"Because they are improvident," said Mrs. Sparsit.
"Yes, ma'am," returned Bitzer, "that's where it is. If they were more provident and less perverse, ma'am, what would they do? They would say, 'While my hat covers my family,' or 'While my bonnet covers my family'--as the case might be, ma'am--'I have only one to feed, and that's the person I most like to feed.' "
"To be sure," assented Mrs. Sparsit, eating a muffin.
"Thank you, ma'am," said Bitzer, knuckling his forehead again, in return for the favour of Mrs. Sparsit's improving conversation. "Would you wish a little more hot water, ma'am, or is there anything else that I could fetch you?"
"Nothing just now, Bitzer."
"Thank you, ma'am. I shouldn't wish to disturb you at your meals, ma'am, particularly tea, knowing your partiality for it," said Bitzer, craning a little to look over into the street from where he stood, "but there's a gentleman been looking up here for a minute or so, ma'am, and he has come across as if he was going to knock. That is his knock, ma'am, no doubt."
He stepped to the window, and looking out, and drawing in his head again, confirmed himself with, "Yes, ma'am. Would you wish the gentleman to be shown in, ma'am?"
"I don't know who it can be," said Mrs. Sparsit, wiping her mouth and arranging her mittens.
"A stranger, ma'am, evidently."
"What a stranger can want at the Bank at this time of the evening, unless he comes upon some business for which he is too late, I don't know," said Mrs. Sparsit, "but I hold a charge in this establishment from Mr. Bounderby, and I will never shrink from it. If to see him is any part of the duty I have accepted, I will see him. Use your own discretion, Bitzer."
Here the visitor, all unconscious of Mrs. Sparsit's magnanimous words, repeated his knock so loudly that the porter hastened down to open the door; while Mrs. Sparsit took the precaution of concealing her little table, with all its appliances upon it, in a cupboard, and then decamped upstairs, that she might appear, if needful, with the greater dignity.
"If you please, ma'am, the gentleman would wish to see you," said Bitzer, with his light eye at Mrs. Sparsit's keyhole. So Mrs. Sparsit, who had improved the interval by touching up her cap, took her classical features downstairs again, and entered the board-room in the manner of a Roman matron going outside the city walls to treat with an invading general.
The visitor having strolled to the window, and being then engaged in looking carelessly out, was as unmoved by this impressive entry as man could possibly be. He stood whistling to himself with all imaginable coolness, with his hat still on, and a certain air of exhaustion upon him, in part arising from excessive summer, and in part from excessive gentility. For it was to be seen with half an eye that he was a thorough gentleman, made to the model of the time--weary of everything, and putting no more faith in anything than Lucifer.
"I believe, sir," quoth Mrs. Sparsit, "you wished to see me."
"I beg your pardon," he said, turning and removing his hat; "pray excuse me."
"Humph!" thought Mrs. Sparsit, as she made a stately bend. "Five-and-thirty, good-looking, good figure, good teeth, good voice, good breeding, well-dressed, dark hair, bold eyes." All which Mrs. Sparsit observed in her womanly way--like the Sultan who put his head in the pail of water--merely in dipping down and coming up again.
"Please to be seated, sir," said Mrs. Sparsit.
"Thank you. Allow me." He placed a chair for her, but remained himself carelessly lounging against the table. "I left my servant at the railway looking after the luggage--very heavy train and vast quantity of it in the van--and strolled on, looking about me. Exceedingly odd place. Will you allow me to ask you if it's always as black as this?"
"In general much blacker," returned Mrs. Sparsit in her uncompromising way.
"Is it possible! Excuse me: you are not a native, I think?"
"No, sir," returned Mrs. Sparsit. "It was once my good or ill fortune, as it may be--before I became a widow--to move in a very different sphere. My husband was a Powler."
"Beg your pardon, really!" said the stranger. "Was--?"
Mrs. Sparsit repeated, "A Powler."
"Powler family," said the stranger, after reflecting a few moments. Mrs. Sparsit signified assent. The stranger seemed a little more fatigued than before.
"You must be very much bored here?" was the inference he drew from the communication.
"I am the servant of circumstances, sir," said Mrs. Sparsit, "and I have long adapted myself to the governing power of my life."
