Multimedia Mania/abacus-multimedia-mania.iso/dp/0066/00660.txt

Text File | 1993-07-27 | 14KB | 293 lines

$Unique_ID{bob00660}
$Pretitle{}
$Title{(A) Tale Of Two Cities
Chapter II}
$Subtitle{}
$Author{Dickens, Charles}
$Affiliation{}
$Subject{jerry
upon
court
old
stood
bailey
way
lorry
sir
law}
$Date{}
$Log{}
Title:       (A) Tale Of Two Cities
Book:        Book The Second: The Golden Thread
Author:      Dickens, Charles

Chapter II

A Sight

     "You know the Old Bailey well, no doubt?" said one of the oldest of
clerks to Jerry the messenger.

     "Ye-es, sir," returned Jerry, in something of a dogged manner.  "I do
know the Bailey."

     "Just so.  And you know Mr. Lorry."

     "I know Mr. Lorry, sir, much better than I know the Bailey.  Much
better," said Jerry, not unlike a reluctant witness at the establishment in
question, "than I, as a honest tradesman, wish to know the Bailey."

     "Very well.  Find the door where the witnesses go in, and show the
door-keeper this note for Mr. Lorry.  He will then let you in."

     "Into the court, sir?"

     "Into the court."

     Mr. Cruncher's eyes seemed to get a little closer to one another, and to
interchange the inquiry, "What do you think of this?"

     "Am I to wait in the court, sir?" he asked, as the result of that
conference.

     "I am going to tell you.  The door-keeper will pass the note to Mr.
Lorry, and do you make any gesture that will attract Mr. Lorry's attention,
and show him where you stand.  Then what you have to do, is, to remain there
until he wants you."

     "Is that all, sir?"

     "That's all.  He wishes to have a messenger at hand.  This is to tell
him you are there."

     As the ancient clerk deliberately folded and superscribed the note, Mr.
Cruncher, after surveying him in silence until he came to the blotting-paper
stage, remarked:

     "I suppose they'll be trying Forgeries this morning?"

     "Treason!"

     "That's quartering," said Jerry.  "Barbarous!"

     "It is the law," remarked the ancient clerk, turning his surprised
spectacles upon him.  "It is the law."

     "It's hard in the law to spile a man, I think.  It's hard enough to kill
him, but it's wery hard to spile him, sir."

     "Not at all," returned the ancient clerk.  "Speak well of the law.  Take
care of your chest and voice, my good friend, and leave the law to take care
of itself.  I give you that advice."

     "It's the damp, sir, what settles on my chest and voice," said Jerry.
"I leave you to judge what a damp way of earning a living mine is."

     "Well, well," said the old clerk; "we all have our various ways of
gaining a livelihood.  Some of us have damp ways, and some of us have dry
ways.  Here is the letter.  Go along."

     Jerry took the letter, and, remarking to himself with less internal
deference than he made an outward show of, "You are a lean old one, too,"
made his bow, informed his son, in passing, of his destination, and went his
way.

     They hanged at Tyburn, in those days, so the street outside Newgate had
not obtained one infamous notoriety that has since attached to it.  But, the
gaol was a vile place, in which most kinds of debauchery and villainy were
practised, and where dire diseases were bred, that came into court with the
prisoners, and sometimes rushed straight from the dock at my Lord Chief
Justice himself, and pulled him off the bench.  It had more than once
happened, that the Judge in the black cap pronounced his own doom as
certainly as the prisoner's and even died before him.  For the rest, the Old
Bailey was famous as a kind of deadly inn-yard, from which pale travellers
set out continually, in carts and coaches, on a violent passage into the
other world: traversing some two miles and a half of public street and road,
and shaming few good citizens, if any.  So powerful is use, and so desirable
to be good use in the beginning.  It was famous, too, for the pillory, a wise
old institution, that inflicted a punishment of which no one could foresee
the extent; also, for the whipping-post, another dear old institution, very
humanising and softening to behold in action; also, for extensive
transactions in blood-money, another fragment of ancestral wisdom,
systematically leading to the most frightful mercenary crimes that could be
committed under Heaven.  Altogether, the Old Bailey, at that date, was a
choice illustration of the precept, that "Whatever is is right;" an aphorism
that would be as final as it is lazy, did it not include that troublesome
consequence, that nothing that ever was, was wrong.

