Hard Times
‘You are a piece of caustic, Tom,’ retorted Mr. James Harthouse.
There was something so very agreeable in being so intimate with such a
waistcoat; in being called Tom, in such an intimate way, by such a voice;
in being on such off-hand terms so soon, with such a pair of whiskers;
that Tom was uncommonly pleased with himself.
‘Oh! I don’t care for old Bounderby,’ said he, ‘if you mean that. I
have always called old Bounderby by the same name when I have talked
about him, and I have always thought of him in the same way. I am not
going to begin to be polite now, about old Bounderby. It would be rather
late in the day.’
‘Don’t mind me,’ returned James; ‘but take care when his wife is by, you
know.’
‘His wife?’ said Tom. ‘My sister Loo? O yes!’ And he laughed, and took
a little more of the cooling drink.
James Harthouse continued to lounge in the same place and attitude,
smoking his cigar in his own easy way, and looking pleasantly at the
whelp, as if he knew himself to be a kind of agreeable demon who had only
to hover over him, and he must give up his whole soul if required. It
certainly did seem that the whelp yielded to this influence. He looked
at his companion sneakingly, he looked at him admiringly, he looked at
him boldly, and put up one leg on the sofa.
‘My sister Loo?’ said Tom. ‘_She_ never cared for old Bounderby.’
‘That’s the past tense, Tom,’ returned Mr. James Harthouse, striking the
ash from his cigar with his little finger. ‘We are in the present tense,
now.’
‘Verb neuter, not to care. Indicative mood, present tense. First person
singular, I do not care; second person singular, thou dost not care;
third person singular, she does not care,’ returned Tom.
‘Good! Very quaint!’ said his friend. ‘Though you don’t mean it.’
‘But I _do_ mean it,’ cried Tom. ‘Upon my honour! Why, you won’t tell
me, Mr. Harthouse, that you really suppose my sister Loo does care for
old Bounderby.’
‘My dear fellow,’ returned the other, ‘what am I bound to suppose, when I
find two married people living in harmony and happiness?’
Tom had by this time got both his legs on the sofa. If his second leg
had not been already there when he was called a dear fellow, he would
have put it up at that great stage of the conversation. Feeling it
necessary to do something then, he stretched himself out at greater
length, and, reclining with the back of his head on the end of the sofa,
and smoking with an infinite assumption of negligence, turned his common
face, and not too sober eyes, towards the face looking down upon him so
carelessly yet so potently.
‘You know our governor, Mr. Harthouse,’ said Tom, ‘and therefore, you
needn’t be surprised that Loo married old Bounderby. She never had a
lover, and the governor proposed old Bounderby, and she took him.’
‘Very dutiful in your interesting sister,’ said Mr. James Harthouse.
‘Yes, but she wouldn’t have been as dutiful, and it would not have come
off as easily,’ returned the whelp, ‘if it hadn’t been for me.’
The tempter merely lifted his eyebrows; but the whelp was obliged to go
on.
‘_I_ persuaded her,’ he said, with an edifying air of superiority. ‘I
was stuck into old Bounderby’s bank (where I never wanted to be), and I
knew I should get into scrapes there, if she put old Bounderby’s pipe
out; so I told her my wishes, and she came into them. She would do
anything for me. It was very game of her, wasn’t it?’
‘It was charming, Tom!’
‘Not that it was altogether so important to her as it was to me,’
continued Tom coolly, ‘because my liberty and comfort, and perhaps my
getting on, depended on it; and she had no other lover, and staying at
home was like staying in jail—especially when I was gone. It wasn’t as
if she gave up another lover for old Bounderby; but still it was a good
thing in her.’
‘Perfectly delightful. And she gets on so placidly.’
‘Oh,’ returned Tom, with contemptuous patronage, ‘she’s a regular girl.
A girl can get on anywhere. She has settled down to the life, and _she_
don’t mind. It does just as well as another. Besides, though Loo is a
girl, she’s not a common sort of girl. She can shut herself up within
herself, and think—as I have often known her sit and watch the fire—for
an hour at a stretch.’
‘Ay, ay? Has resources of her own,’ said Harthouse, smoking quietly.
‘Not so much of that as you may suppose,’ returned Tom; ‘for our governor
had her crammed with all sorts of dry bones and sawdust. It’s his
system.’
‘Formed his daughter on his own model?’ suggested Harthouse.
‘His daughter? Ah! and everybody else. Why, he formed Me that way!’
said Tom.
‘Impossible!’
‘He did, though,’ said Tom, shaking his head. ‘I mean to say, Mr.
Harthouse, that when I first left home and went to old Bounderby’s, I was
as flat as a warming-pan, and knew no more about life, than any oyster
does.’
‘Come, Tom! I can hardly believe that. A joke’s a joke.’
‘Upon my soul!’ said the whelp. ‘I am serious; I am indeed!’ He smoked
with great gravity and dignity for a little while, and then added, in a
highly complacent tone, ‘Oh! I have picked up a little since. I don’t
deny that. But I have done it myself; no thanks to the governor.’
‘And your intelligent sister?’
‘My intelligent sister is about where she was. She used to complain to
me that she had nothing to fall back upon, that girls usually fall back
upon; and I don’t see how she is to have got over that since. But _she_
don’t mind,’ he sagaciously added, puffing at his cigar again. ‘Girls
can always get on, somehow.’
