A Tale of Two Cities and Great Expectations (Oprah's Book Club) (9 page)

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 agin!’

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 agin, 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 agin 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! your mother’s a nice woman, young Jerry, going a praying agin 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 agin, 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 circumwented into the worst of luck. Bu-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 agin, 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 preparations for business. In the mean time, 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 agin?’

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 respectable 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 in-door 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!’

‘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 doorkeeper 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 doorkeeper 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 villany 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 the 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 they 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 doorkeeper, 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.