Sissy hesitated before replying, and so plainly showed her sense that they were entering on forbidden ground that Louisa added, "No one hears us, and if anyone did I am sure no harm could be found in such an innocent question."
"No, Miss Louisa," answered Sissy, upon this encouragement, shaking her head, "Father knows very little indeed. It's as much as he can do to write, and it's more than people in general can do to read his writing. Though it's plain to me."
"Your mother!"
"Father says she was quite a scholar. She died when I was born. She was"--Sissy made the terrible communication nervously--"she was a dancer."
"Did your father love her?" Louisa asked these questions with a strong, wild, wandering interest peculiar to her; an interest gone astray like a banished creature and hiding in solitary places.
"Oh yes! As dearly as he loves me. Father loved me, first, for her sake. He carried me about with him when I was quite a baby. We have never been asunder from that time."
"Yet he leaves you now, Sissy?"
"Only for my good. Nobody understands him as I do; nobody knows him as I do. When he left me for my good--he never would have left me for his own--I know he was almost broken-hearted with the trial. He will not be happy for a single minute till he comes back."
"Tell me more about him," said Louisa; "I will never ask you again. Where did you live?"
"We travelled about the country and had no fixed place to live in. Father's a"--Sissy whispered the awful word--"a clown."
"To make the people laugh?" said Louisa, with a nod of intelligence.
"Yes. But they wouldn't laugh sometimes, and then Father cried. Lately, they very often wouldn't laugh, and he used to come home despairing. Father's not like most. Those who didn't know him as well as I do, and didn't love him as dearly as I do, might believe he was not quite right. Sometimes they played tricks upon him; but they never knew how he felt them, and shrunk up, when he was alone with me. He was far, far timider than they thought!"
"And you were his comfort through everything?"
She nodded, with the tears rolling down her face. "I hope so, and Father said I was. It was because he grew so scared and trembling, and because he felt himself to be a poor, weak, ignorant, helpless man (those used to be his words), that he wanted me so much to know a great deal and be different from him. I used to read to him to cheer his courage, and he was very fond of that. They were wrong books--I am never to speak of them here--but we didn't know there was any harm in them."
"And he liked them?" said Louisa, with a searching gaze on Sissy all this time.
"Oh very much! They kept him, many times, from what did him real harm. And often and often of a night he used to forget all his troubles in wondering whether the Sultan would let the lady go on with the story or would have her head cut off before it was finished."
"And your father was always kind? To the last?" asked Louisa, contravening the great principle and wondering very much.
"Always, always!" returned Sissy, clasping her hands. "Kinder and kinder than I can tell. He was angry only one night, and that was not to me, but Merrylegs. Merrylegs"--she whispered the awful fact--"is his performing dog."
"Why was he angry with the dog?" Louisa demanded.
"Father, soon after they came home from performing, told Merrylegs to jump up on the backs of the two chairs and stand across them--which is one of his tricks. He looked at Father and didn't do it at once. Everything of Father's had gone wrong that night, and he hadn't pleased the public at all. He cried out that the very dog knew he was failing and had no compassion on him. Then he beat the dog, and I was frightened and said, 'Father, Father! Pray don't hurt the creature who is so fond of you! Oh Heaven forgive you, Father, stop!' And he stopped, and the dog was bloody, and Father lay down crying on the floor with the dog in his arms, and the dog licked his face."
Louisa saw that she was sobbing, and, going to her, kissed her, took her hand, and sat down beside her.
"Finish by telling me how your father left you, Sissy. Now that I have asked you so much, tell me the end. The blame, if there is any blame, is mine, not yours."
"Dear Miss Louisa," said Sissy, covering her eyes and sobbing yet, "I came home from the school that afternoon and found poor Father just come home, too, from the booth. And he sat rocking himself over the fire, as if he was in pain. And I said, 'Have you hurt yourself, Father?' (as he did sometimes, like they all did), and he said, 'A little, my darling.' And when I came to stoop down and look up at his face, I saw that he was crying. The more I spoke to him the more he hid his face, and at first he shook all over and said nothing but 'My darling, ' and 'My love!' "
Here Tom came lounging in and stared at the two with a coolness not particularly savouring of interest in anything but himself, and not much of that at present.
