A Tale of Two Cities
By Charles Dickens
Book
the First-Recalled to Life
I
The Period
It
was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it
was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of
incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the
spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we
had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going
direct the other way--in short, the period was so far like the present period,
that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good
or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.
There
were a king with a large jaw and a queen with a plain face, on the throne of
England; there were a king with a large jaw and a queen with a fair face, on
the throne of France. In both countries it was clearer than crystal to the
lords of the State preserves of loaves and fishes, that things in general were
settled for ever.
It
was the year of Our Lord one thousand seven hundred and seventy-five.
Spiritual
revelations were conceded to England at that favoured period, as at this. Mrs.
Southcott had recently attained her five-and-twentieth blessed birthday, of
whom a prophetic private in the Life Guards had heralded the sublime appearance
by announcing that arrangements were made for the swallowing up of London and
Westminster. Even the Cock-lane ghost had been laid only a round dozen of
years, after rapping out its messages, as the spirits of this very year last
past (supernaturally deficient in originality) rapped out theirs. Mere messages
in the earthly order of events had lately come to the English Crown and People,
from a congress of British subjects in America: which, strange to relate, have
proved more important to the human race than any communications yet received
through any of the chickens of the Cock-lane brood.
France,
less favoured on the whole as to matters spiritual than her sister of the
shield and trident, rolled with exceeding smoothness down hill, making paper
money and spending it. Under the guidance of her Christian pastors, she
entertained herself, besides, with such humane achievements as sentencing a
youth to have his hands cut off, his tongue torn out with pincers, and his body
burned alive, because he had not kneeled down in the rain to do honour to a
dirty procession of monks which passed within his view, at a distance of some
fifty or sixty yards. It is likely enough that, rooted in the woods of France
and Norway, there were growing trees, when that sufferer was put to death,
already marked by the Woodman, Fate, to come down and be sawn into boards, to
make a certain movable framework with a sack and a knife in it, terrible in
history. It is likely enough that in the rough outhouses of some tillers of the
heavy lands adjacent to Paris, there were sheltered from the weather that very
day, rude carts, bespattered
with
rustic mire, snuffed about by pigs, and roosted in by poultry, which the
Farmer, Death, had already set apart to be his tumbrils of the Revolution. But
that Woodman and that Farmer, though they work unceasingly, work silently, and
no one heard them as they went about with muffled tread: the rather, forasmuch
as to entertain any suspicion that they were awake, was to be atheistical and
traitorous.
In
England, there was scarcely an amount of order and protection to justify much
national boasting. Daring burglaries by armed men, and highway robberies, took
place in the capital itself every night; families were publicly cautioned not
to go out of town without removing their furniture to upholsterers' warehouses
for security; the highwayman in the dark was a City tradesman in the light,
and, being recognised and challenged by his fellow- tradesman whom he stopped
in his character of "the Captain," gallantly shot him through the
head and rode away; the mall was waylaid by seven robbers, and the guard shot
three dead, and then got shot dead
himself
by the other four, "in consequence of the failure of his ammunition:"
after which the mall was robbed in peace; that magnificent potentate, the Lord
Mayor of London, was made to stand and deliver on Turnham Green, by one
highwayman, who despoiled the illustrious creature in sight of all his retinue;
prisoners in London gaols fought battles with their turnkeys, and the majesty
of the law fired blunderbusses in among them, loaded with rounds of shot and
ball; thieves snipped off diamond crosses from the necks of noble lords at
Court drawing-rooms; musketeers went into St. Giles's, to search for contraband
goods, and the mob fired on the musketeers, and the musketeers fired on the
mob, and nobody thought any of these occurrences much out of the common way. In
the midst of them, the hangman, ever busy and ever worse than useless, was in
constant requisition; now, stringing up long rows of miscellaneous criminals;
now, hanging a housebreaker on Saturday who had been taken on Tuesday; now,
burning people in the hand at Newgate by the dozen, and now burning pamphlets
at the door of Westminster Hall; to-day, taking the life of an atrocious
murderer, and to-morrow of a wretched pilferer who had robbed a farmer's boy of
sixpence.
All
these things, and a thousand like them, came to pass in and close upon the dear
old year one thousand seven hundred and seventy-five. Environed by them, while
the Woodman and the Farmer worked unheeded, those two of the large jaws, and
those other two of the plain and the fair faces, trod with stir enough, and
carried their divine rights with a high hand. Thus did the year one thousand
seven hundred and seventy-five conduct their Greatnesses, and myriads of small
creatures--the creatures of this chronicle among the rest--along the roads that
lay before them.
