Dickens As an Educator Part 16

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, a.n.a.logous to the changes on a blind face groping its way.

"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."

When they reached home, Mr. Gradgrind in an injured tone said to Mrs.

Gradgrind, after telling her where he had found the children:

"I should as soon have expected to find my children reading poetry."

"Dear me," whimpered Mrs. Gradgrind. "How can you, Louisa and Thomas!

I wonder at you. As if, with my head in its present throbbing state, you couldn't go and look at the sh.e.l.ls and minerals and things provided for you, instead of circuses!" said Mrs. Gradgrind. "You know as well as I do, no young people have circus masters, or keep circuses in cabinets, or attend lectures about circuses. What can you possibly want to know of circuses then? I am sure you have enough to do, if that's what you want. With my head in its present state, I couldn't remember the mere names of half the facts you have got to attend to."

"That's the reason!" pouted Louisa.

"Don't tell me that's the reason, because it can be nothing of the sort," said Mrs. Gradgrind. "Go and be something-ological directly."

After Louisa had married Mr. Bounderby, Tom and Mr. Harthouse were discussing her one evening, and Tom said she thought a great deal when she was alone:

"Ay, ay? Has resources of her own," said Harthouse.

"Not so much of that as you may suppose," returned Tom; "for our governor had her crammed with all sorts of dry bones and sawdust. It's his system."

"Formed his daughter on his own model?" suggested Harthouse.

"His daughter? Ah! and everybody else. Why, he formed me that way,"

said Tom.

"Impossible!"

"He did though," said Tom, shaking his head. "I mean to say, Mr.

Harthouse, that when I first left home and went to old Bounderby's, I was as flat as a warming-pan, and knew no more about life than any oyster does."

d.i.c.kens describes a visit Louisa made to her father's house, and shows how little of the true home feeling was stirred in her heart, as she approached the place, where she should have had a happy childhood.

Neither, as she approached her old home now, did any of the best influences of old home descend upon her. Her remembrances of home and childhood were remembrances of the drying up of every spring and fountain in her young heart as it gushed out. The golden waters were not there. They were flowing for the fertilization of the land where grapes are gathered from thorns, and figs from thistles.

When her father proposed to Louisa that she should marry Mr. Bounderby, she said:

"The baby preference that even I have heard of as common among children has never had its innocent resting place in my breast. You have been so careful of me, that I never had a child's heart. You have trained me so well, that I never dreamed a child's dream. You have dealt so wisely with me, father, from my cradle to this hour, that I never had a child's belief or a child's fear."

Mr. Gradgrind was delighted at his apparent success. He could not see, he was so practical and so self-opinionated, that her heart was breaking while she was yielding with external calmness.

But the reaping time came soon. Mr. Harthouse, young, attractive, and unscrupulous, made love to Louisa, and finally persuaded her to run away with him. Unable to resist the temptation in her own strength, she fled to her father's house through an awful storm.

The thunder was rolling into distance, and the rain was pouring down like a deluge, when the door of his room opened. He looked round the lamp upon his table, and saw with amazement his eldest daughter.

"Louisa!"

"Father, I want to speak to you."

"What is the matter? What is it? I conjure you, Louisa, tell me what is the matter."

She dropped into a chair before him, and put her cold hand on his arm.

"Father, you have trained me from my cradle."

"Yes, Louisa."

"I curse the hour in which I was born to such a destiny."

He looked at her in doubt and dread, vacantly repeating, "Curse the hour! Curse the hour!"

"How could you give me life, and take from me all the inappreciable things that raise it from the state of conscious death? Where are the graces of my soul? Where are the sentiments of my heart? What have you done, O father, what have you done, with the garden that should have bloomed once, in this great wilderness here?"

She struck herself with both her hands upon her bosom.

"If it had ever been here, its ashes alone would save me from the void in which my whole life sinks."

He tightened his hold in time to prevent her sinking on the floor, but she cried out in a terrible voice, "I shall die if you hold me! Let me fall upon the ground!" And he laid her down there, and saw the pride of his heart and the triumph of his system lying, an insensible heap, at his feet.

In the Schoolboy's Story, the boy who was to have no holiday at home was invited to spend his holidays with "Old Cheeseman" and Mrs. Cheeseman.

So I went to their delightful house, and was as happy as I could possibly be. They understand how to conduct themselves toward boys, _they_ do. When they take a boy to the play, for instance, they _do_ take him. They don't go in after it's begun, or come out before it's over. They know how to bring a boy up, too. Look at their own! Though he is very little as yet, what a capital boy he is! Why, my next favourite to Mrs. Cheeseman and Old Cheeseman is young Cheeseman.

When d.i.c.kens came to his last book his heart was still full of sympathy with the child.

Edwin Drood said to Mr. Jasper: "Life for you is a plum with the natural bloom on. It hasn't been over-carefully wiped off for _you_."

In the same book Mr. Grewgious is described:

He was an arid, sandy man, who, if he had been put into a grinding mill, looked as if he would have ground immediately into high-dried snuff. He had a scanty flat crop of hair, in colour and consistency like some very mangy yellow fur tippet; it was so unlike hair, that it must have been a wig, but for the stupendous improbability of anybody's voluntarily sporting such a head. The little play of feature that his face presented was cut deep into it, in a few hard curves that made it more like work; and he had certain notches in his forehead, which looked as though Nature had been about to touch them into sensibility or refinement, when she had impatiently thrown away the chisel, and said, "I really can not be worried to finish off this man; let him go as he is."

He tried to explain the reason for his peculiarities to Rosa: