A Tale of Two Cities by Dave Mckay, Charles Dickens (easy readers .txt) 📖

to pay Foulon back for what he did to you! Husbands and brothers and young men, give us the blood of Foulon. Give us his head! Give us his heart! Give us the body and soul of Foulon. Tear him to pieces, and dig him into the ground, so grass can grow from him! With these cries, numbers of the women, whipped up into a blind anger, ran around hitting and tearing at their own friends until they fainted from all this emotion, and would have been walked on by the crowd if their men had not stopped the others from stepping on them.

For all this, not one minute was wasted; not even a second! This Foulon was at the Hotel de Ville; he could be freed. It must never happen. Saint Antoine knew all that he had done to hurt him! So men and women, armed with weapons, left Saint Antoine so quickly, pulling others with them with such force, that in less than fifteen minutes there was not one person left in the heart of Saint Antoine apart from a few old women and the crying children.

By that time people were crowding into the court where this ugly, evil old man was. There was not enough room, so they filled the yard and streets outside. The Defarges, husband and wife, The Punisher, and Jack Three were at the front, quite near to Foulon.

"See!" cried Madam, pointing with her knife. "See the evil old man tied with ropes. That was very smart to tie a pile of grass on his back. Ha, ha! Well done! Let him eat it now!" Madam put her knife under her arm, and hit her hands together to show that she liked the entertainment of it all.

The people closest behind her told the people behind them what had made Madam so happy, and they told others until even out on the streets people were clapping at how funny it was. In the same way, over the next two or three hours of boring talk and thousands of words, each time Madam Defarge would show that she wanted things to move more quickly, seconds later the people outside would be agreeing with her. This happened even more quickly after some of the men were able, by some wonderful ability, to climb the outside walls of the building and look in from the windows, where they could see what was happening and then pass the word on to the crowd outside the building.

After some time, the sun was so high that it came through the window straight on the head of the old prisoner, making it look like he had some hope of being protected. That was too much for the crowd to put up with. The wall between the crowd, as weak as dust, had lasted for a surprisingly long time, but in a second it was gone, and Saint Antoine had the prisoner!

Even at the back of the crowd, everyone knew when it happened. Defarge simply jumped a table and a short timber wall before folding the poor man in a deadly hug. Madam Defarge just followed and grabbed one of the ropes with which he was tied. The Punisher and Jack Three were not yet up with them, and the men in the windows had not yet dropped to the floor in the court room, like wild birds from their high nests, when the cry went up all over the city, "Bring him out! Bring him to the lanterns!"

Down, up, then head first down the steps. Now on his knees, now on his feet, now on his back. Pulled and hit at, and not able to breathe with all of the grass and straw that was being pushed into his face by hundreds of hands. Cut, hit, fighting to breathe, bleeding, and always begging for mercy. Now hurting from their angry hits and kicks, with a small open space cleared around him by people wanting to give everyone room to look. Now, like a dead tree branch being pulled through a forest of legs, he was pulled to the nearest street corner where one of the deadly lanterns was hanging. There, Madam Defarge took the ropes off him, like a cat might do with a mouse, and quietly looked on while the crowd prepared for the kill, and while he begged for mercy. The women, filled with hate, cried out through it all, and the men shouted for him to be killed with grass in his mouth. Once they pulled his body up on the lantern rope and it broke. They caught him, crying. Again they did the same thing. Then the rope was kind to him, and held him up until he was dead. His head was soon on a stick, with enough grass in his mouth to make all of Saint Antoine dance.

And this was not the end of the day's evil work. Saint Antoine so shouted and danced his angry blood up that it exploded again when, near the end of the day, they learned that the old man's son-in-law, another enemy of the people, was coming into Paris with five hundred soldiers on horseback as part of the guard that was travelling with him. Saint Antoine wrote the son-in-law’s sins on burning pieces of paper, grabbed him (He would have cut him out of the heart of an army if needed, to put him with Foulon.) put his head on one stick and his heart on another and carried the three rewards In a line through the streets.

It was after dark when the men and women came back to their children, who were crying and hungry. Long lines of them went to the bread shops where they patiently waited to buy bad bread. While they waited with weak and empty stomachs, they passed the time by hugging each other to show their happiness for the happenings of the day, and by going over them all again as they talked. Little by little these lines of dirty poor people died out, and then rough candles were lighted in high windows, and thin fires were made in the streets, where neighbours cooked together before eating their food in front of their doors.

