Multimedia Mania/abacus-multimedia-mania.iso/dp/0065/00659.txt

Text File | 1993-07-27 | 15KB | 264 lines

$Unique_ID{bob00659}
$Pretitle{}
$Title{(A) Tale Of Two Cities
Chapter I}
$Subtitle{}
$Author{Dickens, Charles}
$Affiliation{}
$Subject{tellson's
cruncher
jerry
put
death
house
young
bar
morning
mother}
$Date{}
$Log{}
Title:       (A) Tale Of Two Cities
Book:        Book The Second: The Golden Thread
Author:      Dickens, Charles

Chapter I

Five Years Later

     Tellson's Bank by Temple Bar was an old-fashioned place, even in the
year one thousand seven hundred and eighty.  It was very small, very dark,
very ugly, very incommodious.  It was an old-fashioned place, moreover, in
the moral attribute that the partners in the House were proud of its
smallness, proud of its darkness, proud of its ugliness, proud of its
incommodiousness.  They were even boastful of its eminence in those
particulars, and were fired by an express conviction that, if it were less
objectionable, it would be less respectable.  This was no passive belief, but
an active weapon which they flashed at more convenient places of business.
Tellson's (they said) wanted no elbow-room, Tellson's wanted no light,
Tellson's wanted no embellishment.  Noakes and Co.'s might, or Snooks
Brothers' might; but Tellson's, thank Heaven! -

     Any one of these partners would have disinherited his son on the
question of rebuilding Tellson's.  In this respect the House was much on a
par with the Country; which did very often disinherit its sons for suggesting
improvements in laws and customs that had long been highly objectionable, but
were only the more respectable.

     Thus it had come to pass, that Tellson's was the triumphant perfection
of inconvenience.  After bursting open a door of idiotic obstinacy with a
weak rattle in its throat, you fell into Tellson's down two steps, and came
to your senses in a miserable little shop, with two little counters, where
the oldest of men made your cheque shake as if the wind rustled it, while
they examined the signature by the dingiest of windows, which were always
under a shower-bath of mud from Fleet-street, and which were made the dingier
by their own iron bars proper, and the heavy shadow of Temple Bar.  If your
business necessitated your seeing "the House," you were put into a species of
Condemned Hold at the back, where you meditated on a misspent life, until the
House came with its hands in its pockets, and you could hardly blink at it in
the dismal twilight.  Your money came out of, or went into, wormy old wooden
drawers, particles of which flew up your nose and down your throat when they
were opened and shut.  Your bank-notes had a musty odour, as if they were
fast decomposing into rags again.  Your plate was stowed away among the
neighbouring cesspools, and evil communications corrupted its good polish in
a day or two.  Your deeds got into extemporised strong-rooms made of kitchens
and sculleries, and fretted all the fat out of their parchments into the
banking-house air.  Your lighter boxes of family papers went up-stairs into a
Barmecide room, that always had a great dining-table in it and never had a
dinner, and where, even in the year one thousand seven hundred and eighty,
the first letters written to you by your old love, or by your little
children, were but newly released from the horror of being ogled through the
windows, by the heads exposed on Temple Bar with an insensate brutality and
ferocity worthy of Abyssinia or Ashantee.

     But indeed, at that time, putting to death was a recipe much in vogue
with all trades and professions, and not least of all with Tellson's.  Death
is Nature's remedy for all things, and why not Legislation's?  Accordingly,
the forger was put to Death; the utterer of a bad note was put to Death; the
unlawful opener of a letter was put to Death; the purloiner of forty
shillings and sixpence was put to Death; the holder of a horse at Tellson's
door, who made off with it, was put to Death; the coiner of a bad shilling
was put to Death; the sounders of three-fourths of the notes in the whole
gamut of Crime, were put to Death.  Not that it did the least good in the way
of prevention - it might almost have been worth remarking that the fact was
exactly the reverse - but, it cleared off (as to this world) the trouble of
each particular case, and left nothing else connected with it to be looked
after.  Thus, Tellson's, in its day, like greater places of business, its
contemporaries, had taken so many lives, that, if the heads laid low before
it had been ranged on Temple Bar instead of being privately disposed of,
they would probably have excluded what little light the ground floor had, in
a rather significant manner.