"Very philosophical," returned the stranger, "and very exemplary and laudable, and----" It seemed to be scarcely worth his while to finish the sentence, so he played with his watch-chain wearily.
"May I be permitted to ask, sir," said Mrs. Sparsit, "to what I am indebted for the favour of----"
"Assuredly," said the stranger. "Much obliged to you for reminding me. I am the bearer of a letter of introduction to Mr. Bounderby the Banker. Walking through this extraordinarily black town, while they were getting dinner ready at the hotel, I asked a fellow whom I met--one of the working people--who appeared to have been taking a shower-bath of something fluffy, which I assume to be the raw material----"
Mrs. Sparsit inclined her head.
"--raw material--where Mr. Bounderby, the Banker, might reside. Upon which, misled no doubt by the word Banker, he directed me to the Bank. Fact being, I presume, that Mr. Bounderby the Banker does not reside in the edifice in which I have the honour of offering this explanation?"
"No, sir," returned Mrs. Sparsit, "he does not."
"Thank you. I had no intention of delivering my letter at the present moment, nor have I. But strolling on to the Bank to kill time, and having the good fortune to observe at the window," towards which he languidly waved his hand, then slightly bowed, "a lady of a very superior and agreeable appearance, I considered that I could not do better than take the liberty of asking that lady where Mr. Bounderby the Banker does live. Which I accordingly venture, with all suitable apologies, to do."
The inattention and indolence of his manner were sufficiently relieved, to Mrs. Sparsit's thinking, by a certain gallantry at ease, which offered her homage, too. Here he was, for instance, at this moment, all but sitting on the table, and yet lazily bending over her as if he acknowledged an attraction in her that made her charming--in her way.
"Banks, I know, are always suspicious, and officially must be," said the stranger, whose lightness and smoothness of speech were pleasant likewise; suggesting matter far more sensible and humorous than it ever contained--which was perhaps a shrewd device of the founder of this numerous sect, whosoever may have been that great man: "therefore I may observe that my letter--here it is--is from the member for this place--Gradgrind--whom I have had the pleasure of knowing in London."
Mrs. Sparsit recognized the hand, intimated that such confirmation was quite unnecessary, and gave Mr. Bounderby's address, with all needful clues and directions in aid.
"Thousand thanks," said the stranger. "Of course you know the Banker well?"
"Yes, sir," rejoined Mrs. Sparsit. "In my dependent relation towards him, I have known him ten years."
"Quite an eternity! I think he married Gradgrind's daughter?"
"Yes," said Mrs. Sparsit, suddenly compressing her mouth, "he had that--honour."
"The lady is quite a philosopher, I am told?"
"Indeed, sir," said Mrs. Sparsit. "Is she?"
"Excuse my impertinent curiosity," pursued the stranger, fluttering over Mrs. Sparsit's eyebrows, with a propitiatory air, "but you know the family, and know the world. I am about to know the family, and may have much to do with them. Is the lady so very alarming? Her father gives her such a portentously hard-headed reputation that I have a burning desire to know. Is she absolutely unapproachable? Repellantly and stunningly clever? I see, by your meaning smile, you think not. You have poured balm into my anxious soul. As to age, now. Forty? Five-and-thirty?"
Mrs. Sparsit laughed outright. "A chit,"
said she. "Not twenty when she was married."
"I give you my honour, Mrs. Powler," returned the stranger, detaching himself from the table, "that I never was so astonished in my life!"
It really did seem to impress him, to the utmost extent of his capacity of being impressed. He looked at his informant for full a quarter of a minute, and appeared to have the surprise in his mind all the time. "I assure you, Mrs. Powler," he then said, much exhausted, "that the father's manner prepared me for a grim and stony maturity. I am obliged to you, of all things, for correcting so absurd a mistake. Pray excuse my intrusion. Many thanks. Good day!"
He bowed himself out, and Mrs. Sparsit, hiding in the window curtain, saw him languishing down the street on the shady side of the way, observed of all the town.
"What do you think of the gentleman, Bitzer?" she asked the light porter when he came to take away.
"Spends a deal of money on his dress, ma'am."
"It must be admitted," said Mrs. Sparsit, "that it's very tasteful."
