The Best of the Bureau/The_Best_of_the_Bureau_Bureau_Development_Inc._1992.iso/dp/0059/00590.txt

Text File | 1992-08-07 | 29KB | 557 lines

$Unique_ID{bob00590}
$Pretitle{}
$Title{Hard Times
Chapter I}
$Subtitle{}
$Author{Dickens, Charles}
$Affiliation{}
$Subject{mrs
sparsit
ma'am
bitzer
upon
coketown
light
little
never
now}
$Date{}
$Log{}
Title:       Hard Times
Book:        Book The Second: Reaping
Author:      Dickens, Charles

Chapter I

Effects In The Bank

     A sunny midsummer day.  There was such a thing sometimes, even in
Coketown.

     Seen from a distance in such weather, Coketown lay shrouded in a haze of
its own, which appeared impervious to the sun's rays.  You only knew the town
was there, because you knew there could have been no such sulky blotch upon
the prospect without a town.  A blur of soot and smoke, now confusedly tending
this way, now that way, now aspiring to the vault of Heaven, now murkily
creeping along the earth, as the wind rose and fell, or changed its quarter: a
dense formless jumble, with sheets of cross light in it, that showed nothing
but masses of darkness: - Coketown in the distance was suggestive of itself,
though not a brick of it could be seen.

     The wonder was, it was there at all.  It had been ruined so often, that
it was amazing how it had borne so many shocks.  Surely there never was such
fragile chinaware as that of which the millers of Coketown were made.  Handle
them never so lightly, and they fell to pieces with such ease that you might
suspect them of having been flawed before.  They were ruined, when they were
required to send labouring children to school; they were ruined when
inspectors were appointed to look into their works; they were ruined, when
such inspectors considered it doubtful whether they were quite justified in
chopping people up with their machinery; they were utterly undone, when it was
hinted that perhaps they need not always make quite so much smoke.  Besides
Mr. Bounderby's gold spoon which was generally received in Coketown, another
prevalent fiction was very popular there.  It took the form of a threat.
Whenever a Coketowner felt he was ill-used - that is to say, whenever he was
not left entirely alone, and it was proposed to hold him accountable for the
consequences of any of his acts - he was sure to come out with the awful
menace, that he would "sooner pitch his property into the Atlantic." This had
terrified the Home Secretary within an inch of his life, on several occasions.

     However, the Coketowners were so patriotic after all, that they never had
pitched their property into the Atlantic yet, but on the contrary, had been
kind enough to take mighty good care of it.  So there it was, in the haze
yonder; and it increased and multiplied.

     The streets were hot and dusty on the summer day, and the sun was so
bright that it even shone through the heavy vapour drooping over Coketown, and
could not be looked at steadily.  Stokers emerged from low underground
doorways into factory yards, and sat on steps, and posts, and palings, wiping
their swarthy visages, and contemplating coals.  The whole town seemed to be
frying in oil.  There was a stifling smell of hot oil everywhere.  The
steam-engines shone with it, the dresses of the Hands were soiled with it, the
mills throughout their many stories oozed and trickled it.  The atmosphere of
those Fairy palaces was like the breath of the simoom; and their inhabitants,
wasting with heat toiled languidly in the desert.  But no temperature made the
melancholy mad elephants more mad or more sane.  Their wearisome heads went up
and down at the same rate, in hot weather and cold, wet weather and dry, fair
weather and foul.  The measured motion of their shadows on the walls, was the
substitute Coketown had to show for the shadows of rustling woods; while, for
the summer hum of insects, it could offer, all the year round, from the dawn
of Monday to the night of Saturday, the whirr of shafts and wheels.

     Drowsily they whirred all through this sunny day, making the passenger
more sleepy and more hot as he passed the humming walls of the mills.
Sun-blinds, and sprinklings of water, a little cooled the main streets and the
shops; but the mills, and the courts and the alleys, baked at a fierce heat.
Down upon the river that was black and thick with dye, some Coketown boys who
were at large - a rare sight there - rowed a crazy boat, which made a spumons
track upon the water as it jogged along, while every dip of an oar stirred up
vile smells.  But the sun itself, however beneficent generally, was less kind
to Coketown than hard frost, and rarely looked intently into any of its closer
regions without engendering more death than life.  So does the eye of Heaven
itself become an evil eye, when incapable or sordid hands are interposed
between it and the things it looks upon to bless.

     Mrs. Sparsit sat in her afternoon apartment at the Bank, on the shadier
side of the frying street.  Office-hours were over: and at that period of the
day, in warm weather, she usually embellished with her genteel presence, a
managerial board-room over the public office.  Her own private sitting-room
was a story high, at the window of which post of observation she was ready,
every morning, to greet Mr. Bounderby, as he came across the road with the
sympathising recognition appropriate to a Victim.  He had been married now, a
year; and Mrs. Sparsit had never released him from her determined pity a
moment.

     The Bank offered no violence to the wholesome monotony of the town. It
was another red brick house, with black outside shutters, green inside blinds,
a black street-door up two white steps, a brazen door-plate, and a brazen
door-handle full stop.  It was a size larger than Mr. Bounderby's house, as
other houses were from a size to a half-a-dozen sizes smaller; in all other
particulars, it was strictly according to pattern.

     Mrs. Sparsit was conscious that by coming in the evening tide among the
desks and writing implements, she shed a feminine, not to say also
aristocratic, grace upon the office.  Seated, with her needlework or netting
apparatus, at the window, she had a self-laudatory sense of correcting, by her
ladylike deportment, the rude business aspect of the place.  With this
impression of her interesting character upon her, Mrs. Sparsit considered
herself, in some sort, the Bank Fairy.  The townspeople who, in their passing
and repassing, saw her there regarded her as the Bank Dragon keeping watch
over the treasures of the mine.

     What those treasures were, Mrs. Sparsit knew as little as they did. Gold
and silver coin, precious paper, secrets that if divulged would bring a vague
destruction upon vague persons (generally, however, people whom she disliked),
were the chief items in her ideal catalogue thereof.  For the rest, she knew
that after office-hours, she reigned supreme over all the office furniture,
and over a locked-up iron room with three locks, against the door of which
strong chamber the light porter laid his head every night, on a truckle bed,
that disappeared at cockcrow.  Further she was lady paramount over certain
vaults in the basement, sharply piked off from communication with the
predatory world; and over the relics of the current day's work, consisting of
blots of ink, worn-out pens, fragments of wafers, and scraps of paper torn so
small, that nothing interesting could ever be deciphered on them when Mrs.
Sparsit tried.  Lastly, she was guardian over a little armoury of cutlasses
and carbines, arrayed in vengeful order above one of the official
chimney-pieces; and over that respectable tradition never to be separated from
a place of business claiming to be wealthy - a row of fire-buckets - vessels
calculated to be of no physical utility on any occasion, but observed to
exercise a fine moral influence, almost equal to bullion, on most beholders.

     A deaf serving woman and a light porter completed Mrs. Sparsit's empire.
The deaf serving woman was rumoured to be wealthy; and a saying had for years
gone about among the lower orders of Coketown, that she would be murdered some
night when the Ban