     Cramped in all kinds of dim cupboards and hutches at Tellson's, the
oldest of men carried on the business gravely.  When they took a young man
into Tellson's London house, they hid him somewhere till he was old.  They
kept him in a dark place, like a cheese, until he had the full Tellson
flavour and blue-mould upon him.  Then only was he permitted to be seen,
spectacularly poring over large books, and casting his breeches and gaiters
into the general weight of the establishment.

     Outside Tellson's - never by any means in it, unless called in - was an
odd-job-man, an occasional porter and messenger, who served as the live sign
of the house.  He was never absent during business hours, unless upon an
errand, and then he was represented by his son: a grisly urchin of twelve,
who was his express image.  People understood that Tellson's, in a stately
way, tolerated the odd-job-man.  The house had always tolerated some person
in that capacity, and time and tide had drifted this person to the post.  His
surname was Cruncher, and on the youthful occasion of his renouncing by proxy
the works of darkness, in the easterly parish church of Houndsditch, he had
received the added appellation of Jerry.

     The scene was Mr. Cruncher's private lodging in Hanging-sword-alley,
Whitefriars: the time, half-past seven of the clock on a windy March morning,
Anno Domini seventeen hundred and eighty.  (Mr. Cruncher himself always spoke
of the year of our Lord as Anna Dominoes: apparently under the impression
that the Christian era dated from the invention of a popular game, by a lady
who had bestowed her name upon it.)

     Mr. Cruncher's apartments were not in a savoury neighbourhood, and were
but two in number, even if a closet with a single pane of glass in it might
be counted as one.  But they were very decently kept.  Early as it was, on
the windy March morning, the room in which he lay a-bed was already scrubbed
throughout; and between the cups and saucers arranged for breakfast, and the
lumbering deal table, a very clean white cloth was spread.

     Mr. Cruncher reposed under a patchwork counterpane, like a Harlequin at
home.  At first, he slept heavily, but, by degrees, began to roll and surge
in bed, until he rose above the surface, with his spiky hair looking as if it
must tear the sheets  to ribbons.  At which juncture, he exclaimed, in a
voice of dire exasperation:

     "Bust me, if she ain't at it again!"

     A woman of orderly and industrious appearance rose from her knees in a
corner, with sufficient haste and trepidation to show that she was the person
referred to.

     "What!" said Mr. Cruncher, looking out of bed for a boot.  "You're at it
again, are you?"

     After hailing the morn with this second salutation, he threw a boot at
the woman as a third.  It was a very muddy boot, and may introduce the odd
circumstance connected with Mr. Cruncher's domestic economy, that, whereas he
often came home after banking hours with clean boots, he often got up next
morning to find the same boots covered with clay.

     "What," said Mr. Cruncher, varying his apostrophe after missing his
mark - "what are you up to, Aggerawayter?"

     "I was only saying my prayers."

     "Saying your prayers!  You're a nice woman!  What do you mean by
flopping yourself down and praying again me?"

     "I was not praying against you; I was praying for you."

     "You weren't.  And if you were, I won't be took the liberty with.  Here!
our mother's a nice woman, young Jerry, going a praying again your father's
prosperity.  You've got a dutiful mother, you have, my son.  You've got a
religious mother, you have, my boy: going and flopping herself down, and
praying that the bread-and-butter may be snatched out of the mouth of her
only child."

     Master Cruncher (who was in his shirt) took this very ill, and, turning
to his mother, strongly deprecated any praying away of his personal board.

     "And what do you suppose, you conceited female," said Mr. Cruncher, with
unconscious inconsistency, "that the worth of your prayers may be?  Name the
price that you put your prayers at!"

     "They only come from the heart, Jerry.  They are worth no more than
that."

