complaint he could bring against her, rather than he would leave
her for a moment to her own reflections. The devoutest person
could have rendered no greater homage to the efficacy of an
honest prayer than he did in this distrust of his wife. It was as if a
professed unbeliever in ghosts should be frightened by a ghost
story.
“And mind you!” said Mr. Cruncher. “No games tomorrow! If I,
as a honest tradesman, succeed in providing a jinte of meat or two,
none of your not touching of it, and sticking to bread. If I, as a
honest tradesman, am able to provide a little beer, none of your
declaring on water. When you go to Rome, do as Rome does. Rome
will be a ugly customer to you, if you don’t. I’m your Rome, you
know.”
Then he began grumbling again:
“With you flying into the face of your own wittles and drink! I
don’t know how scarce you mayn’t make the wittles and drink
here, by your flopping tricks and your unfeeling conduct. Look at
your boy: he is your’n, ain’t he? He’s as thin as a lath. Do you call
yourself a mother, and not know that a mother’s first duty is to
blow her boy out?”
This touched young Jerry on a tender place; who adjured his
mother to perform her first duty, and whatever else she did or
neglected, above all things to lay especial stress on the discharge
of that maternal function so affectingly and delicately indicated by
his other parent.
Thus the evening wore away with the Cruncher family, until
Young Jerry was ordered to bed, and his mother, laid under
similar injunctions, obeyed them. Mr. Cruncher beguiled the
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earlier watches of the night with solitary pipes, and did not start
upon his excursion until one o’clock. Towards that small and
ghostly hour, he rose up from his chair, took a key out of his
pocket, opened a locked cupboard, and brought forth a sack, a
crowbar of convenient size, a rope and chain, and other fishing
tackle of that nature. Disposing these articles about him in skilful
manner, he bestowed a parting defiance on Mrs. Cruncher,
extinguished the light, and went out.
Young Jerry, who had only made a feint of undressing when he
went to bed, was not long after his father. Under cover of the
darkness he followed out of the room, followed down the stairs,
followed down the court, followed out into the streets. He was in
no uneasiness concerning his getting into the house again, for it
was full of lodgers, and the door stood ajar all night.
Impelled by a laudable ambition to study the art and mystery of
his father’s honest calling, Young Jerry, keeping as close to house
fronts, walls, and doorways, as his eyes were close to one another,
held his honoured parent in view. The honoured parent steering
northward, had not gone far, when he was joined by another
disciple of Izaak Walton, and the two trudged on together.
Within half an hour from the first starting, they were beyond
the winking lamps, and the more than winking watchman, and
were out upon a lonely road. Another fisherman was picked up
here—and that so silently, that if Young Jerry had been
superstitious, he might have supposed the second follower of the
gentle craft to have, all of a sudden, split himself in two.
The three went on, and Young Jerry went on, until the three
stopped under a bank overhanging the road. Upon the top of the
bank was a low brick wall, surmounted by an iron railing. In the
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shadow of bank and wall the three turned out of the road, and up a
blind lane, of which the wall—there, risen to some eight or ten feet
high—formed one side. Crouching down in a corner, peeping up
the lane, the next object that Young Jerry saw was the form of his
honoured parent, pretty well defined against a watery and clouded
moon, nimbly scaling an iron gate. He was soon over, and then the
second fisherman got over, and then the third. They all dropped
softly on the ground within the gate, and lay there a little—
listening perhaps. Then they moved away on their hands and
knees.
It was now Young Jerry’s turn to approach the gate: which he
did, holding his breath. Crouching down again in a corner there,
and looking in, he made out the three fishermen creeping through
some rank grass! and all the gravestones in the churchyard—it
was a large churchyard that they were in—looking on like ghosts
in white, while the church tower itself looked on like the ghost of a
monstrous giant. They did not creep far, before they stopped and
stood upright. And then they began to fish.
