Hard Times
‘What a game girl you are, to be such a first-rate sister, Loo!’
whispered Tom.
She clung to him as she should have clung to some far better nature that
day, and was a little shaken in her reserved composure for the first
time.
‘Old Bounderby’s quite ready,’ said Tom. ‘Time’s up. Good-bye! I shall
be on the look-out for you, when you come back. I say, my dear Loo!
AN’T it uncommonly jolly now!’
* * * * *
END OF THE FIRST BOOK
BOOK THE SECOND
_REAPING_
CHAPTER I
EFFECTS IN THE BANK
A SUNNY midsummer day. There was such a thing sometimes, even in
Coketown.
Seen from a distance in such weather, Coketown lay shrouded in a haze of
its own, which appeared impervious to the sun’s rays. You only knew the
town was there, because you knew there could have been no such sulky
blotch upon the prospect without a town. A blur of soot and smoke, now
confusedly tending this way, now that way, now aspiring to the vault of
Heaven, now murkily creeping along the earth, as the wind rose and fell,
or changed its quarter: a dense formless jumble, with sheets of cross
light in it, that showed nothing but masses of darkness:—Coketown in the
distance was suggestive of itself, though not a brick of it could be
seen.
The wonder was, it was there at all. It had been ruined so often, that
it was amazing how it had borne so many shocks. Surely there never was
such fragile china-ware as that of which the millers of Coketown were
made. Handle them never so lightly, and they fell to pieces with such
ease that you might suspect them of having been flawed before. They were
ruined, when they were required to send labouring children to school;
they were ruined when inspectors were appointed to look into their works;
they were ruined, when such inspectors considered it doubtful whether
they were quite justified in chopping people up with their machinery;
they were utterly undone, when it was hinted that perhaps they need not
always make quite so much smoke. Besides Mr. Bounderby’s gold spoon
which was generally received in Coketown, another prevalent fiction was
very popular there. It took the form of a threat. Whenever a Coketowner
felt he was ill-used—that is to say, whenever he was not left entirely
alone, and it was proposed to hold him accountable for the consequences
of any of his acts—he was sure to come out with the awful menace, that he
would ‘sooner pitch his property into the Atlantic.’ This had terrified
the Home Secretary within an inch of his life, on several occasions.
However, the Coketowners were so patriotic after all, that they never had
pitched their property into the Atlantic yet, but, on the contrary, had
been kind enough to take mighty good care of it. So there it was, in the
haze yonder; and it increased and multiplied.
The streets were hot and dusty on the summer day, and the sun was so
bright that it even shone through the heavy vapour drooping over
Coketown, and could not be looked at steadily. Stokers emerged from low
underground doorways into factory yards, and sat on steps, and posts, and
palings, wiping their swarthy visages, and contemplating coals. The
whole town seemed to be frying in oil. There was a stifling smell of hot
oil everywhere. The steam-engines shone with it, the dresses of the
Hands were soiled with it, the mills throughout their many stories oozed
and trickled it. The atmosphere of those Fairy palaces was like the
breath of the simoom: and their inhabitants, wasting with heat, toiled
languidly in the desert. But no temperature made the melancholy mad
elephants more mad or more sane. Their wearisome heads went up and down
at the same rate, in hot weather and cold, wet weather and dry, fair
weather and foul. The measured motion of their shadows on the walls, was
the substitute Coketown had to show for the shadows of rustling woods;
while, for the summer hum of insects, it could offer, all the year round,
from the dawn of Monday to the night of Saturday, the whirr of shafts and
wheels.
Drowsily they whirred all through this sunny day, making the passenger
more sleepy and more hot as he passed the humming walls of the mills.
Sun-blinds, and sprinklings of water, a little cooled the main streets
and the shops; but the mills, and the courts and alleys, baked at a
fierce heat. Down upon the river that was black and thick with dye, some
Coketown boys who were at large—a rare sight there—rowed a crazy boat,
which made a spumous track upon the water as it jogged along, while every
dip of an oar stirred up vile smells. But the sun itself, however
beneficent, generally, was less kind to Coketown than hard frost, and
rarely looked intently into any of its closer regions without engendering
more death than life. So does the eye of Heaven itself become an evil
eye, when incapable or sordid hands are interposed between it and the
things it looks upon to bless.
Mrs. Sparsit sat in her afternoon apartment at the Bank, on the shadier
side of the frying street. Office-hours were over: and at that period of
the day, in warm weather, she usually embellished with her genteel
presence, a managerial board-room over the public office. Her own
private sitting-room was a story higher, at the window of which post of
observation she was ready, every morning, to greet Mr. Bounderby, as he
came across the road, with the sympathizing recognition appropriate to a
Victim. He had been married now a year; and Mrs. Sparsit had never
released him from her determined pity a moment.
The Bank offered no violence to the wholesome monotony of the town. It
was another red brick house, with black outside shutters, green inside
blinds, a black street-door up two white steps, a brazen door-plate, and
a brazen door-handle full stop. It was a size larger than Mr.
Bounderby’s house, as other houses were from a size to half-a-dozen sizes
smaller; in all other particulars, it was strictly according to pattern.