"Yes, ma'am," returned Bitzer, "if that's worth the money.
"Besides which, ma'am," resumed Bitzer, while he was polishing the table, "he looks to me as if he gamed."
"It's immoral to game," said Mrs. Sparsit.
"It's ridiculous, ma'am," said Bitzer, "because the chances are against the players."
Whether it was that the heat prevented Mrs. Sparsit from working, or whether it was that her hand was out, she did not work that night. She sat at the window, when the sun began to sink behind the smoke; she sat there, when the smoke was burning red, when the colour faded from it, when darkness seemed to rise slowly out of the ground, and creep upward, upward, up to the house-tops, up the church steeple, up to the summits of the factory chimneys, up to the sky. Without a candle in her room, Mrs. Sparsit sat at the window, with her hands before her, not thinking much of the sounds of evening: the whooping of boys, the barking of dogs, the rumbling of wheels, the steps and voices of passengers, the shrill street cries, the clogs upon the pavement when it was their hour for going by, the shutting-up of shop-shutters. Not until the light porter announced that her nocturnal sweetbread was ready did Mrs. Sparsit arouse herself from her reverie and convey her dense black eyebrows--by that time creased with meditation, as if they needed ironing out--upstairs.
"Oh, you Fool!" said Mrs. Sparsit, when she was alone at her supper. Whom she meant, she did not say--but she could scarcely have meant the sweetbread.
CHAPTER II
Mr. James Harthouse
THE Gradgrind party wanted assistance in cutting the throats of the Graces. They went about recruiting, and where could they enlist recruits more hopefully than among the fine gentlemen who, having found out everything to be worth nothing, were equally ready for anything?
Moreover, the healthy spirits who had mounted to this sublime height were attractive to many of the Gradgrind school. They liked fine gentlemen; they pretended that they did not, but they did. They became exhausted in imitation of them; and they yaw-yawed in their speech like them; and they served out, with an enervated air, the little mouldy rations of political economy on which they regaled their disciples. There never before was seen on earth such a wonderful hybrid race as was thus produced.
Among the fine gentlemen not regularly belonging to the Gradgrind school, there was one of a good family and a better appearance, with a happy turn of humour which had told immensely with the House of Commons on the occasion of his entertaining it with his (and the Board of Directors') view of a railway accident, in which the most careful officers ever known, employed by the most liberal managers ever heard of, assisted by the finest mechanical contrivances ever devised, the whole in action on the best line ever constructed, had killed five and wounded thirty-two, by a casualty without which the excellence of the whole system would have been positively incomplete. Among the slain was a cow, and among the scattered articles unowned, a widow's cap. And the honourable member had so tickled the House (which has a delicate sense of humour) by putting the cap on the cow that it became impatient of any serious reference to the Coroner's Inquest, and brought the railway off with Cheers and Laughter.
Now, this gentleman had a younger brother of still better appearance than himself, who had tried life as a Cornet of Dragoons, and found it a bore; and had afterwards tried it in the train of an English minister abroad, and found it a bore; and had then strolled to Jerusalem, and got bored there; and had then gone yachting about the world, and got bored everywhere. To whom this honourable and jocular member fraternally said one day, "Jem, there's a good opening among the Hard Fact fellows, and they want men. I wonder you don't go in for statistics." Jem, rather taken by the novelty of the idea, and very hard up for a change, was as ready to "go in" for statistics as for anything else. So, he went in. He coached himself up with a blue-book or two; and his brother put it about among the Hard Fact fellows, and said, "If you want to bring in, for any place, a handsome dog who can make you a devilish good speech, look after my brother Jem, for he's your man." After a few dashes in the public-meeting way, Mr. Gradgrind and a council of political sages approved of Jem, and it was resolved to send him down to Coketown, to become known there and in the neighbourhood. Hence the letter Jem had last night shown to Mrs. Sparsit, which Mr. Bounderby now held in his hand, superscribed, "Josiah Bounderby, Esquire, Banker, Coketown. Specially to introduce James Harthouse, Esquire. Thomas Gradgrind."
Within an hour of the receipt of this dispatch and Mr. James Harthouse's card, Mr. Bounderby put on his hat and went down to the Hotel. There he found Mr. James Harthouse looking out of window, in a state of mind so disconsolate that he was already half-disposed to "go in" for something else.
