A Tale of Two Cities by Dave Mckay, Charles Dickens (sight word books TXT) 📕

evening listening, until I have started to think... but even remembering my foolish thoughts makes me shake tonight, when all is so black and serious..."

"Let us shake too. Tell us what you have thought."

"It will seem nothing to you. Such thoughts are only real to the people who have them, I think. Words cannot make them real for others; but I have at times sat here alone at night, listening, until I started to believe that the steps I was hearing were the steps of all the people who will come into our lives."

"If that is so, then there is a great crowd coming our way one day," Sydney Carton added in his sad way.

The steps did not stop, and they moved more and more quickly. The sound came over and over there at the corner; some, as it seemed, under the window, some, as it seemed, in the room, some coming, some going, some turning away, some stopping; all far off in the street, and not one that they could see.

"Are all of these coming to all of us, Miss Manette, or will some be for one and some for another?"

"I don't know, Mr. Darnay. I told you it was a foolish thought, but you asked for it. When the thought has come to me, I have been alone, so I believed the steps were coming only into my life and into the life of my father."

"I take them into mine too!" said Carton. "I ask no question, and agree with all that you have said. There is a great crowd coming toward us, Miss Manette, and I see them... by the lightning.” He added the last words after there was a bright explosion of lightning that showed him leaning back in the window.

"And I hear them!" he added again, after the noise that followed the lightning. "Here they come, fast, dangerous, and angry!"

It was the sound of the rain that these last words marked, and it stopped him, because no voice could be heard in it. A great lightning storm followed, and there was not a minute's break in the noise and light and rain until the moon came up at midnight

The great bell of the church was hitting one in the morning when Mr. Lorry, helped by Jerry, who was carrying a lantern in the now clear night air, left to walk back toward his home. There were some dark streets on the way, and because Mr. Lorry was always afraid of robbers, he always had Jerry come for him. But this time, Jerry had been two hours late in getting there.

"What a night this has been! Almost a night, Jerry, to bring the dead back to life," said Mr. Lorry.

"I never see the night myself, sir -- and don't think I ever will -- that would do that," answered Jerry.

"Good night, Mr. Carton," said the businessman. "Good night, Mr. Darnay. Shall we ever see such a night together again?"

Maybe. And maybe see the great crowd of people with all its noise and anger coming toward them too.

7. Sir in the Town

Once every two weeks, Sir the Governor, one of the top men in the government of France, would hold a party at his great hotel in Paris. Sir was, on the day in question, in his secret room, the holiest of holy places for all of the worshippers who were partying in the many other rooms of the hotel. He was about to drink a cup of hot chocolate. The Governor was a man who found it easy to swallow many things, for there were some who said that he was quickly swallowing all of France, but his morning chocolate could not so much as get into his throat without the help of four strong men besides the cook.

This is true. It took four men, all four dressed most beautifully, and the most important one not able to live without at least two gold watches in his pocket, in keeping with the perfect pattern set out by Sir himself, to bring the happy chocolate to the Governor's lips. One servant carried the pot of chocolate into his holy room; a second mixed it by turning around and around a special little instrument that he carried with him; a third handed the Governor a cloth with which to cover himself; and a fourth (he of the two gold watches) poured the chocolate into the Governor's cup. It would not be possible for Sir to do away with even one of these men and still be able to hold his head up before the heavens. His family name would have been deeply marked if he had so much as tried to drink chocolate with the help of only three men; and if he should have tried to do it with only two, he would have surely died.

The night before, Sir's entertainment had been music and jokes, with food on the side. Food and entertainment were his on most nights, and always in company with beautiful people. So open was Sir the Governor to what others said, that the jokes and music had far more effect on him and his thinking than all the boring rules and needs of France. Doing things in this way was destroying France, as always happens in countries where the leaders are like that -- just as it did for England in the days when one of its leaders just up and sold it.

Sir's general plan for government business was to let it go on in its own way; and for any one part of that government business the plan was that it should all go his way, giving him more power and filling his pockets more fully. As for what his way was, his plan, both general and special, was that the world was made to let him do what he liked to do. The Bible verse for his business (which only has one little word changed in it) is this one, "The earth is mine and all that is in it," says Sir the Governor.

