CHAPTER III

A LOOPHOLE

MR. GRADGRIND walked homeward from the school, in a state of considerable

satisfaction. It was his school, and he intended it to be a model. He

intended every child in it to be a model—just as the young Gradgrinds

were all models.

There were five young Gradgrinds, and they were models every one. They

had been lectured at, from their tenderest years; coursed, like little

hares. Almost as soon as they could run alone, they had been made to run

to the lecture-room. The first object with which they had an

association, or of which they had a remembrance, was a large black board

with a dry Ogre chalking ghastly white figures on it.

Not that they knew, by name or nature, anything about an Ogre Fact

forbid! I only use the word to express a monster in a lecturing castle,

with Heaven knows how many heads manipulated into one, taking childhood

captive, and dragging it into gloomy statistical dens by the hair.

No little Gradgrind had ever seen a face in the moon; it was up in the

moon before it could speak distinctly. No little Gradgrind had ever

learnt the silly jingle, Twinkle, twinkle, little star; how I wonder what

you are! No little Gradgrind had ever known wonder on the subject, each

little Gradgrind having at five years old dissected the Great Bear like a

Professor Owen, and driven Charles’s Wain like a locomotive

engine-driver. No little Gradgrind had ever associated a cow in a field

with that famous cow with the crumpled horn who tossed the dog who

worried the cat who killed the rat who ate the malt, or with that yet

more famous cow who swallowed Tom Thumb: it had never heard of those

celebrities, and had only been introduced to a cow as a graminivorous

ruminating quadruped with several stomachs.

To his matter-of-fact home, which was called Stone Lodge, Mr. Gradgrind

directed his steps. He had virtually retired from the wholesale hardware

trade before he built Stone Lodge, and was now looking about for a

suitable opportunity of making an arithmetical figure in Parliament.

Stone Lodge was situated on a moor within a mile or two of a great

town—called Coketown in the present faithful guide-book.

A very regular feature on the face of the country, Stone Lodge was. Not

the least disguise toned down or shaded off that uncompromising fact in

the landscape. A great square house, with a heavy portico darkening the

principal windows, as its master’s heavy brows overshadowed his eyes. A

calculated, cast up, balanced, and proved house. Six windows on this

side of the door, six on that side; a total of twelve in this wing, a

total of twelve in the other wing; four-and-twenty carried over to the

back wings. A lawn and garden and an infant avenue, all ruled straight

like a botanical account-book. Gas and ventilation, drainage and

water-service, all of the primest quality. Iron clamps and girders,

fire-proof from top to bottom; mechanical lifts for the housemaids, with

all their brushes and brooms; everything that heart could desire.

Everything? Well, I suppose so. The little Gradgrinds had cabinets in

various departments of science too. They had a little conchological

cabinet, and a little metallurgical cabinet, and a little mineralogical

cabinet; and the specimens were all arranged and labelled, and the bits

of stone and ore looked as though they might have been broken from the

parent substances by those tremendously hard instruments their own names;

and, to paraphrase the idle legend of Peter Piper, who had never found

his way into their nursery, If the greedy little Gradgrinds grasped at

more than this, what was it for good gracious goodness’ sake, that the

greedy little Gradgrinds grasped it!

Their father walked on in a hopeful and satisfied frame of mind. He was

an affectionate father, after his manner; but he would probably have

described himself (if he had been put, like Sissy Jupe, upon a

definition) as ‘an eminently practical’ father. He had a particular

pride in the phrase eminently practical, which was considered to have a

special application to him. Whatsoever the public meeting held in

Coketown, and whatsoever the subject of such meeting, some Coketowner was

sure to seize the occasion of alluding to his eminently practical friend

Gradgrind. This always pleased the eminently practical friend. He knew

it to be his due, but his due was acceptable.

He had reached the neutral ground upon the outskirts of the town, which

was neither town nor country, and yet was either spoiled, when his ears

were invaded by the sound of music. The clashing and banging band

attached to the horse-riding establishment, which had there set up its

rest in a wooden pavilion, was in full bray. A flag, floating from the

summit of the temple, proclaimed to mankind that it was ‘Sleary’s

Horse-riding’ which claimed their suffrages. Sleary himself, a stout

modern statue with a money-box at its elbow, in an ecclesiastical niche

of early Gothic architecture, took the money. Miss Josephine Sleary, as

some very long and very narrow strips of printed bill announced, was then

inaugurating the entertainments with her graceful equestrian Tyrolean

flower-act. Among the other pleasing but always strictly moral wonders

which must be seen to be believed, Signor Jupe was that afternoon to

‘elucidate the diverting accomplishments of his highly trained performing

dog Merrylegs.’ He was also to exhibit ‘his astounding feat of throwing

seventy-five hundred-weight in rapid succession backhanded over his head,

thus forming a fountain of solid iron in mid-air, a feat never before

attempted in this or any other country, and which having elicited such

rapturous plaudits from enthusiastic throngs it cannot be withdrawn.’

