Hard Times
the first-floor window as he had seen her before; and there was the light
porter, sometimes talking with her there, and sometimes looking over the
blind below which had BANK upon it, and sometimes coming to the door and
standing on the steps for a breath of air. When he first came out,
Stephen thought he might be looking for him, and passed near; but the
light porter only cast his winking eyes upon him slightly, and said
nothing.
Two hours were a long stretch of lounging about, after a long day’s
labour. Stephen sat upon the step of a door, leaned against a wall under
an archway, strolled up and down, listened for the church clock, stopped
and watched children playing in the street. Some purpose or other is so
natural to every one, that a mere loiterer always looks and feels
remarkable. When the first hour was out, Stephen even began to have an
uncomfortable sensation upon him of being for the time a disreputable
character.
Then came the lamplighter, and two lengthening lines of light all down
the long perspective of the street, until they were blended and lost in
the distance. Mrs. Sparsit closed the first-floor window, drew down the
blind, and went up-stairs. Presently, a light went up-stairs after her,
passing first the fanlight of the door, and afterwards the two staircase
windows, on its way up. By and by, one corner of the second-floor blind
was disturbed, as if Mrs. Sparsit’s eye were there; also the other
corner, as if the light porter’s eye were on that side. Still, no
communication was made to Stephen. Much relieved when the two hours were
at last accomplished, he went away at a quick pace, as a recompense for
so much loitering.
He had only to take leave of his landlady, and lie down on his temporary
bed upon the floor; for his bundle was made up for to-morrow, and all was
arranged for his departure. He meant to be clear of the town very early;
before the Hands were in the streets.
It was barely daybreak, when, with a parting look round his room,
mournfully wondering whether he should ever see it again, he went out.
The town was as entirely deserted as if the inhabitants had abandoned it,
rather than hold communication with him. Everything looked wan at that
hour. Even the coming sun made but a pale waste in the sky, like a sad
sea.
By the place where Rachael lived, though it was not in his way; by the
red brick streets; by the great silent factories, not trembling yet; by
the railway, where the danger-lights were waning in the strengthening
day; by the railway’s crazy neighbourhood, half pulled down and half
built up; by scattered red brick villas, where the besmoked evergreens
were sprinkled with a dirty powder, like untidy snuff-takers; by
coal-dust paths and many varieties of ugliness; Stephen got to the top of
the hill, and looked back.
Day was shining radiantly upon the town then, and the bells were going
for the morning work. Domestic fires were not yet lighted, and the high
chimneys had the sky to themselves. Puffing out their poisonous volumes,
they would not be long in hiding it; but, for half an hour, some of the
many windows were golden, which showed the Coketown people a sun
eternally in eclipse, through a medium of smoked glass.
So strange to turn from the chimneys to the birds. So strange, to have
the road-dust on his feet instead of the coal-grit. So strange to have
lived to his time of life, and yet to be beginning like a boy this summer
morning! With these musings in his mind, and his bundle under his arm,
Stephen took his attentive face along the high road. And the trees
arched over him, whispering that he left a true and loving heart behind.
CHAPTER VII
GUNPOWDER
MR. JAMES HARTHOUSE, ‘going in’ for his adopted party, soon began to
score. With the aid of a little more coaching for the political sages, a
little more genteel listlessness for the general society, and a tolerable
management of the assumed honesty in dishonesty, most effective and most
patronized of the polite deadly sins, he speedily came to be considered
of much promise. The not being troubled with earnestness was a grand
point in his favour, enabling him to take to the hard Fact fellows with
as good a grace as if he had been born one of the tribe, and to throw all
other tribes overboard, as conscious hypocrites.
‘Whom none of us believe, my dear Mrs. Bounderby, and who do not believe
themselves. The only difference between us and the professors of virtue
or benevolence, or philanthropy—never mind the name—is, that we know it
is all meaningless, and say so; while they know it equally and will never
say so.’
Why should she be shocked or warned by this reiteration? It was not so
unlike her father’s principles, and her early training, that it need
startle her. Where was the great difference between the two schools,
when each chained her down to material realities, and inspired her with
no faith in anything else? What was there in her soul for James
Harthouse to destroy, which Thomas Gradgrind had nurtured there in its
state of innocence!
It was even the worse for her at this pass, that in her mind—implanted
there before her eminently practical father began to form it—a struggling
disposition to believe in a wider and nobler humanity than she had ever
heard of, constantly strove with doubts and resentments. With doubts,
because the aspiration had been so laid waste in her youth. With
resentments, because of the wrong that had been done her, if it were
indeed a whisper of the truth. Upon a nature long accustomed to
self-suppression, thus torn and divided, the Harthouse philosophy came as
a relief and justification. Everything being hollow and worthless, she
had missed nothing and sacrificed nothing. What did it matter, she had
said to her father, when he proposed her husband. What did it matter,
she said still. With a scornful self-reliance, she asked herself, What
did anything matter—and went on.
Towards what? Step by step, onward and downward, towards some end, yet
so gradually, that she believed herself to remain motionless. As to Mr.
