Hard Times
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