A Tale of Two Cities and Great Expectations (Oprah's Book Club) Read online

  ‘Hold then! True!’ muttered her husband. ‘Gentlemen – my wife!’

  The three customers pulled off their hats to Madame Defarge, with three flourishes. She acknowledged their homage by bending her head, and giving them 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, and became absorbed in it.

  ‘Gentlemen,’ said her husband, who had kept his bright eye observantly upon her, ‘good day. The chamber, furnished bachelor-fashion, that you wished to see, and were inquiring for when I stepped out, is on the fifth floor. The doorway of the staircase gives on the little court-yard close to the left here,’ 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 the way. Gentlemen, adieu!’

  They paid for their wine, and left the place. The eyes of Monsieur Defarge were studying his wife at her knitting, when the elderly gentleman advanced from his corner, and begged the favour of a word.

  ‘Willingly, sir,’ said Monsieur Defarge, and quietly stepped with him to the door.

  Their conference was very short, but very decided. Almost at the first word, Monsieur Defarge started and became deeply attentive. It had not lasted a minute, when he nodded and went out. The gentleman then beckoned to the young lady, and they, too, went out. Madame Defarge knitted with nimble fingers and steady eyebrows, and saw nothing.

  Mr Jarvis Lorry and Miss Manette, emerging from the wine-shop thus, joined Monsieur Defarge in the doorway to which he had directed his other company just before. It opened from a stinking little black court-yard, and was the general public entrance to a great pile of houses, inhabited by a great number of people. In the gloomy tile-paved entry to the gloomy tile-paved staircase, Monsieur Defarge bent down on one knee to the child of his old master, and put her hand to his lips. It was a gentle action, but not at all gently done; a very remarkable transformation had come over him in a few seconds. 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 ascending the stairs.

  ‘Is he alone?’ the latter whispered.

  ‘Alone! God help him who should be with him!’ said the other, in the same low 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 me and demanded to know if I would take him, and, at my peril, be discreet – as he 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, and mutter a tremendous curse. No direct answer could have been half so forcible. Mr Lorry’s spirits grew heavier and heavier, as he and his two companions ascended higher and higher.

  Such a staircase, with its accessories, in the older and more crowded part of Paris, would be bad enough now; but, at that time, it was vile indeed to unaccustomed and unhardened senses. Every little habitation within the great foul nest of one high building – that is to say, the room or rooms within every door that opened on the general staircase – left its own heap of refuse on its own landing, besides flinging other refuse from its own windows. The uncontrollable and hopeless mass of decomposition so engendered, would have polluted the air, even if poverty and deprivation had not loaded it with their intangible impurities; the two bad sources combined made it almost insupportable. Through such an atmosphere, by a steep dark shaft of dirt and poison, the way lay. Yielding to his own disturbance of mind, and to his young companion’s agitation, which became greater every instant, Mr Jarvis Lorry twice stopped to rest. Each of these stoppages was made at a doleful grating, by which any languishing good airs that were left uncorrupted, seemed to escape, and all spoilt and sickly vapours seemed to crawl in. Through the rusted bars, tastes, rather than glimpses, were caught of the jumbled neighbourhood; and nothing within range, nearer or lower than the summits of the two great towers of Notre-Dame had any promise on it of healthy life or wholesome aspirations.

  At last, the top of the staircase was gained, and they stopped for the third time. There was yet an upper staircase, of a steeper inclination and of contracted dimensions, to be ascended, before the garret story was reached. The keeper of the wine-shop, always going a little in advance, and always going on the side which Mr Lorry took, as though he dreaded to be asked any question by the young lady, turned himself about here, and, carefully feeling in the pockets of the coat he carried over his shoulder, took out a key.

  ‘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 it closer 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 his door was left open.’

  ‘Is it possible!’ exclaimed Mr Lorry.

  ‘Is it possible?’ repeated Defarge, bitterly. ‘Yes. And a beautiful world we live in, when it is possible, and when many other such things are possible, and not only possible, but done – done, see you! – under that sky there, 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 it had reached the young lady’s ears. But, by this time she trembled under such strong 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 a word 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 good you 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, friend Defarge. Come, now. Business, business!’

