Multimedia Mania/abacus-multimedia-mania.iso/dp/0067/00674.txt

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$Unique_ID{bob00674}
$Pretitle{}
$Title{(A) Tale Of Two Cities
Chapter XVI}
$Subtitle{}
$Author{Dickens, Charles}
$Affiliation{}
$Subject{madame
defarge
little
long
spy
knitting
time
monsieur
day
husband}
$Date{}
$Log{}
Title:       (A) Tale Of Two Cities
Book:        Book The Second: The Golden Thread
Author:      Dickens, Charles

Chapter XVI

Still Knitting

     Madame Defarge and monsieur her husband returned amicably to the bosom
of Saint Antoine, while a speck in a blue cap toiled through the darkness,
and through the dust, and down the weary miles of avenue by the wayside,
slowly tending towards that point of the compass where the chateau of
Monsieur the Marquis, now in his grave, listened to the whispering trees.
Such ample leisure had the stone faces, now, for listening to the trees and
to the fountain, that the few village scarecrows who, in their quest for
herbs to eat and fragments of dead stick to burn, strayed within sight of the
great stone court-yard and terrace staircase, had it borne in upon their
starved fancy that the expression of the faces was altered.  A rumour just
lived in the village - had a faint and bare existence there, as its people
had - that when the knife struck home, the faces changed, from faces of pride
to faces of anger and pain; also, that when that dangling figure was hauled
up forty feet above the fountain, they changed again, and bore a cruel look
of being avenged, which they would henceforth bear for ever.  In the stone
face over the great window of the bed-chamber where the murder was done, two
fine dints were pointed out in the sculptured nose, which everybody
recognised, and which nobody had seen of old; and on the scarce occasions
when two or three ragged peasants emerged from the crowd to take a hurried
peep at Monsieur the Marquis petrified, a skinny finger would not have
pointed to it for a minute, before they all started away among the moss and
leaves, like the more fortunate hares who could find a living there.

     Chateau and hut, stone face and dangling figure, the red stain on the
stone floor, and the pure water in the village well - thousands of acres of
land - a whole province of France - all France itself - lay under the night
sky, concentrated into a faint hair-breadth line.  So does a whole world,
with all its greatnesses and littlenesses, lie in a twinkling star.  And as
mere human knowledge can split a ray of light and analyse the manner of its
composition, so, sublimer intelligences may read in the feeble shining of
this earth of ours, every thought and act, every vice and virtue, of every
responsible creature on it.

     The Defarges, husband and wife, came lumbering under the starlight, in
their public vehicle, to that gate of Paris whereunto their journey naturally
tended.  There was the usual stoppage at the barrier guard-house, and the
usual lanterns came glancing forth for the usual examination and inquiry.
Monsieur Defarge alighted; knowing one or two of the soldiery there, and one
of the police.  The latter he was intimate with, and affectionately embraced.

     When Saint Antoine had again enfolded the Defarges in his dusky wings,
and they, having finally alighted near the Saint's boundaries, were picking
their way on foot through the black mud and offal of his streets, Madame
Defarge spoke to her husband:

     "Say then, my friend; what did Jacques of the police tell thee?"

     "Very little to-night, but all he knows.  There is another spy
commissioned for our quarter.  There may be many more, for all that he can
say, but he knows of one."

     "Eh well!" said Madame Defarge, raising her eyebrows with a cool
business air.  "It is necessary to register him.  How do they call that man?"

     "He is English."

     "So much the better.  His name?"

     "Barsad," said Defarge, making it French by pronunciation.  But, he had
been so careful to get it accurately, that he then spelt it with perfect
correctness.

     "Barsad," repeated madame.  "Good.  Christian name?"

     "John."

     "John Barsad," repeated madame, after murmuring it once to herself.
Good.  His appearance; is it known?"

     "Age, about forty years; height, about five feet nine; black hair;
complexion dark; generally, rather handsome visage; eyes dark, face thin,
long, and sallow; nose aquiline, but not straight, having a peculiar
inclination towards the left cheek; expression, therefore, sinister."

