Chapter XII - The Old Woman

Hard Times

by Charles Dickens

Old Stephen descended the two white steps, shutting the black
door with the brazen door-plate, by the aid of the brazen full-stop,
to which he gave a parting polish with the sleeve of his coat,
observing that his hot hand clouded it. He crossed the street with
his eyes bent upon the ground, and thus was walking sorrowfully away,
when he felt a touch upon his arm.

It was not the touch he needed most at such a moment - the touch
that could calm the wild waters of his soul, as the uplifted hand of
the sublimest love and patience could abate the raging of the sea -
yet it was a woman's hand too. It was an old woman, tall and shapely
still, though withered by time, on whom his eyes fell when he stopped
and turned. She was very cleanly and plainly dressed, had country
mud upon her shoes, and was newly come from a journey. The flutter of
her manner, in the unwonted noise of the streets; the spare shawl,
carried unfolded on her arm; the heavy umbrella, and little basket;
the loose long-fingered gloves, to which her hands were unused; all
bespoke an old woman from the country, in her plain holiday clothes,
come into Coketown on an expedition of rare occurrence. Remarking
this at a glance, with the quick observation of his class, Stephen
Blackpool bent his attentive face - his face, which, like the faces
of many of his order, by dint of long working with eyes and hands in
the midst of a prodigious noise, had acquired the concentrated look
with which we are familiar in the countenances of the deaf - the
better to hear what she asked him.

'Pray, sir,' said the old woman, 'didn't I see you come out of
that gentleman's house?' pointing back to Mr. Bounderby's. 'I
believe it was you, unless I have had the bad luck to mistake the
person in following?'

'Yes, missus,' returned Stephen, 'it were me.'

'Have you - you'll excuse an old woman's curiosity - have you
seen the gentleman?'

'Yes, missus.'

'And how did he look, sir? Was he portly, bold, outspoken, and
hearty?' As she straightened her own figure, and held up her head in
adapting her action to her words, the idea crossed Stephen that he
had seen this old woman before, and had not quite liked her.

'O yes,' he returned, observing her more attentively, 'he were
all that.'

'And healthy,' said the old woman, 'as the fresh wind?'

'Yes,' returned Stephen. 'He were ett'n and drinking - as large
and as loud as a Hummobee.'

'Thank you!' said the old woman, with infinite content. 'Thank
you!'

He certainly never had seen this old woman before. Yet there
was a vague remembrance in his mind, as if he had more than once
dreamed of some old woman like her.

She walked along at his side, and, gently accommodating himself
to her humour, he said Coketown was a busy place, was it not? To
which she answered 'Eigh sure! Dreadful busy!' Then he said, she
came from the country, he saw? To which she answered in the
affirmative.

'By Parliamentary, this morning. I came forty mile by
Parliamentary this morning, and I'm going back the same forty mile
this afternoon. I walked nine mile to the station this morning, and
if I find nobody on the road to give me a lift, I shall walk the nine
mile back to-night. That's pretty well, sir, at my age!' said the
chatty old woman, her eye brightening with exultation.

''Deed 'tis. Don't do't too often, missus.'

'No, no. Once a year,' she answered, shaking her head. 'I
spend my savings so, once every year. I come regular, to tramp about
the streets, and see the gentlemen.'

'Only to see 'em?' returned Stephen.

'That's enough for me,' she replied, with great earnestness and
interest of manner. 'I ask no more! I have been standing about, on
this side of the way, to see that gentleman,' turning her head back
towards Mr. Bounderby's again, 'come out. But, he's late this year,
and I have not seen him. You came out instead. Now, if I am obliged
to go back without a glimpse of him - I only want a glimpse - well!
I have seen you, and you have seen him, and I must make that do.'
Saying this, she looked at Stephen as if to fix his features in her
mind, and her eye was not so bright as it had been.

With a large allowance for difference of tastes, and with all
submission to the patricians of Coketown, this seemed so
extraordinary a source of interest to take so much trouble about,
that it perplexed him. But they were passing the church now, and as
his eye caught the clock, he quickened his pace.

He was going to his work? the old woman said, quickening hers,
too, quite easily. Yes, time was nearly out. On his telling her
where he worked, the old woman became a more singular old woman than
before.

'An't you happy?' she asked him.