     "Worth no more than that," repeated Mr. Cruncher.  "They ain't worth
much, then.  Whether or no, I won't be prayed again, I tell you.  I can't
afford it.  I'm not a going to be made unlucky by your sneaking.  If you must
go flopping yourself down, flop in favour of your husband and child, and not
in opposition to 'em.  If I had had any but a unnat'ral wife, and this poor
boy had had any but a unnat'ral mother, I might have made some money last
week instead of being counterprayed and countermined and religiously
circumvented into the worst of luck.  B-u-u-ust me!" said Mr. Cruncher, who
all this time had been putting on his clothes, "if I ain't, what with piety
and one blowed thing and another, been choused this last week into as bad
luck as ever a poor devil of a honest tradesman met with!  Young Jerry, dress
yourself, my boy, and while I clean my boots keep a eye upon your mother now
and then, and if you see any signs of more flopping, give me a call.  For, I
tell you," here he addressed his wife once more, "I won't be gone again, in
this manner.  I am as rickety as a hackney-coach, I'm as sleepy as laudanum,
my lines is strained to that degree that I shouldn't know, if it wasn't for
the pain in 'em, which was me and which somebody else, yet I'm none the
better for it in pocket; and it's my suspicion that you've been at it from
morning to night to prevent me from being the better for it in pocket, and I
won't put up with it.  Aggerawayter, and what do you say now!"

     Growling, in addition, such phrases as "Ah! yes!  You're religious, too.
You wouldn't put yourself in opposition to the interests of your husband and
child, would you?  Not you!" and throwing off other sarcastic sparks from the
whirling grindstone of his indignation, Mr. Cruncher betook himself to his
boot-cleaning and his general preparation for business.  In the meantime, his
son, whose head was garnished with tenderer spikes, and whose young eyes
stood close by one another, as his father's did, kept the required watch upon
his mother.  He greatly disturbed that poor woman at intervals, by darting
out of his sleeping closet, where he made his toilet, with a suppressed cry
of "You are going to flop, mother. - Halloa, father!" and, after raising this
fictitious alarm, darting in again with an undutiful grin.

     Mr. Cruncher's temper was not at all improved when he came to his
breakfast.  He resented Mrs. Cruncher's saying grace with particular
animosity.

     "Now, Aggerawayter!  What are you up to?  At it again?"

     His wife explained that she had merely "asked a blessing."

     "Don't do it!" said Mr. Cruncher, looking about, as if he rather
expected to see the loaf disappear under the efficacy of his wife's
petitions.  "I ain't a going to be blest out of house and home.  I won't have
my wittles blest off my table.  Keep still!"

     Exceedingly red-eyed and grim, as if he had been up all night at a party
which had taken anything but a convivial turn, Jerry Cruncher worried his
breakfast rather than ate it, growling over it like any four-footed inmate of
a menagerie.  Towards nine o'clock he smoothed his ruffled aspect, and,
presenting as respectful and business-like an exterior as he could overlay
his natural self with, issued forth to the occupation of the day.

     It could scarcely be called a trade, in spite of his favourite
description of himself as "a honest tradesman."  His stock consisted of a
wooden stool, made out of a broken-backed chair cut down, which stool, young
Jerry, walking at his father's side, carried every morning to beneath the
banking-house window that was nearest Temple Bar: where, with the addition of
the first handful of straw that could be gleaned from any passing vehicle to
keep the cold and wet from the odd-job-man's feet, it formed the encampment
for the day.  On this post of his, Mr. Cruncher was as well known to
Fleet-street and the Temple, as the Bar itself, - and was almost as
ill-looking.

     Encamped at a quarter before nine, in good time to touch his
three-cornered hat to the oldest of men as they passed in to Tellson's, Jerry
took up his station on this windy March morning, with young Jerry standing by
him, when not engaged in making forays through the Bar, to inflict bodily and
mental injuries of an acute description on passing boys who were small enough
for his amiable purpose.  Father and son, extremely like each other, looking
silently on at the morning traffic in Fleet-street, with their two heads as
near to one another as the two eyes of each were, bore a considerable
resemblance to a pair of monkeys.  The resemblance was not lessened by the
accidental circumstance, that the mature Jerry bit and spat out straw, while
the twinkling eyes of the youthful Jerry were as restlessly watchful of him
as of everything else in Fleet-street.

     The head of one of the regular indoor messengers attached to Tellson's
establishment was put through the door, and the word was given:

     "Porter wanted!"

     "Hooray, father!  Here's an early job to begin with!"

     Having thus given his parent God speed, young Jerry seated himself on
the stool, entered on his reversionary interest in the straw his father had
been chewing, and cogitated.

     "Al-ways rusty!  His fingers is al-ways rusty!" muttered young Jerry.
"Where does my father get all that iron rust from?  He don't get no iron rust
here!"