Yet, Sir had slowly been having more problems with things going wrong both in his family business and in his government business, and so he joined with a controller-general to fix both problems. His government business was in trouble because he could not make anything of it, and so he needed to give it to one who could. His family business was in trouble because he had been spending more than he was making, and so he needed a rich relative to help him out. He had a sister whom he had given to the Catholic Church; but just before she finished her studies, he pulled her out and gave her as a gift to a very rich controller-general who was poor in those qualities that it takes to get a wife. This same controller-general was in the next room, holding a stick with a golden apple on the top of it, while all others bowed down to him. All, that is, apart from Sir's family, who looked down on him with the greatest feelings of hate. And his own wife was a part of that group.

A very rich man was the controller-general. He owned thirty horses, twenty-four male servants, and six body women to look after his wife. As one whose job it was to take money from anyone he could, the controller-general was the one person in Sir's hotel that day who most lived up to what his job asked of him.

For all the beautiful furniture, clothes and jewelry in those rooms, which were all the best that could be found anywhere at the time, the party-goers there were not, on the whole, ones who could do any real work. If you were to put them beside the poor scarecrows in rags who were not so far away that the watching towers of Notre Dame could not see them both, the scarecrows would have been, by far, the better workers, and done more to help Sir the Governor in a real way. There were army officers who knew nothing about the army; officers on ships who knew nothing about ships; government managers who knew nothing of government; and church leaders who had loose tongues and lived looser lives; all of them quite wrong for the jobs they had, and all living a lie. All of these people were from the class that Sir was in, and because of it, they took any job that they could use in a selfish way. But there were an equal number of people at the party who were not a part of Sir's class, but who were also not real people and not people who had travelled by any straight road to any true end. There were doctors who had made great wealth by selling strange mixtures as medicines for sicknesses that were not even real. They were there, being smiled at by the rich patients that they had used to make their wealth. There were planners who would promise to fix every little problem that touched the government, but who never fixed even one real sin. They came to the Governor's parties to whisper their empty promises into any ears they could find that would listen. Men of wisdom, who talked nothing but foolishness about how they were going to make a better world, talked with men of science who believed they could make gold through magic. Men from families of the highest class, which at that time and at this time as well, is marked by showing no interest toward anything that is really important to real people in the real world, talked themselves sick at the Governor's hotel. The homes that each of these people came from were such that people looking for secrets to tell Sir the Governor (who were about half of the people there) would have a hard time finding one real mother in any of them. Apart from the act of giving birth to a baby that was not wanted -- which is not enough to make one a real mother -- the wives of these men had nothing to do with their children. It was left to the poor women to care for their children, while the mothers themselves partied on even after their children had children, always trying to look like they were in their twenties.

The sickness of hypocrisy crippled every person who came there to kiss up to Sir the Governor. In the farthest rooms were half a dozen people who had, for a few years, been thinking that something was not right in the country. Half of this half dozen had become members of a strange group of people who turned in on themselves looking for answers in one emotion or another. Even now they were asking themselves if they should shout, cry, or roll on the floor to warn the Governor about what they could feel was coming soon. The other three had joined a different group, that worked at fixing the problem through finding "the center of truth". They believed that the world had moved away from the center of truth (and it did not take much to prove that argument) but they said that we had not yet gone past the border of the circle. To keep the world under control, and to point people back to the center they would go without eating and talk to spirits. Many of these people were known to have talked at length with spirits, and through that to have fixed up many of the problems in the country, not that any of the answers came in a way that anyone else could see.

But the good news was that everyone at Sir the Governor's great hotel was perfectly dressed. If the day when God is to judge the world could only be a dress day, everyone there would be right for eternity. Such shaping and powdering and sticking up of the hair, such beautiful skin, covered and fixed with the best pastes and powders, such brave swords to look at, and such careful interest to how they smelled would surely be enough to keep them saved forever. The men from the best families had little pieces of gold hanging here and there and making noises like little bells as they moved ever so smoothly from place to place. The sound of those bells and the movement of so much expensive material made a wind that must have touched Saint Antoine and his great hunger so far away.

How one dressed was the safest way to keep everyone in their place. All of Sir's friends were dressed for a top class party that was to never stop. From the king's house, through to the courts, and the managers of government, and all of the country (apart from the scarecrows) the top class party look was the way to be. It went down even to the man whose job it was to kill people for the country. To keep the country beautiful, the rules said that he must