"I am asking Sissy a few questions, Tom," observed his sister. "You have no occasion to go away; but don't interrupt us for a moment, Tom dear."
"Oh! Very well!" returned Tom. "Only Father has brought old Bounderby home, and I want you to come into the drawing-room. Because if you come there's a good chance of old Bounderby's asking me to dinner, and if you don't there's none."
"I'll come directly."
"I'll wait for you," said Tom, "to make sure."
Sissy resumed in a lower voice. "At last poor Father said that he had given no satisfaction again, and never did give any satisfaction now, and that he was a shame and disgrace, and I should have done better without him all along. I said all the affectionate things to him that came into my heart, and presently he was quiet and I sat down by him, and told him all about the school and everything that had been said and done there. When I had no more left to tell, he put his arms round my neck, and kissed me a great many times. Then he asked me to fetch some of the stuff he used for the little hurt he had had, and to get it at the best place, which was at the other end of town from there; and then, after kissing me again, he let me go. When I had gone downstairs, I turned back that I might be a little bit more company to him yet, and looked in at the door, and said, 'Father dear, shall I take Merrylegs?' Father shook his head and said, 'No, Sissy, no; take nothing that's known to be mine, my darling,' and I left him sitting by the fire. Then the thought must have come upon him, poor, poor Father! of going away to try something for my sake, for when I came back, he was gone."
"I say! Look sharp for old Bounderby, Loo!" Tom remonstrated.
"There's no more to tell, Miss Louisa. I keep the nine oils ready for him, and I know he will come back. Every letter that I see in Mr. Gradgrind's hand takes my breath away and blinds my eyes, for I think it comes from Father, or from Mr. Sleary about Father. Mr. Sleary promised to write as soon as ever Father should be heard of, and I trust to him to keep his word."
"Do look sharp for old Bounderby, Loo!" said Tom, with an impatient whistle. "He'll be off if you don't look sharp!"
After this, whenever Sissy dropped a curtsey to Mr. Gradgrind in the presence of his family, and said in a faltering way, "I beg your pardon, sir, for being troublesome--but--have you had any letter yet about me?" Louisa would suspend the occupation of the moment, whatever it was, and look for the reply as earnestly as Sissy did. And when Mr. Gradgrind regularly answered, "No, Jupe, nothing of the sort," the trembling of Sissy's lip would be repeated in Louisa's face, and her eyes would follow Sissy with compassion to the door. Mr. Gradgrind usually improved these occasions by remarking, when she was gone, that if Jupe had been properly trained from an early age she would have remonstrated to herself on sound principles the baselessness of these fantastic hopes. Yet it did seem (though not to him, for he saw nothing of it) as if fantastic hope could take as strong a hold as Fact.
This observation must be limited exclusively to his daughter. As to Tom, he was becoming that not unprecedented triumph of calculation which is usually at work on number one. As to Mrs. Gradgrind, if she said anything on the subject, she would come a little way out of her wrappers, like a feminine dormouse,
and say:
"Good gracious bless me, how my poor head is vexed and worried by that girl Jupe's so perseveringly asking, over and over again, about her tiresome letters! Upon my word and honour, I seem to be fated, and destined, and ordained, to live in the midst of things that I am never to hear the last of. It really is a most extraordinary circumstance that it appears as if I never was to hear the last of anything!"
At about this point Mr. Gradgrind's eye would fall upon her, and under the influence of that wintry piece of fact she would become torpid again.
CHAPTER X
Stephen Blackpool
I ENTERTAIN a weak idea that the English people are as hard-worked as any people upon whom the sun shines. I acknowledge to this ridiculous idiosyncrasy as a reason why I would give them a little more play.