II
The Mail
It
was the Dover road that lay, on a Friday night late in November, before the
first of the persons with whom this history has business. The Dover road lay,
as to him, beyond the Dover mail, as it lumbered up Shooter's Hill. He walked
up hill in the mire by the side of the mail, as the rest of the passengers did;
not because they had the least relish for walking exercise, under the
circumstances, but because the hill, and the harness, and the mud, and the
mail, were all so heavy, that the horses had three times already come to a
stop, besides once drawing the coach across the road, with the mutinous intent
of taking it back to Blackheath. Reins and whip and coachman and guard,
however, in combination, had read that article of war which forbade a purpose
otherwise strongly in favour of the argument, that some brute animals are
endued with Reason; and the team had capitulated and returned to their duty.
With
drooping heads and tremulous tails, they mashed their way through the thick
mud, floundering and stumbling between whiles, as if they were falling to
pieces at the larger joints. As often as the driver rested them and brought
them to a stand, with a wary "Wo-ho! so-ho- then!" the near leader violently
shook his head and everything upon it--like an unusually emphatic horse, denying
that the coach could be got up the hill. Whenever the leader made this rattle,
the passenger started, as a nervous passenger might, and was disturbed in mind.
There
was a steaming mist in all the hollows, and it had roamed in its forlornness up
the hill, like an evil spirit, seeking rest and finding none. A clammy and
intensely cold mist, it made its slow way through the air in ripples that
visibly followed and overspread one another, as the waves of an unwholesome sea
might do. It was dense enough to shut out everything from the light of the
coach-lamps but these its own workings, and a few yards of road; and the reek
of the labouring horses steamed into it, as if they had made it all.
Two
other passengers, besides the one, were plodding up the hill by the side of the
mail. All three were wrapped to the cheekbones and over the ears, and wore
jack-boots. Not one of the three could have said, from anything he saw, what
either of the other two was like; and each was
hidden
under almost as many wrappers from the eyes of the mind, as from the eyes of
the body, of his two companions. In those days, travellers were very shy of
being confidential on a short notice, for anybody on the road might be a robber
or in league with robbers. As to the latter, when every posting-house and
ale-house could produce somebody in "the Captain's" pay, ranging from
the landlord to the lowest stable non-descript, it was the likeliest thing upon
the cards. So the guard of the Dover mail thought to himself, that Friday night
in November, one thousand seven hundred and seventy-five, lumbering up
Shooter's Hill, as he stood on his own particular perch behind the mail,
beating his feet, and keeping an eye and a hand on the arm-chest before him,
where a loaded blunderbuss lay at the top of six or eight loaded horse-pistols,
deposited on a substratum of cutlass.
The
Dover mail was in its usual genial position that the guard suspected the passengers,
the passengers suspected one another and the guard, they all suspected
everybody else, and the coachman was sure of nothing but the horses; as to
which cattle he could with a clear conscience have taken his oath on the two
Testaments that they were not fit for the journey. "Wo-ho!" said the
coachman. "So, then! One more pull and you're at the top and be damned to
you, for I have had trouble enough to get you to it!--Joe!"
"Halloa!"
the guard replied.
"What
o'clock do you make it, Joe?"
"Ten
minutes, good, past eleven."
"My
blood!" ejaculated the vexed coachman, "and not atop of Shooter's yet!
Tst! Yah! Get on with you!"
The
emphatic horse, cut short by the whip in a most decided negative, made a
decided scramble for it, and the three other horses followed suit. Once more,
the Dover mail struggled on, with the jack-boots of its passengers squashing
along by its side. They had stopped when the coach stopped, and they kept close
company with it. If any one of the three had had the hardihood to propose to
another to walk on a little ahead into the mist and darkness, he would have put
himself in a fair way of getting shot instantly as a highwayman.
The
last burst carried the mail to the summit of the hill. The horses stopped to
breathe again, and the guard got down to skid the wheel for the descent, and
open the coach-door to let the passengers in.
"Tst!
Joe!" cried the coachman in a warning voice, looking down from his box.
"What
do you say, Tom?"
They both listened.
"I say a
horse at a canter coming up, Joe."
"I
say a horse at a gallop, Tom," returned the guard, leaving his hold of
the door, and mounting nimbly to his place. "Gentlemen! In the kings name,
all of you!"
With
this hurried adjuration, he cocked his blunderbuss, and stood on the offensive.
The
passenger booked by this history, was on the coach-step, getting in; the two
other passengers were close behind him, and about to follow. He remained on the
step, half in the coach and half out of; they re-mained in the road below him.
They all looked from the coachman to the guard, and from the guard to the
coachman, and listened. The coachman looked back and the guard looked back, and
even the emphatic leader pricked up his ears and looked back, without
contradicting.
The
stillness consequent on the cessation of the rumbling and labouring of the
coach, added to the stillness of the night, made it very quiet indeed. The panting
of the horses communicated a tremulous motion to the coach, as if it were in a
state of agitation. The hearts of the passengers beat loud enough perhaps to be
heard; but at any rate, the quiet pause was audibly expressive
of
people out of breath, and holding the breath, and having the pulses quickened
by expectation.
The
sound of a horse at a gallop came fast and furiously up the hill.
"So-ho!"
the guard sang out, as loud as he could roar. "Yo there! Stand! I shall
fire!"
