有声名著之双城记Book1 Chapter05

　　有声名著之双城记 Chapter05

       CHAPTER VThe Wine-shop

       A LARGE cask of wine had been dropped and broken, street. The accident hadhappened in getting it out of a cart; the cask had tumbled out with a run,the hoops had burst, and it lay on the stones just outside the door of thewine-shop, shattered like a walnut-shell.

　　All the people within reach had suspended their business or their idleness,to run to the spot and drink the wine. The rough, irregular stones of thestreet, pointing every way, and designed, one might have thought, expresslyto lame all living creatures that approached them, had dammed it into littlepools; these were surrounded, each by its own jostling group or crowd,according to its size. Some men kneeled down, made scoops of their two handsjoined, and sipped, or tried to help women, who bent over their shoulders tosip, before the wine had all run out between their fingers. Others, men andwomen, dipped in the puddles with little mugs of mutilated earthenware, oreven with handkerchiefs from women's heads, which were squeezed dry intoinfants mouths; others made small mud embankments, to stem the wine as itran; others, directed by lookers-on up at high windows, darted here andthere, to cut off little streams of wine that started away in newdirections; others devoted themselves to the sodden and lee-dyed pieces ofthe cask licking, and even champing the moister wine-rotted fragments witheager relish. There was no drainage to carry off the wine, and not only didit all get taken up, but so much mud got taken up along with it, that theremight have been a scavenger in the street, if anybody acquainted with itcould have believed in such a miraculous presence.

　　A shrill sound of laughter and of amused voices--voices of men, women, andchildren--resounded in the street while this wine game lasted. There waslittle roughness in the spot and much playfulness. There was a specialcompanionship in it, an observable inclination on the part of every one tojoin some other one, which led, especially among the luckier or lighter-hearted, to frolicsome embraces, drinking of healths, shaking of hands, andeven joining of hands and dancing, a dozen together. When the wine was gone,and the places where it had been most abundant were raked into a gridiron-pattern by fingers, these demonstrations ceased, as suddenly as they hadbroken out. The man who had left his saw sticking in the firewood he wascutting, set it in motion again; the woman who had left on a door-step thelittle pot of hot ashes, at which she had been trying to soften the pain inher own starved fingers and toes, or in those of her child, returned to it;men with bare arms, matted locks, and cadaverous faces, who had emerged intothe winter light from cellars, moved away, to descend again; and a gloomgathered on the scene that appeared more natural to it than sunshine.

　　The wine was red wine, and had stained the ground of the narrow street inthe suburb of Saint Antoine, in Paris, where it was spilled. It had stainedmany hands, too, and many faces, and many naked feet, and many wooden shoes.

　　The hands of the man who sawed the wood, left red marks on the billets; andthe forehead of the woman who nursed her baby, was stained with the stain ofthe old rag she wound about her head again. Those who had been greedy withthe staves of the cask, had acquired a tigerish smear about the mouth; andone tall joker so besmirched, his head more out of a long squalid bag of anight-cap than in it, scrawled upon a wall with his finger dipped in muddywine-lees--BLOOD.

　　The time was to come, when that wine too would be spilled on the street-stones, and when the stain of it would be red upon many there.

　　And now that the cloud settled on Saint Antoine, which a momentary gleamhad driven from his sacred countenance, the darkness of it was heavy--cold,dirt, sickness, ignorance, and want, were the lords in waiting on thesaintly presence--nobles of great power all of them; but, most especiallythe last. Samples of a people that had undergone a terrible grinding and re-grinding in the mill, and certainly not in the fabulous mill which groundold people young, shivered at every corner, passed in and out at everydoorway, looked from every window, fluttered in every vestige of a garmentthat the wind shock. The mill which had worked them down, was the mill thatgrinds young people old; the children had ancient faces and grave voices;and upon them, and upon the grown faces, and ploughed into every furrow ofage and coming up afresh, was the sign, Hunger. It was prevalent everywhere.