They fished with a spade, at first. Presently the honoured
parent appeared to be adjusting some instrument like a great
corkscrew. Whatever tools they worked with, they worked hard,
until the awful striking of the church clock so terrified Young
Jerry, that he made off, with his hair as stiff as his father’s.
But, his long-cherished desire to know more about these
matters, not only stopped him in his running away, but lured him
back again. They were still fishing perseveringly, when he peeped
in at the gate for the second time; but now they seemed to have got
a bite. There was a screwing and complaining sound down below,
and their bent figures were strained, as if by a weight. By slow
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degrees the weight broke away the earth upon it, and came to the
surface. Young Jerry very well knew what it would be; but, when
he saw it, and saw his honoured parent about to wrench it open,
he was so frightened, being new to the sight, that he made off
again, and never stopped until he had run a mile or more.
He would not have stopped then, for anything less necessary
than breath, it being a spectral sort of race that he ran, and one
highly desirable to get to the end of. He had a strong idea that the
coffin he had seen was running after him; and, pictured as
hopping on behind him, bolt upright, upon its narrow end, always
on the point of overtaking him and hopping on at his side—
perhaps taking his arm—it was a pursuer to shun. It was an
inconsistent and ubiquitous fiend too, for, while it was making the
whole night behind him dreadful, he darted out into the roadway
to avoid dark alleys, fearful of its coming hopping out of them like
a dropsical boy’s-Kite without tail and wings. It hid in doorways
too, rubbing its horrible shoulders against doors, and drawing
them up to its ears, as if it were laughing. It got into shadows on
the road, and lay cunningly on its back to trip him up. All this time
it was incessantly hopping on behind and gaining on him, so that
when the boy got to his own door he had reason for being half
dead. And even then it would not leave him, but followed him
upstairs with a bump on every stair, scrambled into bed with him,
and bumped down, dead and heavy, on his breast when he fell
asleep.
From his oppressed slumber, Young Jerry in his closet was
awakened after daybreak and before sunrise by the presence of
his father in the family room. Something had gone wrong with
him; at least so Young Jerry inferred, from the circumstance of his
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holding Mrs. Cruncher by the ears, and knocking the back of her
head against the headboard of the bed.
“I told you I would,” said Mr. Cruncher, “and I did.”
“Jerry, Jerry, Jerry!” his wife implored.
“You oppose yourself to the profit of the business,” said Jerry,
“and me and my partners suffer. You was to honour and obey;
why the devil don’t you?”
“I try to be a good wife, Jerry,” the poor woman protested, with
tears.
“Is it being a good wife to oppose your husband’s business? Is it
honouring your husband to dishonour his business? Is it obeying
your husband to disobey him on the wital subject of his business?”
“You hadn’t taken to the dreadful business then, Jerry.”
“It’s enough for you,” retorted Mr. Cruncher, “to be the wife of
a honest tradesman, and not occupy your female mind with
calculations when he took to his trade or when he didn’t. A
honouring and obeying wife would let his trade alone altogether.
Call yourself a religious woman? If you’re a religious woman, give
me a irreligious one! You have no more nat’ral sense of duty than
the bed of this here Thames river has of a pile, and similarly it
must be knocked into you.”
The altercation was conducted in a low tone of voice, and
terminated in the honest tradesman’s kicking off his clay-soiled
boots, and lying down at his length on the floor. After taking a
timid peep at him lying on his back, with his rusty hands under his
head for a pillow, his son lay down too, and fell asleep again.
There was no fish for breakfast, and not much of anything else.
Mr. Cruncher was out of spirits, and out of temper, and kept an
iron pot-lid by him as a projectile for the correction of Mrs.
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Cruncher, in case he should observe any symptoms of her saying
Grace. He was brushed and washed at the usual hour, and set off
with his son to pursue his ostensible calling.
Young Jerry, walking with the stool under his arm at his
father’s side along sunny and crowded Fleet Street, was a very
different Young Jerry from him of the previous night, running
home through the darkness and solitude from his grim pursuer.
