Nicholas Nickleby
are nearly one by years, God help you.’
‘By years!’ cried Smike. ‘Oh dear, dear, how many of them! How many of
them since I was a little child, younger than any that are here now!
Where are they all!’
‘Whom do you speak of?’ inquired Nicholas, wishing to rouse the poor
half-witted creature to reason. ‘Tell me.’
‘My friends,’ he replied, ‘myself--my--oh! what sufferings mine have
been!’
‘There is always hope,’ said Nicholas; he knew not what to say.
‘No,’ rejoined the other, ‘no; none for me. Do you remember the boy that
died here?’
‘I was not here, you know,’ said Nicholas gently; ‘but what of him?’
‘Why,’ replied the youth, drawing closer to his questioner’s side, ‘I
was with him at night, and when it was all silent he cried no more for
friends he wished to come and sit with him, but began to see faces round
his bed that came from home; he said they smiled, and talked to him; and
he died at last lifting his head to kiss them. Do you hear?’
‘Yes, yes,’ rejoined Nicholas.
‘What faces will smile on me when I die!’ cried his companion,
shivering. ‘Who will talk to me in those long nights! They cannot come
from home; they would frighten me, if they did, for I don’t know what it
is, and shouldn’t know them. Pain and fear, pain and fear for me, alive
or dead. No hope, no hope!’
The bell rang to bed: and the boy, subsiding at the sound into his usual
listless state, crept away as if anxious to avoid notice. It was with a
heavy heart that Nicholas soon afterwards--no, not retired; there was no
retirement there--followed--to his dirty and crowded dormitory.
CHAPTER 9
Of Miss Squeers, Mrs. Squeers, Master Squeers, and Mr. Squeers; and of
various Matters and Persons connected no less with the Squeerses than
Nicholas Nickleby
When Mr. Squeers left the schoolroom for the night, he betook himself, as
has been before remarked, to his own fireside, which was situated--not
in the room in which Nicholas had supped on the night of his arrival,
but in a smaller apartment in the rear of the premises, where his lady
wife, his amiable son, and accomplished daughter, were in the full
enjoyment of each other’s society; Mrs. Squeers being engaged in the
matronly pursuit of stocking-darning; and the young lady and gentleman
being occupied in the adjustment of some youthful differences, by means
of a pugilistic contest across the table, which, on the approach of
their honoured parent, subsided into a noiseless exchange of kicks
beneath it.
And, in this place, it may be as well to apprise the reader, that Miss
Fanny Squeers was in her three-and-twentieth year. If there be any one
grace or loveliness inseparable from that particular period of life,
Miss Squeers may be presumed to have been possessed of it, as there is
no reason to suppose that she was a solitary exception to an universal
rule. She was not tall like her mother, but short like her father; from
the former she inherited a voice of harsh quality; from the latter a
remarkable expression of the right eye, something akin to having none at
all.
Miss Squeers had been spending a few days with a neighbouring friend,
and had only just returned to the parental roof. To this circumstance
may be referred, her having heard nothing of Nicholas, until Mr. Squeers
himself now made him the subject of conversation.
‘Well, my dear,’ said Squeers, drawing up his chair, ‘what do you think
of him by this time?’
‘Think of who?’ inquired Mrs. Squeers; who (as she often remarked) was no
grammarian, thank Heaven.
‘Of the young man--the new teacher--who else could I mean?’
‘Oh! that Knuckleboy,’ said Mrs. Squeers impatiently. ‘I hate him.’
‘What do you hate him for, my dear?’ asked Squeers.
‘What’s that to you?’ retorted Mrs. Squeers. ‘If I hate him, that’s
enough, ain’t it?’
‘Quite enough for him, my dear, and a great deal too much I dare say,
if he knew it,’ replied Squeers in a pacific tone. ‘I only ask from
curiosity, my dear.’
‘Well, then, if you want to know,’ rejoined Mrs. Squeers, ‘I’ll tell you.
Because he’s a proud, haughty, consequential, turned-up-nosed peacock.’
Mrs. Squeers, when excited, was accustomed to use strong language, and,
moreover, to make use of a plurality of epithets, some of which were of
a figurative kind, as the word peacock, and furthermore the allusion
to Nicholas’s nose, which was not intended to be taken in its literal
sense, but rather to bear a latitude of construction according to the
fancy of the hearers.
Neither were they meant to bear reference to each other, so much as to
the object on whom they were bestowed, as will be seen in the present
case: a peacock with a turned-up nose being a novelty in ornithology,
and a thing not commonly seen.
‘Hem!’ said Squeers, as if in mild deprecation of this outbreak. ‘He is
cheap, my dear; the young man is very cheap.’
‘Not a bit of it,’ retorted Mrs. Squeers.
‘Five pound a year,’ said Squeers.
‘What of that; it’s dear if you don’t want him, isn’t it?’ replied his
wife.
‘But we DO want him,’ urged Squeers.
‘I don’t see that you want him any more than the dead,’ said
Mrs. Squeers. ‘Don’t tell me. You can put on the cards and in the
advertisements, “Education by Mr. Wackford Squeers and able assistants,”
without having any assistants, can’t you? Isn’t it done every day by all
the masters about? I’ve no patience with you.’
‘Haven’t you!’ said Squeers, sternly. ‘Now I’ll tell you what, Mrs
Squeers. In this matter of having a teacher, I’ll take my own way, if
you please. A slave driver in the West Indies is allowed a man under
him, to see that his blacks don’t run away, or get up a rebellion; and
I’ll have a man under me to do the same with OUR blacks, till such time
as little Wackford is able to take charge of the school.’
