"About the Fairies, sir, and the Dwarf, and the Hunchback, and the Genies," she sobbed out, "and about----"
"Hush!" said Mr. Gradgrind, "that is enough. Never breathe a word of such destructive nonsense any more. Bounderby, this is a case for rigid training, and I shall observe it with interest."
"Well," returned Mr. Bounderby, "I have given you my opinion already, and I shouldn't do as you do. But, very well, very well. Since you are bent upon it, very well!"
So Mr. Gradgrind and his daughter took Cecilia Jupe off with them to Stone Lodge, and on the way Louisa never spoke one word, good or bad. And Mr. Bounderby went about his daily pursuits. And Mrs. Sparsit got behind her eyebrows and meditated in the gloom of that retreat all the evening.
CHAPTER VIII
Never Wonder
LET us strike the keynote again before pursuing the tune.
When she was half-a-dozen years younger, Louisa had been overheard to begin a conversation with her brother one day by saying, "Tom, I wonder"--upon which Mr. Gradgrind, who was the person overhearing, stepped forth into the light and said, "Louisa, never wonder!"
Herein lay the spring of the mechanical art and mystery of educating the reason without stooping to the cultivation of the sentiments and affections. Never wonder. By means of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division, settle everything somehow, and never wonder. Bring to me, says McChoakumchild, yonder baby just able to walk, and I will engage that it shall never wonder.
Now, besides very many babies just able to walk, there happened to be in Coketown a considerable population of babies who had been walking against time towards the infinite world, twenty, thirty, forty, fifty years and more. These portentous infants being alarming creatures to stalk about in any human society, the eighteen denominations incessantly scratched one another's faces and pulled one another's hair by way of agreeing on the steps to be taken for their improvement--which they never did; a surprising circumstance, when the happy adaptation of the means to the end is considered. Still, although they differed in every other particular, conceivable and inconceivable (especially inconceivable), they were pretty well united on the point that these unlucky infants were never to wonder. Body number one said they must take everything on trust. Body number two said they must take everything on political economy. Body number three wrote leaden little books for them, showing how the good grown-up baby invariably got to the savings-bank, and the bad grown-up baby invariably got transported. Body number four, under dreary pretences of being droll (when it was very melancholy indeed), made the shallowest pretences of concealing pitfalls of knowledge, into which it was the duty of these babies to be smuggled and inveigled. But all the bodies agreed that they were never to wonder.
There was a library in Coketown, to which general access was easy. Mr. Gradgrind greatly tormented his mind about what the people read in this library--a point whereon little rivers of tabular statements periodically flowed into the howling ocean of tabular statements, which no diver ever got to any depth in and came up sane. It was a disheartening circumstance but a melancholy fact that even these readers persisted in wondering. They wondered about human nature, human passions, human hopes and fears, the struggles, triumphs and defeats, the cares and joys and sorrows, the lives and deaths, of common men and women! They sometimes, after fifteen hours' work, sat down to read mere fables about men and women, more or less like themselves, and about children, more or less like their own. They took Defoe to their bosoms instead of Euclid, and seemed to be on the whole more comforted by Gold-smith than by Cocker. Mr. Gradgrind was forever working, in print and out of print, at this eccentric sum, and he never could make out how it yielded this unaccountable product.
"I am sick of my life, Loo. I hate it altogether, and I hate everybody except you," said the unnatural young Thomas Gradgrind in the hair-cutting chamber at twilight.
"You don't hate Sissy, Tom?"
"I hate to be obliged to call her Jupe. And she hates me," said Tom, moodily.
"No, she does not, Tom, I am sure!"
"She must," said Tom. "She must just hate and detest the whole set-out of us. They'll bother her head off, I think, before they have done with her. Already she's getting as pale as wax, and as heavy as--I am."
Young Thomas expressed these sentiments sitting astride of a chair before the fire, with his arms on the back, and his sulky face on his arms. His sister sat in the darker corner by the fire-side, now looking at him, now looking at the bright sparks as they dropped upon the hearth.