In the hardest-working part of Coketown; in the innermost fortifications of that ugly citadel, where Nature was as strongly bricked out as killing airs and gases were bricked in; at the heart of the labyrinth of narrow courts upon courts, and close streets upon streets, which had come into existence piecemeal, every piece in a violent hurry for some one man's purpose, and the whole an unnatural family, shouldering, and trampling, and pressing one another to death; in the last close nook of this great exhausted receiver, where the chimneys, for want of air to make a draught, were built in an immense variety of stunted and crooked shapes, as though every house put out a sign of the kind of people who might be expected to be born in it; among the multitude of Coketown, generically called "the Hands"--a race who would have found more favour with some people if Providence had seen fit to make them only hands, or, like the lower creatures of the seashore, only hands and stomachs--lived a certain Stephen Blackpool, forty years of age.
Stephen looked older, but he had had a hard life. It is said that every life has its roses and thorns; there seemed, however, to have been a misadventure or mistake in Stephen's case, whereby somebody else had become possessed of his roses, and he had become possessed of the same somebody else's thorns in addition to his own. He had known, to use his words, a peck of trouble. He was usually called Old Stephen, in a kind of rough homage to the fact.
A rather stooping man, with a knitted brow, a pondering expression of face, and a hard-looking head sufficiently capacious on which his iron-grey hair lay long and thin, Old Stephen might have passed for a particularly intelligent man in his condition. Yet he was not. He took no place among those remarkable "Hands," who, piecing together their broken intervals of leisure through many years, had mastered difficult sciences and acquired a knowledge of most unlikely things. He held no station among the Hands who could make speeches and carry on debates. Thousands of his compeers could talk much better than he, at any time. He was a good power-loom weaver, and a man of perfect integrity. What more he was, or what else he had in him, if anything, let him show for himself.
The lights in the great factories, which looked, when they were illuminated, like Fairy Palaces--or the travellers by express-train said so--were all extinguished; and the bells had rung for knocking off for the night, and had ceased again; and the Hands, men and women, boy and girl, were clattering home. Old Stephen was standing in the street with the old sensation upon him which the stoppage of the machinery always produced--the sensation of its having worked and stopped in his own head.
"Yet I don't see Rachael, still!" said he.
It was a wet night, and many groups of young women passed him, with their shawls drawn over their bare heads and held close under their chins to keep the rain out. He knew Rachael well, for a glance at any one of these groups was sufficient to show him that she was not there. At last there were no more to come; and then he turned away, saying in a tone of disappointment, "Why, then, I ha' missed her!"
But he had not gone the length of three streets when he saw another of the shawled figures in advance of him, at which he looked so keenly that perhaps its mere shadow indistinctly reflected on the wet pavement--if he could have seen it without the figure itself moving along from lamp to lamp, brightening and fading as it went-- would have been enough to tell him who was there. Making his pace at once much quicker and much softer, he darted on until he was very near this figure, then fell into his former walk, and called, "Rachael!"
She turned, being then in the brightness of a lamp, and, raising her hood a little, showed a quiet oval face, dark and rather delicate, irradiated by a pair of very gentle eyes, and further set off by the perfect order of her shining black hair. It was not a face in its first bloom; she was a woman five-and-thirty years of age.
"Ah, lad! 'Tis thou?" When she had said this, with a smile which would have been quite expressed though nothing of her had been seen but her pleasant eyes, she replaced her hood again and they went on together.
"I thought thou wast ahind me, Rachael?"
"No."
"Early t' night, lass?"
" 'Times I'm a little early, Stephen! 'times a little late. I'm never to be counted on, going home."
"Nor going t' other way, neither, 't seems to me, Rachael?"
"No, Stephen."
He looked at her with some disappointment in his face, but with a respectful and patient conviction that she must be right in whatever she did. The expression was not lost upon her; she laid her hand lightly on his arm a moment as if to thank him for it.
"We are such true friends, lad, and such old friends, and getting to be such old folk, now."
"No, Rachael, thou'rt as young as ever thou wast."
