The Best of the Bureau/The_Best_of_the_Bureau_Bureau_Development_Inc._1992.iso/dp/0057/00577.txt

Text File | 1992-08-07 | 15KB | 310 lines

$Unique_ID{bob00577}
$Pretitle{}
$Title{Hard Times
Chapter IV}
$Subtitle{}
$Author{Dickens, Charles}
$Affiliation{}
$Subject{bounderby
gradgrind
mrs
louisa
always
young
thomas
friend
once
reason}
$Date{}
$Log{}
Title:       Hard Times
Book:        Book The First: Sowing
Author:      Dickens, Charles

Chapter IV

Mr. Bounderby

     Not being Mrs. Grundy, who was Mr. Bounderby?

     Why, Mr. Bounderby was as near being Mr. Gradgrind's bosom friend, as a
man perfectly devoid of sentiment can approach that spiritual relationship
towards another man perfectly devoid of sentiment.  So near was Mr. Bounderby
- or, if the reader should prefer it, so far off.

     He was a rich man: banker, merchant, manufacturer, and what not.  A big,
loud man, with a stare, and a metallic laugh.  A man made out of a coarse
material, which seemed to have been stretched to make so much of him.  A man
with a great puffed head and forehead, swelled veins in his temples, and such
a strained skin to his face that it seemed to hold his eyes open, and lift his
eyebrows up.  A man with a pervading appearance on him of being inflated like
a balloon, and ready to start.  A man who could never sufficiently vaunt
himself a selfmade man.  A man who was always proclaiming, through that brassy
speaking-trumpet of a voice of his, his old ignorance and his old poverty.  A
man who was the Bully of humility.

     A year or two younger than his eminently practical friend, Mr. Bounderby
looked older; his seven or eight and forty might have had the seven or eight
added to it again, without surprising anybody.  He had not much hair.  One
might have fancied he had talked it off; and that what was left, all standing
up in disorder, was in that condition from being constantly blown about by his
windy boastfulness.

     In the formal drawing-room of Stone Lodge, standing on the hearth-rug,
warming himself before the fire, Mr. Bounderby delivered some observations to
Mrs. Gradgrind on the circumstance of its being his birthday.  He stood before
the fire, partly because it was a cool spring afternoon, though the sun shone;
partly because the shade of Stone Lodge was always haunted by the ghost of
damp mortar; partly because he thus took up a commanding position, from which
to subdue Mrs. Gradgrind.

     "I hadn't a shoe to my foot.  As to a stocking, I didn't know such a
thing by name.  I passed the day in a ditch, and the night in a pigsty. That's
the way I spent my tenth birth-day.  Not that a ditch was new to me, for I was
born in a ditch.

     Mrs. Gradgrind, a little, thin, white, pink-eyed bundle of shawls, of
surpassing feebleness, mental and bodily; who was always taking physic without
any effect, and who, whenever she showed a symptom of coming to life, was
invariably stunned by some weighty piece of fact tumbling on her; Mrs.
Gradgrind hoped it was a dry ditch?

     "No!  As wet as a sop.  A foot of water in it," said Mr. Bounderby.

     "Enough to give a baby cold," Mrs. Gradgrind considered.

     "Cold?  I was born with inflammation of the lungs, and of everything
else, I believe, that was capable of inflammation," returned Mr. Bounderby.
"For years, ma'am, I was one of the most miserable little wretches ever seen.
I was so sickly, that I was always moaning and groaning.  I was so ragged and
dirty, that you wouldn't have touched me with a pair of tongs."

     Mrs. Gradgrind faintly looked at the tongs, as the most appropriate thing
her imbecility could think of doing.

     "How I fought through it, I don't know," said Bounderby.  "I was
determined, I suppose.  I have been a determined character in later life, and
I suppose I was then.  Here I am, Mrs. Gradgrind, anyhow, and nobody to thank
for my being here, but myself."