"As to me," said Tom, tumbling his hair all manner of ways with his sulky hands, "I am a Donkey, that's what I am. I am as obstinate as one, I am more stupid than one, I get as much pleasure as one, and I should like to kick like one."
"Not me, I hope, Tom?"
"No, Loo; I wouldn't hurt you. I made an exception of you at first. I don't know what this--jolly old--Jaundiced Jail," Tom had paused to find a sufficiently complimentary and expressive name for the parental roof, and seemed to relieve his mind for a moment by the strong alliteration of this one, "would be without you."
"Indeed, Tom? Do you really and truly say so?"
"Why, of course I do. What's the use of talking about it!" returned Tom, chafing his face on his coat-sleeve, as if to mortify his flesh, and have it in unison with his spirit.
"Because, Tom," said his sister, after silently watching the sparks awhile, "as I get older, and nearer growing up, I often sit wondering here, and think how unfortunate it is for me that I can't reconcile you to home better than I am able to do. I don't know what other girls know. I can't play to you, or sing to you. I can't talk to you so as to lighten your mind, for I never see any amusing sights or read any amusing books that it would be a pleasure or a relief to you to talk about when you are tired."
"Well, no more do I. I am as bad as you in that respect; and I am a Mule, too, which you're not. If father was determined to make me either a Prig or a Mule, and I am not a Prig, why, it stands to reason I must be a Mule. And so I am," said Tom, desperately.
"It's a great pity," said Louisa, after another pause, and speaking thoughtfully out of her dark corner, "it's a great pity, Tom. It's very unfortunate for both of us."
"Oh! You," said Tom, "you are a girl, Loo, and a girl comes out of it better than a boy does. I don't miss anything in you. You are the only pleasure I have--you can brighten even this place--and you can always lead me as you like."
"You are a dear brother, Tom; and while you think I can do such things, I don't so much mind knowing better. Though I do know better, Tom, and am very sorry for it." She came and kissed him, and went back into her corner again.
"I wish I could collect all the Facts we hear so much about," said Tom, spitefully setting his teeth, "and all the Figures, and all the people who found them out--and I wish I could put a thousand barrels of gunpowder under them and blow them all up together! However, when I go to live with old Bounderby I'll have my revenge."
"Your revenge, Tom?"
"I mean, I'll enjoy myself a little, and go about and see something, and hear something. I'll recompense myself for the way in which I have been brought up."
"But don't disappoint yourself beforehand, Tom. Mr. Bounderby thinks as Father thinks, and is a great deal rougher, and not half so kind."
"Oh!" said Tom, laughing, "I don't mind that. I shall very well know how to manage and smooth old Bounderby!"
Their shadows were defined upon the wall, but those of the high presses in the room were all blended together on the wall and on the ceiling, as if the brother and sister were overhung by a dark cavern. Or, a fanciful imagination--if such treason could have been there--might have made it out to be the shadow of their subject, and of its lowering association with their future.
"What is your great mode of smoothing and managing, Tom? Is it a secret?"
"Oh!" said Tom, "if it is a secret, it's not far off. It's you. You are his little pet, you are his favourite; he'll do anything for you. When he says to m
e what I don't like, I shall say to him, 'My sister Loo will be hurt and disappointed, Mr. Bounderby. She always used to tell me she was sure you would be easier with me than this.' That'll bring him about, or nothing will."
After waiting for some answering remark and getting none, Tom warily relapsed into the present time, and twined himself yawning round and about the rails of his chair, and rumpled his head more and more, until he suddenly looked up and asked:
"Have you gone to sleep, Loo?"
"No, Tom. I am looking at the fire."
"You seem to find more to look at in it than ever I could find," said Tom. "Another of the advantages, I suppose, of being a girl."
"Tom," enquired his sister, slowly and in a curious tone, as if she were reading what she asked in the fire and it were not quite plainly written there, "do you look forward with any satisfaction to this change to Mr. Bounderby's?"
"Why, there's one thing to be said of it," returned Tom, pushing his chair from him, and standing up; "it will be getting away from home."