     "Eh my faith.  It is a portrait!" said madame, laughing.  "He shall be
registered tomorrow."

     They turned into the wine-shop, which was closed (for it was midnight)
and where Madame Defarge immediately took her post at her desk, counted the
small moneys that had been taken during her absence, examined the stock, went
through the entries in the book, made other entries of her own, checked the
serving man in every possible way, and finally dismissed him to bed.  Then
she turned out the contents of the bowl of money for the second time, and
began knotting them up in her handkerchief, in a chain of separate knots, for
safe keeping through the night.  All this while, Defarge, with his pipe in
his mouth, walked up and down, complacently admiring, but never interfering;
in which condition, indeed, as to the business and his domestic affairs, he
walked up and down through life.

     The night was hot, and the shop, close shut and surrounded by so foul a
neighbourhood, was ill-smelling.  Monsieur Defarge's olfactory sense was by
no means delicate, but the stock of wine smelt much stronger than it ever
tasted, and so did the stock of rum and brandy and aniseed.  He whiffed the
compound of scents away, as he put down his smoked-out pipe.

     "You are fatigued," said madame, raising her glance as she knotted the
money.  "There are only the usual odours."

     "I am a little tired," her husband acknowledged.

     "You are a little depressed, too," said madame, whose quick eyes had
never been so intent on the accounts, but they had had a ray or two for him.
Oh, the men, the men!"

     "But my dear!" began Defarge.

     "But my dear!" repeated madame, nodding firmly; "but my dear!  You are
faint of heart to-night, my dear!"

     "Well, then," said Defarge, as if a thought were wrung out of his
breast, "it is a long time."

     "It is a long time," repeated his wife; "and when is it not a long time?
Vengeance and retribution require a long time; it is the rule."

     "It does not take a long time to strike a man with Lightning," said
Defarge.

     "How long," demanded madame, composedly, "does it take to make and store
the lightning?  Tell me."

     Defarge raised his head thoughtfully, as if there were something in that
too.

     "It does not take a long time," said madame, "for an earthquake to
swallow a town.  Eh well!  Tell me how long it takes to prepare the
earthquake?"

     "A long time, I suppose," said Defarge.

     "But when it is ready, it takes place, and grinds to pieces everything
before it.  In the meantime, it is always preparing, though it is not seen or
heard.  That is your consolation.  Keep it."

     She tied a knot with flashing eyes, as if it throttled a foe.

     "I tell thee," said madame, extending her right hand, for emphasis,
"that although it is a long time on the road, it is on the road and coming.
I tell thee it never retreats, and never stops.  I tell thee it is always
advancing.  Look around and consider the lives of all the world that we know,
consider the faces of all the world that we know, consider the rage and
discontent to which the Jacquerie addresses itself with more and more of
certainty every hour.  Can such things last?  Bah!  I mock you."

     "My brave wife," returned Defarge, standing before her with his head a
little bent, and his hands clasped at his back, like a docile and attentive
pupil before his catechist, "I do not question all this.  But it has lasted a
long time, and it is possible - you know well, my wife, it is possible - that
it may not come, during our lives."

     "Eh well!  How then?" demanded madame, tying another knot, as if there
were another enemy strangled.

     "Well!" said Defarge, with a half-complaining and half-apologetic shrug.
"We shall not see the triumph."

     "We shall have helped it," returned madame, with her extended hand in
strong action.  "Nothing that we do, is done in vain.  I believe, with all my
soul, that we shall see the triumph.  But even if not, even if I knew
certainly not, show me the neck of an aristocrat and tyrant, and still I
would -"

     Then madame, with her teeth set, tied a very terrible knot indeed.

     "Hold!" cried Defarge, reddening a little as if he felt charged with
cowardice; "I too, my dear, will stop at nothing."

     "Yes!  But it is your weakness that you sometimes need to see your
victim and your opportunity, to sustain you.  Sustain yourself without that.
When the time comes, let loose a tiger and a devil; but wait for the time
with the tiger and the devil chained - not shown - yet always ready."