　　Hunger was pushed out of the tall houses, in the wretched clothing that hungupon poles and lines; Hunger was patched into them with straw and rag andwood and paper; Hunger was repeated in every fragment of the small modicumof firewood that the man sawed off; Hunger stared down from the smokelesschimneys, and started up from the filthy street that had no offal, among itsrefuse, of anything to eat. Hunger was the inscription on the baker'sshelves, written in every small loaf of his Scanty stock of bad bread; atthe sausage-shop, in every dead-dog preparation that was offered for sale.

　　Hunger rattled its dry bones among the roasting chestnuts in the turnedcylinder; Hunger was shred into atomies in every farthing porringer of huskychips of potato, fried with some reluctant drops of oil.

　　Its abiding place was in all things fitted to it. A narrow winding street,full of offence and stench, with other narrow winding streets diverging, allpeopled by rags and nightcaps, and all smelling of rags and nightcaps, andall visible things with a brooding look upon them that looked ill. In thehunted air of the people there was yet some wild-beast thought of thepossibility of turning at bay. Depressed and slinking though they were, eyesof fire were not wanting among them; nor compressed lips, white with whatthey suppressed; nor foreheads knitted into the likeness of the gallows-ropethey mused about enduring, or inflicting. The trade signs (and they werealmost as many as the shops) were, all, grim illustrations of Want. Thebutcher and the porkman painted up, only the leanest scrags of meat; thebaker, the coarsest of meagre loaves. The people rudely pictured as drinkingin the wine-shops, croaked over their scanty measures of thin wine and beer,and were gloweringly confidential together. Nothing was represented in aflourishing condition, save tools and weapons; but, the cutler's knives andaxes were sharp and bright, the smith's hammers-were heavy, and thegunmaker's stock was murderous. The crippling stones of the pavement, withtheir many little reservoirs of mud and water, had no footways, but brokeoff abruptly at the doors. The kennel, to make amends, ran down the middleof the street--when it ran at all: which was only after heavy rains, andthen it ran, by many eccentric fits, into the houses. Across the streets, atwide intervals, one clumsy lamp was slung by a rope and pulley; at night,when the lamplighter had let these down, and lighted, and hoisted themagain, a feeble grove of dim wicks swung in a sickly manner overhead, as ifthey were at sea. Indeed they were at sea, and the ship and crew were inperil of tempest.

　　For, the time was to come, when the gaunt scarecrows of that region shouldhave watched the lamplighter, in their idleness and hunger, so long, as toconceive the idea of improving on his method, and hauling up men by thoseropes and pulleys, to flare upon the darkness of their condition. But, thetime was not come yet; and every wind that blew over France shook the ragsof the scarecrows in vain, for the birds, fine of song and feather, took nowarning.

　　The wine-shop was a comer shop, better than most other' in its appearanceand degree, and the master of the wine shop had stood outside it, in ayellow waistcoat and green breeches, looking on at the struggle for the lostwine. `It'' not my affair,' said he, with a final shrug of the shoulders,`The people from the market did it. Let them bring another.

　　There, his eyes happening to catch the tall joker writing up his joke, hecalled to him across the way:

　　`Say, then, my Gaspard, what do you do there?'

　　The fellow pointed to his joke with immense significance as is often theway with his tribe. It missed its mark, and completely failed, as is oftenthe way with his tribe too.

　　`What now? Are you a subject for the mad hospital?' said the wine-shopkeeper, crossing the road, and obliterating the jest with a handful of mud,picked up for the purpose and smeared over it. `Why do you write in thepublic streets? Is there--tell me thou--is there no other place to writesuch words in?'

　　In his expostulation he dropped his cleaner hand (perhaps accidentally,perhaps not) upon the joker's heart. The joke rapped it with his own, took animble spring upward, and came down in a fantastic dancing attitude, withone of his stained shoes jerked off his foot into his hand, and held out Ajoker of an extremely, not to say wolfishly practical character, he looked,under those circumstances.