‘Calling at the Bank yesterday evening, for Mr. Bounderby’s address, I
found an ancient lady there, who seems to entertain great admiration for
your sister,’ observed Mr. James Harthouse, throwing away the last small
remnant of the cigar he had now smoked out.
‘Mother Sparsit!’ said Tom. ‘What! you have seen her already, have you?’
His friend nodded. Tom took his cigar out of his mouth, to shut up his
eye (which had grown rather unmanageable) with the greater expression,
and to tap his nose several times with his finger.
‘Mother Sparsit’s feeling for Loo is more than admiration, I should
think,’ said Tom. ‘Say affection and devotion. Mother Sparsit never set
her cap at Bounderby when he was a bachelor. Oh no!’
These were the last words spoken by the whelp, before a giddy drowsiness
came upon him, followed by complete oblivion. He was roused from the
latter state by an uneasy dream of being stirred up with a boot, and also
of a voice saying: ‘Come, it’s late. Be off!’
‘Well!’ he said, scrambling from the sofa. ‘I must take my leave of you
though. I say. Yours is very good tobacco. But it’s too mild.’
‘Yes, it’s too mild,’ returned his entertainer.
‘It’s—it’s ridiculously mild,’ said Tom. ‘Where’s the door! Good
night!’
He had another odd dream of being taken by a waiter through a mist,
which, after giving him some trouble and difficulty, resolved itself into
the main street, in which he stood alone. He then walked home pretty
easily, though not yet free from an impression of the presence and
influence of his new friend—as if he were lounging somewhere in the air,
in the same negligent attitude, regarding him with the same look.
The whelp went home, and went to bed. If he had had any sense of what he
had done that night, and had been less of a whelp and more of a brother,
he might have turned short on the road, might have gone down to the
ill-smelling river that was dyed black, might have gone to bed in it for
good and all, and have curtained his head for ever with its filthy
waters.
CHAPTER IV
MEN AND BROTHERS
‘OH, my friends, the down-trodden operatives of Coketown! Oh, my friends
and fellow-countrymen, the slaves of an iron-handed and a grinding
despotism! Oh, my friends and fellow-sufferers, and fellow-workmen, and
fellow-men! I tell you that the hour is come, when we must rally round
one another as One united power, and crumble into dust the oppressors
that too long have battened upon the plunder of our families, upon the
sweat of our brows, upon the labour of our hands, upon the strength of
our sinews, upon the God-created glorious rights of Humanity, and upon
the holy and eternal privileges of Brotherhood!’
‘Good!’ ‘Hear, hear, hear!’ ‘Hurrah!’ and other cries, arose in many
voices from various parts of the densely crowded and suffocatingly close
Hall, in which the orator, perched on a stage, delivered himself of this
and what other froth and fume he had in him. He had declaimed himself
into a violent heat, and was as hoarse as he was hot. By dint of roaring
at the top of his voice under a flaring gaslight, clenching his fists,
knitting his brows, setting his teeth, and pounding with his arms, he had
taken so much out of himself by this time, that he was brought to a stop,
and called for a glass of water.
As he stood there, trying to quench his fiery face with his drink of
water, the comparison between the orator and the crowd of attentive faces
turned towards him, was extremely to his disadvantage. Judging him by
Nature’s evidence, he was above the mass in very little but the stage on
which he stood. In many great respects he was essentially below them.
He was not so honest, he was not so manly, he was not so good-humoured;
he substituted cunning for their simplicity, and passion for their safe
solid sense. An ill-made, high-shouldered man, with lowering brows, and
his features crushed into an habitually sour expression, he contrasted
most unfavourably, even in his mongrel dress, with the great body of his
hearers in their plain working clothes. Strange as it always is to
consider any assembly in the act of submissively resigning itself to the
dreariness of some complacent person, lord or commoner, whom
three-fourths of it could, by no human means, raise out of the slough of
inanity to their own intellectual level, it was particularly strange, and
it was even particularly affecting, to see this crowd of earnest faces,
whose honesty in the main no competent observer free from bias could
doubt, so agitated by such a leader.
Good! Hear, hear! Hurrah! The eagerness both of attention and
intention, exhibited in all the countenances, made them a most impressive
sight. There was no carelessness, no languor, no idle curiosity; none of
the many shades of indifference to be seen in all other assemblies,
visible for one moment there. That every man felt his condition to be,
somehow or other, worse than it might be; that every man considered it
incumbent on him to join the rest, towards the making of it better; that
every man felt his only hope to be in his allying himself to the comrades
by whom he was surrounded; and that in this belief, right or wrong
(unhappily wrong then), the whole of that crowd were gravely, deeply,
faithfully in earnest; must have been as plain to any one who chose to
see what was there, as the bare beams of the roof and the whitened brick
walls. Nor could any such spectator fail to know in his own breast, that
these men, through their very delusions, showed great qualities,
susceptible of being turned to the happiest and best account; and that to
pretend (on the strength of sweeping axioms, howsoever cut and dried)
that they went astray wholly without cause, and of their own irrational
wills, was to pretend that there could be smoke without fire, death
without birth, harvest without seed, anything or everything produced from
nothing.
The orator having refreshed himself, wiped his corrugated forehead from
left to right several times with his handkerchief folded into a pad, and
concentrated all his revived forces, in a sneer of great disdain and
bitterness.