"There is one thing to be said of it," Louisa repeated in her former curious tone; "it will be getting away from home. Yes."
"Not but what I shall be very unwilling, both to leave you, Loo, and to leave you here. But I must go, you know, whether I like it or not; and I had better go where I can take with me some advantage of your influence than where I should lose it altogether. Don't you see?"
"Yes, Tom."
The answer was so long in coming, though there was no indecision in it, that Tom went and leaned on the back of her chair, to contemplate the fire which so engrossed her, from her point of view, and see what he could make of it.
"Except that it is a fire," said Tom, "it looks to me as stupid and blank as everything else looks. What do you see in it? Not a circus?"
"I don't see anything in it, Tom, particularly. But since I have been looking at it, I have been wondering about you and me, grown up."
"Wondering again!" said Tom.
"I have such unmanageable thoughts," returned his sister, "that they will wonder."
"Then I beg of you, Louisa," said Mrs. Gradgrind, who had opened the door without being heard, "to do nothing of that description, for goodness' sake, you inconsiderate girl, or I shall never hear the last of it from your father. And, Thomas, it is really shameful, with my poor head continually wearing me out, that a boy brought up as you have been, and whose education has cost what yours has, should be found encouraging his sister to wonder, when he knows his father has expressly said that she is not to do it."
Louisa denied Tom's participation in the offence; but her mother stopped her with the conclusive answer, "Louisa, don't tell me, in my state of health; for unless you had been encouraged, it is morally and physically impossible that you could have done it."
"I was encouraged by nothing, Mother, but by looking at the red sparks dropping out of the fire, and whitening and dying. It made me think, after all, how short my life would be, and how little I could hope to do in it."
"Nonsense!" said Mrs. Gradgrind, rendered almost energetic. "Nonsense! Don't stand there and tell me such stuff, Louisa, to my face, when you know very well that if it was ever to reach your father's ears I should never hear the last of it. After all the trouble that has been taken with you! After the lectures you have attended, and the experiments you have seen! After I have heard you myself, when the whole of my right side has been benumbed, going on with your master about combustion, and calcination, and calorification, and I may say every kind of ation that could drive a poor invalid distracted, to hear you talking in this absurd way about sparks and ashes! I wish," whimpered Mrs. Gradgrind, taking a chair and discharging her strongest point before succumbing under these mere shadows of facts, "yes, I really do wish that I had never had a family, and then you would have known what it was to do without me!"
CHAPTER IX
Sissy's Progress
SISSY JUPE had not an easy time of it, between Mr. McChoakumchild and Mrs. Gradgrind, and was not without strong impulses, in the first months of her probation, to run away. It hailed facts all day long so very hard, and life in general was opened to her as such a closely ruled ciphering-book, that assuredly she would have run away, but for only one restraint.
It is lamentable to think of, but this restraint was the result of no arithmetical process, was self-imposed in defiance of all calculation, and went dead against any table of probabilities that any actuary would have drawn up from the premises. The girl believed that her father had not deserted her; she lived in the hope that he would come back, and in the faith that he would be made the happier by her remaining where she was.
The wretched ignorance with which Jupe clung to this consolation, rejecting the superior comfort of knowing, on a sound arithmetical basis, that her father was an unnatural vagabond, filled Mr. Gradgrind with pity. Yet, what was to be done? McChoakumchild reported that she had a very dense head for figures; that, once possessed with a general idea of the globe, she took the smallest conceivable interest in its exact measurements; that she was extremely slow in the acquisition of dates, unless some pitiful incident happened to be connected therewith; that she would burst into tears on being required (by the mental process) immediately to name the cost of two hundred and forty-seven muslin caps at fourteen-pence halfpenny; that she was as low down, in the school, as low could be; that after eight weeks of induction into the elements of Political Economy, she had only yesterday been set right by a prattler three feet high for returning to the question, "What is the first principle of this science?" the absurd answer, "To do unto others as I would that they should do unto me."
