“Yes, sir, very,” she answered, curtseying.
“I shall have the satisfaction of causing you to be strictly educated; and you will be a living proof to all who come into communication with you, of the advantages of the training you will receive. You will be reclaimed and formed. You have been in the habit now of reading to your father, and those people I found you among, I dare say?” said Mr. Gradgrind, beckoning her nearer to him before he said so, and dropping his voice.
“Only to father and Merrylegs, sir. At least I mean to father, when Merrylegs was always there.”
“Never mind Merrylegs, Jupe,” said Mr. Gradgrind, with a passing frown. “I don’t ask about him. I understand you to have been in the habit of reading to your father?”
“O yes, sir, thousands of times. They were the happiest – O, of all the happy times we had together, sir!”
It was only now when her sorrow broke out, that Louisa looked at her.
“And what,” asked Mr. Gradgrind, in a still lower voice, “did you read to your father, Jupe?”
“About the Fairies, sir, and the Dwarf, and the Hunchback, and the Genies,” she sobbed out; “and about – ”
“Hush!” said Mr. Gradgrind, “that is enough. Never breathe a word of such destructive nonsense any more. Bounderby, this a case of rigid training, and I shall observe it with interest.”
“Well,” returned Mr. Bounderby, “I have given you my opinion already, and I shouldn’t do as you do. But, very well, very well. Since you are bent upon it, very well!”
So, Mr. Gradgrind and his daughter took Cecilia Jupe off with them to Stone Lodge, and on the way Louisa never spoke one word, good or bad. And Mr. Bounderby went about his daily pursuits. And Mrs. Sparsit got behind her eyebrows and meditated in the gloom of that retreat, all the evening.
Chapter VIII Never Wonder
Let us strike the key-note again, before pursuing the tune. When she was half a dozen years younger, Louisa had been overheard to begin a conversation with her brother on one day, by saying, “Tom, I wonder” – upon which Mr. Gradgrind, who was the person overhearing, stepped forth into the light, and said, “Louisa, never wonder!”
Herein lay the spring of the mechanical art and mystery of educating the reason without stooping to the cultivation of the sentiments and affections. Never wonder. By means of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division, settle everything somehow, and never wonder. Bring to me, says M’Choakumchild, yonder baby just able to walk, and I will engage that it shall never wonder.
Now, besides very many babies just able to walk, there happened to be in Coketown a considerable population of babies who had been walking against time towards the infinite world, twenty, thirty, forty, fifty years and more. These portentous infants being alarming creatures to stalk about in any human society, the eighteen denominations incessantly scratched one another’s faces and pulled one another’s hair by way of agreeing on the steps to be taken for their improvement – which they never did; a surprising circumstance, when the happy adaptation of the means to the end is considered. Still, although they differed in every other particular, conceivable and inconceivable (especially inconceivable), they were pretty well united on the point that these unlucky infants were never to wonder. Body number one, said they must take everything on trust. Body number two, said they must take everything on political economy. Body number three, wrote leaden little books for them, showing how the good grown-up baby invariably got to the Savings-bank, and the bad grown-up baby invariably got transported. Body number four, under dreary pretences of being droll (when it was very melancholy indeed), made the shallowest pretences of concealing pitfalls of knowledge, into which it was the duty of these babies to be smuggled and inveigled. But, all the bodies agreed that they were never to wonder.
There was a library in Coketown, to which general access was easy. Mr. Gradgrind greatly tormented his mind about what the people read in this library: a point whereon little rivers of tabular statements periodically flowed into the howling ocean of tabular statements, which no diver ever got to any depth in and came up sane. It was a disheartening circumstance, but a melancholy fact, that even these readers persisted in wondering.