His cunning was fresh with the day, and his qualms were gone
with the night—in which particulars it is not improbable that he
had compeers in Fleet Street and the City of London, that fine
morning.
“Father,” said Young Jerry, as they walked along: taking care to
keep at arm’s length and to have the stool well between them:
“what’s a Resurrection-Man?”
Mr. Cruncher came to a stop on the pavement before he
answered, “How should I know?”
“I thought you knowed everything, father,” said the artless boy.
“Hem! Well,” returned Mr. Cruncher, going on again, and
lifting off his hat to give his spikes free play. “he’s a tradesman.”
“What’s his goods, father?” asked the brisk Young Jerry.
“His goods,” said Mr. Cruncher, after turning it over in his
mind, “is a branch of Scientific goods.”
“Persons’ bodies, ain’t it, father?” asked the lively boy.
“I believe it is something of that sort,” said Mr. Cruncher.
“Oh, father, I should so like to be a Resurrection-Man when I’m
quite growed up!”
Mr. Cruncher was soothed, but shook his head in a dubious and
moral way. “It depends on how you dewelop your talents. Be
careful to dewelop your talents, and never to say no more than you
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can help to nobody, and there’s no telling at the present time what
you may not come to be fit for.” As Young Jerry, thus encouraged,
went on a few yards in advance, to plant the stool in the shadow of
the Bar, Mr. Cruncher added to himself: “Jerry, you honest
tradesman, there’s hope wot that boy will yet be a blessing to you,
and a recompense to you for his mother.”
Charles Dickens ElecBook Classics
A Tale of Two Cities
Chapter XXI
KNITTING
T here had been earlier drinking than usual in the wine-
shop of Monsieur Defarge. As early as six o’clock in the
morning, sallow faces peeping through its barred windows
had descried other faces within, bending over measures of wine.
Monsieur Defarge sold a very thin wine at the best of times, but it
would seem to have been an unusually thin wine that he sold at
this time. A sour wine, moreover, or a souring, for its influence on
the mood of those who drank it was to make them gloomy. No
vivacious Bacchanalian flame leaped out of the pressed grape of
Monsieur Defarge: but, a smouldering fire that burnt in the dark,
lay hidden in the dregs of it.
This had been the third morning in succession, on which there
had been early drinking at the wine-shop of Monsieur Defarge. It
had been begun on Monday, and here was Wednesday come.
There had been more of early brooding than drinking; for, many
men had listened and whispered and slunk about there from the
time of the opening of the door, who could not have laid a piece of
money on the counter to save their souls. These were to the full as
interested in the place, however, as if they could have commanded
whole barrels of wine; and they glided from seat to seat, and from
corner to corner, swallowing talk in lieu of drink, with greedy
looks.
Notwithstanding an unusual flow of company, the master of the
wine-shop was not visible. He was not missed; for, nobody who
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crossed the threshold looked for him, nobody asked for him,
nobody wondered to see only Madame Defarge in her seat,
presiding over the distribution of wine, with a bowl of battered
small coins before her, as much defaced and beaten out of their
original impress as the small coinage of humanity from whose
ragged pockets they had come.
A suspended interest and a prevalent absence of mind, were
perhaps observed by the spies who looked in at the wine-shop, as
they looked in at every place, high and low, from the king’s palace
to the criminal’s gaol. Games at cards languished, players at
dominoes musingly built towers with them, drinkers drew figures
on the table with spilt drops of wine, Madame Defarge herself
picked out the pattern on her sleeve with her toothpick, and saw
and heard something invisible and inaudible a long way off.
Thus, Saint Antoine in this vinous feature of his, until midday.
It was high noontide, when two dusty men passed through his
streets and under his swinging lamps: of whom, one was Monsieur
Defarge: the other a mender of roads in a blue cap. All adust and
athirst, the two entered the wine-shop. Their arrival had lighted a
kind of fire in the breast of Saint Antoine, fast spreading as they
