有声名著之双城记 Chapter05
CHAPTER VThe Wine-shop
A LARGE cask of wine had been dropped and broken, street. The accident hadhappened in getting it out of a cart; the cask had tumbled out with a run,the hoops had burst, and it lay on the stones just outside the door of thewine-shop, shattered like a walnut-shell.
All the people within reach had suspended their business or their idleness,to run to the spot and drink the wine. The rough, irregular stones of thestreet, pointing every way, and designed, one might have thought, expresslyto lame all living creatures that approached them, had dammed it into littlepools; these were surrounded, each by its own jostling group or crowd,according to its size. Some men kneeled down, made scoops of their two handsjoined, and sipped, or tried to help women, who bent over their shoulders tosip, before the wine had all run out between their fingers. Others, men andwomen, dipped in the puddles with little mugs of mutilated earthenware, oreven with handkerchiefs from women's heads, which were squeezed dry intoinfants mouths; others made small mud embankments, to stem the wine as itran; others, directed by lookers-on up at high windows, darted here andthere, to cut off little streams of wine that started away in newdirections; others devoted themselves to the sodden and lee-dyed pieces ofthe cask licking, and even champing the moister wine-rotted fragments witheager relish. There was no drainage to carry off the wine, and not only didit all get taken up, but so much mud got taken up along with it, that theremight have been a scavenger in the street, if anybody acquainted with itcould have believed in such a miraculous presence.
A shrill sound of laughter and of amused voices--voices of men, women, andchildren--resounded in the street while this wine game lasted. There waslittle roughness in the spot and much playfulness. There was a specialcompanionship in it, an observable inclination on the part of every one tojoin some other one, which led, especially among the luckier or lighter-hearted, to frolicsome embraces, drinking of healths, shaking of hands, andeven joining of hands and dancing, a dozen together. When the wine was gone,and the places where it had been most abundant were raked into a gridiron-pattern by fingers, these demonstrations ceased, as suddenly as they hadbroken out. The man who had left his saw sticking in the firewood he wascutting, 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 the pain inher own starved fingers and toes, or in those of her child, returned to it;men with bare arms, matted locks, and cadaverous faces, who had emerged intothe winter light from cellars, moved away, to descend again; and a gloomgathered on the scene that appeared more natural to it than sunshine.
The wine was red wine, and had stained the ground of the narrow street inthe suburb of Saint Antoine, in Paris, where it was spilled. It had stainedmany hands, too, and many faces, and many naked feet, and many wooden shoes.
The hands of the man who sawed the wood, left red marks on the billets; andthe forehead of the woman who nursed her baby, was stained with the stain ofthe old rag she wound about her head again. Those who had been greedy withthe staves of the cask, had acquired a tigerish smear about the mouth; andone tall joker so besmirched, his head more out of a long squalid bag of anight-cap than in it, scrawled upon a wall with his finger dipped in muddywine-lees--BLOOD.
The time was to come, when that wine too would be spilled on the street-stones, and when the stain of it would be red upon many there.
And now that the cloud settled on Saint Antoine, which a momentary gleamhad driven from his sacred countenance, the darkness of it was heavy--cold,dirt, sickness, ignorance, and want, were the lords in waiting on thesaintly presence--nobles of great power all of them; but, most especiallythe last. Samples of a people that had undergone a terrible grinding and re-grinding in the mill, and certainly not in the fabulous mill which groundold people young, shivered at every corner, passed in and out at everydoorway, looked from every window, fluttered in every vestige of a garmentthat the wind shock. The mill which had worked them down, was the mill thatgrinds young people old; the children had ancient faces and grave voices;and upon them, and upon the grown faces, and ploughed into every furrow ofage and coming up afresh, was the sign, Hunger. It was prevalent everywhere.
Hunger was pushed out of the tall houses, in the wretched clothing that hungupon poles and lines; Hunger was patched into them with straw and rag andwood and paper; Hunger was repeated in every fragment of the small modicumof firewood that the man sawed off; Hunger stared down from the smokelesschimneys, and started up from the filthy street that had no offal, among itsrefuse, of anything to eat. Hunger was the inscription on the baker'sshelves, written in every small loaf of his Scanty stock of bad bread; atthe sausage-shop, in every dead-dog preparation that was offered for sale.
