Chapter X - Stephen Blackpool

Hard Times

by Charles Dickens

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.