Multimedia Mania/abacus-multimedia-mania.iso/dp/0057/00578.txt

Text File | 1993-07-27 | 13KB | 246 lines

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$Title{Hard Times
Chapter V}
$Subtitle{}
$Author{Dickens, Charles}
$Affiliation{}
$Subject{sir
bounderby
fact
gradgrind
coketown
never
town
get
girl
like}
$Date{}
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Title:       Hard Times
Book:        Book The First: Sowing
Author:      Dickens, Charles

Chapter V

The Key-Note

     Coketown, to which Messrs. Bounderby and Gradgrind now walked, was a
triumph of fact; it had no greater taint of fancy in it than Mrs.
Gradgrind herself.  Let us strike the key-note, Coketown, before pursuing
our tune.

     It was a town of red brick, or of brick that would have been red if the
smoke and ashes had allowed it; but as matters stood it was a town of
unnatural red and and black like the painted face of a savage.  It was a town
of machinery and tall chimneys, out of which interminable serpents of smoke
trailed themselves for ever and ever, and never got uncoiled.  It had a black
canal in it, and a river that ran purple with ill-smelling dye, and vast piles
of building full of windows where there was a rattling and a trembling all day
long, and where the piston of the steam-engine worked monotonously up and
down, like the head of an elephant in a state of melancholy madness.  It
contained several large streets all very like one another, and many small
streets still more like one another, inhabited by people equally like one
another, who all went in and out at the same hours, with the same sound upon
the same payments, to do the same work, and to whom every day was the same as
yesterday and to-morrow, and every year the counterpart of the last and the
next.

     These attributes of Coketown were in the main inseparable from the work
by which it was sustained; against them were to be set off, comforts of life,
which found their way all over the world, and elegances of life which made, we
will not ask how much of the fine lady, who could scarcely bear to hear the
place mentioned.  The rest of its features were voluntary, and they were
these.

     You saw nothing in Coketown but what was severely workful.  If the
members of a religious persuasion built a chapel there - as the members of
eighteen religious persuasions had done - they made it a pious warehouse of
red brick, with sometimes (but this is only in highly ornamented examples) a
bell in a bird-cage on the top of it.  The solitary exception was the New
Church; a stuccoed edifice with a square steeple over the door, terminating in
four short pinnacles like florid wooden legs.  All the public inscriptions in
the town were painted alike, in severe characters of black and white.  The
jail might have been the infirmary, the infirmary might have been the jail,
the town-hall might have been either, or both or anything else, for anything
that appeared to the contrary in the graces of their construction.  Fact,
fact, fact, everywhere in the material aspect of the town; fact, fact, fact,
everywhere in the immaterial.  The M'Choakumchild school was all fact, and the
school of design was all fact, and the relations between master and man were
all fact, and everything was fact between the lying-in hospital and the
cemetery, and what you couldn't state in figures, or show to be purchaseable
in the cheapest market and saleable in the dearest, was not, and never should
be, world without end, Amen.

     A town so sacred to fact, and so triumphant in its assertion, of course
got on well?  Why, no, not quite well.  No?  Dear me!

     No.  Coketown did not come out of its own furnaces, in all respects like
gold that had stood the fire.  First, the perplexing mystery of the place was,
Who belonged to the eighteen denominations?  Because, who ever did, the
labouring people did not.  It was very strange to walk through the streets on
a Sunday morning, and note how few of them the barbarous jangling of bells
that was driving the sick and nervous mad, called away from their own quarter,
from their own close rooms, from the corners of their own streets, where they
lounged listlessly, gazing at all the church and chapel going, as at a thing
with which they had no manner of concern. Nor was it merely the stranger who
noticed this, because there was a native organisation in Coketown itself,
whose members were to be heard of in the House of Commons every session,
indignantly petitioning for acts of parliament that should make these people
religious by main force.  Then came the Teetotal Society, who complained that
these same people would get drunk, and showed in tabular statements that they
did get drunk, and proved at tea parties that no inducement, human or Divine
(except a medal), would induce them to forego their custom of getting drunk.
Then came the chemist and druggist, with other tabular statements, showing
that when they didn't get drunk, they took opium.  Then came the experienced
chaplain of the jail, with more tabular statements, outdoing all the previous
tabular statements, and showing that the same people would resort to low
haunts, hidden from the public eye, where they heard low singing and saw low
dancing, and may-hap joined in it; and where A. B., aged twenty-four next
birthday, and committed for eighteen months' solitary, had himself said (not
that he had ever shown himself particularly worthy of belief) his ruin began,
as he was perfectly sure and confident that otherwise he would have been a
tip-top moral specimen.  Then came Mr. Gradgrind and Mr. Bounderby, the two
gentlemen at this present moment walking through Coketown, and both eminently
practical, who could, on occasion, furnish more tabular statements derived
from their own personal experience, and illustrated by cases they had known
and seen, from which it clearly appeared - in short, it was the only clear
thing in the case - that these same people were a bad lot altogether,
gentlemen; that do what you would for them they were never thankful for it,
gentlemen; that they were restless, gentlemen; that they never knew what they
wanted; that they live upon the best, and bought fresh butter; and insisted on
Mocha coffee, and rejected all but prime parts of meat, and yet were eternally
dissatisfied and unmanageable.  In short it was the moral of the old nursery
fable:

     There was an old woman, and what do you think?
     She lived upon nothing but victuals and drink;
     Victuals and drink were the whole of her diet,
     And yet this old woman would never be quiet.

