Hard 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