Hunger rattled its dry bones among the roasting chestnuts in the turnedcylinder; Hunger was shred into atomies in every farthing porringer of huskychips of potato, fried with some reluctant drops of oil.
Its abiding place was in all things fitted to it. A narrow winding street,full of offence and stench, with other narrow winding streets diverging, allpeopled by rags and nightcaps, and all smelling of rags and nightcaps, andall visible things with a brooding look upon them that looked ill. In thehunted air of the people there was yet some wild-beast thought of thepossibility of turning at bay. Depressed and slinking though they were, eyesof fire were not wanting among them; nor compressed lips, white with whatthey suppressed; nor foreheads knitted into the likeness of the gallows-ropethey mused about enduring, or inflicting. The trade signs (and they werealmost as many as the shops) were, all, grim illustrations of Want. Thebutcher and the porkman painted up, only the leanest scrags of meat; thebaker, the coarsest of meagre loaves. The people rudely pictured as drinkingin the wine-shops, croaked over their scanty measures of thin wine and beer,and were gloweringly confidential together. Nothing was represented in aflourishing condition, save tools and weapons; but, the cutler's knives andaxes were sharp and bright, the smith's hammers-were heavy, and thegunmaker's stock was murderous. The crippling stones of the pavement, withtheir many little reservoirs of mud and water, had no footways, but brokeoff abruptly at the doors. The kennel, to make amends, ran down the middleof the street--when it ran at all: which was only after heavy rains, andthen it ran, by many eccentric fits, into the houses. Across the streets, atwide intervals, one clumsy lamp was slung by a rope and pulley; at night,when the lamplighter had let these down, and lighted, and hoisted themagain, a feeble grove of dim wicks swung in a sickly manner overhead, as ifthey were at sea. Indeed they were at sea, and the ship and crew were inperil of tempest.
For, the time was to come, when the gaunt scarecrows of that region shouldhave watched the lamplighter, in their idleness and hunger, so long, as toconceive the idea of improving on his method, and hauling up men by thoseropes and pulleys, to flare upon the darkness of their condition. But, thetime was not come yet; and every wind that blew over France shook the ragsof the scarecrows in vain, for the birds, fine of song and feather, took nowarning.
The wine-shop was a comer shop, better than most other' in its appearanceand degree, and the master of the wine shop had stood outside it, in ayellow waistcoat and green breeches, looking on at the struggle for the lostwine. `It'' not my affair,' said he, with a final shrug of the shoulders,`The people from the market did it. Let them bring another.
There, his eyes happening to catch the tall joker writing up his joke, hecalled to him across the way:
`Say, then, my Gaspard, what do you do there?'
The fellow pointed to his joke with immense significance as is often theway with his tribe. It missed its mark, and completely failed, as is oftenthe way with his tribe too.
`What now? Are you a subject for the mad hospital?' said the wine-shopkeeper, crossing the road, and obliterating the jest with a handful of mud,picked up for the purpose and smeared over it. `Why do you write in thepublic streets? Is there--tell me thou--is there no other place to writesuch words in?'
In his expostulation he dropped his cleaner hand (perhaps accidentally,perhaps not) upon the joker's heart. The joke rapped it with his own, took animble spring upward, and came down in a fantastic dancing attitude, withone of his stained shoes jerked off his foot into his hand, and held out Ajoker of an extremely, not to say wolfishly practical character, he looked,under those circumstances. #p#副标题#e#`Put it on, put it on,' said the other. `Call wine, wine and finish there.'
With that advice, he wiped his soiled hand upon the joker's dress, such asit was--quite deliberately, as having dirtied the hand on his account; andthen re-crossed the road and entered the wine-shop.
This wine-shop keeper was a bull-necked', martial-looking man of thirty,and he should have bean of a hot temperament, for, although it was a bitterday, he wore no coat, but carried one slung over his shoulder. His shirt-sleeves were rolled up, too, and his brown arms were bare to the elbows.