     Mrs. Gradgrind meekly and weakly hoped that his mother -

     "My mother?  Bolted, ma'am!" said Bounderby.

     Mrs. Gradgrind, stunned as usual, collapsed and gave it up.

     "My mother left me to my grandmother," said Bounderby; "and, according to
the best of my remembrance, my grandmother was the wickedest and the worst old
woman that ever lived.  If I got a little pair of shoes by any chance, she
would take 'em off and sell 'em for drink.  Why, I have known that grandmother
of mine lie in her bed and drink her fourteen glasses of liquor before
breakfast!"

     Mrs. Gradgrind, weakly smiling, and giving no other sign of vitality,
looked (as she always did) like an indifferently executed transparency of a
small female figure, without enough light behind it.

     "She kept a chandler's shop," pursued Bounderby, "and kept me in an
egg-box.  That was the cot of my infancy; an old egg-box.  As soon as I was
big enough to run away, of course I ran away.  Then I became a young vagabond;
and instead of one old woman knocking me about and starving me, everybody of
all ages knocked me about and starved me.  They were right; they had no
business to do anything else.  I was a nuisance, and incumbrance, and a pest.
I know that very well."

     His pride in having at any time of his life achieved such a great social
distinction as to be a nuisance, an incumbrance, and a pest, was only to be
satisfied by three sonorous repetitions of the boast.

     "I was to pull through it I suppose, Mrs. Gradgrind.  Whether I was to do
it or not, ma'am, I did it.  I pulled through it, though nobody threw me out a
rope.  Vagabond, errand-boy, vagabond, laborer, porter, clerk, chief manager,
small partner, Josiah Bounderby of Coketown.  Those are the antecedents, and
the culmination.  Josiah Bounderby of Coketown learnt his letters from the
outsides of the shops, Mrs. Gradgrind, and was first able to tell the time
upon a dial-plate, from studying the steeple clock of St. Giles's Church,
London, under the directions of a drunken cripple, who was a convicted thief,
and an incorrigible vagrant.  Tell Josiah Bounderby of Coketown, of your
district schools and your model schools, and your training schools, and your
whole kettle-of-fish of schools; and Josiah Bounderby of Coketown, tells you
plainly, all right, all correct - he hadn't such advantages - but let us have
hard-headed, solid-fisted people - the education that made him won't do for
everybody, he knows well - such and such his education was, however, and you
may force him to swallow boiling fat, but you shall never force him to
suppress the facts of his life."

     Being heated when he arrived at this climax, Josiah Bounderby of Coketown
stopped.  His stopped just as his eminently practical friend, still
accompanied by the two young culprits, entered the room.  His eminently
practical friend, on seeing him, stopped also, and gave Louisa a reproachful
look that plainly said, "Behold your Bounderby!"

     "Well!" blustered Mr. Bounderby, "what's the matter?"

     "What is young Thomas in the dumps about?"

     He spoke of young Thomas, but he looked at Louisa.

     "We were peeping at the circus," muttered Louisa haughtily, without
lifting up her eyes, "and father caught us."

     "And Mrs. Gradgrind," said her husband in a lofty manner, "I should as
soon have expected to find my children reading poetry."

     "Dear me," whimpered Mrs. Gradgrind.  "How can you, Louisa and Thomas!  I
wonder at you.  I declare you're enough to make one regret ever having had a
family at all.  I have a great mind to say I wish I hadn't. Then what would
you have done, I should like to know."

     Mr. Gradgrind did not seem favourably impressed by these cogent remarks.
He frowned impatiently.

     "As if, with my head in its present throbbing state, you couldn't go and
look at the shells, and minerals and things provided for you, instead of
circuses!" said Mrs. Gradgrind.  "You know, as well as I do, no young people
have circus masters, or keep circuses in cabinets, or attend lectures of
circuses.  What can you possibly want to know about circuses then?  I am sure
you have enough to do, if that's what you want.  With my head in its present
state, I couldn't re