     Making his way through the tainted crowd, dispersed up and down this
hideous scene of action, with the skill of a man accustomed to make his way
quietly, the messenger found out the door he sought, and handed in his letter
through a trap in it.  For people then paid to see the play at the Old
Bailey, just as they paid to see the play in Bedlam - only the former
entertainment was much the dearer.  Therefore, all the Old Bailey doors were
well guarded - except, indeed, the social doors by which the criminals got
there, and those were always left wide open.

     After some delay and demur, the door grudgingly turned on its hinges a
very little way, and allowed Mr. Jerry Cruncher to squeeze himself into
court.

     "What's on?" he asked, in a whisper, of the man he found himself next
to.

     "Nothing yet."

     "What's coming on?"

     "The Treason case."

     "The quartering one, eh?"

     "Ah!" returned the man, with a relish; "he'll be drawn on a hurdle to be
half hanged, and then he'll be taken down and sliced before his own face, and
then his inside will be taken out and burnt while he looks on, and then his
head will be chopped off, and he'll be cut into quarters.  That's the
sentence."

     "If he's found Guilty, you mean to say?" Jerry added, by way of proviso.

     "Oh! they'll find him guilty," said the other.  "Don't you be afraid of
that."

     Mr. Cruncher's attention was here diverted to the door-keeper, whom he
saw making his way to Mr. Lorry, with the note in his hand.  Mr. Lorry sat at
a table, among the gentlemen in wigs: not far from a wigged gentleman, the
prisoner's counsel, who had a great bundle of papers before him: and nearly
opposite another wigged gentleman with his hands in his pockets, whose whole
attention, when Mr. Cruncher looked at him then or afterwards, seemed to be
concentrated on the ceiling of the court.  After some gruff coughing and
rubbing of his chin and signing with his hand, Jerry attracted the notice of
Mr. Lorry, who had stood up to look for him, and who quietly nodded and sat
down again.

     "What's he got to do with the case?" asked the man he had spoken with.

     "Blest if I know," said Jerry.

     "What have you got to do with it, then, if a person may inquire?"

     "Blest if I know that either," said Jerry.

     The entrance of the Judge, and a consequent great stir and settling down
in the court, stopped the dialogue.  Presently, the dock became the central
point of interest.  Two gaolers, who had been standing there, went out, and
the prisoner was brought in, and put to the bar.

     Everybody present, except the one wigged gentleman who looked at the
ceiling, stared at him.  All the human breath in the place, rolled at him,
like a sea, or a wind, or a fire.  Eager faces strained round pillars and
corners, to get a sight of him; spectators in back rows stood up, not to miss
a hair of him; people on the floor of the court, laid their hands on the
shoulders of the people before them, to help themselves, at anybody's cost,
to a view of him - stood a-tiptoe, got upon ledges, stood upon next to
nothing, to see every inch of him.  Conspicuous among these latter, like an
animated bit of the spiked wall of Newgate, Jerry stood: aiming at the
prisoner the beery breath of a whet he had taken as he came along, and
discharging it to mingle with the waves of other beer, and gin, and tea, and
coffee, and what not, that flowed at him, and already broke upon the great
windows behind him in an impure mist and rain.

     The object of all this staring and blaring, was a young man of about
five-and-twenty, well-grown and well-looking, with a sunburnt cheek and a
dark eye.  His condition was that of a young gentleman.  He was plainly
dressed in black, or very dark grey, and his hair, which was long and dark,
was gathered in a ribbon at the back of his neck; more to be out of his way
than for ornament.  As an emotion of the mind will express itself through any
covering of the body, so the paleness which his situation engendered came
through the brown upon his cheek, showing the soul to be stronger than the
sun.  He was otherwise quite self-possessed, bowed to the Judge, and stood
quiet.