Harthouse, whither _he_ tended, he neither considered nor cared. He had
no particular design or plan before him: no energetic wickedness ruffled
his lassitude. He was as much amused and interested, at present, as it
became so fine a gentleman to be; perhaps even more than it would have
been consistent with his reputation to confess. Soon after his arrival
he languidly wrote to his brother, the honourable and jocular member,
that the Bounderbys were ‘great fun;’ and further, that the female
Bounderby, instead of being the Gorgon he had expected, was young, and
remarkably pretty. After that, he wrote no more about them, and devoted
his leisure chiefly to their house. He was very often in their house, in
his flittings and visitings about the Coketown district; and was much
encouraged by Mr. Bounderby. It was quite in Mr. Bounderby’s gusty way
to boast to all his world that _he_ didn’t care about your highly
connected people, but that if his wife Tom Gradgrind’s daughter did, she
was welcome to their company.
Mr. James Harthouse began to think it would be a new sensation, if the
face which changed so beautifully for the whelp, would change for him.
He was quick enough to observe; he had a good memory, and did not forget
a word of the brother’s revelations. He interwove them with everything
he saw of the sister, and he began to understand her. To be sure, the
better and profounder part of her character was not within his scope of
perception; for in natures, as in seas, depth answers unto depth; but he
soon began to read the rest with a student’s eye.
Mr. Bounderby had taken possession of a house and grounds, about fifteen
miles from the town, and accessible within a mile or two, by a railway
striding on many arches over a wild country, undermined by deserted
coal-shafts, and spotted at night by fires and black shapes of stationary
engines at pits’ mouths. This country, gradually softening towards the
neighbourhood of Mr. Bounderby’s retreat, there mellowed into a rustic
landscape, golden with heath, and snowy with hawthorn in the spring of
the year, and tremulous with leaves and their shadows all the summer
time. The bank had foreclosed a mortgage effected on the property thus
pleasantly situated, by one of the Coketown magnates, who, in his
determination to make a shorter cut than usual to an enormous fortune,
overspeculated himself by about two hundred thousand pounds. These
accidents did sometimes happen in the best regulated families of
Coketown, but the bankrupts had no connexion whatever with the
improvident classes.
It afforded Mr. Bounderby supreme satisfaction to instal himself in this
snug little estate, and with demonstrative humility to grow cabbages in
the flower-garden. He delighted to live, barrack-fashion, among the
elegant furniture, and he bullied the very pictures with his origin.
‘Why, sir,’ he would say to a visitor, ‘I am told that Nickits,’ the late
owner, ‘gave seven hundred pound for that Seabeach. Now, to be plain
with you, if I ever, in the whole course of my life, take seven looks at
it, at a hundred pound a look, it will be as much as I shall do. No, by
George! I don’t forget that I am Josiah Bounderby of Coketown. For
years upon years, the only pictures in my possession, or that I could
have got into my possession, by any means, unless I stole ’em, were the
engravings of a man shaving himself in a boot, on the blacking bottles
that I was overjoyed to use in cleaning boots with, and that I sold when
they were empty for a farthing a-piece, and glad to get it!’
Then he would address Mr. Harthouse in the same style.
‘Harthouse, you have a couple of horses down here. Bring half a dozen
more if you like, and we’ll find room for ’em. There’s stabling in this
place for a dozen horses; and unless Nickits is belied, he kept the full
number. A round dozen of ’em, sir. When that man was a boy, he went to
Westminster School. Went to Westminster School as a King’s Scholar, when
I was principally living on garbage, and sleeping in market baskets.
Why, if I wanted to keep a dozen horses—which I don’t, for one’s enough
for me—I couldn’t bear to see ’em in their stalls here, and think what my
own lodging used to be. I couldn’t look at ’em, sir, and not order ’em
out. Yet so things come round. You see this place; you know what sort
of a place it is; you are aware that there’s not a completer place of its
size in this kingdom or elsewhere—I don’t care where—and here, got into
the middle of it, like a maggot into a nut, is Josiah Bounderby. While
Nickits (as a man came into my office, and told me yesterday), Nickits,
who used to act in Latin, in the Westminster School plays, with the
chief-justices and nobility of this country applauding him till they were
black in the face, is drivelling at this minute—drivelling, sir!—in a
fifth floor, up a narrow dark back street in Antwerp.’
It was among the leafy shadows of this retirement, in the long sultry
summer days, that Mr. Harthouse began to prove the face which had set him
wondering when he first saw it, and to try if it would change for him.
‘Mrs. Bounderby, I esteem it a most fortunate accident that I find you
alone here. I have for some time had a particular wish to speak to you.’
It was not by any wonderful accident that he found her, the time of day
being that at which she was always alone, and the place being her
favourite resort. It was an opening in a dark wood, where some felled
trees lay, and where she would sit watching the fallen leaves of last
year, as she had watched the falling ashes at home.
He sat down beside her, with a glance at her face.
‘Your brother. My young friend Tom—’