‘Am I to take care of the school when I grow up a man, father?’ said
Wackford junior, suspending, in the excess of his delight, a vicious
kick which he was administering to his sister.
‘You are, my son,’ replied Mr. Squeers, in a sentimental voice.
‘Oh my eye, won’t I give it to the boys!’ exclaimed the interesting
child, grasping his father’s cane. ‘Oh, father, won’t I make ‘em squeak
again!’
It was a proud moment in Mr. Squeers’s life, when he witnessed that burst
of enthusiasm in his young child’s mind, and saw in it a foreshadowing
of his future eminence. He pressed a penny into his hand, and gave
vent to his feelings (as did his exemplary wife also), in a shout of
approving laughter. The infantine appeal to their common sympathies,
at once restored cheerfulness to the conversation, and harmony to the
company.
‘He’s a nasty stuck-up monkey, that’s what I consider him,’ said Mrs
Squeers, reverting to Nicholas.
‘Supposing he is,’ said Squeers, ‘he is as well stuck up in our
schoolroom as anywhere else, isn’t he?--especially as he don’t like it.’
‘Well,’ observed Mrs. Squeers, ‘there’s something in that. I hope it’ll
bring his pride down, and it shall be no fault of mine if it don’t.’
Now, a proud usher in a Yorkshire school was such a very extraordinary
and unaccountable thing to hear of,--any usher at all being a novelty;
but a proud one, a being of whose existence the wildest imagination
could never have dreamed--that Miss Squeers, who seldom troubled
herself with scholastic matters, inquired with much curiosity who this
Knuckleboy was, that gave himself such airs.
‘Nickleby,’ said Squeers, spelling the name according to some eccentric
system which prevailed in his own mind; ‘your mother always calls things
and people by their wrong names.’
‘No matter for that,’ said Mrs. Squeers; ‘I see them with right eyes,
and that’s quite enough for me. I watched him when you were laying on
to little Bolder this afternoon. He looked as black as thunder, all the
while, and, one time, started up as if he had more than got it in his
mind to make a rush at you. I saw him, though he thought I didn’t.’
‘Never mind that, father,’ said Miss Squeers, as the head of the family
was about to reply. ‘Who is the man?’
‘Why, your father has got some nonsense in his head that he’s the son of
a poor gentleman that died the other day,’ said Mrs. Squeers.
‘The son of a gentleman!’
‘Yes; but I don’t believe a word of it. If he’s a gentleman’s son at
all, he’s a fondling, that’s my opinion.’
‘Mrs. Squeers intended to say ‘foundling,’ but, as she frequently
remarked when she made any such mistake, it would be all the same a
hundred years hence; with which axiom of philosophy, indeed, she was in
the constant habit of consoling the boys when they laboured under more
than ordinary ill-usage.
‘He’s nothing of the kind,’ said Squeers, in answer to the above remark,
‘for his father was married to his mother years before he was born, and
she is alive now. If he was, it would be no business of ours, for we
make a very good friend by having him here; and if he likes to learn the
boys anything besides minding them, I have no objection I am sure.’
‘I say again, I hate him worse than poison,’ said Mrs. Squeers
vehemently.
‘If you dislike him, my dear,’ returned Squeers, ‘I don’t know anybody
who can show dislike better than you, and of course there’s no occasion,
with him, to take the trouble to hide it.’
‘I don’t intend to, I assure you,’ interposed Mrs. S.
‘That’s right,’ said Squeers; ‘and if he has a touch of pride about him,
as I think he has, I don’t believe there’s woman in all England that can
bring anybody’s spirit down, as quick as you can, my love.’
Mrs. Squeers chuckled vastly on the receipt of these flattering
compliments, and said, she hoped she had tamed a high spirit or two in
her day. It is but due to her character to say, that in conjunction with
her estimable husband, she had broken many and many a one.
Miss Fanny Squeers carefully treasured up this, and much more
conversation on the same subject, until she retired for the night,
when she questioned the hungry servant, minutely, regarding the outward
appearance and demeanour of Nicholas; to which queries the girl returned
such enthusiastic replies, coupled with so many laudatory remarks
touching his beautiful dark eyes, and his sweet smile, and his straight
legs--upon which last-named articles she laid particular stress; the
general run of legs at Dotheboys Hall being crooked--that Miss Squeers
was not long in arriving at the conclusion that the new usher must be
a very remarkable person, or, as she herself significantly phrased it,
‘something quite out of the common.’ And so Miss Squeers made up her
mind that she would take a personal observation of Nicholas the very
next day.
In pursuance of this design, the young lady watched the opportunity of
her mother being engaged, and her father absent, and went accidentally
into the schoolroom to get a pen mended: where, seeing nobody but
Nicholas presiding over the boys, she blushed very deeply, and exhibited
great confusion.
‘I beg your pardon,’ faltered Miss Squeers; ‘I thought my father was--or
might be--dear me, how very awkward!’
‘Mr. Squeers is out,’ said Nicholas, by no means overcome by the
apparition, unexpected though it was.
‘Do you know will he be long, sir?’ asked Miss Squeers, with bashful
hesitation.
‘He said about an hour,’ replied Nicholas--politely of course, but
without any indication of being stricken to the heart by Miss Squeers’s
charms.
‘I never knew anything happen so cross,’ exclaimed the young lady.
‘Thank you! I am very sorry I intruded, I am sure. If I hadn’t thought
my father was here, I wouldn’t upon any account have--it is very
provoking--must look so very strange,’ murmured Miss Squeers, blushing
once more, and glancing, from the pen in her hand, to Nicholas at his
desk, and back again.
‘If that is all you want,’ said Nicholas, pointing to the pen, and