The Best of the Bureau/The_Best_of_the_Bureau_Bureau_Development_Inc._1992.iso/dp/0059/00596.txt

Text File | 1992-08-07 | 27KB | 517 lines

$Unique_ID{bob00596}
$Pretitle{}
$Title{Hard Times
Chapter VII}
$Subtitle{}
$Author{Dickens, Charles}
$Affiliation{}
$Subject{harthouse
tom
am
bounderby
brother
upon
now
mrs
face
little}
$Date{}
$Log{}
Title:       Hard Times
Book:        Book The Second: Reaping
Author:      Dickens, Charles

Chapter VII

Gunpowder

     Mr. James Harthouse, "going in" for his adopted party, soon began to
score.  With the aid of a little more coaching for the political sages, a
little more genteel listlessness for the general society, and a tolerable
management of the assumed honesty in dishonesty, most effective and most
patronized of the polite deadly sins, he speedily came to be considered of
much promise.  The not being troubled with earnestness was a grand point in
his favour, enabling him to take to the hard Fact fellows with as good a grace
as if he had been born one of the tribe, and to throw all other tribes
overboard, as conscious hypocrites.

     "Whom none of us believe, my dear Mrs. Bounderby, and who do not believe
themselves.  The only difference between us and the professors of virtue or
benevolence, or philanthopy - never mind the name - is, that we know it is all
meaningless, and say so; while they know it equally and will never say so."

     Why should she be shocked or warned by this reiteration?  It was not so
unlike her father's principles, and her early training, that it need startle
her.  Where was the great difference between the two schools, when each
chained her down to material realities, and inspired her with no faith in
anything else?  What was there in her soul for James Harthouse to destroy,
which Thomas Gradgrind had nurtured there in its state of innocence!

     It was even the worse for her at this pass, that in her mind - implanted
there before her eminently practical father began to form it - a struggling
disposition to believe in a wider and nobler humanity than she had ever heard
of, constantly strove with doubts and resentments.  With doubts, because the
aspiration had been so laid waste in her youth.  With resentments, because of
the wrong that had been done her, if it were indeed a whisper of the truth.
Upon a nature long accustomed to self-suppression, thus torn and divided, the
Harthouse philosophy came as a relief and justification.  Everything being
hollow and worthless, she had missed nothing and sacrificed nothing.  What did
it matter, she had said to her father, when he proposed her husband.  What did
it matter, she said still.  With a scornful self-reliance, she asked herself,
What did anything matter - and went on.

     Towards what?  Step by step, onward and downward, towards some end, yet
so gradually, that she believed herself to remain motionless.  As to Mr.
Harthouse, whither he tended he neither considered nor cared.  He had no
particular design or plan before him: no energetic wickedness ruffled his
lassitude.  He was as much amused and interested at present, as it became so
fine a gentleman to be; perhaps even more than it would have been consistent
with his reputation to confess.  Soon after his arrival he languidly wrote to
his brother, the honourable and jocular member, that the Bounderbys were
"great fun;" and further, that the female Bounderby, instead of being the
Gorgon he expected, was young, and remarkably pretty. After that, he wrote no
more about them, and devoted his leisure chiefly to their house.  He was very
often in their house, in his flittings and visitings about the Coketown
district; and was much encouraged by Mr. Bounderby.  It was quite in Mr.
Bounderby's gusty way to boast to all his world that he didn't care about your
highly connected people, but that if his wife, Tom Gradgrind's daughter, did,
she was welcome to their company.

     Mr. James Harthouse began to think it would be a new sensation, if the
face which changed so beautifully for the whelp, would change for him.

     He was quick enough to observe; he had a good memory, and did not forget
a word of the brother's revelations.  He interwove them with everything he saw
of the sister, and he began to understand her.  To be sure, the better and
profounder part of her character was not within his scope of perception; for
in natures, as in seas, depth answers unto depth; but he soon began to read
the rest with a student's eye.

     Mr. Bounderby had taken possession of a house and grounds, about fifteen
miles from the town, and accessible within a mile or two, by a railway
striding on many arches over a wild country, undermined by deserted
coal-shafts, and spotted at night by fires and black shapes of stationary
engines at pits' mouths.  This country, gradually softening towards the
neighbourhood of Mr. Bounderby's retreat, there mellowed into a rustic
landscape, golden with heath, and snowy with hawthorn in the spring of the
year, and tremulous with leaves and their shadows all the summer time.  The
bank had foreclosed a mortgage effected on the property thus pleasantly
situated, by one of the Coketown magnates, who, in his determination to make a
shorter cut than usual to an enormous fortune, overspeculated himself by about
two hundred thousand pounds.  These accidents did sometimes happen in the
best-regulated families of Coketown, but the bankrupts had no connexion
whatever with the improvident classes.

     It afforded Mr. Bounderby supreme satisfaction to instal himself in this
snug little estate, and with demonstrative humility to grow cabbages in the
flower garden.  He delighted to live, barrack-fashion, among the elegant
furniture, and he bullied the very pictures with his origin. "Why, sir," he
would say to a visitor, "I am told that Nickits," the late owner, "gave seven
hundred pound for that Sea-beach.  Now to be plain with you, if I ever, in the
whole course of my life, take seven looks at it, at a hundred pound a look, it
will be as much as I shall do.  No, by George! I don't forget that I am Josiah
Bounderby of Coketown.  For years upon years, the only pictures in my
possession, or that I could have got into my possession by any means, unless I
stole 'em, were the engravings of a man shaving himself in a boot, on the
blacking bottles that I was overjoyed to use in cleaning boots with, and that
I sold when they were empty for a farthing apiece, and glad to get it!"

     Then he would address Mr. Harthouse in the same style.

     "Harthouse, you have a couple of horses down here.  Bring half a dozen
more if you like, and we'll find room for 'em.  There's stabling in this place
for a dozen horses; and unless Nickits is belied, he kept the full number.  A
round dozen of 'em, sir.  When that man was a boy, he went to Westminster
School.  Went to Westminster School as a King's Scholar, when I was
principally living on garbage, and sleeping in market baskets. Why, if I
wanted to keep a dozen horses - which I don't, for one's enough for me - I
couldn't bear to see 'em in their stalls here, and think what my own lodging
used to be.  I couldn't look at 'em, sir, and not order 'em out.  Yet so
things come round.  You see this place; you know what sort of a place it is;
you are aware that there's not a completer place of its size in this kingdom
or elsewhere - I don't care where - and here, got into the middle of it, like
a maggot into a nut, is Josiah Bounderby. While Nickits (as a man came into my
office, and told me yesterday), Nickits, who used to act in Latin, in
Westminster School plays, with the chief-justices and nobility of this country
applauding him till they were black in the face, is drivelling at this minute
- drivelling, sir! - in a fifth floor up a narrow dark back street in
Antwerp."

     It was among the leafy shadows of this retirement, in the long sultry
summer days, that Mr. Harthouse began to prove the face which had set him
wondering when he first saw it, and to try if it would change for him.

     "Mrs. Bounderby, I esteem it a most fortunate accident that I find you
alone here.  I have for some time had a particular wish to speak to you