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,
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, and 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 fok 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, 'Ay, 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 to-morrow-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 again!'
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.
'Back agen?' she screeched, after some minutes, as if he had that moment said
it. 'Yes! And back agen. Back agen ever and ever so often. Back? Yes, back. Why
not?'
Roused by the unmeaning violence with which she cried it out, she scrambled
up, and stood supporting herself with her shoulders against the wall; dangling
in one hand by the string, a dunghill- fragment of a bonnet, and trying to look
scornfully at him.
'I'll sell thee off again, and I'll sell thee off again, and I'll sell thee
off a score of times!' she cried, with something between a furious menace and an
effort at a defiant dance. 'Come awa' from th' bed!' He was sitting on the side
of it, with his face hidden in his hands. 'Come awa! from 't. 'Tis mine, and
I've a right to t'!'
As she staggered to it, he avoided her with a shudder, and passed - his face
still hidden - to the opposite end of the room. She threw herself upon the bed
heavily, and soon was snoring hard. He sunk into a chair, and moved but once all
that night. It was to throw a covering over her; as if his hands were not enough
to hide her, even in the darkness.
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