The same Signor Jupe was to ‘enliven the varied performances at frequent

intervals with his chaste Shaksperean quips and retorts.’ Lastly, he was

to wind them up by appearing in his favourite character of Mr. William

Button, of Tooley Street, in ‘the highly novel and laughable

hippo-comedietta of The Tailor’s Journey to Brentford.’

Thomas Gradgrind took no heed of these trivialities of course, but passed

on as a practical man ought to pass on, either brushing the noisy insects

from his thoughts, or consigning them to the House of Correction. But,

the turning of the road took him by the back of the booth, and at the

back of the booth a number of children were congregated in a number of

stealthy attitudes, striving to peep in at the hidden glories of the

place.

This brought him to a stop. ‘Now, to think of these vagabonds,’ said he,

‘attracting the young rabble from a model school.’

A space of stunted grass and dry rubbish being between him and the young

rabble, he took his eyeglass out of his waistcoat to look for any child

he knew by name, and might order off. Phenomenon almost incredible

though distinctly seen, what did he then behold but his own metallurgical

Louisa, peeping with all her might through a hole in a deal board, and

his own mathematical Thomas abasing himself on the ground to catch but a

hoof of the graceful equestrian Tyrolean flower-act!

Dumb with amazement, Mr. Gradgrind crossed to the spot where his family

was thus disgraced, laid his hand upon each erring child, and said:

‘Louisa!! Thomas!!’

Both rose, red and disconcerted. But, Louisa looked at her father with

more boldness than Thomas did. Indeed, Thomas did not look at him, but

gave himself up to be taken home like a machine.

‘In the name of wonder, idleness, and folly!’ said Mr. Gradgrind, leading

each away by a hand; ‘what do you do here?’

‘Wanted to see what it was like,’ returned Louisa, shortly.

‘What it was like?’

‘Yes, father.’

There was an air of jaded sullenness in them both, and particularly in

the girl: yet, struggling through the dissatisfaction of her face, there

was a light with nothing to rest upon, a fire with nothing to burn, a

starved imagination keeping life in itself somehow, which brightened its

expression. Not with the brightness natural to cheerful youth, but with

uncertain, eager, doubtful flashes, which had something painful in them,

analogous to the changes on a blind face groping its way.

She was a child now, of fifteen or sixteen; but at no distant day would

seem to become a woman all at once. Her father thought so as he looked

at her. She was pretty. Would have been self-willed (he thought in his

eminently practical way) but for her bringing-up.

‘Thomas, though I have the fact before me, I find it difficult to believe

that you, with your education and resources, should have brought your

sister to a scene like this.’

‘I brought _him_, father,’ said Louisa, quickly. ‘I asked him to come.’

‘I am sorry to hear it. I am very sorry indeed to hear it. It makes

Thomas no better, and it makes you worse, Louisa.’

She looked at her father again, but no tear fell down her cheek.

‘You! Thomas and you, to whom the circle of the sciences is open; Thomas

and you, who may be said to be replete with facts; Thomas and you, who

have been trained to mathematical exactness; Thomas and you, here!’ cried

Mr. Gradgrind. ‘In this degraded position! I am amazed.’

‘I was tired, father. I have been tired a long time,’ said Louisa.

‘Tired? Of what?’ asked the astonished father.

‘I don’t know of what—of everything, I think.’

‘Say not another word,’ returned Mr. Gradgrind. ‘You are childish. I

will hear no more.’ He did not speak again until they had walked some

half-a-mile in silence, when he gravely broke out with: ‘What would your

best friends say, Louisa? Do you attach no value to their good opinion?

What would Mr. Bounderby say?’ At the mention of this name, his daughter

stole a look at him, remarkable for its intense and searching character.

He saw nothing of it, for before he looked at her, she had again cast

down her eyes!

‘What,’ he repeated presently, ‘would Mr. Bounderby say?’ All the way to

Stone Lodge, as with grave indignation he led the two delinquents home,

he repeated at intervals ‘What would Mr. Bounderby say?’—as if Mr.

Bounderby had been Mrs. Grundy.