The food was poor, and there was little of it. There was no meat, and not much of anything else to put on the bread. But just being together in what they were doing added some happiness to the poor food. Fathers and mothers, who had received their strength from the actions in the worst part of the day, now played quietly with their hungry children. Lovers, with such a world around them and in front of them, loved and hoped.

It was almost morning when the last group of people left Defarge's wine shop, and Mr. Defarge said to Madam, his wife, in a rough, tired voice, while locking the door:

"At last it has come, my love!"

"Eh, well," returned Madam, "almost".

Saint Antoine went to sleep, the Defarges went to sleep; even The Punisher went to sleep with her hungry husband, and the drum was at rest. The voice of the drum was the only one in Saint Antoine that had not been changed by the blood and hurry of the day. The Punisher, whose job it was to keep the drum, could have picked it up at any time and forced the same words out of it as had been said before the prison had been attacked, or before old Foulon had been killed. On the other hand, the voices of the men and women in Saint Antoine, were sore and rough.

23. The Fire Grows

A change had come over the village with a fountain in the middle of it, the one where the road worker would leave each day to go and hammer out enough stones for the highway to buy himself a little bread to hold his poor hungry body and his poor uneducated soul together. The prison on the cliff was not of so much interest now as it had been in the past. There were soldiers to guard it, but not many; and there were officers to guard the soldiers, but not one of them knew what his men would really do if a serious problem came up, apart from knowing that it would probably not be what they were told to do.

Far and wide, the land received rain, but it gave little in return. Every green leaf, every blade of grass and every grain was as rough and poor as the people who lived there. It was all leaning over, sad, broken, and hurting. Houses, fences, animals, men, women, children, and the land they lived on -- all used up.

Local leaders (often very good men on their own) were a blessing to the country, giving a nice touch to all that was done by the government, as they would be rich men who lived good lives and much more. But, as a group, these men had in some way brought things to where they were now. It is strange how the world, which had been made just for these leaders, should have been so quickly destroyed by them. Surely there must have been something wrong with the way God planned it! But that is how it was. The last drop of blood had been forced out of the rocks, and the turn of the screw on the instruments of torture had taken from the land until there was nothing more to get, and now the leaders were starting to run from the awful effects of their own selfish lives.

But this is not the change that had come over the village and many other villages like it. For many years, the leaders had squeezed what they could from the villages and almost never visited the people apart from when they were out hunting, at times hunting for people, and at times hunting for wild animals, for whom they had cleared the trees from much of the land, leaving it empty and dead. No, the change that had come over the villages was in the looks on the strange faces of the poor, and the change was not that they were without (in this one village) the beautiful rich face of Sir.

In these times, the road worker worked alone in the dust, not often thinking about how he had been made from dust, and how he would one day return to the dust, because he was too busy thinking about how little he had for food that night, and how much more he would eat if he had the money. In these times, as he lifted his eyes from his quiet work, and looked out over the road, he would see someone coming on foot, something that in other days did not often happen, but which now happened a lot. As the walker came closer, the poor labourer would see, without surprise, that it was a man with long rough hair, an almost wild look, tall -- in timber shoes that would not be comfortable even for a road worker -- serious, rough, dark, covered in the mud and dust of many highways, wet from the rain that flooded many low places on the road, carrying leaves and seeds in his clothes from where he had been sleeping under the trees on the way.

Such a man came up to him, like a ghost, at noon one hot but cloudy July day, as he was sitting on his pile of stones under a low cliff on the side of the road, to hide from the hail that had been falling.

The man looked at him, looked at the village at the bottom of the hill, at the windmill, and at the prison on the cliff. When he had marked out these places in his uneducated mind, he said in an accent that the road worker could only just understand:

"How goes it, Jack?"

"All is well, Jack."

"Shake then!"

They shook hands, and the man sat down on the stone pile.

"No dinner?"

"Nothing but a little before I go to bed these days," said the road worker with a hungry look on his face.

"It is the same everywhere I go," the man said angrily.

He took out a dirty old pipe, filled it, lighted it by hitting a piece of metal against a piece of stone that he carried with him, and then breathed in on the pipe until it started to burn well. That is when he quickly dropped something into it from between his thumb and finger. A flame jumped up from it and then died down into a very little cloud of smoke.

"Shake then.” It was the road worker’s turn to say it this time, after watching the man light his pipe. They again shook hands.

"Tonight?” asked the road worker.

"Tonight," said the man, putting the pipe in his mouth. "Where?"

"Here."

He and the road worker sat on the pile of stones looking at each other without talking. The hail was falling between them like very small knives, until the sky started to clear over the village.

"Show me!" said the traveller then,