Neither did he wear anything more on his head than his own crisply-curlingshort dark hair. He was a dark man altogether, with good eyes and a goodbold breadth between them. Good-humoured looking on the whole, butimplacable-looking, too; evidently a man of a strong resolution and a setpurpose; a man not desirable to be met, rushing down a narrow pass with agulf on either side, for nothing would turn the man.
Madame Defarge, his wife, sat in the shop behind the counter as he came in.
Madame Defarge was a stout woman of about his own age, with a watchful eyethat seldom seemed to look at anything, a large hand heavily ringed, asteady face, strong features, and great composure of manner. There was acharacter about Madame Defarge, from which one might have predicated thatshe did not often make mistakes against herself in any of the reckoningsover which she presided. Madame Defarge being sensitive to cold, was wrappedin fur, and had a quantity of bright shawl twined about her head, though notto the concealment of her large earrings. Her knitting was before her, butshe had laid it down to pick her teeth with a toothpick. Thus engaged, withher right elbow supported by her left hand, Madame Defarge said nothing whenher lord came in, but coughed Just one grain of cough. This, in combinationwith the lifting of her darkly defined eyebrows over her toothpick by thebreadth of a line, suggested to her husband that he would do well to lookround the shop among the customers, for any new customer who had dropped inwhile he stepped over the way.
The wine-shop keeper accordingly rolled his eyes about, until they restedupon an elderly gentleman and a young lady, who were seated in a corner.
Other company were there: two playing cards, two playing dominoes, threestanding by the counter lengthening out a short supply of wine. As he passedbehind the counter, he took notice that the elderly gentleman said in a lookto the young lady `This is our man.
`What the devil do you do in that galley there?' said Monsieur Defarge tohimself; `I don't know you.'
But, he feigned not to notice the two strangers, and fell into discoursewith the triumvirate of customers who were drinking at the counter.
`How goes it, Jacques?' said one of these three to Monsieur Defarge. `Isall the spilt wine swallowed?'
`Every drop, Jacques,' answered Monsieur Defarge.
When this interchange of christian name was effected. Madame Defarge,picking her teeth with her toothpick coughed another grain of cough, andraised her eyebrows by the breadth of another line.
`It is not often,' said the second of the three, addressing MonsieurDefarge, `that many of these miserable beasts know the taste of wine, or ofanything but black bread and death. Is it not so, Jacques?'
`It is so, Jacques,' Monsieur Defarge returned.
At this second interchange of the christian name, Madame Defarge, stillusing her toothpick with profound composure, coughed another grain of cough,and raised her eyebrows by the breadth of another line.
The last of the three now said his say, as he put down his empty drinkingvessel and smacked his lips.
`Ah! So much the worse! A bitter taste it is that such poor cattle alwayshave in their mouths, and hard lives they live, Jacques. Am I right,Jacques?'
`You are right, Jacques,' was the response of Monsieur Defarge.
This third interchange of the christian name was completed at the momentwhen Madame Defarge put her toothpick by, kept her eyebrows up, and slightlyrustled in her seat.
`Hold then! True!' muttered her husband. `Gentlemen--my wife!'
The three customers pulled off their hats to Madame Defarge, with threeflourishes. She acknowledged their homage by bending her head, and givingthem a quick look. Then she glanced in a casual manner round the wine-shop,took up her knitting with great apparent calmness and repose of spirit, andbecame absorbed in it. #p#副标题#e#`Gentlemen,' said her husband, who had kept his bright eye observantly uponher, `good day. The chamber, furnished bachelor-fashion, that you wished tosee, and `were inquiring for when I stepped out, is on the fifth floor. Thedoorway of the staircase gives on the little court-yard close to the lefthere,' pointing with his hand, `near to the window of my establishment. But,now that I remember, one of you has already been there, and can show theway. Gentlemen, adieu!