Mr. Gradgrind observed, shaking his head, that all this was very bad; that it showed the necessity of infinite grinding at the mill of knowledge, as per system, schedule, blue book, report, and tabular statements A to Z; and that Jupe "must be kept to it." So Jupe was kept to it, and became low-spirited, but no wiser.
"It would be a fine thing to be you, Miss Louisa!" she said, one night, when Louisa had endeavoured to make her perplexities for next day something clearer to her.
"Do you think so?"
"I should know so much, Miss Louisa. All that is difficult to me now would be so easy then."
"You might not be the better for it, Sissy."
Sissy submitted, after a little hesitation, "I should not be the worse, Miss Louisa." To which Miss Louisa answered, "I don't know that."
There had been so little communication between these two--both because life at Stone Lodge went monotonously round like a piece of machinery which discouraged human interference, and because of the prohibition relative to Sissy's past career--that they were still almost strangers. Sissy, with her dark eyes wonderingly directed to Louisa's face, was uncertain whether to say more or to remain silent.
"You are more useful to my mother, and more pleasant with her than I can ever be," Louisa resumed. "You are pleasanter to yourself than I am to myself."
"But, if you please, Miss Louisa," Sissy pleaded, "I am--oh so stupid!"
Louisa, with a brighter laugh than usual, told her she would be wiser by-and-by.
"You don't know," said Sissy, half crying, "what a stupid girl I am. All through school hours I make mistakes. Mr. and Mrs. McChoakumchild call me up, over and over again, regularly to make mistakes. I can't help them. They seem to come natural to me."
"Mr. and Mrs. McChoakumchild never make any mistakes themselves, I suppose, Sissy?"
"Oh no!" she eagerly returned. "They know everything."
"Tell me some of your mistakes."
"I am almost ashamed," said Sissy, with reluctance. "But today, for instance, Mr. McChoakumchild was explaining to us about Natural Prosperity."
"National, I think it must have been," observed Louisa.
"Yes, it was.--But isn't it the same?" she timidly asked.
"You had better say 'National,' as he said so," returned Louisa, with her dry reserve.
"National Prosperity. And he said, 'Now, this
schoolroom is a Nation. And in this nation, there are fifty millions of money. Isn't this a prosperous nation? Girl number twenty, isn't this a prosperous nation, and an't you in a thriving state?' "
"What did you say?" asked Louisa.
"Miss Louisa, I said I didn't know. I thought I couldn't know whether it was a prosperous nation or not, and whether I was in a thriving state or not, unless I knew who had got the money, and whether any of it was mine. But that had nothing to do with it. It was not in the figures at all," said Sissy, wiping her eyes.
"That was a great mistake of yours," observed Louisa.
"Yes, Miss Louisa, I know it was, now. Then Mr. McChoakumchild said he would try me again. And he said, 'This schoolroom is an immense town, and in it there are a million of inhabitants, and only five-and-twenty are starved to death in the streets in the course of a year. What is your remark on that proportion?' And my remark was--for I couldn't think of a better one--that I thought it must be just as hard upon those who were starved, whether the others were a million, or a million million. And that was wrong, too."
"Of course it was."
"Then Mr. McChoakumchild said he would try me once more. And he said, 'Here are the stutterings----' "
"Statistics," said Louisa.
"Yes, Miss Louisa--they always remind me of stut terings, and that's another of my mistakes--of accidents upon the sea. And I find (Mr. McChoakumchild said) that in a given time a hundred thousand persons went to sea on long voyages, and only five hundred of them were drowned or burnt to death. What is the percentage? And I said, Miss"--here Sissy fairly sobbed as confessing with extreme contrition to her greatest error--"I said it was nothing."
"Nothing, Sissy?"
"Nothing, Miss--to the relations and friends of the people who were killed. I shall never learn," said Sissy. "And the worst of all is that although my poor father wished me so much to learn, and although I am so anxious to learn because he wished me to, I am afraid I don't like it."
Louisa stood looking at the pretty modest head as it drooped abashed before her until it was raised again to glance at her face. Then she asked:
"Did your father know so much himself that he wished you to be well taught, too, Sissy?"