     Madame enforced the conclusion of this piece of advice by striking her
little counter with her chain of money as if she knocked its brains out, and
then gathering the heavy handkerchief under her arm in a serene manner, and
observing that it was time to go to bed.

     Next noontide saw the admirable woman in her usual place in the
wine-shop, knitting away assiduously.  A rose lay beside her, and if she now
and then glanced at the flower, it was with no infraction of her usual
preoccupied air.  There were a few customers, drinking or not drinking,
standing or seated, sprinkled about.  The day was very hot, and heaps of
flies, who were extending their inquisitive and adventurous perquisitions
into all the glutinous little glasses near madame, fell dead at the bottom.
Their decease made no impression on the other flies out promenading, who
looked at them in the coolest manner (as if they themselves were elephants,
or something as far removed), until they met the same fate.  Curious to
consider how heedless flies are! - perhaps they thought as much at Court that
sunny summer day.

     A figure entering at the door threw a shadow on Madame Defarge which she
felt to be a new one.  She laid down her knitting, and began to pin her rose
in her head-dress, before she looked at the figure.

     It was curious.  The moment Madame Defarge took up the rose, the
customers ceased talking, and began gradually to drop out of the wine-shop.

     "Good day, madame," said the new-comer.

     "Good day, monsieur."

     She said it aloud, but added to herself, as she resumed her knitting:
"Hah!  Good day, age about forty, height about five feet nine, black hair,
generally rather handsome visage, complexion dark, eyes dark, thin, long and
sallow face, aquiline nose but not straight, having a peculiar inclination
towards the left cheek which imparts a sinister expression!  Good day, one
and all!"

     "Have the goodness to give me a little glass of old cognac, and a
mouthful of cool fresh water, madame."

     Madame complied with a polite air.

     "Marvellous cognac this, madame!"

     It was the first time it had ever been so complimented, and Madame
Defarge knew enough of its antecedents to know better.  She said, however,
that the cognac was flattered, and took up her knitting.  The visitor watched
her fingers for a few moments, and took the opportunity of observing the
place in general.

     "You knit with great skill, madame."

     "I am accustomed to it."

     "A pretty pattern too!"

     "You think so?" said madame, looking at him with a smile.

     "Decidedly.  May one ask what it is for?"

     "Pastime," said madame, still looking at him with a smile, while her
fingers moved nimbly.

     "Not for use?"

     "That depends.  I may find a use for it one day.  If I do-well," said
madame, drawing a breath and nodding her head with a stern kind of coquetry,
"I'll use it!"

     It was remarkable: but the taste of Saint Antoine seemed to be decidedly
opposed to a rose on the head-dress of Madame Defarge.  Two men had entered
separately, and had been about to order drink, when, catching sight of that
novelty, they faltered, made a pretence of looking about as if for some
friend who was not there, and went away.  Nor, of those who had been there
when this visitor entered, was there one left.  They had all dropped off.
The spy had kept his eyes open, but had been able to detect no sign.  They
had lounged away in a poverty-stricken, purposeless, accidental manner, quite
natural and unimpeachable.

     "John," thought madame, checking off her work as her fingers knitted,
and her eyes looked at the stranger.  "Stay long enough, and I shall knit
'Barsad' before you go."

     "You have a husband, madame?"

     "I have."

     "Children?"

     "No children."

     "Business seems bad?"

     "Business is very bad; the people are so poor."

     "Ah, the unfortunate, miserable people!  So oppressed, too-as you say."

     "As you say," madame retorted, correcting him, and deftly knitting an
extra something into his name that boded him no good.

     "Pardon me; certainly it was I who said so, but you naturally think so.
Of course."

     "I think?" returned madame, in a high voice.  "I and my husband have
enough to do to keep this wine-shop open, without thinking.  All we think,
here, is how to live.  That is the subject we think of, and it gives us, from
morning to night, enough to think about, without embarrassing our heads
concerning others.  I think for others?  No, no."

     The spy, who was there to pick up any crumbs he could find or make, did
not allow his baffled state to express itself in his sinister face; but,
stood with an air of gossiping gallantry, leaning his elbow on Madame
Defarge's little counter, and occasionally sipping his cognac.

