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Cosette joined in his laughter, all her lugubrious suppositions were allayed, and the next morning, as she was at breakfast with her father, she made merry over the sinister garden haunted by the shadows of iron chimney-pots.
He watched her do this and watched her then slightly pause at the wide window that, in Buckingham Crescent, commanded the prospect they had ramified rearward to enjoy; a medley of smoky brick and spotty stucco, of other undressed backs, of glass invidiously opaque, of roofs and chimney-pots and stables unnaturally near one of the private pictures that in London, in select situations, run up, as the phrase is, the rent.
Instances were known of people who, being asked to dine at Todgers's, had travelled round and round for a weary time, with its very chimney-pots in view; and finding it, at last, impossible of attainment, had gone home again with a gentle melancholy on their spirits, tranquil and uncomplaining. Nobody had ever found Todgers's on a verbal direction, though given within a few minutes' walk of it.
When we passed within the hanging smoke of London town, threading our way amid numberless railway tracks, sometimes over a road and sometimes under one, now burrowing into the ground, and now running along among the chimney-pots, when we came into the pale light and the thickening industry of a London day, we could but at once contrast Paris.
Her eyes were red-rimmed as she cast them up towards the window behind which Mr. Scougall, no doubt, was at that moment arraying himself: but she commanded a firm step, and even a firm voice to remark outside the wicket, as she looked up at the chimney-pots, that Nature had put on her fairest garb. The day, to be sure, was monstrously hot and stuffy.
The inquiry took time which he might better have spent in day-dreaming before the prospect of the gray March heaven, with the combs of the roofs and the chimney-pots mezzotinted against it.
As the roof was almost flat, he had set up his bench on it, a wide shutter supported on two trestles. A beautiful May sun was setting, giving a golden hue to the chimney-pots. And, right up at the top, against the clear sky, the workman was quietly cutting up his zinc with a big pair of shears, leaning over the bench, and looking like a tailor in his shop cutting out a pair of trousers.
With both you can pass days in an enchanted country of the mind, with people, scenery and manners of its own; live a life apart, more arduous, active and glowing than any real existence; and come forth again when the talk is over, as out of a theatre or a dream, to find the east wind still blowing and the chimney-pots of the old battered city still around you.
And the talk we had that evening when the stew-pot was empty and we were smoking on the narrow-ledged roof of the prison-house for he always begged for open air, and with cushions we often sat beneath the stars and against the grimy chimney-pots that talk I shall never forget. Life became constructed all anew.
As the shells began to burst over the close-packed houses, David felt grimly that an economic Providence had saved him from wasting his time in training pistoliers. A ricocheting cannon-ball crashed through the chimney-pots at his side, but he did not budge. His eyes were glued upon a figure he had espied amid the cannon.
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