They paid for their wine, and left the place. The eyes of Monsieur Defargewere studying his wife at her knitting when the elderly gentleman advancedfrom his corner, and begged the favour of a word.
`Willingly, sir,' said Monsieur Defarge, and quietly stepped with him tothe door.
Their conference was very short, but very decided. Almost at the firstword, Monsieur Defarge started and became deeply attentive. It had notlasted a minute, when he nodded and went out. The gentleman then beckoned tothe young lady, and they, too, went out. Madame Defarge knitted with nimblefingers and steady eyebrows, and saw nothing.
Mr. Jarvis Lorry and Miss Manette, emerging from the wine-shop thus, joinedMonsieur Defarge in the doorway to which he had directed his other companyjust before. It opened from a stinking little black court-yard, and was thegeneral public entrance to a great pile of houses, inhabited by a greatnumber of people. In the gloomy tile-paved entry to the gloomy tile-pavedstaircase, Monsieur Defarge bent down on one knee to the child of his oldmaster, and put her hand to his lips. It was a gentle action, but not at allgently done; a very remarkable transformation had come over him in a fewseconds. He had no good-humour in his face, nor any openness of aspect left,but had become a secret, angry, dangerous man.
`It is very high; it is a little difficult. Better to begin slowly.' Thus,Monsieur Defarge, in a stern voice, to Mr. Lorry, as they began ascendingthe stairs.
`Is he alone?' the latter whispered.
`Alone! God help him, who should be with him?' said the other, in the samelow voice.
`Is he, always alone, then?'
`Yes.
`Of his own desire?'
`Of his own necessity. As he was, when I first saw him after they found meand demanded to know if I would take him, and, at my peril be discreet--hashe was then, so he is now.
`He is greatly changed?'
`Changed!'
The keeper of the wine-shop stopped to strike the wall with his hand, andmutter a tremendous curse. No direct answer could have been half soforcible. Mr. Lorry's spirits grew heavier and heavier, as he and his twocompanions ascended higher and higher.
Such a staircase, with its accessories, in the older and more crowded partsof Paris, would be bad enough now; but, at that time, it was vile indeed tounaccustomed and unhardened senses. Every little habitation within the greatfoul nest of one high building--that is to say, the room or rooms withinevery door that opened on the general staircase--left its own heap of refuseon its own landing, besides Ringing other refuse from its own windows. Theuncontrollable and hopeless mass of decomposition so engendered, would havepolluted the air, even if poverty and deprivation had not loaded it wit!'
their intangible impurities; the Mo bad sources combined made it almostinsupportable. Through such an atmosphere, by a steep dark shaft of dirt andpoison, the way lay. Yielding to his own disturbance of mind, and to hisyoung companion's agitation, which became greater every instant, Mr. JarvisLorry twice stopped to rest. Each of these stoppages was made at a dolefulgrating, by which any languishing good airs that were left uncorruptedseemed to escape, and all spoilt and sickly vapours seemed to crawl in.
Through the rusted bars, tastes, rather than glimpses, were caught of thejumbled neighbourhood; and nothing within range, nearer or lower than thesummits of the two-great towers of Notre-Dame, had any promise on it ofhealthy life or wholesome aspirations. #p#副标题#e#At last, the top of the staircase was gained, and they stopped for the thirdtime. There was yet an upper staircase, of a steeper inclination and ofcontracted dimensions, to be ascended, before the garret story was reached.
The keeper of the wine-shop, always going a little in advance, and alwaysgoing on the side which Mr. Lorry took, as though he dreaded to be asked anyquestion by the young lady, turned himself about here, and, carefullyfeeling in the pockets of the coat he carried over his shoulder, took out akey.
`The door is locked then, my friend?' said Mr. Lorry', surprised.
`Ay. Yes,' was the grim reply of Monsieur Defarge.
`You think it necessary to keep the unfortunate gentleman so retired?'
`I think it necessary to turn the key.' Monsieur Defarge whispered itcloser in his ear, and frowned heavily.
`Why?'
`Why! Because he has lived so long, locked up, that he would be frightened--rave--tear himself to pieces--die--come to I know not what harm-if hisdoor was left open.'
