Section 37

"Not well enough to understand how you are going to use them," returned the spy with a worried look on his face.
"I play my best card, by telling the nearest local court about you. And what do you do? Look over your hand, Mr. Barsad, and see what you have. Don't hurry."
He pulled the bottle closer, poured another glass and finished it off He could see that the spy was afraid he would drink too much and run off to tell the local leaders. Seeing that, he poured himself another glass and finished that off too.
"Look over your hand carefully, Mr. Barsad. Take your time."
It was a worse hand than he had believed. Mr. Barsad could see losing cards that Sydney Carton knew nothing of. He had been forced out of England because his lies had not worked there... not that he was not wanted there, because it was only later that we started acting like we do not have secrets and do not use spies. He knew that he had crossed the Channel and started working for France: first to test and listen in to people from his own country, and then to do the same with the French. He knew that under the old government he had spied on Saint Antoine and on Defarge's wine shop. He had received enough information from the police about Doctor Manette's life, that he was able to talk to the Defarges like an old friend. He had tried them on Madam Defarge, but they did not work at all. He always remembered with fear and shaking that the awful woman had knitted when he talked with her, and had looked dangerously at him as her fingers moved.
He had seen her in Saint Antoine, over and over, bring out her knitted squares and use them against people whose lives were then taken from them by the guillotine. Like anyone doing his kind of work, he knew that he was never safe, that there was nowhere to run, that he was locked under the shadow of the axe, and that no measure of help for the government that was paying him could stop that axe from falling if someone pointed a finger at him, and on the serious grounds that Sydney Carton had just listed, he knew that awful woman that he had seen hurt so many other people, would bring out the knitting square that would take away his life. Apart from the truth that all who have secrets have reason to fear, here were enough cards of one black shape as to make the one holding them turn them over on the table.
"You don't seem to like your hand," said Sydney, fully relaxed. "Will you play?"
"I think, sir," said the spy in the humblest way, as he turned to Mr. Lorry, "I can ask a man of your years and kindness, to ask this other man, so much younger than you, how he could ever play that top card that he talks of. It's true that I am a spy, and people think poorly of me because of it... but someone has to do it. Yet this man is not a spy, so why should he bring himself so low as to do this to me?"
"I will be playing my card, Mr. Barsad," said Carton, taking it on himself to answer for Mr. Lorry, and looking at his watch, "without any fear, in a very few minutes."
"I should have hoped, with you both being good men," said the spy, still trying to pull Mr. Lorry into the talk, "that your kind feelings for my sister..."
"I could not think of a better way to help your sister than to take her brother out of the way," said Sydney Carton.
"You think there is no better way, sir?"
"I have made up my mind about it."
The smooth way of the spy, strangely opposite to his very rough way of dressing, and probably with the way he did much of his business, was so well covered by Carton's ability to hide his true thoughts... for he was a secret to men who were much smarter and more honest than Barsad... that it fell apart at this point. Seeing that Barsad was losing, Carton said, returning to his earlier game of looking at cards:
"Now that I think about it, I believe I have another good card here, one I haven't yet talked about. That other Sheep, who talked of making a living for himself in the prisons. Who was he?"
"He's French. You wouldn't know him," said the spy quickly.
"French, eh?" repeated Carton, thinking to himself, and not showing any interest in Barsad at all, even as he repeated the same word. "Well, he may be."
"He is. I promise you," said the spy. "But it's not important."
"But it's not important," repeated Carton in the same empty way. "But it's not important... No, it's not important. No. Yet I know the face."
"I don't think so. I am sure you do not. It can't be," said the spy.
"It... can't... be," Sydney Carton said to himself as he played with his glass (which, luckily, was a small one) again. "Can't... be. He spoke good French. But I still thought it sounded like his second language."
"He's from another part of France," said the spy.
"No, from another country!" cried Carton, hitting his open hand on the table, as a light broke through to his mind. "Cly! Changed a little, but the same man. We had that man before us at the Old Bailey."