"My name, sir," said his visitor, "is Josiah Bounderby, of Coketown."
Mr. James Harthouse was very happy indeed (though he scarcely looked so) to have a pleasure he had long expected.
"Coketown, sir," said Bounderby, obstinately taking a chair, "is not the kind of place you have been accustomed to. Therefore, if you will allow me--or whether you will or not, for I am a plain man--I'll tell you something about it before we go any further."
Mr. Harthouse would be charmed.
"Don't be too sure of that," said Bounderby. "I don't promise it. First of all, you see our smoke. That's meat and drink to us. It's the healthiest thing in the world in all respects, and particularly for the lungs. If you are one of those who want us to consume it, I differ from you. We are not going to wear the bottoms of our boilers out any faster than we wear 'em out now, for all the humbugging sentiment in Great Britain and Ireland."
By way of "going in" to the fullest extent, Mr. Harthouse rejoined, "Mr. Bounderby, I assure you I am entirely and completely of your way of thinking. On conviction."
"I am glad to hear it," said Bounderby. "Now, you have heard a lot of talk about the work in our mills, no doubt. You have? Very good. I'll state the fact of it to you. It's the pleasantest work there is, and it's the lightest work there is, and it's the best-paid work there is. More than that, we couldn't improve the mills themselves unless we laid down Turkey carpets on the floors. Which we're not a-going to do."
"Mr. Bounderby, perfectly right."
"Lastly," said Bounderby, "as to our Hands. There's not a Hand in this town, sir, man, woman, or child, but has one ultimate object in life. That object is to be fed on turtle soup and venison with a gold spoon. Now, they're not a-going--none of 'em--ever to be fed on turtle soup and venison with a gold spoon. And now you know the place."
Mr. Harthouse professed himself in the highest degree instructed and refreshed by this condensed epitome of the whole Coketown question.
"Why, you see," replied Mr. Bounderby, "it suits my disposition to have a full understanding with a man, particularly with a public man, when I make his acquaintance. I have only one thing more to say to you, Mr. Harthouse, before assuring you of the pleasure with which I shall respond, to the utmost of my poor ability, to my friend Tom Gradgrind's letter of intr
oduction. You are a man of family. Don't you deceive yourself by supposing for a moment that I am a man of family. I am a bit of dirty riff-raff, and a genuine scrap of tag, rag, and bobtail."
If anything could have exalted Jem's interest in Mr. Bounderby, it would have been this very circumstance. Or, so he told him.
"So now," said Bounderby, "we may shake hands on equal terms. I say 'equal terms' because, although I know what I am, and the exact depth of the gutter I have lifted myself out of, better than any man does, I am as proud as you are. I am just as proud as you are. Having now asserted my independence in a proper manner, I may come to how do you find yourself, and I hope you're pretty well."
The better, Mr. Harthouse gave him to understand as they shook hands, for the salubrious air of Coketown. Mr. Bounderby received the answer with favour.
"Perhaps you know," said he, "or perhaps you don't know, I married Tom Gradgrind's daughter. If you have nothing better to do than to walk up town with me, I shall be glad to introduce you to Tom Gradgrind's daughter."
"Mr. Bounderby," said Jem, "you anticipate my dearest wishes."
They went out without further discourse, and Mr. Bounderby piloted the new acquaintance, who so strongly contrasted with him, to the private red brick dwelling, with the black outside shutters, the green inside blinds, and the black street-door up the two white steps. In the drawing-room of which mansion there presently entered to them the most remarkable girl Mr. James Harthouse had ever seen. She was so constrained, and yet so careless; so reserved, and yet so watchful; so cold and proud, and yet so sensitively ashamed of her husband's braggart humility--from which she shrunk as if every example of it were a cut or a blow--that it was quite a new sensation to observe her. In face she was no less remarkable than in manner. Her features were handsome, but their natural play was so locked up that it seemed impossible to guess at their genuine expression. Utterly indifferent, perfectly self-reliant, never at a loss, and yet never at her ease, with her figure in company with them there, and her mind apparently quite alone--it was of no use "going in" yet awhile to comprehend this girl, for she baffled all penetration.