  They went up slowly and softly. The staircase was short, and they were soon at the top. There, as it had an abrupt turn in it, they came all at once in sight of three men, whose heads were bent down close together at the side of a door, and who were intently looking into the room to which the door belonged, through some chinks or holes in the wall. On hearing footsteps close at hand, these three turned, and rose, and showed themselves to be the three 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 the wine-shop going straight to this one when they were left alone, Mr Lorry asked him in a whisper, with a 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 the sight 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 in through the crevice in the wall. Soon raising his head again, he struck twice or thrice upon the door – evidently with no other object than to make a noise there. With the same intention, he drew the key across it, three or four times, before he put it clumsily into the lock, and turned it as heavily as he could.

  The door slowly opened inward under his hand, and
he looked into the room and said something. A faint voice answered something. Little more than a single syllable could have been spoken on either side.

  He looked back over his shoulder, and beckoned them to enter. Mr Lorry got his arm securely round the daughter’s waist, and held her; for he felt that she was sinking.

  ‘A – a – a – business, business!’ he urged, with a moisture that was not of business 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 their conductor, 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 just within the door, and held her, clinging to him.

  Defarge drew out the key, closed the door, locked it on the inside, took out 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 window was. He stopped there, and faced round.

  The garret, built to be a dry depository for firewood and the like, was dim and dark: for, the window of dormer shape, was in truth a door in the roof, with a little crane over it for the hoisting up of stores from the street: unglazed, and closing up the middle in two pieces, like any other door of French construction. To exclude the cold, one half of this door was fast closed, and the other was opened but a very little way. Such a scanty portion of light was admitted through these means, that it was difficult, on first coming in, to see anything; and long habit alone could have slowly formed in any one, the ability to do any work requiring nicety in such obscurity. Yet, work of that kind was being done in the garret; for, with his back towards the door, and his face towards the window where the keeper of the wine-shop stood looking at him, a white-haired man sat on a low bench, stooping forward and very busy, making shoes.

  [END OF INSTALMENT 3]

  CHAPTER 6

  The Shoemaker

  ‘Good day!’ said Monsieur Defarge, looking down at the white head that bent low over the shoemaking.

  It was raised for a moment, and a very faint voice responded to the salutation, as if it were at a distance:

  ‘Good day!’

  ‘You are still hard at work, I see?’

  After a long silence, the head was lifted for another moment, and the voice replied, ‘Yes – I am working.’ This time, a pair of haggard eyes had looked at the questioner, before the face had dropped again.

  The faintness of the voice was pitiable and dreadful. It was not the faintness of physical weakness, though confinement and hard fare no doubt had their part in it. Its deplorable peculiarity was, that it was the faintness of solitude and disuse. It was like the last feeble echo of a sound made long and long ago. So entirely had it lost the life and resonance of the human voice, that it affected the senses like a once beautiful colour, faded away into a poor weak stain. So sunken and suppressed it was, that it was like a voice underground. So expressive it was, of a hopeless and lost creature, that a famished traveller, wearied out by lonely wandering in a wilderness, would have remembered home and friends in such a tone before lying down to die.

  Some minutes of silent work had passed, and the haggard eyes had looked up again: not with any interest or curiosity, but with a dull mechanical perception, beforehand, that the spot where the only visitor they were aware of had stood, was not yet empty.

  ‘I want,’ said Defarge, who had not removed his gaze from the shoemaker, ‘to let in a little more light here. You can bear a little more?’

  The shoemaker stopped his work; looked, with a vacant air of listening, at the floor on one side of him; then, similarly, at the floor on the other side of him; then upward at the speaker.

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘You can bear a little more light?’

  ‘I must bear it, if you let it in.’ (Laying the palest shadow of a stress upon the second word.)

  The opened half-door was opened a little further, and secured at that angle for the time. A broad ray of light fell into the garret, and showed the workman, with an unfinished shoe upon his lap, pausing in his labour. His few common tools and various scraps of leather were at his feet and on his bench. He had a white beard, raggedly cut, but not very long, a hollow face, and exceedingly bright eyes. The hollowness and thinness of his face would have caused them to look large, under his yet dark eyebrows and his confused white hair, though they had been really otherwise; but, they were naturally large, and looked unnaturally so. His yellow rags of shirt lay open at the throat, and showed his body to be withered and worn. He, and his old canvas frock, and his loose stockings, and all his poor tatters of clothes, had, in a long seclusion from direct light and air, faded down to such a dull uniformity of parchment-yellow, that it would have been hard to say which was which.

  He had put up a hand between his eyes and the light, and the very bones of it seemed transparent. So he sat, with a steadfastly vacant gaze, pausing in his work. He never looked at the figure before him, without first looking down on this side of himself, then on that, as if he had lost the habit of associating place with sound; he never spoke, without first wandering in this manner, and forgetting to speak.

