a tale of two cities(双城记)-4

discomposed him that he stopped, wandered, and began anew:“As I was saying: if Monsieur Manette had not died; if he hadsuddenly and silently disappeared; if he had been spirited away; ifit had not been difficult to guess to what dreadful place, though noart could trace him; if he had an enemy in some compatriot whocould exercise a privilege that I in my own time have known theboldest people afraid to speak of in a whisper, across the waterthere; for instance, the privilege of filling up blank forms of theconsignment of any one to the oblivion of a prison for any length oftime; if his wife had implored the king, the queen, the court, theclergy, for any tidings of him, and all quite in vain;—then thehistory of your father would have been the history of thisunfortunate gentleman, the Doctor of Beauvais.”“I entreat you to tell me more, sir.”“I will. I am going to. You can bear it?”“I can bear anything but the uncertainty you leave me in at thismoment.”“You speak collectedly, and you—are collected. That’s good!”(Though his manner was less satisfied than his words.) “A matterof business. Regard it as a matter of business—business that mustbe done. Now if this doctor’s wife, though a lady of great courageand spirit, had suffered so intensely from this cause before herlittle child was born—”“The little child was a daughter, sir.”“A daughter. A—a—matter of business—don’t be distressed.Miss, if the poor lady had suffered so intensely before her littlechild was born, that she came to the determination of sparing thepoor child the inheritance of any part of the agony she had knownthe pains of, by rearing her in the belief that her father was dead—Charles Dickens ElecBook ClassicsA Tale of Two CitiesNo, don’t kneel! In Heaven’s name why should you kneel to me!”“For the truth. O dear, good, compassionate sir, for the truth!”“A—a matter of business. You confuse me, and how can Itransact business if I am confused? Let us be clear-headed. If youcould kindly mention now, for instance, what nine timesninepence are, or how many shillings in twenty guineas, it wouldbe so encouraging. I should be so much more at my ease aboutyour state of mind.”Without directly answering to this appeal, she sat so still whenhe had very gently raised her, and the hands that had not ceasedto clasp his wrists were so much more steady than they had been,that she communicated some reassurance to Mr. Jarvis Lorry.“That’s right, that’s right. Courage! Business! You havebusiness before you; useful business. Miss Manette, your mothertook this course with you. And when she died—I believe brokenhearted—having never slackened her unavailing search for yourfather, she left you, at two years old, to grow to be blooming,beautiful, and happy, without the dark cloud upon you of living inuncertainty whether your father soon wore his heart out in prison,or wasted there through many lingering years.”As he said the words he looked down, with an admiring pity, onthe flowing golden hair; as if he pictured to himself that it mighthave been already tinged with grey.“You know that your parents had no great possession, and thatwhat they had was secured to your mother and to you. There hasbeen no new discovery, of money, or of any other property; but—”He felt his wrist held closer, and he stopped. The expression in theforehead, which had so particularly attracted his notice, and whichwas now immovable, had deepened into one of pain and horror.Charles Dickens ElecBook ClassicsA Tale of Two Cities“But he has been—been found. He is alive. Greatly changed, itis too probable; almost a wreck, it is possible; though we will hopefor the best. Still, alive. Your father has been taken to the house ofan old servant in Paris, and we are going there: I, to identify him ifI can: you, to restore him to life, love, duty, rest, comfort.”A shiver ran through her frame, and from it through his. Shesaid, in a low, distinct, awe-stricken voice, as if she were saying itin a dream, “I am going to see his Ghost! It will be his Ghost—nothim!”Mr. Lorry quietly chafed the hands that held his arm. “There,there, there! See now, see now! The best and the worst are knownto you, now. You are well on your way to the poor wrongedgentleman, and, with a fair sea voyage, and a fair land journey, youwill be soon at his dear side.”She repeated in the same tone, sunk to a whisper, “I have beenfree, I have been happy, yet his Ghost has never haunted me!”