XXII
The
Sea Still Rises
Haggard
Saint Antoine had had only one exultant week, in which to soften his modicum of
hard and bitter bread to such extent as he could, with the relish of fraternal
embraces and congratulations, when Madame Defarge sat at her counter, as usual,
presiding over the customers. Madame Defarge wore no rose in her head, for the
great brotherhood of Spies had become, even in one short week, extremely chary
of trusting themselves to the saint's mercies. The lamps across his streets had
a portentously elastic swing with them.
Madame
Defarge, with her arms folded, sat in the morning light and heat, contemplating
the wine-shop and the street. In both, there were several knots of loungers,
squalid and miserable, but now with a manifest sense of power enthroned on
their distress. The raggedest nightcap, awry on the wretchedest head, had this
crooked significance in it: "I know how hard it has grown for me, the
wearer of this, to support life in myself; but do you know how easy it has
grown for me, the wearer of this, to destroy life in you?" Every lean bare
arm, that had been without work before, had this work always ready for it now,
that it could strike. The fingers of the knitting women were vicious, with the
experience that they could tear. There was a change in the appearance of Saint
Antoine; the image had been hammering into this for hundreds of years, and the
last finishing blows had told mightily on the expression.
Madame
Defarge sat observing it, with such suppressed approval as was to be desired in
the leader of the Saint Antoine women. One of her sisterhood knitted beside
her. The short, rather plump wife of a starved grocer, and the mother of two
children withal, this lieutenant had already earned the complimentary name of
The Vengeance.
"Hark!"
said The Vengeance. "Listen, then! Who comes?"
As
if a train of powder laid from the outermost bound of Saint Antoine Quarter to
the wine-shop door, had been suddenly fired, a fast-spreading murmur came
rushing along.
"It
is Defarge," said madame. "Silence, patriots!"
Defarge
came in breathless, pulled off a red cap he wore, and looked around him!
"Listen, everywhere!" said madame again. "Listen to him!"
Defarge stood, panting, against a background of eager eyes and open mouths,
formed outside the door; all those within the wine-shop had sprung to their
feet.
"Say
then, my husband. What is it?"
"News
from the other world!"
"How,
then?" cried madame, contemptuously. "The other world?"
"Does
everybody here recall old Foulon, who told the famished people that they might
eat grass, and who died, and went to Hell?"
"Everybody!"
from all throats.
"The
news is of him. He is among us!"
"Among
us!" from the universal throat again. "And dead?"
"Not
dead! He feared us so much--and with reason--that he caused himself to be represented
as dead, and had a grand mock-funeral. But they have found him alive, hiding in
the country, and have brought him in. I have seen him but now, on his way to
the Hotel de Ville, a prisoner. I have said that he had reason to fear us. Say
all! HAD he reason?"
Wretched
old sinner of more than threescore years and ten, if he had never known it yet,
he would have known it in his heart of hearts if he could have heard the
answering cry.
A
moment of profound silence followed. Defarge and his wife looked steadfastly at
one another. The Vengeance stooped, and the jar of a drum was heard as she
moved it at her feet behind the counter.
"Patriots!"
said Defarge, in a determined voice, "are we ready?"
Instantly
Madame Defarge's knife was in her girdle; the drum was beating in the streets,
as if it and a drummer had flown together by magic; and The Vengeance, uttering
terrific shrieks, and flinging her arms about her head like all the forty
Furies at once, was tearing from house to house, rousing the women.
The
men were terrible, in the bloody-minded anger with which they looked from
windows, caught up what arms they had, and came pouring down into the streets;
but, the women were a sight to chill the boldest. From such household
occupations as their bare poverty yielded, from their children, from their aged
and their sick crouching on the bare ground famished and naked, they ran out
with streaming hair, urging one another, and themselves, to madness with the
wildest cries and actions. Villain Foulon taken, my sister! Old Foulon taken,
my mother! Miscreant Foulon taken, my daughter! Then, a score of others ran
into the midst of these, beating their breasts, tearing their hair, and
screaming, Foulon alive! Foulon who told the starving people they might eat
grass! Foulon who told my old father that he might eat grass, when I had no
bread to give him! Foulon who told my baby it might suck grass, when these
breasts where dry with want! O mother of God, this Foulon! O Heaven our
suffering! Hear me, my dead baby and my withered father: I swear on my knees,
on these stones, to avenge you on Foulon! Husbands, and brothers, and young
men, Give us the blood of Foulon, Give us the head of Foulon, Give us the heart
of Foulon, Give us the body and soul of Foulon, Rend Foulon to pieces, and dig
him into the ground, that grass may grow from him! With these cries, numbers of
the women, lashed into blind frenzy, whirled about, striking and tearing at
their own friends until they dropped into a passionate swoon, and were only
saved by the men belonging to them from being trampled under foot.
Nevertheless,
not a moment was lost; not a moment! This Foulon was at the Hotel de Ville, and
might be loosed. Never, if Saint Antoine knew his own sufferings, insults, and wrongs!