     "A bad business this, madame, of Gaspard's execution.  Ah! the poor
Gaspard!"  With a sigh of great compassion.

     "My faith!" returned madame, coolly and lightly, "if people use knives
for such purposes, they have to pay for it.  He knew beforehand what the
price of his luxury was; he has paid the price."

     "I believe," said the spy, dropping his soft voice to a tone that
invited confidence, and expressing an injured revolutionary susceptibility in
every muscle of his wicked face: "I believe there is much compassion and
anger in this neighbourhood, touching the poor fellow?  Between ourselves."

     "Is there?" asked madame, vacantly.

     "Is there not?"

     "- Here is my husband!" said Madame Defarge.

     As the keeper of the wine-shop entered at the door, the spy saluted him
by touching his hat, and saying, with an engaging smile, "Good day, Jacques!"
Defarge stopped short, and stared at him.

     "Good day, Jacques!" the spy repeated; with not quite so much
confidence, or quite so easy a smile under the stare.

     "You deceive yourself, monsieur," returned the keeper of the wine-shop.
"You mistake me for another.  That is not my name.  I am Ernest Defarge."

     "It is all the same," said the spy, airily, but discomfited too: "good
day!"

     "Good day!" answered Defarge, drily.

     "I was saying to madame, with whom I had the pleasure of chatting when
you entered, that they tell me there is - and no wonder! - much sympathy and
anger in Saint Antoine, touching the unhappy fate of poor Gaspard."

     "No one has told me so," said Defarge, shaking his head.  "I know
nothing of it."

     Having said it, he passed behind the little counter, and stood with his
hand on the back of his wife's chair, looking over that barrier at the person
to whom they were both opposed, and whom either of them would have shot with
the greatest satisfaction.

     The spy, well used to his business, did not change his unconscious
attitude, but drained his little glass of cognac, took a sip of fresh water,
and asked for another glass of cognac.  Madame Defarge poured it out for him,
took to her knitting again, and hummed a little song over it.

     "You seem to know this quarter well; that is to say, better than I do?"
observed Defarge.

     "Not at all, but I hope to know it better.  I am so profoundly
interested in its miserable inhabitants."

     "Hah!" muttered Defarge.

     "The pleasure of conversing with you, Monsieur Defarge, recalls to me,"
pursued the spy, "that I have the honour of cherishing some interesting
associations with your name."

     "Indeed!" said Defarge, with much indifference.

     "Yes, indeed.  When Dr. Manette was released, you, his old domestic, had
the charge of him, I know.  He was delivered to you.  You see I am informed
of the circumstances?"

     "Such is the fact, certainly," said Defarge.  He had had it conveyed to
him, in an accidental touch of his wife's elbow as she knitted and warbled,
that he would do best to answer, but always with brevity.

     "It was to you," said the spy, "that his daughter came; and it was from
your care that his daughter took him, accompanied by a neat brown monsieur;
how is he called? - in a little wig - Lorry - of the bank of Tellson and
Company - over to England."

     "Such is the fact," repeated Defarge.

     "Very interesting remembrances!" said the spy.  "I have known Dr.
Manette and his daughter, in England."

     "Yes?" said Defarge.

     "You don't hear much about them now?" said the spy.

     "No," said Defarge.

     "In effect," madame struck in, looking up from her work and her little
song, "we never hear about them.  We received the news of their safe arrival,
and perhaps another letter, or perhaps two; but, since then, they have
gradually taken their road in life - we, ours - and we have held no
correspondence."

     "Perfectly so, madame," replied the spy.  "She is going to be married."

     "Going?" echoed madame.  "She was pretty enough to have been married
long ago.  You English are cold, it seems to me."

     "Oh!  You know I am English."

     "I perceive your tongue is," returned madame; "and what the tongue is, I
suppose the man is."