"Now you have jumped too soon, sir," said Barsad with a smile that made his eagle- like nose move a little to one side. "You have really helped me by accident. You see, Cly (who, at this distance in time, I can freely say had been working with me) has been dead now for a few years. I was with him just before he died. He was buried in London at the church of Saint Pancras in the Fields. The dirty-talking crowds at the time did not like him, and they stopped me from going with him to the burying; but I helped to put him in the box."
Here, Mr. Lorry could see, from where he was sitting, a strange movement in a shadow on the wall. Looking around the room, he could see that it was a movement in the wild hair on Mr. Cruncher's head.
"Let us talk about this," said the spy, "and let us be fair. To show you how wrong you are, I will show you a paper showing that Cly was buried, which I just happen to have carried here in my pocket-book ever since that day." He quickly found it and opened it. "There! Look at it, look at it! You can pick it up. It's real."
Here, Mr. Lorry saw the shadow on the wall grow taller as Mr. Cruncher stood up and stepped forward. His hair could not have been more wildly on end if it had, at that time, been put in place by the cow with a broken horn in the house that Jack built.
Without the spy seeing him, Mr. Cruncher moved to his side and touched him on the shoulder like a ghost calling him to court.
"That there Roger Cly, master," said Mr. Cruncher, with a hard look that needed few words, "so you put him in his box?"
"I did."
"And who took him out of it?"
Barsad leaned back in his chair and said in stops and starts, "What do you mean?"
"I mean," said Mr. Cruncher, "that he weren't never in it. No! Not he! I'll have my head took off if he was ever in it."
The spy looked around at the other two men, and they looked at Jerry with such surprise that they could not speak.
"I tell you," said Jerry, "that you buried stones and dirt in that there box. Don't go and tell me that you buried Cly. It was a take in. Me and two more knows it."
"How do you know it?"
"What's that to you?" Mr. Cruncher said angrily. "So it's you I should of been angry against all this time, with your awful way of hurting honest workers! I'd catch hold of your throat and squeeze it to death for half a pound."
Sydney Carton, who, with Mr. Lorry, had been lost in surprise at this turn in their business, here asked Mr. Cruncher to back up and tell them what he was on about.
"At another time, sir," he returned, trying to get away from it. "The present time is not the best for talking. What I stand to is that we knows well enough that there Cly was never in that there box. Let him say he was, in so much as a word, and I'll either catch hold of his throat and squeeze him to death for half a pound..." Mr. Cruncher waited for a second, clearly believing that the next line was the kinder of two choices. "... or I'll out and tell what he did."
"Hmm! I see that I have another card, Mr. Barsad," said Carton. "It would be impossible, with fear filling the air here in Paris, for you to live if I tell, when they find you are working with another spy for the rich who comes from the same country as yourself, who, himself, has a secret past in which he made people believe he was dead, and then came to life again! A plan in the prisons by two English men against the new government. A strong card... a clear Guillotine card! Do you still want to play against me?"
"No!" returned the spy. "I give up. It's true that the crowds were against us in London. I was almost drowned, and Cly was so hunted that he would have never been able to get away at all without that burying trick. But I have no way of knowing how this man knows about it."
"Never you trouble your head about this man," argued Mr. Cruncher. "You'll have trouble enough with listening to that man. And look here! Again!" Mr. Cruncher could not be stopped from showing them all how kind he was. "I'd catch hold of your throat and squeeze it to death for half a pound."
The prison Sheep turned from him to Sydney Carton, and said more seriously this time, "It has come to a point. I should be starting work soon, and cannot stay here much longer. You said you had a plan you wanted me to help with. What is it? There is no good in asking too much from me. If you ask me to do something in my job that could get me killed, then I'll be happier to face the danger of saying no than the danger of saying yes. Remember that I can say things against you too, and I have ways to get through stone walls, and so can others who are my friends. So what do you want from me?"
"Not very much. You hold the keys at the court prison?"
"I'm telling you this once for all, it is not possible to run away from there," said the spy strongly.
"I don't need answers to questions I have not asked. Do you hold the keys?" "I do, at times."
"You can choose when that will be?" "I can come and go as I choose."
Sydney Carton filled another glass with wine, but poured it slowly on the fire, when no one was looking. When it was all gone, he said, standing:
"So far we have been talking in front of these other two, because it was good for the strength of the cards to be measured by others apart from you and me. But come into this dark room here, and we can say the last things alone."