Armed men and women flocked out of the Quarter so fast, and drew even these
last dregs after them with such a force of suction, that within a quarter of an
hour there was not a human creature in Saint Antoine's bosom but a few old
crones and the wailing children.
No.
They were all by that time choking the Hall of Examination where this old man,
ugly and wicked, was, and overflowing into the adjacent open space and streets.
The Defarges, husband and wife, The Vengeance, and Jacques Three, were in the
first press, and at no great distance from him in the Hall.
"See!"
cried madame, pointing with her knife. "See the old villain bound with
ropes. That was well done to tie a bunch of grass upon his back. Ha, ha! That
was well done. Let him eat it now!" Madame put her knife under her arm,
and clapped her hands as at a play.
The
people immediately behind Madame Defarge, explaining the cause of her
satisfaction to those behind them, and those again explaining to others, and
those to others, the neighbouring streets resounded with the clapping of hands.
Similarly, during two or three hours of drawl, and the winnowing of many
bushels of words, Madame Defarge's frequent expressions of impatience were
taken up, with marvellous quickness, at a distance: the more readily, because
certain men who had by some wonderful exercise of agility climbed up the
external architecture to look in from the windows, knew Madame Defarge well,
and acted as a telegraph between her and the crowd outside the building.
At
length the sun rose so high that it struck a kindly ray as of hope or
protection, directly down upon the old prisoner's head. The favour was too much
to bear; in an instant the barrier of dust and chaff that had stood
surprisingly long, went to the winds, and Saint Antoine had got him!
It
was known directly, to the furthest confines of the crowd. Defarge had but
sprung over a railing and a table, and folded the miserable wretch in a deadly
embrace--Madame Defarge had but followed and turned her hand in one of the ropes
with which he was tied--The Vengeance and Jacques Three were not yet up with
them, and the men at the windows had not yet swooped into the Hall, like birds
of prey from their high perches--when the cry seemed to go up, all over the
city, "Bring him out! Bring him to the lamp!"
Down,
and up, and head foremost on the steps of the building; now, on his knees; now,
on his feet; now, on his back; dragged, and struck at, and stifled by the
bunches of grass and straw that were thrust into his face by hundreds of hands;
torn, bruised, panting, bleeding, yet always entreating and beseeching for
mercy; now full of vehement agony of action, with a small clear space about him
as the people drew one another back that they might see; now, a log of dead
wood drawn through a forest of legs; he was hauled to the nearest street corner
where one of the fatal lamps swung, and there Madame Defarge let him go--as a
cat might have done to a mouse--and silently and composedly looked at him while
they made ready, and while he besought her: the women passionately screeching
at him all the time, and the men sternly calling out to have him killed with
grass in his mouth. Once, he went aloft, and the rope broke, and they caught
him shrieking; twice, he went aloft, and the rope broke, and they caught him
shrieking; then, the rope was merciful, and held him, and his head was soon
upon a pike, with grass enough in the mouth for all Saint Antoine to dance at
the sight of.
Nor
was this the end of the day's bad work, for Saint Antoine so shouted and danced
his angry blood up, that it boiled again, on hearing when the day closed in
that the son-in-law of the despatched, another of the people's enemies and
insulters, was coming into Paris under a guard five hundred strong, in cavalry
alone. Saint Antoine wrote his crimes on flaring sheets of paper, seized
him--would have torn him out of the breast of an army to bear Foulon
company--set his head and heart on pikes, and carried the three spoils of the
day, in Wolf-procession through the streets.
Not
before dark night did the men and women come back to the children, wailing and
breadless. Then, the miserable bakers' shops were beset by long files of them,
patiently waiting to buy bad bread; and while they waited with stomachs faint
and empty, they beguiled the time by embracing one another on the triumphs of
the day, and achieving them again in gossip. Gradually, these strings of ragged
people shortened and frayed away; and then poor lights began to shine in high
windows, and slender fires were made in the streets, at which neighbours cooked
in common, afterwards supping at their doors.
Scanty
and insufficient suppers those, and innocent of meat, as of most other sauce to
wretched bread. Yet, human fellowship infused some nourishment into the flinty
viands, and struck some sparks of cheerfulness out of them. Fathers and mothers
who had had their full share in the worst of the day, played gently with their
meagre children; and lovers, with such a world around them and before them,
loved and hoped.
It
was almost morning, when Defarge's wine-shop parted with its last knot of
customers, and Monsieur Defarge said to madame his wife, in husky tones, while
fastening the door:
"At
last it is come, my dear!"
"Eh
well!" returned madame. "Almost."
Saint
Antoine slept, the Defarges slept: even The Vengeance slept with her starved
grocer, and the drum was at rest. The drum's was the only voice in Saint
Antoine that blood and hurry had not changed. The Vengeance, as custodian of
the drum, could have wakened him up and had the same speech out of him as
before the Bastille fell, or old Foulon was seized; not so with the hoarse
tones of the men and women in Saint Antoine's bosom.