“Only one thing more,” said Mr. Lorry, laying stress upon it as awholesome means of enforcing her attention: “he has been foundunder another name; his own, long forgotten or long concealed. Itwould be worse than useless now to inquire which; worse thanuseless to seek to know whether he has been for years overlooked,or always designedly held prisoner. It would be worse than uselessnow to make any inquiries, because it would be dangerous. Betternot to mention the subject, anywhere or in any way, and to removehim—for a while at all events—out of France. Even I, safe as anEnglishman, and even Tellson’s, important as they are to Frenchcredit, avoid all naming of the matter. I carry about me, not ascrap of writing openly referring to it. This is a secret servicealtogether. My credentials, entries, and memoranda, are allCharles Dickens ElecBook ClassicsA Tale of Two Citiescomprehended in the one line, ‘Recalled to Life’; which may meananything. But what is the matter! She doesn’t notice a word! MissManette!”Perfectly still and silent, and not even fallen back in her chair,she sat under his hand, utterly insensible; with her eyes open andfixed upon him, and with that last expression looking as if it werecarved or branded into her forehead. So close was her hold uponhis arm, that he feared to detach himself lest he should hurt her;therefore he called out loudly for assistance without moving.A wild-looking woman, whom even in his agitation, Mr. Lorryobserved to be all of a red colour, and to have red hair, and to bedressed in some extraordinary tight-fitting fashion, and to have onher head a most wonderful bonnet like a Grenadier woodenmeasure, and good measure too, or a great Stilton cheese, camerunning into the room in advance of the inn servants, and soonsettled the question of his detachment from the poor young lady,by laying a brawny hand upon his chest, and sending him flyingback against the nearest wall.(“I really think this must be a man!” was Mr. Lorry’s breathlessreflection, simultaneously with his coming against the wall.)“Why, look at you all!” bawled this figure, addressing the innservants. “Why don’t you go and fetch things, instead of standingthere staring at me? I am not so much to look at, am I? Why don’tyou go and fetch things? I’ll let you know, if you don’t bringsmelling-salts, cold water, and vinegar, quick, I will.”There was an immediate dispersal for these restoratives, andshe softly laid the patient on a sofa, and tended her with great skilland gentleness: calling her “my precious!” and “my bird!” andspreading her golden hair aside over her shoulders with greatCharles Dickens ElecBook ClassicsA Tale of Two Citiespride and care.“And you in brown!” she said, indignantly turning to Mr. Lorry;“couldn’t you tell her what you had to tell her, without frighteningher to death? Look at her, with her pale face and her cold hands.Do you call that being a Banker?”Mr. Lorry was so exceedingly disconcerted by a question sohard to answer, that he could only look on, at a distance, withmuch feebler sympathy and humility, while the strong woman,having banished the inn servants under the mysterious penalty of“letting them know” something not mentioned if they stayedthere, staring, recovered her charge by a regular series ofgradations, and coaxed her to lay her drooping head upon hershoulder.“I hope she will do well now,” said Mr. Lorry.“No thanks to you in brown, if she does. My darling pretty!”“I hope,” said Mr. Lorry, after another pause of feeblesympathy and humility, “that you accompany Miss Manette toFrance?”“A likely thing, too!” replied the strong woman. “If it was everintended that I should go across salt water, do you supposeProvidence would have cast my lot in an island?”This being another question hard to answer, Mr. Jarvis Lorrywithdrew to consider it.Charles Dickens ElecBook ClassicsA Tale of Two CitiesChapter VTHE WINE SHOPAlarge cask of wine had been dropped and broken, in thestreet. The accident had happened in getting it out of acart; the cask had tumbled out with a run, the hoops hadburst, and it lay on the stones just outside the door of the wine-shop, shattered like a walnut-shell.All the people within reach had suspended their business, ortheir idleness, to run to the spot and drink the wine. The rough,irregular stones of the street, pointing every way, and designed,one might have thought, expressly to lame all living creatures thatapproached them, had damned it into