Mrs. Sparsit was conscious that by coming in the evening-tide among the
desks and writing implements, she shed a feminine, not to say also
aristocratic, grace upon the office. Seated, with her needlework or
netting apparatus, at the window, she had a self-laudatory sense of
correcting, by her ladylike deportment, the rude business aspect of the
place. With this impression of her interesting character upon her, Mrs.
Sparsit considered herself, in some sort, the Bank Fairy. The
townspeople who, in their passing and repassing, saw her there, regarded
her as the Bank Dragon keeping watch over the treasures of the mine.
What those treasures were, Mrs. Sparsit knew as little as they did. Gold
and silver coin, precious paper, secrets that if divulged would bring
vague destruction upon vague persons (generally, however, people whom she
disliked), were the chief items in her ideal catalogue thereof. For the
rest, she knew that after office-hours, she reigned supreme over all the
office furniture, and over a locked-up iron room with three locks,
against the door of which strong chamber the light porter laid his head
every night, on a truckle bed, that disappeared at cockcrow. Further,
she was lady paramount over certain vaults in the basement, sharply
spiked off from communication with the predatory world; and over the
relics of the current day’s work, consisting of blots of ink, worn-out
pens, fragments of wafers, and scraps of paper torn so small, that
nothing interesting could ever be deciphered on them when Mrs. Sparsit
tried. Lastly, she was guardian over a little armoury of cutlasses and
carbines, arrayed in vengeful order above one of the official
chimney-pieces; and over that respectable tradition never to be separated
from a place of business claiming to be wealthy—a row of
fire-buckets—vessels calculated to be of no physical utility on any
occasion, but observed to exercise a fine moral influence, almost equal
to bullion, on most beholders.
A deaf serving-woman and the light porter completed Mrs. Sparsit’s
empire. The deaf serving-woman was rumoured to be wealthy; and a saying
had for years gone about among the lower orders of Coketown, that she
would be murdered some night when the Bank was shut, for the sake of her
money. It was generally considered, indeed, that she had been due some
time, and ought to have fallen long ago; but she had kept her life, and
her situation, with an ill-conditioned tenacity that occasioned much
offence and disappointment.
Mrs. Sparsit’s tea was just set for her on a pert little table, with its
tripod of legs in an attitude, which she insinuated after office-hours,
into the company of the stern, leathern-topped, long board-table that
bestrode the middle of the room. The light porter placed the tea-tray on
it, knuckling his forehead as a form of homage.
‘Thank you, Bitzer,’ said Mrs. Sparsit.
‘Thank _you_, ma’am,’ returned the light porter. He was a very light
porter indeed; as light as in the days when he blinkingly defined a
horse, for girl number twenty.
‘All is shut up, Bitzer?’ said Mrs. Sparsit.
‘All is shut up, ma’am.’
‘And what,’ said Mrs. Sparsit, pouring out her tea, ‘is the news of the
day? Anything?’
‘Well, ma’am, I can’t say that I have heard anything particular. Our
people are a bad lot, ma’am; but that is no news, unfortunately.’
‘What are the restless wretches doing now?’ asked Mrs. Sparsit.
‘Merely going on in the old way, ma’am. Uniting, and leaguing, and
engaging to stand by one another.’
‘It is much to be regretted,’ said Mrs. Sparsit, making her nose more
Roman and her eyebrows more Coriolanian in the strength of her severity,
‘that the united masters allow of any such class-combinations.’
‘Yes, ma’am,’ said Bitzer.
‘Being united themselves, they ought one and all to set their faces
against employing any man who is united with any other man,’ said Mrs.
Sparsit.
‘They have done that, ma’am,’ returned Bitzer; ‘but it rather fell
through, ma’am.’
‘I do not pretend to understand these things,’ said Mrs. Sparsit, with
dignity, ‘my lot having been signally cast in a widely different sphere;
and Mr. Sparsit, as a Powler, being also quite out of the pale of any
such dissensions. I only know that these people must be conquered, and
that it’s high time it was done, once for all.’
‘Yes, ma’am,’ returned Bitzer, with a demonstration of great respect for
Mrs. Sparsit’s oracular authority. ‘You couldn’t put it clearer, I am
sure, ma’am.’
As this was his usual hour for having a little confidential chat with
Mrs. Sparsit, and as he had already caught her eye and seen that she was
going to ask him something, he made a pretence of arranging the rulers,
inkstands, and so forth, while that lady went on with her tea, glancing
through the open window, down into the street.
‘Has it been a busy day, Bitzer?’ asked Mrs. Sparsit.
‘Not a very busy day, my lady. About an average day.’ He now and then
slided into my lady, instead of ma’am, as an involuntary acknowledgment
of Mrs. Sparsit’s personal dignity and claims to reverence.
‘The clerks,’ said Mrs. Sparsit, carefully brushing an imperceptible
crumb of bread and butter from her left-hand mitten, ‘are trustworthy,
punctual, and industrious, of course?’
‘Yes, ma’am, pretty fair, ma’am. With the usual exception.’
He held the respectable office of general spy and informer in the
establishment, for which volunteer service he received a present at
Christmas, over and above his weekly wage. He had grown into an
extremely clear-headed, cautious, prudent young man, who was safe to rise
in the world. His mind was so exactly regulated, that he had no
affections or passions. All his proceedings were the result of the