     He did not take the identification as a compliment; but he made the best
of it, and turned it off with a laugh.  After sipping his cognac to the end,
he added:

     "Yes, Miss Manette is going to be married.  But not to an Englishman; to
one who, like herself, is French by birth.  And speaking of Gaspard (ah, poor
Gaspard!  It was cruel, cruel!), it is a curious thing that she is going to
marry the nephew of Monsieur the Marquis, for whom Gaspard was exalted to
that height of so many feet; in other words, the present Marquis.  But he
lives unknown in England, he is no Marquis there; he is Mr. Charles Darnay.
D'Aulnais is the name of his mother's family."

     Madame Defarge knitted steadily, but the intelligence had a palpable
effect upon her husband.  Do what he would, behind the little counter, as to
the striking of a light and the lighting of his pipe, he was troubled, and
his hand was not trustworthy.  The spy would have been no spy if he had
failed to see it, or to record it in his mind.

     Having made, at least, this one hit, whatever it might prove to be
worth, and no customers coming in to help him to any other, Mr. Barsad paid
for what he had drunk, and took his leave: taking occasion to say, in a
genteel manner, before he departed, that he looked forward to the pleasure of
seeing Monsieur and Madame Defarge again.  For some minutes after he had
emerged into the outer presence of Saint Antoine, the husband and wife
remained exactly as he had left them, lest he should come back.

     "Can it be true," said Defarge, in a low voice, looking down at his wife
as he stood smoking with his hand on the back of her chair: "what he has said
of Ma'amselle Manette?"

     "As he has said it," returned madame, lifting her eyebrows a little, "it
is probably false.  But it may be true."

     "If it is -" Defarge began, and stopped.

     "If it is?" repeated his wife.

     "- And if it does come, while we live to see it triumph - I hope, for
her sake, Destiny will keep her husband out of France."

     "Her husband's destiny," said Madame Defarge, with her usual composure,
"will take him where he is to go, and will lead him to the end that is to end
him.  That is all I know."

     "But it is very strange - now, at least, is it not very strange" - said
Defarge, rather pleading with his wife to induce her to admit it, "that,
after all our sympathy for Monsieur her father, and herself, her husband's
name should be proscribed under your hand at this moment, by the side of that
infernal dog's who has just left us?"

     "Stranger things than that will happen when it does come," answered
madame.  "I have them both here, of a certainty; and they are both here for
their merits; that is enough."

     She rolled up her knitting when she had said those words, and presently
took the rose out of the handkerchief that was wound about her head.  Either
Saint Antoine had an instinctive sense that the objectionable decoration was
gone, or Saint Antoine was on the watch for its disappearance; howbeit, the
Saint took courage to lounge in, very shortly afterwards, and the wine-shop
recovered its habitual aspect.

     In the evening, at which season of all others Saint Antoine turned
himself inside out, and sat on door-steps and window-ledges, and came to the
corners of vile streets and courts, for a breath of air, Madame Defarge with
her work in her hand was accustomed to pass from place to place and from
group to group: a Missionary - there were many like her - such as the world
will do well never to breed again.  All the women knitted.  They knitted
worthless things; but, the mechanical work was a mechanical substitute for
eating and drinking; the hands moved for the jaws and the digestive
apparatus: if the bony fingers had been still, the stomachs would have been
more famine-pinched.

     But, as the fingers went, the eyes went, and the thoughts.  And as
Madame Defarge moved on from group to group, all three went quicker and
fiercer among every little knot of women that she had spoken with, and left
behind.

     Her husband smoked at his door, looking after her with admiration.  "A
great woman," said he, "a strong woman, a grand woman, a frightfully grand
woman!"

     Darkness closed around, and then came the ringing of church bells and
the distant beating of the military drums in the Palace Court-Yard, as the
women sat knitting, knitting.  Darkness encompassed them.  Another darkness
was closing in as surely, when the church bells, then ringing pleasantly in
many an airy steeple over France, should be melted into thundering cannon;
when the military drums should be beating to drown a wretched voice, that
night all-potent as the voice of Power and Plenty, Freedom and Life.  So much
was closing in about the women who sat knitting, knitting, that they their
very selves were closing in around a structure yet unbuilt, where they were
to sit knitting, knitting, counting dropping heads.