  ‘Are you going to finish that pair of shoes to-day?’ asked Defarge, motioning to Mr Lorry to come forward.

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘Do you mean to finish that pair of shoes to-day?’

  ‘I can’t say that I mean to. I suppose so. I don’t know.’

  But, the question reminded him of his work, and he bent over it again.

  Mr Lorry came silently forward, leaving the daughter by the door. When he had stood, for a minute or two, by the side of Defarge, the shoemaker looked up. He showed no surprise at seeing another figure, but the unsteady fingers of one of his hands strayed to his lips as he looked at it (his lips and his nails were of the same pale lead-colour), and then the hand dropped to his work, and he once more bent over the shoe. The look and the action had occupied but an instant.

  ‘You have a visitor, you see,’ said Monsieur Defarge.

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘Here is a visitor.’

  The shoemaker looked up as before, but without removing a hand from his work.

  ‘Come!’ said Defarge. ‘Here is monsieur, who knows a well-made shoe when he sees one. Show him that shoe you are working at. Take it, monsieur.’

  Mr Lorry took it in his hand.

  ‘Tell monsieur what kind of shoe it is, and the maker’s name.’ There was a longer pause than usual, before the shoemaker replied:

  ‘I forget what it was you asked me. What did you say?’

  ‘I said, couldn’t you describe the kind of shoe, for monsieur’s information?’

  ‘It is a lady’s shoe. It is a young lady’s walking-shoe. It is in the present mode. I never saw the mode. I have had a pattern in my hand.’ He glanced at the shoe, with some little passing touch of pride.

  ‘And the maker’s name?’ said Defarge.

  Now that he had no work to hold, he laid the knuckles of the right hand in the hollow of the left, and then the knuckles of the left hand in the hollow of the right, and then passed a hand across his bearded chin, and so on in regular changes, without a moment’s intermission. The task of recalling him from the vacancy into which he always sank when he had spoken, was like recalling some very weak person from a swoon, or endeavouring, in the hope of some disclosure, to stay the spirit of a fast-dying man.

  ‘Did you ask me for my name?’

  ‘Assuredly I did.’

  ‘One Hundred and Five, North Tower.’

  ‘Is that all?’

  ‘One Hundred and Five, North Tower.’

  With a weary sound that was not a sigh, nor a groan, he bent to work again, until the silence was again broken.

  ‘You are
not a shoemaker by trade?’ said Mr Lorry, looking steadfastly at him.

  His haggard eyes turned to Defarge as if he would have transferred the question to him; but as no help came from that quarter, they turned back on the questioner when they had sought the ground.

  ‘I am not a shoemaker by trade? No, I was not a shoemaker by trade. I – I learnt it here. I taught myself. I asked leave to—’

  He lapsed away, even for minutes, ringing those measured changes on his hands the whole time. His eyes came slowly back, at last, to the face from which they had wandered; when they rested on it, he started, and resumed, in the manner of a sleeper that moment awake, reverting to a subject of last night.

  ‘I asked leave to teach myself, and I got it with much difficulty after a long while, and I have made shoes ever since.’

  As he held out his hand for the shoe that had been taken from him, Mr Lorry said, still looking steadfastly in his face:

  ‘Monsieur Manette, do you remember nothing of me?’

  The shoe dropped to the ground, and he sat looking fixedly at the questioner.

  ‘Monsieur Manette;’ Mr Lorry laid his hand upon Defarge’s arm; ‘do you remember nothing of this man? Look at him. Look at me. Is there no old banker, no old business, no old servant, no old time, rising in your mind, Monsieur Manette?’

  As the captive of many years sat looking fixedly, by turns at Mr Lorry and at Defarge, some long-obliterated marks of an actively intent intelligence in the middle of the forehead, gradually forced themselves through the black mist that had fallen on him. They were overclouded again, they were fainter, they were gone; but, they had been there. And so exactly was the expression repeated on the fair young face of her who had crept along the wall to a point where she could see him, and where she now stood looking at him, with hands which at first had been only raised in frightened compassion, if not even to keep him off and shut out the sight of him, but which were now extending towards him, trembling with eagerness to lay the spectral face upon her warm young breast, and love it back to life and hope – so exactly was the expression repeated (though in stronger characters) on her fair young face, that it looked as though it had passed, like a moving light, from him to her.