9. The Game Made
While Sydney Carton and the prison Sheep were in the next room, speaking so softly in the darkness that not a sound was heard, Mr. Lorry was looking at Jerry in a way that showed he did not trust him; and the way Jerry acted on seeing the look made him seem more guilty than ever. He moved from one leg to the other as often as if he had fifty legs and was trying each one of them. He looked at his fingernails too closely. And whenever Mr. Lorry's eyes crossed with his, he would do that strange little cough of his and put his hand over his mouth, which is not an action that makes one think a person is being perfectly open.
"Jerry," said Mr. Lorry. "Come here."
Mr. Cruncher moved forward, but did it with one side of his body leading the other side.
"What work have you been doing, apart from your work for Tellson's?"
After some thinking, that came with a serious look at his boss, Mr. Cruncher came up with the smart answer, "Farm work, sir. Digging."
"Something tells me," said Mr. Lorry, angrily shaking a finger at him, "that you have used the great name of Tellson's as a cover, and that you have been doing work that is against the law. If you have, then know that I will not help you when you get back to England. If you have, don't count on me keeping your secret. Tellson's will not be used in this way."
"I hope, sir," begged the worried Mr. Cruncher, "that a good man like yourself who I have been happy to work for until I am now grey at it, would think twice about hurting me, even if it was true... and I don't say it is, but even if it was. And it is to be took into your thinking that if it was, it wouldn't, even then, be all on one side. There'd be two sides to it. There might be a doctor even now, picking up their pounds where an honest worker don't pick up cents... cents? No, not even his half cents. But they goes banking away like smoke at Tellson's, and a pointing their doctor eyes at that worker on the street, while they's going in and going out of their own coaches, and equally doing that like smoke too, if not more so. Now that'd be using Tellson's too, for you cannot put sauce on the female goose and not put it on the male goose too. And here's Mrs. Crunch, at least she was back when we was in England, and would be again tomorrow, if she had reason to, prayin' against the business so much that she was destroying it... fully destroying it! But the doctor wives, they don't pray... you won't never catch them at it! Or, if they do, their prayers go to getting more sick people for their husbands. So how can you rightly turn on one without the other? Then what with giving something to the men who bury the body, and the man who watches over the church, and all of them greedy, a man wouldn't get much by it, even if it was so. And what little a man did get, would not make him rich, Mr. Lorry. He'd never have no good of it, and he'd want all along to be out of it if he could see his way to, but being once in... even if it was so."
"Stop it!" cried Mr. Lorry, giving in some, all the same. "I am surprised just to look at you."
"Now what I would like to humbly give you, sir," went on Mr. Cruncher, "even if it was so, which I don't say it is..."
"Don't kick around the bush," said Mr. Lorry.
"No, I will not, sir," returned Mr. Cruncher, as if nothing was farther from his thoughts or actions. "I'm not saying that it is... but what I would humbly want to give you, sir, if it was, would be this. On that chair there at the bank, sits that boy of mine, growed up to be a good worker for you, taking letters here and there and doing every little job for you until your heels are where your head is, if you would like him to do that. If it was so, which I still don't say it is (for I will not kick around the bush to you, sir), then, if it was, let that there boy keep his father's place, so he can take care of his mother; don't blow on that boy's father... do not do it, sir... but let that father go into the line of honest digging, and make up for what he should not have been digging... if it was so... by digging for them with a will and in a faith that would keep them safe for the future. That, Mr. Lorry," said Mr. Cruncher, rubbing his forehead with his arm to show that he had come to the finishing point of what he was trying to say, "is what I would humbly want to give to you, sir. A man don't see all the awful happenings that are going on round him here, in the way of people without heads, and happening to so many that the price of a life is no more than the cost of carrying it
away, without having his serious thoughts of such things. And these here would be my thoughts if it was so kind of you to think that what I said just now, I up and said for a good reason when I might have kept it back."
"At least that much is true," said Mr. Lorry. "Say no more now. It may be that I will yet be your friend, if I think you have repented... in action, and not just in words. I want no more words."