'Why - there's awmost nobbody but has their troubles, missus.'
He answered evasively, because the old woman appeared to take it for
granted that he would be very happy indeed, and he had not the heart
to disappoint her. He knew that there was trouble enough in the
world; and if the old woman had lived so long, and could count upon
his having so little, why so much the better for her, and none the
worse for him.

'Ay, ay! You have your troubles at home, you mean?' she
said.

'Times. Just now and then,' he answered, slightly.

'But, working under such a gentleman, they don't follow you to
the Factory?'

No, no; they didn't follow him there, said Stephen. All correct
there. Everything accordant there. (He did not go so far as to say,
for her pleasure, that there was a sort of Divine Right there; but, I
have heard claims almost as magnificent of late years.)

They were now in the black by-road near the place, and the Hands
were crowding in. The bell was ringing, and the Serpent was a
Serpent of many coils, and the Elephant was getting ready. The
strange old woman was delighted with the very bell. It was the
beautifullest bell she had ever heard, she said, and sounded
grand!

She asked him, when he stopped good-naturedly to shake hands
with her before going in, how long he had worked there?

'A dozen year,' he told her.

'I must kiss the hand,' said she, 'that has worked in this fine
factory for a dozen year!' And she lifted it, though he would have
prevented her, and put it to her lips. What harmony, besides her age
and her simplicity, surrounded her, he did not know, but even in this
fantastic action there was a something neither out of time nor place:
a something which it seemed as if nobody else could have made as
serious, or done with such a natural and touching air.

He had been at his loom full half an hour, thinking about this
old woman, when, having occasion to move round the loom for its
adjustment, he glanced through a window which was in his corner, and
saw her still looking up at the pile of building, lost in admiration.
Heedless of the smoke and mud and wet, and of her two long journeys,
she was gazing at it, as if the heavy thrum that issued from its many
stories were proud music to her.

She was gone by and by, and the day went after her, and the
lights sprung up again, and the Express whirled in full sight of the
Fairy Palace over the arches near: little felt amid the jarring of
the machinery, and scarcely heard above its crash and rattle. Long
before then his thoughts had gone back to the dreary room above the
little shop, and to the shameful figure heavy on the bed, but heavier
on his heart.

Machinery slackened; throbbing feebly like a fainting pulse;
stopped. The bell again; the glare of light and heat dispelled; the
factories, looming heavy in the black wet night - their tall chimneys
rising up into the air like competing Towers of Babel.

He had spoken to Rachael only last night, it was true, and had
walked with her a little way; but he had his new misfortune on him,
in which no one else could give him a moment's relief, and, for the
sake of it, and because he knew himself to want that softening of his
anger which no voice but hers could effect, he felt he might so far
disregard what she had said as to wait for her again. He waited, but
she had eluded him. She was gone. On no other night in the year
could he so ill have spared her patient face.

O! Better to have no home in which to lay his head, than to
have a home and dread to go to it, through such a cause. He ate and
drank, for he was exhausted - but he little knew or cared what; and
he wandered about in the chill rain, thinking and thinking, and
brooding and brooding.

No word of a new marriage had ever passed between them; but
Rachael had taken great pity on him years ago, and to her alone he
had opened his closed heart all this time, on the subject of his
miseries; and he knew very well that if he were free to ask her, she
would take him. He thought of the home he might at that moment have
been seeking with pleasure and pride; of the different man he might
have been that night; of the lightness then in his now heavy- laden
breast; of the then restored honour, self-respect, and tranquillity
all torn to pieces. He thought of the waste of the best part of his
life, of the change it made in his character for the worse every day,
of the dreadful nature of his existence, bound hand and foot, to a
dead woman, and tormented by a demon in her shape. He thought of
Rachael, how young when they were first brought together in these
circumstances, how mature now, how soon to grow old. He thought of
the number of girls and women she had seen marry, how many homes with
children in them she had seen grow up around her, how she had
contentedly pursued her own lone quiet path - for him - and how he
had sometimes seen a shade of melancholy on her blessed face, that
smote him with remorse and despair. He set the picture of her up,
beside the infamous image of last night; and thought, Could it be,
that the whole earthly course of one so gentle, good, and
self-denying, was subjugate to such a wretch as that!

Filled with these thoughts - so filled that he had an
unwholesome sense of growing larger, of being placed in some new and
diseased relation towards the objects among which he passed, of
seeing the iris round every misty light turn red - he went home for
shelter.