`Is it possible?' exclaimed Mr. Lorry.
`Is it possible?' repeated Defarge, bitterly. `Yes. And a beautiful worldwe live in, when it is possible, and when many other such things arepossible, and not only possible, but done--done, see you!--under that skythere, every day. Long live the Devil. Let us go on.'
This dialogue had been held in so very low a whisper, that not a word of ithad reached the young lady's ears. But, by this time she trembled under suchstrong emotion, and her face expressed such deep anxiety, and, above all,such dread and terror, that Mr. Lorry felt it incumbent on him to speak aword or two of reassurance.
`Courage, dear miss! Courage! Business! The worst will be over in a moment;it is but passing the room-door, and the worst is over. Then, all the goodyou bring to him, all the relief, all the happiness you bring to him, begin.
Let our good friend here, assist you on that side. That's well, friendDefarge. Come, now. Business, business!'
They went up slowly and softly. The staircase was short, and they were soonat the top. There, as it had an abrupt turn in it, they came all at once insight of three men, whose heads were bent down close together at the side ofa door, and who were intently looking into the room to which the doorbelonged, through some chinks or holes in the wall. On hearing footstepsclose at hand, these three turned, and rose, and showed themselves to be thethree of one name who had been drinking in the wine-shop.
`I forgot them in the surprise of your visit,' explained Monsieur Defarge.
`Leave us, good boys; we have business' here.'
The three glided by, and went silently down.
There appearing to be no other door on that floor, and the keeper of thewine-shop going straight to this one when they were left alone, Mr. Lorryasked him in a whisper, with little anger:
`Do you make a show of Monsieur Manette?'
`I show him, in the way you have seen, to a chosen few.'
`Is that well?'
`I think it is well.'
`Who are the few? How do you choose them?'
`I choose them as real men, of my name--Jacques is my name--to whom thesight is likely to do good. Enough you are English; that is another thing.
Stay there, if you please, a little moment.'
With an admonitory gesture to keep them back, he stooped, and looked inthrough the crevice in the wall. Soon raising his head again, he strucktwice or thrice upon the door--evidently with no other object than to make anoise there With the same intention, he drew the key across it, three orfour times, before he put it clumsily into the lock, and turned it asheavily as he could.
The door slowly opened inward under his hand, and he looked into the roomand said something. A faint voice answered something. Little more than asingle syllable could have been spoken on either side.
He looked back over his shoulder, and beckoned them cc enter. Mr. Lorry gothis arm securely round the daughter waist, and held her; for he felt thatshe was sinking.
`A--a--a--business, business!' he urged, with a moisture that was not ofbusiness shining on his cheek. `Come in come in!'
`I am afraid of it,' she answered, shuddering.
`Of it? What?'
`I mean of him. Of my father.'
Rendered in a manner desperate, by her state and by the beckoning of theirconductor, he drew over his neck the arm that shook upon his shoulder,lifted her a little, and hurried her into the room. He set her down justwithin the door and held her, clinging to him.
Defarge drew out the key, closed the door, locked it on the inside, tookout the key again, and held it in his hand. All this he did, methodically,and with as loud and harsh an accompaniment of noise as he could make.
Finally, he walked across the room with a measured tread to where the windowwas. He stopped there, and faced round.
The garret, built to be a depository for firewood and the like, was dim anddark: for the window of dormer shape, was in truth a door in the roof, witha little crane over it for the hoisting up of stores from the street:
unglazed, anal closing up the middle in two pieces, like any other door ofFrench construction. To exclude the cold, one half of thin door was fastclosed, and the other was opened but a very little way. Such a scantyportion of light was admitted through these means, that it was difficult, onfirst coming in, to see anything; and long habit alone could have slowlyformed in any one, the ability to do any work requiring nicety in suchobscurity. Yet, work of that kind was being done in the garret; for, withhis back towards the door, and his face towards the window where the keeperof the wine-shop stood looking at him, a white-haired man sat on a lowbench, stooping forward and very busy, making shoes. |