A Tale of Two Cities-CHAPTER 5 The Wine-shop

CHAPTER 5,The Wine-shop,A LARGE cask of wine had been dropped and broken, street. The accident had happened in getting it out of a cart; the cask had tumbled out with a run, the hoops ¹ had burst, and it lay on the stones just outside the door of the wine-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 the street, pointing every way, and designed, one might have thought, expressly to lame ² all living creatures that approached them, had dammed it into little pools; these were surrounded, each by its own jostling group or crowd, according to its size. Some men kneeled down, made scoops ³ of their two hands joined, and sipped ⁵, or tried to help women, who bent ⁶ over their shoulders to sip ⁴, before the wine had all run out between their fingers. Others, men and women, dipped in the puddles ⁷ with little mugs of mutilated earthenware ⁸, or even with handkerchiefs from women's heads, which were squeezed dry into infants mouths; others made small mud embankments, to stem the wine as it ran; others, directed by lookers-on up at high windows, darted ⁹ here and there, to cut off little streams of wine that started away in new directions; others devoted ¹⁰ themselves to the sodden ¹¹ and lee-dyed pieces of the cask licking, and even champing the moister wine-rotted fragments with eager relish ¹². There was no drainage to carry off the wine, and not only did it all get taken up, but so much mud got taken up along with it, that there might have been a scavenger ¹³ in the street, if anybody acquainted with it could have believed in such a miraculous ¹⁴ presence.,A shrill ¹⁵ sound of laughter and of amused voices--voices of men, women, and children--resounded in the street while this wine game lasted. There was little roughness in the spot and much playfulness. There was a special companionship in it, an observable inclination ¹⁷ on the part of every one to join some other one, which led, especially among the luckier or lighter-hearted, to frolicsome ¹⁸ embraces, drinking of healths, shaking of hands, and even 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 ¹⁹ ceased, as suddenly as they had broken out. The man who had left his saw sticking in the firewood he was cutting, set it in motion again; the woman who had left on a door-step the little pot of hot ashes, at which she had been trying to soften ²⁰ the pain in her 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 into the winter light from cellars, moved away, to descend ²¹ again; and a gloom gathered 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 in the suburb of Saint Antoine, in Paris, where it was spilled. It had stained many 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; and the forehead of the woman who nursed her baby, was stained with the stain of the old rag she wound about her head again. Those who had been greedy with the staves of the cask, had acquired a tigerish smear ²² about the mouth; and one tall joker so besmirched ²³, his head more out of a long squalid bag of a night-cap than in it, scrawled ²⁴ upon a wall with his finger dipped in muddy wine-lees--BLOOD.,And now that the cloud settled on Saint Antoine, which a momentary ²⁵ gleam had driven from his sacred countenance ²⁶, the darkness of it was heavy--cold, dirt, sickness, ignorance, and want, were the lords in waiting on the saintly presence--nobles of great power all of them; but, most especially the last. Samples of a people that had undergone a terrible grinding and re-grinding in the mill, and certainly not in the fabulous ²⁷ mill which ground old people young, shivered at every corner, passed in and out at every doorway ²⁸, looked from every window, fluttered in every vestige ²⁹ of a garment that the wind shock. The mill which had worked them down, was the mill that grinds young people old; the children had ancient faces and grave voices; and upon them, and upon the grown faces, and ploughed into every furrow ³⁰ of age 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 hung upon poles and lines; Hunger was patched into them with straw and rag and wood and paper; Hunger was repeated in every fragment of the small modicum ³¹ of firewood that the man sawed off; Hunger stared down from the smokeless chimneys, and started up from the filthy ³² street that had no offal, among its refuse, of anything to eat. Hunger was the inscription ³³ on the baker ³⁴'s shelves, written in every small loaf of his Scanty ³⁵ stock of bad bread; at the sausage-shop, in every dead-dog preparation that was offered for sale. Hunger rattled ³⁶ its dry bones among the roasting chestnuts ³⁷ in the turned cylinder ³⁸; Hunger was shred ³⁹ into atomies in every farthing porringer of husky chips of potato, fried with some reluctant drops of oil.,Its abiding ⁴⁰ place was in all things fitted to it. A narrow winding ⁴¹ street, full of offence and stench, with other narrow winding streets diverging ⁴², all peopled by rags and nightcaps, and all smelling of rags and nightcaps, and all visible things with a brooding look upon them that looked ill. In the hunted air of the people there was yet some wild-beast thought of the possibility of turning at bay. Depressed ⁴³ and slinking though they were, eyes of fire were not wanting among them; nor compressed lips, white with what they suppressed; nor foreheads knitted into the likeness ⁴⁴ of the gallows-rope they mused ¹⁶ about enduring, or inflicting ⁴⁵. The trade signs (and they were almost as many as the shops) were, all, grim illustrations of Want. The butcher and the porkman painted up, only the leanest scrags of meat; the baker, the coarsest of meagre loaves. The people rudely pictured as drinking in the wine-shops, croaked ⁴⁶ over their scanty measures of thin wine and beer, and were gloweringly ⁴⁷ confidential ⁴⁸ together. Nothing was represented in a flourishing condition, save tools and weapons; but, the cutler's knives and axes were sharp and bright, the smith's hammers-were heavy, and the gunmaker's stock was murderous. The crippling stones of the pavement, with their many little reservoirs of mud and water, had no footways, but broke off abruptly ⁴⁹ at the doors. The kennel ⁵⁰, to make amends ⁵¹, ran down the middle of the street--when it ran at all: which was only after heavy rains, and then it ran, by many eccentric fits, into the houses. Across the streets, at wide intervals ⁵², one clumsy lamp was slung ⁵³ by a rope and pulley; at night, when the lamplighter had let these down, and lighted, and hoisted ⁵⁴ them again, a feeble grove ⁵⁵ of dim wicks swung in a sickly manner overhead, as if they were at sea. Indeed they were at sea, and the ship and crew were in peril ⁵⁶ of tempest.,For, the time was to come, when the gaunt scarecrows of that region should have watched the lamplighter, in their idleness and hunger, so long, as to conceive the idea of improving on his method, and hauling up men by those ropes and pulleys, to flare ⁵⁷ upon the darkness of their condition. But, the time was not come yet; and every wind that blew over France shook the rags of the scarecrows in vain, for the birds, fine of song and feather, took no warning.,The wine-shop was a comer shop, better than most other' in its appearance and degree, and the master of the wine shop had stood outside it, in a yellow waistcoat and green breeches, looking on at the struggle for the lost wine. `It'' not my affair,' said he, with a final shrug <sup>58</sup> 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, he called to him across the way:,Hoops in Paris were wider this season and skirts were shorter. 在巴黎 ，这个季节的裙圈比较宽大
，裙裾却短一些 。 来自飘（部分）,The lame man needs a stick when he walks.那跛脚男子走路时需借助拐棍
。