Страница 10 из 78
VI
The Shoemaker
«Good day!» said Monsieur Defarge, looking down at the white head that bent low over the shoemaking.
It was raised for a moment, and a very faint voice responded to the salutation, as if it were at a distance:
«Good day!»
«You are still hard at work, I see?»
After a long silence, the head was lifted for another moment, and the voice replied, «Yes-I am working.» This time, a pair of haggard eyes had looked at the questioner, before the face had dropped again.
The faintness of the voice was pitiable and dreadful. It was not the faintness of physical weakness, though confinement and hard fare no doubt had their part in it. Its deplorable peculiarity was, that it was the faintness of solitude and disuse. It was like the last feeble echo of a sound made long and long ago. So entirely had it lost the life and resonance of the human voice, that it affected the senses like a once beautiful colour faded away into a poor weak stain. So sunken and suppressed it was, that it was like a voice underground. So expressive it was, of a hopeless and lost creature, that a famished traveller, wearied out by lonely wandering in a wilderness, would have remembered home and friends in such a tone before lying down to die.
Some minutes of silent work had passed: and the haggard eyes had looked up again: not with any interest or curiosity, but with a dull mechanical perception, beforehand, that the spot where the only visitor they were aware of had stood, was not yet empty.
«I want,» said Defarge, who had not removed his gaze from the shoemaker, «to let in a little more light here. You can bear a little more?»
The shoemaker stopped his work; looked with a vacant air of listening, at the floor on one side of him; then similarly, at the floor on the other side of him; then, upward at the speaker.
«What did you say?»
«You can bear a little more light?»
«I must bear it, if you let it in.» (Laying the palest shadow of a stress upon the second word.)
The opened half-door was opened a little further, and secured at that angle for the time. A broad ray of light fell into the garret, and showed the workman with an unfinished shoe upon his lap, pausing in his labour. His few common tools and various scraps of leather were at his feet and on his bench. He had a white beard, raggedly cut, but not very long, a hollow face, and exceedingly bright eyes. The hollowness and thi
He had put up a hand between his eyes and the light, and the very bones of it seemed transparent. So he sat, with a steadfastly vacant gaze, pausing in his work. He never looked at the figure before him, without first looking down on this side of himself, then on that, as if he had lost the habit of associating place with sound; he never spoke, without first wandering in this ma
«Are you going to finish that pair of shoes to-day?» asked Defarge, motioning to Mr. Lorry to come forward.
Mr. Lorry took it in his hand.
«Tell monsieur what kind of shoe it is, and the maker's name.»
There was a longer pause than usual, before the shoemaker replied:
«I forget what it was you asked me. What did you say?»
«I said, couldn't you describe the kind of shoe, for monsieur's information?»
«It is a lady's shoe. It is a young lady's walking-shoe. It is in the present mode. I never saw the mode. I have had a pattern in my hand.» He glanced at the shoe with some little passing touch of pride.
«And the maker's name?» said Defarge.
Now that he had no work to hold, he laid the knuckles of the right hand in the hollow of the left, and then the knuckles of the left hand in the hollow of the right, and then passed a hand across his bearded chin, and so on in regular changes, without a moment's intermission. The task of recalling him from the vagrancy into which he always sank when he had spoken, was like recalling some very weak person from a swoon, or endeavouring, in the hope of some disclosure, to stay the spirit of a fast-dying man.