     Is it possible, I wonder, that there was any analogy between the case of
the Coketown population and the case of the little Gradgrinds?  Surely none of
us in our sober senses and acquainted with figures, are to be told at this
time of day, that one of the foremost elements in the existence of the
Coketown working-people had been for scores of years, deliberately set at
naught?  That there was any Fancy in them demanding to be brought into healthy
existence instead of struggling on in convulsions?  That exactly in the ratio
as they worked long and monotonously, the craving grew within them for some
physical relief - some relaxation, encouraging good humour and good spirits,
and giving them a vent - some recognised holiday, though it were but for an
honest dance to a stirring band of music, - some occasional light pie in which
even M'Choakumchild had no finger - which craving must and would be satisfied
aright, or must and would inevitably go wrong, until the laws of the Creation
were repealed?

     "This man lives at Pod's End, and I don't quite know Pod's End," said Mr.
Gradgrind.  "Which is it, Bounderby?"

     Mr. Bounderby knew it was somewhere down town, but knew no more
respecting it.  So they stopped for a moment, looking about.

     Almost as they did so, there came running round the corner of the street
at a quick pace and with a frightened look, a girl whom Mr. Gradgrind
recognised.  "Halloa!" said he.  "Stop!  Where are you going? Stop!" Girl
number twenty stopped then, palpitating, and made him a curtsey.

     "Why are you tearing about the streets," said Mr. Gradgrind, "in this
improper manner?"

     "I was - I was run after, sir," the girl panted, "and I wanted to get
away."

     "Run after?" repeated Mr. Gradgrind.  "Who would run after you?"

     The question was unexpectedly and suddenly answered for her, by the
colourless boy, Bitzer, who came round the corner with such blind speed and so
little anticipating a stoppage on the pavement, that he brought himself up
against Mr. Gradgrind's waistcoat and rebounded into the road.

     "What do you mean, boy?" said Mr. Gradgrind.  "What are you doing? How
dare you dash against - everybody - in this manner?"

     Bitzer picked up his cap, which the concussion had knocked off; and
backing, and knuckling his forehead, pleaded that it was an accident.

     "Was this boy running after you, Jupe?" asked Mr. Gradgrind.

     "Yes, sir," said the girl reluctantly.

     "No, I wasn't, sir!" cried Bitzer.  "Not till she run away from me. But
the horse-riders never mind what they say, sir; they're famous for it. You
know the horse-riders are famous for never minding what they say," addressing
Sissy.  "It's as well known in the town as - please, sir, as the
multiplication table isn't known to the horse-riders." Bitzer tried Mr.
Bounderby with this.

     "He frightened me so," said the girl, "with his cruel faces!"

     "Oh!" cried Bitzer.  "Oh!  An't you one of the rest!  An't you a
horse-rider!  I never looked at her, sir.  I asked her if she would know how
to define a horse to-morrow, and offered to tell her again, and she ran away,
and I ran after her, sir, that she might know how to answer when she was
asked.  You wouldn't have thought of saying such mischief if you hadn't been a
horse-rider!"

     "Her calling seems to be pretty well known among 'em," observed Mr.
Bounderby.  "You'd have had the whole school peeping in a row, in a week."

     "Truly, I think so," returned his friend.  "Bitzer, turn you about and
take yourself home.  Jupe, stay here a moment.  Let me hear of your running in
this manner any more, boy, and you will hear of me through the master of the
school.  You understand what I mean.  Go along."

     The boy stopped in his rapid blinking, knuckled his forehead again,
glanced at Sissy, turned about, and retreated.

     "Now, girl," said Mr. Gradgrind, "take this gentleman and me to your
father's; we are going there.  What have you got in that bottle you are
carrying?"

     "Gin," said Mr. Bounderby.

     "Dear, no sir!  It's the nine oils."

     "The what?" cried Mr. Bounderby.

     "The nine oils, sir.  To rub father with."

     "Then," said Mr. Bounderby, with a loud short laugh, "what the devil do
you rub your father with nine oils for?"

     "It's what our people always use, sir, when they get any hurts in the
ring," replied the girl, looking over her shoulder, to assure herself that her
pursuer was gone.  "They bruise themselves very bad sometimes."

     "Serve 'em right," said Mr. Bounderby, "for being idle." She glanced up
at his face, with mingled astonishment and dread.

     "By George!" said Mr. Bounderby, "when I was four or five years younger
than you, I had worse bruises upon me than ten oils, twenty oils, forty oils
would have rubbed off.  I didn't get 'em by posture-making, but by being
banged about.  There was no rope-dancing for me; I danced on the bare ground
and was larruped with the rope."

     Mr. Gradgrind, though hard enough, was by no means so rough a man as Mr.
Bounderby.  His character was not unkind, all things considered; it might have
been a very kind one indeed, if he had only made some round mistake in the
arithmetic that balanced it, years ago.  He said, in what he meant for a
re-assuring tone, as they turned down a narrow road, "And this is Pod's End;
is it, Jupe?"

     "This is it, sir, and - if you wouldn't mind, sir - this is the house."

     She stopped, at twilight, at the door of a mean little public house, with
dim red lights in it.  As haggard and as shabby, as if, for want of custom, it
had itself taken to drinking, and had gone the way all drunkards go, and was
very near the end of it.

     "It's only crossing the bar, sir, and up the stairs, if you wouldn't
mind, and waiting there for a moment till I get a candle.  If you should hear
a dog, sir, it's only Merrylegs, and he only barks."

     "Merrylegs and nine oils, eh!" said Mr. Bounderby, entering last with his
metallic laugh.  "Pretty well this, for a self-made man!"