A TALE OF TWO CITIES
A STORY OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION
By Charles Dickens
The Golden Thread
(12)
The Fellow of Delicacy
Mr. Stryver having made up his mind to that magnanimous bestowal of good
fortune on the Doctor's daughter, resolved to make her happiness known
to her before he left town for the Long Vacation. After some mental
debating of the point, he came to the conclusion that it would be as
well to get all the preliminaries done with, and they could then arrange
at their leisure whether he should give her his hand a week or two
before Michaelmas Term, or in the little Christmas vacation between it
and Hilary.
As to the strength of his case, he had not a doubt about it, but clearly
saw his way to the verdict. Argued with the jury on substantial worldly
grounds--the only grounds ever worth taking into account--it was a
plain case, and had not a weak spot in it. He called himself for the
plaintiff, there was no getting over his evidence, the counsel for
the defendant threw up his brief, and the jury did not even turn to
consider. After trying it, Stryver, C. J., was satisfied that no plainer
case could be.
Accordingly, Mr. Stryver inaugurated the Long Vacation with a formal
proposal to take Miss Manette to Vauxhall Gardens; that failing, to
Ranelagh; that unaccountably failing too, it behoved him to present
himself in Soho, and there declare his noble mind.
Towards Soho, therefore, Mr. Stryver shouldered his way from the Temple,
while the bloom of the Long Vacation's infancy was still upon it.
Anybody who had seen him projecting himself into Soho while he was yet
on Saint Dunstan's side of Temple Bar, bursting in his full-blown way
along the pavement, to the jostlement of all weaker people, might have
seen how safe and strong he was.
His way taking him past Tellson's, and he both banking at Tellson's and
knowing Mr. Lorry as the intimate friend of the Manettes, it entered Mr.
Stryver's mind to enter the bank, and reveal to Mr. Lorry the brightness
of the Soho horizon. So, he pushed open the door with the weak rattle
in its throat, stumbled down the two steps, got past the two ancient
cashiers, and shouldered himself into the musty back closet where Mr.
Lorry sat at great books ruled for figures, with perpendicular iron
bars to his window as if that were ruled for figures too, and everything
under the clouds were a sum.
“Halloa!” said Mr. Stryver. “How do you do? I hope you are well!”
It was Stryver's grand peculiarity that he always seemed too big for any
place, or space. He was so much too big for Tellson's, that old clerks
in distant corners looked up with looks of remonstrance, as though he
squeezed them against the wall. The House itself, magnificently reading
the paper quite in the far-off perspective, lowered displeased, as if
the Stryver head had been butted into its responsible waistcoat.
The discreet Mr. Lorry said, in a sample tone of the voice he would
recommend under the circumstances, “How do you do, Mr. Stryver? How do
you do, sir?” and shook hands. There was a peculiarity in his manner
of shaking hands, always to be seen in any clerk at Tellson's who shook
hands with a customer when the House pervaded the air. He shook in a
self-abnegating way, as one who shook for Tellson and Co.
“Can I do anything for you, Mr. Stryver?” asked Mr. Lorry, in his
business character.
“Why, no, thank you; this is a private visit to yourself, Mr. Lorry; I
have come for a private word.”
“Oh indeed!” said Mr. Lorry, bending down his ear, while his eye strayed
to the House afar off.
“I am going,” said Mr. Stryver, leaning his arms confidentially on the
desk: whereupon, although it was a large double one, there appeared to
be not half desk enough for him: “I am going to make an offer of myself
in marriage to your agreeable little friend, Miss Manette, Mr. Lorry.”
“Oh dear me!” cried Mr. Lorry, rubbing his chin, and looking at his
visitor dubiously.
“Oh dear me, sir?” repeated Stryver, drawing back. “Oh dear you, sir?
What may your meaning be, Mr. Lorry?”
“My meaning,” answered the man of business, “is, of course, friendly and
appreciative, and that it does you the greatest credit, and--in short,
my meaning is everything you could desire. But--really, you know, Mr.
Stryver--” Mr. Lorry paused, and shook his head at him in the oddest
manner, as if he were compelled against his will to add, internally,
“you know there really is so much too much of you!”
“Well!” said Stryver, slapping the desk with his contentious hand,
opening his eyes wider, and taking a long breath, “if I understand you,
Mr. Lorry, I'll be hanged!”
Mr. Lorry adjusted his little wig at both ears as a means towards that
end, and bit the feather of a pen.
