have
been made to _me_? Whom have I seen? Where have I been? What are my
heart’s experiences?’
‘My dear Louisa,’ returned Mr. Gradgrind, reassured and satisfied. ‘You
correct me justly. I merely wished to discharge my duty.’
‘What do _I_ know, father,’ said Louisa in her quiet manner, ‘of tastes
and fancies; of aspirations and affections; of all that part of my nature
in which such light things might have been nourished? What escape have I
had from problems that could be demonstrated, and realities that could be
grasped?’ As she said it, she unconsciously closed her hand, as if upon
a solid object, and slowly opened it as though she were releasing dust or
ash.
‘My dear,’ assented her eminently practical parent, ‘quite true, quite
true.’
‘Why, father,’ she pursued, ‘what a strange question to ask _me_! The
baby-preference that even I have heard of as common among children, has
never had its innocent resting-place in my breast. You have been so
careful of me, that I never had a child’s heart. You have trained me so
well, that I never dreamed a child’s dream. You have dealt so wisely
with me, father, from my cradle to this hour, that I never had a child’s
belief or a child’s fear.’
Mr. Gradgrind was quite moved by his success, and by this testimony to
it. ‘My dear Louisa,’ said he, ‘you abundantly repay my care. Kiss me,
my dear girl.’
So, his daughter kissed him. Detaining her in his embrace, he said, ‘I
may assure you now, my favourite child, that I am made happy by the sound
decision at which you have arrived. Mr. Bounderby is a very remarkable
man; and what little disparity can be said to exist between you—if any—is
more than counterbalanced by the tone your mind has acquired. It has
always been my object so to educate you, as that you might, while still
in your early youth, be (if I may so express myself) almost any age.
Kiss me once more, Louisa. Now, let us go and find your mother.’
Accordingly, they went down to the drawing-room, where the esteemed lady
with no nonsense about her, was recumbent as usual, while Sissy worked
beside her. She gave some feeble signs of returning animation when they
entered, and presently the faint transparency was presented in a sitting
attitude.
‘Mrs. Gradgrind,’ said her husband, who had waited for the achievement of
this feat with some impatience, ‘allow me to present to you Mrs.
Bounderby.’
‘Oh!’ said Mrs. Gradgrind, ‘so you have settled it! Well, I’m sure I
hope your health may be good, Louisa; for if your head begins to split as
soon as you are married, which was the case with mine, I cannot consider
that you are to be envied, though I have no doubt you think you are, as
all girls do. However, I give you joy, my dear—and I hope you may now
turn all your ological studies to good account, I am sure I do! I must
give you a kiss of congratulation, Louisa; but don’t touch my right
shoulder, for there’s something running down it all day long. And now
you see,’ whimpered Mrs. Gradgrind, adjusting her shawls after the
affectionate ceremony, ‘I shall be worrying myself, morning, noon, and
night, to know what I am to call him!’
‘Mrs. Gradgrind,’ said her husband, solemnly, ‘what do you mean?’
‘Whatever I am to call him, Mr. Gradgrind, when h
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