     The sort of interest with which this man was stared and breathed at, was
not a sort that elevated humanity.  Had he stood in peril of a less horrible
sentence - had there been a chance of any one of its savage details being
spared - by just so much would he have lost in his fascination.  The form
that was to be doomed to be so shamefully mangled, was the sight; the
immortal creature that was to be so butchered and torn asunder, yielded the
sensation.  Whatever gloss the various spectators put upon the interest,
according to their several arts and powers of self-deceit, the interest was,
at the root of it, Ogreish.

     Silence in the court!  Charles Darnay had yesterday pleaded Not Guilty
to an indictment denouncing him (with infinite jingle and jangle) for that he
was a false traitor to our serene, illustrious, excellent, and so forth,
prince, our Lord the King, by reason of his having, on divers occasions, and
by divers means and ways, assisted Lewis, the French King, in his wars
against our said serene, illustrious, excellent, and so forth; that was to
say, by coming and going, between the dominions of our said serene,
illustrious, excellent, and so forth, and those of the said French Lewis, and
wickedly, falsely, traitorously, and otherwise evil-adverbiously, revealing
to the said French Lewis what forces our said serene, illustrious, excellent,
and so forth, had in preparation to send to Canada and North America.  This
much, Jerry, with his head becoming more and more spiky as the law terms
bristled it, made out with huge satisfaction, and so arrived circuitously at
the understanding that the aforesaid, and over and over again aforesaid,
Charles Darnay, stood there before him upon his trial; that the jury were
swearing in; and that Mr. Attorney-General was making ready to speak.

     The accused, who was (and who knew he was) being mentally hanged,
beheaded, and quartered, by everybody there, neither flinched from the
situation, nor assumed any theatrical air in it.  He was quiet and attentive;
watched the opening proceedings with a grave interest; and stood with his
hands resting on the slab of wood before him, so composedly, that they had
not displaced a leaf of the herbs with which it was strewn.  The court was
all bestrewn with herbs and sprinkled with vinegar, as a precaution against
gaol air and gaol fever.

     Over the prisoner's head there was a mirror, to throw the light down
upon him.  Crowds of the wicked and the wretched had been reflected in it,
and had passed from its surface and this earth's together.  Haunted in a most
ghastly manner that abominable place would have been, if the glass could ever
have rendered back its reflections, as the ocean is one day to give up its
dead.  Some passing thought of the infamy and disgrace for which it had been
reserved, may have struck the prisoner's mind.  Be that as it may, a change
in his position making him conscious of a bar of light across his face, he
looked up; and when he saw the glass his face flushed, and his right hand
pushed the herbs away.

     It happened, that the action turned his face to that side of the court
which was on his left.  About on a level with his eyes, there sat, in that
corner of the Judge's bench, two persons upon whom his look immediately
rested; so immediately, and so much to the changing of his aspect, that all
the eyes that were turned upon him, turned to them.

     The spectators saw in the two figures, a young lady of little more than
twenty, and a gentleman who was evidently her father; a man of a very
remarkable appearance in respect of the absolute whiteness of his hair, and a
certain indescribable intensity of face: not of an active kind, but pondering
and self-communing.  When this expression was upon him, he looked as if he
were old; but when it was stirred and broken up - as it was now, in a moment,
on his speaking to his daughter - he became a handsome man, not past the
prime of life.

     His daughter had one of her hands drawn through his arm, as she sat by
him, and the other pressed upon it.  She had drawn close to him, in her dread
of the scene, and in her pity for the prisoner.  Her forehead had been
strikingly expressive of an engrossing terror and compassion that saw nothing
but the peril of the accused.  This had been so very noticeable, so very
powerfully and naturally shown; that starers who had had no pity for him were
touched by her; and the whisper went about, "Who are they?"

     Jerry, the messenger, who had made his own observations, in his own
manner, and who had been sucking the rust off his fingers in his absorption,
stretched his neck to hear who they were.  The crowd about him had pressed
and passed the inquiry on to the nearest attendant, and from him it had been
more slowly pressed and passed back; at last it got to Jerry:

     "Witnesses."

     "For which side?"

     "Against."

     "Against what side?"

     "The prisoner's."

     The Judge, whose eyes had gone in the general direction, recalled them,
leaned back in his seat, and looked steadily at the man whose life was in his
hand, as Mr. Attorney-General rose to spin the rope, grind the axe, and
hammer the nails into the scaffold.