“D--n it all, sir!” said Stryver, staring at him, “am I not eligible?”
“Oh dear yes! Yes. Oh yes, you're eligible!” said Mr. Lorry. “If you say
eligible, you are eligible.”
“Am I not prosperous?” asked Stryver.
“Oh! if you come to prosperous, you are prosperous,” said Mr. Lorry.
“And advancing?”
“If you come to advancing you know,” said Mr. Lorry, delighted to be
able to make another admission, “nobody can doubt that.”
“Then what on earth is your meaning, Mr. Lorry?” demanded Stryver,
perceptibly crestfallen.
“Well! I--Were you going there now?” asked Mr. Lorry.
“Straight!” said Stryver, with a plump of his fist on the desk.
“Then I think I wouldn't, if I was you.”
“Why?” said Stryver. “Now, I'll put you in a corner,” forensically
shaking a forefinger at him. “You are a man of business and bound to
have a reason. State your reason. Why wouldn't you go?”
“Because,” said Mr. Lorry, “I wouldn't go on such an object without
having some cause to believe that I should succeed.”
“D--n _me_!” cried Stryver, “but this beats everything.”
Mr. Lorry glanced at the distant House, and glanced at the angry
Stryver.
“Here's a man of business--a man of years--a man of experience--_in_
a Bank,” said Stryver; “and having summed up three leading reasons for
complete success, he says there's no reason at all! Says it with his
head on!” Mr. Stryver remarked upon the peculiarity as if it would have
been infinitely less remarkable if he had said it with his head off.
“When I speak of success, I speak of success with the young lady; and
when I speak of causes and reasons to make success probable, I speak of
causes and reasons that will tell as such with the young lady. The young
lady, my good sir,” said Mr. Lorry, mildly tapping the Stryver arm, “the
young lady. The young lady goes before all.”
“Then you mean to tell me, Mr. Lorry,” said Stryver, squaring his
elbows, “that it is your deliberate opinion that the young lady at
present in question is a mincing Fool?”
“Not exactly so. I mean to tell you, Mr. Stryver,” said Mr. Lorry,
reddening, “that I will hear no disrespectful word of that young lady
from any lips; and that if I knew any man--which I hope I do not--whose
taste was so coarse, and whose temper was so overbearing, that he could
not restrain himself from speaking disrespectfully of that young lady at
this desk, not even Tellson's should prevent my giving him a piece of my
mind.”
The necessity of being angry in a suppressed tone had put Mr. Stryver's
blood-vessels into a dangerous state when it was his turn to be angry;
Mr. Lorry's veins, methodical as their courses could usually be, were in
no better state now it was his turn.
“That is what I mean to tell you, sir,” said Mr. Lorry. “Pray let there
be no mistake about it.”
Mr. Stryver sucked the end of a ruler for a little while, and then stood
hitting a tune out of his teeth with it, which probably gave him the
toothache. He broke the awkward silence by saying:
“This is something new to me, Mr. Lorry. You deliberately advise me not
to go up to Soho and offer myself--_my_self, Stryver of the King's Bench
bar?”
“Do you ask me for my advice, Mr. Stryver?”
“Yes, I do.”
“Very good. Then I give it, and you have repeated it correctly.”
“And all I can say of it is,” laughed Stryver with a vexed laugh, “that
this--ha, ha!--beats everything past, present, and to come.”
“Now understand me,” pursued Mr. Lorry. “As a man of business, I am
not justified in saying anything about this matter, for, as a man of
business, I know nothing of it. But, as an old fellow, who has carried
Miss Manette in his arms, who is the trusted friend of Miss Manette and
of her father too, and who has a great affection for them both, I have
spoken. The confidence is not of my seeking, recollect. Now, you think I
may not be right?”
“Not I!” said Stryver, whistling. “I can't undertake to find third
parties in common sense; I can only find it for myself. I suppose sense
in certain quarters; you suppose mincing bread-and-butter nonsense. It's
new to me, but you are right, I dare say.”
“What I suppose, Mr. Stryver, I claim to characterise for myself--And
understand me, sir,” said Mr. Lorry, quickly flushing again, “I
will not--not even at Tellson's--have it characterised for me by any
gentleman breathing.”
“There! I beg your pardon!” said Stryver.
