CHAPTER X

STEPHEN BLACKPOOL

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.