The Best of the Bureau/The_Best_of_the_Bureau_Bureau_Development_Inc._1992.iso/dp/0068/00681.txt

Text File | 1992-08-07 | 16KB | 299 lines

$Unique_ID{bob00681}
$Pretitle{}
$Title{(A) Tale Of Two Cities
Chapter XXIII}
$Subtitle{}
$Author{Dickens, Charles}
$Affiliation{}
$Subject{roads
mender
village
fire
gabelle
fountain
like
monsieur
away
chateau}
$Date{}
$Log{}
Title:       (A) Tale Of Two Cities
Book:        Book The Second: The Golden Thread
Author:      Dickens, Charles

Chapter XXIII

Fire Rises

     There was a change on the village where the fountain fell, and where the
mender of roads went forth daily to hammer out of the stones on the highway
such morsels of bread as might serve for patches to hold his poor ignorant
soul and his poor reduced body together.  The prison on the crag was not so
dominant as of yore; there were soldiers to guard it, but not many; there
were officers to guard the soldiers, but not one of them knew what his men
would do - beyond this: that it would probably not be what he was ordered.

     Far and wide lay a ruined country, yielding nothing but desolation.
Every green leaf, every blade of grass and blade of grain, was as shrivelled
and poor as the miserable people.  Everything was bowed down, dejected,
oppressed, and broken.  Habitations, fences, domesticated animals, men,
women, children, and the soil that bore them - all worn out.

     Monseigneur (often a most worthy individual gentleman) was a national
blessing, gave a chivalrous tone to things, was a polite example of luxurious
and shining life, and a great deal more to equal purpose; nevertheless,
Monseigneur as a class had, somehow or other, brought things to this.
Strange that Creation, designed expressly for Monseigneur, should be so soon
wrung dry and squeezed out!  There must be something short-sighted in the
eternal arrangements, surely!  Thus it was, however; and the last drop of
blood having been extracted from the flints, and the last screw of the rack
having been turned so often that its purchase crumbled, and it now turned and
turned with nothing to bite, Monseigneur began to run away from a phenomenon
so low and unaccountable.

     But, this was not the change on the village, and on many a village like
it.  For scores of years gone by, Monseigneur had squeezed it and wrung it,
and had seldom graced it with his presence except for the pleasures of the
chase - now, found in hunting the people; now, found in hunting the beasts,
for whose preservation Monseigneur made edifying spaces of barbarous and
barren wilderness.  No.  The change consisted in the appearance of strange
faces of low caste, rather than in the disappearance of the high-caste,
chiseled, and otherwise beatified and beatifying features of Monseigneur.

     For, in these times, as the mender of roads worked, solitary, in the
dust, not often troubling himself to reflect that dust he was and to dust he
must return, being for the most part too much occupied in thinking how little
he had for supper and how much more he would eat if he had it - in these
times, as he raised his eyes from his lonely labour, and viewed the prospect,
he would see some rough figure approaching on foot, the like of which was
once a rarity in those parts, but was now a frequent presence.  As it
advanced, the mender of roads would discern without surprise, that it was a
shaggy-haired man, of almost barbarian aspect, tall, in wooden shoes that
were clumsy even to the eyes of a mender of roads, grim, rough, swart,
steeped in the mud and dust of many highways, dank with the marshy moisture
of many low grounds, sprinkled with the thorns and leaves and moss of many
by ways through woods.

     Such a man came upon him, like a ghost, at noon in the July weather, as
he sat on his heap of stones under a bank, taking such shelter as he could
get from a shower of hail.

     The man looked at him, looked at the village in the hollow, at the mill,
and at the prison on the crag.  When he had identified these objects in what
benighted mind he had, he said, in a dialect that was just intelligible:

     "How goes it, Jacques?"

     "All well, Jacques."

     "Touch then!"

     They joined hands, and the man sat down on the heap of stones.

     "No dinner?"

     "Nothing but supper now," said the mender of roads, with a hungry face.

     "It is the fashion," growled the man.  "I meet no dinner anywhere."

     He took out a blackened pipe, filled it, lighted it with flint and
steel, pulled at it until it was in a bright glow: then, suddenly held it
from him and dropped something into it from between his finger and thumb,
that blazed and went out in a puff of smoke.

     "Touch then."  It was the turn of the mender of roads to say it this
time, after observing these operations.  They again joined hands.

     "To-night?" said the mender of roads.

     "To-night," said the man, putting the pipe in his mouth.

     "Where?"

     "Here."

     He and the mender of roads sat on the heap of stones looking silently at
one another, with the hail driving in between them like a pigmy charge of
bayonets, until the sky began to clear over the village.

     "Show me!" said the traveller then, moving to the brow of the hill.

     "See!" returned the mender of roads, with extended finger.  "You go down
here, and straight through the street, and past the fountain -"

     "To the Devil with all that!" interrupted the other, rolling his eye
over the landscape.  "I go through no streets and past no fountains.  Well?"

     "Well!  About two leagues beyond the summit of that hill above the
village."

     "Good.  When do you cease to work?"

     "At sunset."

     "Will you wake me, before departing?  I have walked two nights without
resting.  Let me finish my pipe, and I shall sleep like a child.  Will you
wake me?"

     "Surely."

     The wayfarer smoked his pipe out, put it in his breast, slipped off his
great wooden shoes, and lay down on his back on the heap of stones.  He was
fast asleep directly.

     As the road-mender plied his dusty labour, and the hail-clouds, rolling
away, revealed bright bars and streaks of sky which were responded to by
silver gleams upon the landscape, the little man (who wore a red cap now, in
place of his blue one) seemed fascinated by the figure on the heap of stones.
His eyes were so often turned towards it, that he used his tools
mechanically, and, one would have said, to very poor account.  The bronze
face, the shaggy black hair and beard, the coarse woollen red cap, the rough
medley dress of home-spun stuff and hairy skins of beasts, the powerful frame
attenuated by spare living, and the sullen and desperate compression of the
lips in sleep, inspired the mender of roads with awe.  The traveller had
travelled far, and his feet were footsore, and his ankles chafed and
bleeding; his great shoes, stuffed with leaves and grass, had been heavy to
drag over the many long leagues, and his clothes were chafed into holes, as
he himself was into sores.  Stooping down beside him, the road-mender tried
to get a peep at secret weapons in his breast or where not; but, in vain, for
he slept with his arms crossed upon him, and set as resolutely as his lips.
Fortified towns with their stockades, guard-houses, gates, trenches, and
drawbridges, seemed to the mender of roads, to be so much air as against this
figure.  And when he lifted his eyes from it to the horizon and looked
around, he saw in his small fancy similar figures, stopped by no obstacle,
tending to centres all over France.

     The man slept on, indifferent to showers of hail and intervals of
brightness, to sunshine on his face and shadow, to the pattering lumps of
dull ice on his body and the diamonds into which the sun changed them, until
the sun was low in the west, and the sky was glowing.  Then, the mender of
roads having got his tools together and all things ready to go down into the
village, roused him.

     "Good!" said the sleeper, rising on his elbow.  "Two leagues beyond the
summit of the hill?"

     "About."

     "About.  Good!"

     The mender of roads went home, with the dust g