Hard Times
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