“Didn’t do what he ought to do. Was short in his leaps and bad in his tumbling,” Mr. Childers interpreted.
“Oh!” said Mr. Gradgrind, “that is tip, is it?”
“In a general way that’s missing his tip,” Mr. E. W. B. Childers answered.
“Nine oils, Merrylegs, missing tips, garters, banners, and Ponging, eh?” ejaculated Bounderby, with his laugh of laughs. “Queer sort of company, too, for a man who has raised himself.”
“Lower yourself, then,” retorted Cupid, “Oh Lord! if you’ve raised yourself so high as all that comes to, let yourself down a bit.”
“This is a very obtrusive lad!” said Mr. Gradgrind turning, and knitting his brows on him.
“We’d have had a young gentleman to meet you, if we had known you were coming,” retorted Master Kidderminster, nothing abashed. “It’s a pity you don’t have a bespeak, being so particular. You’re on the Tight-Jeff, ain’t you?”
“What does this unmannerly boy mean,” asked Mr. Gradgrind, eyeing him in a sort of desperation, “by Tight-Jeff?”
“There! Get out, get out!” said Mr. Childers, thrusting his young friend from the room, rather in the prairie manner. “Tight-Jeff or Slack-Jeff, it don’t much signify: it’s only tight-rope and slack-rope. You were going to give me a message for Jupe?”
“Yes, I was.”
“Then,” continued Mr. Childers, quickly, “my opinion is, he will never receive it. Do you know much of him?”
“I never saw the man in my life.”
“I doubt if you ever will see him now. It’s pretty plain to me, he’s off.”
“Do you mean that he has deserted his daughter?”
“Ay! I mean,” said Mr. Childers, with a nod, “that he has cut. He was goosed last night, he was goosed the night before last, he was goosed to-day. He has lately got in the way of being always goosed, and he can’t stand it.”
“Why has he been – so very much – Goosed?” asked Mr. Gradgrind, forcing the word out of himself, with great solemnity and reluctance.
“His joints are turning stiff, and he is getting used up,” said Childers. “He has his points as a Cackler still, but he can’t get a living out of them.”
“A Cackler!” Bounderby repeated. “Here we go again!”
“A speaker, if the gentleman likes it better,” said Mr. E. W. B. Childers, superciliously throwing the interpretation over his shoulder, and accompanying it with a shake of his long hair – which all shook at once. “Now, it’s a remarkable fact, sir, that it cut that man deeper, to know that his daughter knew of his being goosed, than to go through with it.”
“Good!” interrupted Mr. Bounderby. “This is good, Gradgrind! A man so fond of his daughter, that he runs away from her! This is devilish good! Ha! ha! Now, I’ll tell you what, young man. I haven’t always occupied my present station of life. I know what these things are. You may be astonished to hear it, but my mother ran away from me.”
E. W. B. Childers replied pointedly that he was not at all astonished to hear it.
“Very well,” said Bounderby. “I was born in a ditch, and my mother ran away from me. Do I excuse her for it? No. Have I ever excused her for it? Not I. What do I call her for it? I call her probably the very worst woman that ever lived in the world, except my drunken grandmother. There’s no family pride about, me there’s no imaginative sentimental humbug about me, there’s no imaginative sentimental humbug about me. I call a spade a spade; and I call the mother of Josiah Bounderby of Coketown, without any fear or any favour, what I should call her if she had been the mother of Dick Jones of Wapping. So, with this man. He is a runaway rogue and a vagabond, that’s what he is, in English.”
“It’s all the same to me what he is or what he is not, whether in English or whether in French,” retorted Mr. E. W. B. Childers, facing about. “I am telling your friend what’s the fact; if you don’t like to hear it, you can avail yourself of the open air. You give it mouth enough, you do; but give it mouth in your own building at least,” remonstrated E. W. B. with stern irony. “Don’t give it mouth in this building, till you’re called upon. You have got some building of your own, I dare say, now?”