Chapter 45

The Old Curiosity Shop

by Charles Dickens

In all their journeying, they had never longed so ardently, they
had never so pined and wearied, for the freedom of pure air and open
country, as now. No, not even on that memorable morning, when,
deserting their old home, they abandoned themselves to the mercies of
a strange world, and left all the dumb and senseless things they had
known and loved, behind--not even then, had they so yearned for the
fresh solitudes of wood, hillside, and field, as now, when the noise
and dirt and vapour, of the great manufacturing town reeking with
lean misery and hungry wretchedness, hemmed them in on every side,
and seemed to shut out hope, and render escape impossible.

'Two days and nights!' thought the child. 'He said two days and
nights we should have to spend among such scenes as these. Oh! if we
live to reach the country once again, if we get clear of these
dreadful places, though it is only to lie down and die, with what a
grateful heart I shall thank God for so much mercy!'

With thoughts like this, and with some vague design of
travelling to a great distance among streams and mountains, where
only very poor and simple people lived, and where they might maintain
themselves by very humble helping work in farms, free from such
terrors as that from which they fled--the child, with no resource but
the poor man's gift, and no encouragement but that which flowed from
her own heart, and its sense of the truth and right of what she did,
nerved herself to this last journey and boldly pursued her task.

'We shall be very slow to-day, dear,' she said, as they toiled
painfully through the streets; 'my feet are sore, and I have pains in
all my limbs from the wet of yesterday. I saw that he looked at us
and thought of that, when he said how long we should be upon the
road.'

'It was a dreary way he told us of,' returned her grandfather,
piteously. 'Is there no other road? Will you not let me go some
other way than this?'

'Places lie beyond these,' said the child, firmly, 'where we may
live in peace, and be tempted to do no harm. We will take the road
that promises to have that end, and we would not turn out of it, if
it were a hundred times worse than our fears lead us to expect. We
would not, dear, would we?'

'No,' replied the old man, wavering in his voice, no less than
in his manner. 'No. Let us go on. I am ready. I am quite ready,
Nell.'

The child walked with more difficulty than she had led her
companion to expect, for the pains that racked her joints were of no
common severity, and every exertion increased them. But they wrung
from her no complaint, or look of suffering; and, though the two
travellers proceeded very slowly, they did proceed. Clearing the
town in course of time, they began to feel that they were fairly on
their way.

A long suburb of red brick houses--some with patches of
garden-ground, where coal-dust and factory smoke darkened the
shrinking leaves, and coarse rank flowers, and where the struggling
vegetation sickened and sank under the hot breath of kiln and
furnace, making them by its presence seem yet more blighting and
unwholesome than in the town itself--a long, flat, straggling suburb
passed, they came, by slow degrees, upon a cheerless region, where
not a blade of grass was seen to grow, where not a bud put forth its
promise in the spring, where nothing green could live but on the
surface of the stagnant pools, which here and there lay idly
sweltering by the black road-side.

Advancing more and more into the shadow of this mournful place,
its dark depressing influence stole upon their spirits, and filled
them with a dismal gloom. On every side, and far as the eye could
see into the heavy distance, tall chimneys, crowding on each other,
and presenting that endless repetition of the same dull, ugly form,
which is the horror of oppressive dreams, poured out their plague of
smoke, obscured the light, and made foul the melancholy air. On
mounds of ashes by the wayside, sheltered only by a few rough boards,
or rotten pent-house roofs, strange engines spun and writhed like
tortured creatures; clanking their iron chains, shrieking in their
rapid whirl from time to time as though in torment unendurable, and
making the ground tremble with their agonies. Dismantled houses here
and there appeared, tottering to the earth, propped up by fragments
of others that had fallen down, unroofed, windowless, blackened,
desolate, but yet inhabited. Men, women, children, wan in their
looks and ragged in attire, tended the engines, fed their tributary
fire, begged upon the road, or scowled half-naked from the doorless
houses. Then came more of the wrathful monsters, whose like they
almost seemed to be in their wildness and their untamed air,
screeching and turning round and round again; and still, before,
behind, and to the right and left, was the same interminable
perspective of brick towers, never ceasing in their black vomit,
blasting all things living or inanimate, shutting out the face of
day, and closing in on all these horrors with a dense dark cloud.

But night-time in this dreadful spot!--night, when the smoke was
changed to fire; when every chimney spirited up its flame; and
places, that had been dark vaults all day, now shone red-hot, with
figures moving to and fro within their blazing jaws, and calling to
one another with hoarse cries--night, when the noise of every strange
machine was aggravated by the darkness; when the people near them
looked wilder and more savage; when bands of unemployed labourers
paraded the roads, or clustered by torch-light round their leaders,
who told them, in stern language, of their wrongs, and urged them on
to frightful cries and threats; when maddened men, armed with sword
and firebrand, spurning the tears and prayers of women who would
restrain them, rushed forth on errands of terror and destruction, to
work no ruin half so surely as their own-- night, when carts came
rumbling by, filled with rude coffins (for contagious disease and
death had been busy with the living crops); when orphans cried, and
distracted women shrieked and followed in their wake--night, when
some called for bread, and some for drink to drown their cares, and
some with tears, and some with staggering feet, and some with
bloodshot eyes, went brooding home--night, which, unlike the night
that Heaven sends on earth, brought with it no peace, nor quiet, nor
signs of blessed sleep--who shall tell the terrors of the night to
the young wandering child!