little pools; these weresurrounded, each by its own jostling group or crowd, according toits size. Some men kneeled down, made scoops of their two handsjoined, and sipped, or tried to help women, who bent over theirshoulders, to sip, before the wine had all run out between theirfingers. Others, men and women, dipped in the puddles with littlemugs of mutilated earthenware, or even with handkerchiefs fromwomen’s heads, which were squeezed dry into infants’ mouths;others made small mud-embankments, to stem the wine as it ran;others, directed by lookers-on up at high windows, darted hereand there, to cut off little streams of wine that started away in newdirections; others devoted themselves to the sodden and lee-dyedpieces of the cask, licking, and even champing the moister wine-rotted fragments with eager relish. There was no drainage to carryoff the wine, and not only did it all get taken up, but so much mudCharles Dickens ElecBook ClassicsA Tale of Two Citiesgot taken up along with it that there might have been a scavengerin the street, if anybody acquainted with it could have believed insuch a miraculous presence.A shrill sound of laughter and of amused voices—voices of men,women, and children—resounded in the street while this winegame lasted. There was little roughness in the sport, and muchplayfulness. There was a special companionship in it, andobservable inclination on the part of every one to join some otherone, which led, especially among the luckier or lighter-hearted, tofrolicsome embraces, drinking of healths, shaking of hands, andeven joining of hands and dancing, a dozen together. When thewine was gone, and the places where it had been most abundantwere raked into a gridiron-pattern by fingers, thesedemonstrations ceased, as suddenly as they had broken out. Theman who had left his saw sticking in the firewood he was cutting,set it in motion again; the woman who had left on a door-step thelittle pot of hot ashes, at which she had been trying to soften thepain in her own starved fingers and toes, or in those of her child,returned to it; men with bare arms, matted locks, and cadaverousfaces, who had emerged into the winter light from cellars, movedaway, to descend again; and a gloom gathered on the scene thatappeared more natural to it than sunshine.The wine was red wine, and had stained the ground of thenarrow street in the suburb of Saint Antoine, in Paris, where itwas spilled. It had stained many hands, too, and many faces, andmany naked feet, and many wooden shoes. The hands of the manwho sawed the wood, left red marks on the billets; and theforehead of the woman who nursed her baby, was stained with thestain of the old rag she wound about her head again. Those whoCharles Dickens ElecBook ClassicsA Tale of Two Citieshad been greedy with the staves of the cask, had acquired atigerish smear about the mouth; and one tall joker so besmirched,his head more out of a long squalid bag of a night-cap than in it,scrawled upon a wall with his fingers dipped in muddy wine-lees—BLOOD.The time was to come, when that wine too would be spilled onthe street-stones, and when the stain of it would be red upon manythere.And now that the cloud settled on Saint Antoine, which amomentary gleam had driven from his sacred countenance, thedarkness of it was heavy—cold, dirt, sickness, ignorance, andwant, were the lords in waiting on the saintly presence—nobles ofgreat power all of them; but, most especially the last. Samples of apeople that had undergone a terrible grinding and regrinding inthe mill, and certainly not in the fabulous mill which ground oldpeople young, shivered at every corner, passed in and out at everydoorway, looked from every window, fluttered in every vestige of agarment that the wind shook. The mill which had worked themdown, was the mill that grinds young people old; the children hadancient faces and grave voices; and upon them, and upon thegrown faces, and ploughed into every furrow of age and coming upafresh, was the sign, Hunger. It was prevalent everywhere.Hunger was pushed out of the tall houses, in the wretchedclothing that hung upon poles and lines; Hunger was patched intothem with straw and rag and wood and paper; Hunger wasrepeated in every fragment of the small modicum of firewood thatthe man sawed off; Hunger stared down from the smokelesschimneys, and started up from the filthy street that had no offal,among its refuse, or anything to eat. Hunger was the