"One of us would be puzzled how to get old, Stephen, without t' other getting so, too, both being alive," she answered, laughing; "but, anyways, we're such old friends that t' hide a word of honest truth fro' one another would be a sin and a pity. 'Tis better not to walk too much together. 'Times, yes! 'Twould be hard, indeed, if 'twas not to be at all," she said, with a cheerfulness she sought to communicate to him.
" 'Tis hard anyways, Rachael."
"Try to think not, and 'twill seem better."
"I've tried a long time, and 'ta'nt got better. But thou'rt right; 't might mak' fo'k talk, even of thee. Thou hast been that to me, Rachael, through so many year: thou hast done me so much good, and heartened of me in that cheering way, that thy word is a law to me. Ah lass, and a bright good law! Better than some real ones."
"Never fret about them, Stephen," she answered quickly, and not without an anxious glance at his face. "Let the laws be."
"Yes," he said, with a slow nod or two. "Let 'em be. Let everything be. Let all sorts alone. 'Tis a muddle, and that's aw."
"Always a muddle?" said Rachael, with another gentle touch upon his arm, as if to recall him out of the thoughtfulness in which he was biting the long ends of his loose neckerchief as he walked along. The touch had its instantaneous effect. He let them fall, turned a smiling face upon her, and said, as he broke into a good-humoured laugh, "Aye, Rachael, lass, awlus a muddle. That's where I stick. I come to the muddle many times and agen, and I never get beyond it."
They had walked some distance and were near their own homes. The woman's was the first reached. It was in one of the many small streets for which the favourite undertaker (who turned a handsome sum out of the one poor ghastly pomp of the neighbourhood) kept a black ladder, in order that those who had done their daily groping up and down the narrow stairs might slide out of this working world by the windows. She stopped at the corner, and, putting her hand in his, wished him good night.
"Good night, dear lass; good night!"
She went, with her neat figure and her sober womanly step, down the dark street, and he stood looking after her until she turned into one of the small houses. There was not a flutter of her coarse shawl, perhaps, but had its interest in this man's eyes; not a tone of her voice but had its echo in his innermost heart.
When she was lost to his view, he pursued his homeward way, glancing up sometimes at the sky where the clouds were sailing fast and wildly. But they were broken now, and the rain had ceased, and the moon shone--looking down
the high chimneys of Coketown on the deep furnaces below, and casting titanic shadows of the steam-engines at rest upon the walls where they were lodged. The man seemed to have brightened with the night as he went on.
His home, in such another street as the first, saving that it was narrower, was over a little shop. How it came to pass that any people found it worth their while to sell or buy the wretched little toys, mixed up in its window with cheap newspapers and pork (there was a leg to be raffled for tomorrow night), matters not here. He took his end of candle from a shelf, lighted it at another end of candle on the counter, without disturbing the mistress of the shop, who was asleep in her little room, and went upstairs into his lodging.
It was a room not unacquainted with the black ladder under various tenants, but as neat at present as such a room could be. A few books and writings were on an old bureau in a corner, the furniture was decent and sufficient, and, though the atmosphere was tainted, the room was clean.
Going to the hearth to set the candle down upon a round three-legged table standing there, he stumbled against something. As he recoiled, looking down at it, it raised itself up into the form of a woman in a sitting attitude.
"Heaven's mercy, woman!" he cried, falling farther off from the figure. "Hast thou come back agen?"
Such a woman! A disabled, drunken creature, barely able to preserve her sitting posture by steadying herself with one begrimed hand on the floor, while the other was so purposeless in trying to push away her tangled hair from her face that it only blinded her the more with the dirt upon it. A creature so foul to look at, in her tatters, stains and splashes, but so much fouler than that in her moral infamy, that it was a shameful thing even to see her.
After an impatient oath or two, and some stupid clawing of herself with the hand not necessary to her support, she got her hair away from her eyes sufficiently to obtain a sight of him. Then she sat swaying her body to and fro, and making gestures with her unnerved arm, which seemed intended as the accompaniment to a fit of laughter, though her face was stolid and drowsy.
"Eigh, lad? What, yo'r there?" Some hoarse sounds meant for this came mockingly out of her at last, and her head dropped forward on her breast.