And yet she lay down, with nothing between her and the sky; and,
with no fear for herself, for she was past it now, put up a prayer
for the poor old man. So very weak and spent, she felt, so very calm
and unresisting, that she had no thought of any wants of her own, but
prayed that God would raise up some friend for him. She tried to
recall the way they had come, and to look in the direction where the
fire by which they had slept last night was burning. She had
forgotten to ask the name of the poor man, their friend, and when she
had remembered him in her prayers, it seemed ungrateful not to turn
one look towards the spot where he was watching.

A penny loaf was all they had had that day. It was very little,
but even hunger was forgotten in the strange tranquillity that crept
over her senses. She lay down, very gently, and, with a quiet smile
upon her face, fell into a slumber. It was not like sleep--and yet
it must have been, or why those pleasant dreams of the little scholar
all night long! Morning came. Much weaker, diminished powers even
of sight and hearing, and yet the child made no complaint--perhaps
would have made none, even if she had not had that inducement to be
silent, travelling by her side. She felt a hopelessness of their
ever being extricated together from that forlorn place; a dull
conviction that she was very ill, perhaps dying; but no fear or
anxiety.

A loathing of food that she was not conscious of until they
expended their last penny in the purchase of another loaf, prevented
her partaking even of this poor repast. Her grandfather ate
greedily, which she was glad to see.

Their way lay through the same scenes as yesterday, with no
variety or improvement. There was the same thick air, difficult to
breathe; the same blighted ground, the same hopeless prospect, the
same misery and distress. Objects appeared more dim, the noise less,
the path more rugged and uneven, for sometimes she stumbled, and
became roused, as it were, in the effort to prevent herself from
falling. Poor child! the cause was in her tottering feet.

Towards the afternoon, her grandfather complained bitterly of
hunger. She approached one of the wretched hovels by the way-side,
and knocked with her hand upon the door.

'What would you have here?' said a gaunt man, opening it.

'Charity. A morsel of bread.'

'Do you see that?' returned the man hoarsely, pointing to a kind
of bundle on the ground. 'That's a dead child. I and five hundred
other men were thrown out of work, three months ago. That is my
third dead child, and last. Do you think I have charity to bestow,
or a morsel of bread to spare?'

The child recoiled from the door, and it closed upon her.
Impelled by strong necessity, she knocked at another: a neighbouring
one, which, yielding to the slight pressure of her hand, flew
open.

It seemed that a couple of poor families lived in this hovel,
for two women, each among children of her own, occupied different
portions of the room. In the centre, stood a grave gentleman in
black who appeared to have just entered, and who held by the arm a
boy.

'Here, woman,' he said, 'here's your deaf and dumb son. You may
thank me for restoring him to you. He was brought before me, this
morning, charged with theft; and with any other boy it would have
gone hard, I assure you. But, as I had compassion on his
infirmities, and thought he might have learnt no better, I have
managed to bring him back to you. Take more care of him for the
future.'

'And won't you give me back my son!' said the other woman,
hastily rising and confronting him. 'Won't you give me back my son,
Sir, who was transported for the same offence!'

'Was he deaf and dumb, woman?' asked the gentleman sternly.

'Was he not, Sir?'

'You know he was not.'

'He was,' cried the woman. 'He was deaf, dumb, and blind, to
all that was good and right, from his cradle. Her boy may have
learnt no better! where did mine learn better? where could he? who
was there to teach him better, or where was it to be learnt?'

'Peace, woman,' said the gentleman, 'your boy was in possession
of all his senses.'

'He was,' cried the mother; 'and he was the more easy to be led
astray because he had them. If you save this boy because he may not
know right from wrong, why did you not save mine who was never taught
the difference? You gentlemen have as good a right to punish her
boy, that God has kept in ignorance of sound and speech, as you have
to punish mine, that you kept in ignorance yourselves. How many of
the girls and boys--ah, men and women too--that are brought before
you and you don't pity, are deaf and dumb in their minds, and go
wrong in that state, and are punished in that state, body and soul,
while you gentlemen are quarrelling among yourselves whether they
ought to learn this or that? --Be a just man, Sir, and give me back
my son.'

'You are desperate,' said the gentleman, taking out his
snuff-box, 'and I am sorry for you.'

'I am desperate,' returned the woman, 'and you have made me so.
Give me back my son, to work for these helpless children. Be a just
man, Sir, and, as you have had mercy upon this boy, give me back my
son!'

The child had seen and heard enough to know that this was not a
place at which to ask for alms. She led the old man softly from the
door, and they pursued their journey.

With less and less of hope or strength, as they went on, but
with an undiminished resolution not to betray by any word or sigh her
sinking state, so long as she had energy to move, the child,
throughout the remainder of that hard day, compelled herself to
proceed: not even stopping to rest as frequently as usual, to
compensate in some measure for the tardy pace at which she was
obliged to walk. Evening was drawing on, but had not closed in,
when--still travelling among the same dismal objects--they came to a
busy town.

Faint and spiritless as they were, its streets were
insupportable. After humbly asking for relief at some few doors, and
being repulsed, they agreed to make their way out of it as speedily
as they could, and try if the inmates of any lone house beyond, would
have more pity on their exhausted state.

They were dragging themselves along through the last street, and
the child felt that the time was close at hand when her enfeebled
powers would bear no more. There appeared before them, at this
juncture, going in the same direction as themselves, a traveller on
foot, who, with a portmanteau strapped to his back, leaned upon a
stout stick as he walked, and read from a book which he held in his
other hand.

It was not an easy matter to come up with him, and beseech his
aid, for he walked fast, and was a little distance in advance. At
length, he stopped, to look more attentively at some passage in his
book. Animated with a ray of hope, the child shot on before her
grandfather, and, going close to the stranger without rousing him by
the sound of her footsteps, began, in a few faint words, to implore
his help.

He turned his head. The child clapped her hands together,
uttered a wild shriek, and fell senseless at his feet.