Hard Times by Charles Dickens (ebooks that read to you txt) 📕

Mrs. Sparsit sat in her afternoon apartment at the Bank, on the shadier side of the frying street. Office-hours were over: and at that period of the day, in warm weather, she usually embellished with her genteel presence, a managerial boardroom over the public office. Her own private sitting-room was a story higher, at the window of which post of observation she was ready, every morning, to greet Mr. Bounderby, as he came across the road, with the sympathizing recognition appropriate to a victim. He had been married now a year; and Mrs. Sparsit had never released him from her determined pity a moment.

The Bank offered no violence to the wholesome monotony of the town. It was another red brick house, with black outside shutters, green inside blinds, a black street-door up two white steps, a brazen doorplate, and a brazen door-handle full stop. It was a size larger than Mr. Bounderby’s house, as other houses were from a size to half-a-dozen sizes smaller; in all other particulars, it was strictly according to pattern.

Mrs. Sparsit was conscious that by coming in the evening-tide among the desks and writing implements, she shed a feminine, not to say also aristocratic, grace upon the office. Seated, with her needlework or netting apparatus, at the window, she had a self-laudatory sense of correcting, by her ladylike deportment, the rude business aspect of the place. With this impression of her interesting character upon her, Mrs. Sparsit considered herself, in some sort, the Bank Fairy. The townspeople who, in their passing and repassing, saw her there, regarded her as the Bank Dragon keeping watch over the treasures of the mine.

What those treasures were, Mrs. Sparsit knew as little as they did. Gold and silver coin, precious paper, secrets that if divulged would bring vague destruction upon vague persons (generally, however, people whom she disliked), were the chief items in her ideal catalogue thereof. For the rest, she knew that after office-hours, she reigned supreme over all the office furniture, and over a locked-up iron room with three locks, against the door of which strong chamber the light porter laid his head every night, on a truckle bed, that disappeared at cockcrow. Further, she was lady paramount over certain vaults in the basement, sharply spiked off from communication with the predatory world; and over the relics of the current day’s work, consisting of blots of ink, worn-out pens, fragments of wafers, and scraps of paper torn so small, that nothing interesting could ever be deciphered on them when Mrs. Sparsit tried. Lastly, she was guardian over a little armoury of cutlasses and carbines, arrayed in vengeful order above one of the official chimneypieces; and over that respectable tradition never to be separated from a place of business claiming to be wealthy⁠—a row of fire-buckets⁠—vessels calculated to be of no physical utility on any occasion, but observed to exercise a fine moral influence, almost equal to bullion, on most beholders.

A deaf serving-woman and the light porter completed Mrs. Sparsit’s empire. The deaf serving-woman was rumoured to be wealthy; and a saying had for years gone about among the lower orders of Coketown, that she would be murdered some night when the Bank was shut, for the sake of her money. It was generally considered, indeed, that she had been due some time, and ought to have fallen long ago; but she had kept her life, and her situation, with an ill-conditioned tenacity that occasioned much offence and disappointment.

Mrs. Sparsit’s tea was just set for her on a pert little table, with its tripod of legs in an attitude, which she insinuated after office-hours, into the company of the stern, leathern-topped, long board-table that bestrode the middle of the room. The light porter placed the tea-tray on it, knuckling his forehead as a form of homage.

“Thank you, Bitzer,” said Mrs. Sparsit.

“Thank you, ma’am,” returned the light porter. He was a very light porter indeed; as light as in the days when he blinkingly defined a horse, for girl number twenty.

“All is shut up, Bitzer?” said Mrs. Sparsit.

“All is shut up, ma’am.”

“And what,” said Mrs. Sparsit, pouring out her tea, “is the news of the day? Anything?”

“Well, ma’am, I can’t say that I have heard anything particular. Our people are a bad lot, ma’am; but that is no news, unfortunately.”

“What are the restless wretches doing now?” asked Mrs. Sparsit.

“Merely going on in the old way, ma’am. Uniting, and leaguing, and engaging to stand by one another.”

“It is much to be regretted,” said Mrs. Sparsit, making her nose more Roman and her eyebrows more Coriolanian in the strength of her severity, “that the united masters allow of any such class-combinations.”

“Yes, ma’am,” said Bitzer.

“Being united themselves, they ought one and all to set their faces against employing any man who is united with any other man,” said Mrs. Sparsit.

“They have done that, ma’am,” returned Bitzer; “but it rather fell through, ma’am.”

“I do not pretend to understand these things,” said Mrs. Sparsit, with dignity, “my lot having been signally cast in a widely different sphere; and Mr. Sparsit, as a Powler, being also quite out of the pale of any such dissensions. I only know that these people must be conquered, and that it’s high time it was done, once for all.”

“Yes, ma’am,” returned Bitzer, with a demonstration of great respect for Mrs. Sparsit’s oracular authority. “You couldn’t put it clearer, I am sure, ma’am.”

As this was his usual hour for having a little confidential chat with Mrs. Sparsit, and as he had already caught her eye and seen that she was going to ask him something, he made a pretence of arranging the rulers, inkstands, and so forth, while that lady went on with her tea, glancing through the open window, down into the street.

“Has it been a busy day, Bitzer?” asked Mrs. Sparsit.

“Not a very busy day, my lady. About an average day.” He now and then slided into my lady, instead of ma’am, as an involuntary acknowledgment of Mrs. Sparsit’s personal dignity and claims to reverence.

“The clerks,” said Mrs. Sparsit, carefully brushing an imperceptible crumb of bread and