“Granted. Thank you. Well, Mr. Stryver, I was about to say:--it might be
painful to you to find yourself mistaken, it might be painful to Doctor
Manette to have the task of being explicit with you, it might be very
painful to Miss Manette to have the task of being explicit with you. You
know the terms upon which I have the honour and happiness to stand with
the family. If you please, committing you in no way, representing you
in no way, I will undertake to correct my advice by the exercise of a
little new observation and judgment expressly brought to bear upon
it. If you should then be dissatisfied with it, you can but test its
soundness for yourself; if, on the other hand, you should be satisfied
with it, and it should be what it now is, it may spare all sides what is
best spared. What do you say?”
“How long would you keep me in town?”
“Oh! It is only a question of a few hours. I could go to Soho in the
evening, and come to your chambers afterwards.”
“Then I say yes,” said Stryver: “I won't go up there now, I am not so
hot upon it as that comes to; I say yes, and I shall expect you to look
in to-night. Good morning.”
Then Mr. Stryver turned and burst out of the Bank, causing such a
concussion of air on his passage through, that to stand up against it
bowing behind the two counters, required the utmost remaining strength
of the two ancient clerks. Those venerable and feeble persons were
always seen by the public in the act of bowing, and were popularly
believed, when they had bowed a customer out, still to keep on bowing in
the empty office until they bowed another customer in.
The barrister was keen enough to divine that the banker would not have
gone so far in his expression of opinion on any less solid ground than
moral certainty. Unprepared as he was for the large pill he had to
swallow, he got it down. “And now,” said Mr. Stryver, shaking his
forensic forefinger at the Temple in general, when it was down, “my way
out of this, is, to put you all in the wrong.”
It was a bit of the art of an Old Bailey tactician, in which he found
great relief. “You shall not put me in the wrong, young lady,” said Mr.
Stryver; “I'll do that for you.”
Accordingly, when Mr. Lorry called that night as late as ten o'clock,
Mr. Stryver, among a quantity of books and papers littered out for the
purpose, seemed to have nothing less on his mind than the subject of
the morning. He even showed surprise when he saw Mr. Lorry, and was
altogether in an absent and preoccupied state.
“Well!” said that good-natured emissary, after a full half-hour of
bootless attempts to bring him round to the question. “I have been to
Soho.”
“To Soho?” repeated Mr. Stryver, coldly. “Oh, to be sure! What am I
thinking of!”
“And I have no doubt,” said Mr. Lorry, “that I was right in the
conversation we had. My opinion is confirmed, and I reiterate my
advice.”
“I assure you,” returned Mr. Stryver, in the friendliest way, “that I
am sorry for it on your account, and sorry for it on the poor father's
account. I know this must always be a sore subject with the family; let
us say no more about it.”
“I don't understand you,” said Mr. Lorry.
“I dare say not,” rejoined Stryver, nodding his head in a smoothing and
final way; “no matter, no matter.”
“But it does matter,” Mr. Lorry urged.
“No it doesn't; I assure you it doesn't. Having supposed that there was
sense where there is no sense, and a laudable ambition where there is
not a laudable ambition, I am well out of my mistake, and no harm is
done. Young women have committed similar follies often before, and have
repented them in poverty and obscurity often before. In an unselfish
aspect, I am sorry that the thing is dropped, because it would have been
a bad thing for me in a worldly point of view; in a selfish aspect, I am
glad that the thing has dropped, because it would have been a bad thing
for me in a worldly point of view--it is hardly necessary to say I could
have gained nothing by it. There is no harm at all done. I have not
proposed to the young lady, and, between ourselves, I am by no means
certain, on reflection, that I ever should have committed myself to
that extent. Mr. Lorry, you cannot control the mincing vanities and
giddinesses of empty-headed girls; you must not expect to do it, or you
will always be disappointed. Now, pray say no more about it. I tell you,
I regret it on account of others, but I am satisfied on my own account.
And I am really very much obliged to you for allowing me to sound you,
and for giving me your advice; you know the young lady better than I do;
you were right, it never would have done.”
Mr. Lorry was so taken aback, that he looked quite stupidly at Mr.
Stryver shouldering him towards the door, with an appearance of
showering generosity, forbearance, and goodwill, on his erring head.
“Make the best of it, my dear sir,” said Stryver; “say no more about it;
thank you again for allowing me to sound you; good night!”
Mr. Lorry was out in the night, before he knew where he was. Mr. Stryver
was lying back on his sofa, winking at his ceiling.
******