inscriptionCharles Dickens ElecBook ClassicsA Tale of Two Citieson the baker’s shelves, written in every small loaf of his scantystock of bad bread; at the sausage-shop, in every dead-dogpreparation that was offered for sale. Hunger rattled its dry bonesamong the roasting chestnuts in the turned cylinder; Hunger wasshred into atomies in every farthing porringer of husky chips ofpotato, fried with some reluctant drops of oil.Its abiding place was in all things fitted to it. A narrow windingstreet, full of offence and stench, with other narrow windingstreets diverging, all peopled by rags and nightcaps, and allsmelling of rags and nightcaps, and all visible things with abrooding look upon them that looked ill. In the hunted air of thepeople there was yet some wild-beast thought of the possibility ofturning at bay. Depressed and slinking though they were, eyes offire were not wanting among them; nor compressed lips, whitewith what they suppressed; or foreheads knitted into the likenessof the gallows-rope they mused about enduring, or inflicting. Thetrade signs (and they were almost as many as the shops) were, all,grim illustrations of Want. The butcher and the porkman paintedup only the leanest scrags of meat; the baker, the coarsest ofmeagre loaves. The people rudely pictured as drinking in thewine-shops, croaked over their scanty measures of thin wine andbeer, and were gloweringly confidential together. Nothing wasrepresented in a flourishing condition, save tools and weapons;but, the cutler’s knives and axes were sharp and bright, thesmith’s hammers were heavy, and the gunmaker’s stock wasmurderous. The crippling stones of the pavement, with their manylittle reservoirs of mud and water, had no footways, but broke offabruptly at the doors. The kennel, to make amends, ran down themiddle of the street—when it ran at all: which was only after heavyCharles Dickens ElecBook ClassicsA Tale of Two Citiesrains, and then it ran, by many eccentric fits, into the houses.Across the streets, at wide intervals, one clumsy lamp was slungby a rope and pulley; at night, when the lamplighter had let thesedown, and lighted, and hoisted them again, a feeble grove of dimwicks swung in a sickly manner overhead, as if they were at sea.Indeed they were at sea, and the ship and crew were in peril oftempest.For, the time was to come, when the gaunt scarecrows of thatregion should have watched the lamplighter, in their idleness andhunger, so long, as to conceive the idea of improving on hismethod, and hauling up men by those ropes and pulleys, to flareupon the darkness of their condition. But, the time was not comeyet; and every wind that blew over France shook the rags of thescarecrows in vain, for the birds, fine of song and feather, took nowarning.The wine-shop was a corner shop, better than most others in itsappearance and degree, and the master of the wine-shop hadstood outside it, in a yellow waistcoat and green breeches, lookingon at the struggle for the lost wine. “It’s not my affair,” said he,with a final shrug of the shoulders. “The people from the marketdid it. Let them bring another.”There, his eyes happening to catch the tall joker writing up hisjoke, he called to him across the way:“Say, then, my Gaspard, what do you do there?”The fellow pointed to his joke with immense significance, as isoften the way with his tribe. It missed its mark, and completelyfailed, as is often the way with his tribe too.“What now? Are you a subject for the mad hospital?” said thewine-shop keeper, crossing the road, and obliterating the jest withCharles Dickens ElecBook ClassicsA Tale of Two Citiesa handful of mud, picked up for the purpose, and smeared over it.“Why do you write in the public streets? Is there—tell me thou—isthere no other place to write such words in?”In his expostulation he dropped his cleaner hand (perhapsaccidentally, perhaps not) upon the joker’s heart. The jokerrapped it with his own, took a nimble spring upward, and camedown in a fantastic dancing attitude, with one of his stained shoesjerked off his foot into his hand, and held out. A joker of anextremely, not to say wolfishly practical character, he looked,under those circumstances.“Put it on, put it on,” said the other. “Call wine, wine; and finishthere.” With that advice, he wiped his soiled hand upon the joker’sdress, such as it was—quite deliberately, as having dirtied thehand on his account; and then re-crossed the road and entered thewine-shop.