The
pace was suddenly checked, and, with much splashing and floundering, a man's
voice called from the mist, "Is that the Dover mail?"
"Never
you mind what it is!" the guard retorted. "What are you?"
"IS
that the Dover mail?"
"Why do
you want to know?"
"I
want a passenger, if it is."
"What
passenger?"
"Mr.
Jarvis Lorry."
Our
booked passenger showed in a moment that it was his name. The guard, the
coachman, and the two other passengers eyed him distrustfully.
"Keep
where you are," the guard called to the voice in the mist, "because,
if I should make a mistake, it could never be set right in your lifetime.
Gentleman
of the name of Lorry answer straight."
"What
is the matter?" asked the passenger, then, with mildly quavering speech.
"Who wants me? Is it Jerry?"
("I
don't like Jerry's voice, if it is Jerry," growled the guard to himself.
"He's
hoarser than suits me, is Jerry.")
"Yes,
Mr. Lorry."
"What
is the matter?"
"A
despatch sent after you from over yonder. T. and Co."
"I
know this messenger, guard," said Mr. Lorry, getting down into the road--assisted
from behind more swiftly than politely by the other two passengers, who
immediately scrambled into the coach, shut the door, and pulled up the window.
"He may come close; there's nothing wrong."
"I
hope there ain't, but I can't make so 'Nation sure of that," said the
guard, in gruff soliloquy. "Hallo you!"
"Well!
And hallo you!" said Jerry, more hoarsely than before.
"Come
on at a footpace! d'ye mind me? And if you've got holsters to that saddle o'
yourn, don't let me see your hand go nigh 'em. For I'm a devil at a quick
mistake, and when I make one it takes the form of Lead. So now let's look at
you."
The
figures of a horse and rider came slowly through the eddying mist, and came to
the side of the mail, where the passenger stood. The rider stooped, and,
casting up his eyes at the guard, handed the passenger a small folded paper.
The rider's horse was blown, and both horse and rider were covered with mud,
from the hoofs of the horse to the hat of the man.
"Guard!"
said the passenger, in a tone of quiet business confidence.
The
watchful guard, with his right hand at the stock of his raised blunderbuss, his
left at the barrel, and his eye on the horseman, answered curtly,
"Sir."
"There
is nothing to apprehend. I belong to Tellson's Bank. You must know Tellson's
Bank in London. I am going to Paris on business. A crown to drink. I may read
this?"
"If
so be as you're quick, sir."
He
opened it in the light of the coach-lamp on that side, and read--first to himself
and then aloud: "`Wait at Dover for Mam'selle.' It's not long, you see,
guard. Jerry, say that my answer was, RECALLED TO LIFE."
Jerry
started in his saddle. "That's a Blazing strange answer, too," said
he, at his hoarsest.
"Take
that message back, and they will know that I received this, as well as if I
wrote. Make the best of your way. Good night."
With
those words the passenger opened the coach-door and got in; not at all assisted
by his fellow-passengers, who had expeditiously secreted their watches and
purses in their boots, and were now making a general pretence of being asleep.
With no more definite purpose than to escape the hazard of originating any
other kind of action.
The
coach lumbered on again, with heavier wreaths of mist closing round it as it
began the descent. The guard soon replaced his blunderbuss in his arm-chest,
and, having looked to the rest of its contents, and having looked to the
supplementary pistols that he wore in his belt, looked to a smaller chest
beneath his seat, in which there were a few smith's tools, a couple of
torches,
and a tinder-box. For he was furnished with that completeness that if the
coach-lamps had been blown and stormed out, which did occasionally happen, he
had only to shut himself up inside, keep the flint and steel sparks well off
the straw, and get a light with tolerable safety and ease (if he were lucky) in
five minutes.
"Tom!"
softly over the coach roof.
"Hallo,
Joe."
"Did
you hear the message?"
"I
did, Joe."
"What
did you make of it, Tom?"
"Nothing
at all, Joe."
"That's
a coincidence, too," the guard mused, "for I made the same of it myself."
Jerry,
left alone in the mist and darkness, dismounted meanwhile, not only to ease his
spent horse, but to wipe the mud from his face, and shake the wet out of his
hat-brim, which might be capable of holding about half a gallon. After standing
with the bridle over his heavily-splashed arm, until the wheels of the mail
were no longer within hearing and the night was quite still again, he turned to
walk down the hill.
"After
that there gallop from Temple Bar, old lady, I won't trust your fore-legs till
I get you on the level," said this hoarse messenger, glancing at his mare.
"`Recalled to life.' That's a Blazing strange message. Much of that wouldn't
do for you, Jerry! I say, Jerry! You'd be in a Blazing bad way, if recalling to
life was to come into fashion, Jerry!"
III
The Night
Shadows
A
wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be
that profound secret and mystery to every other. A solemn consideration, when I
enter a great city by night, that every one of those darkly clustered houses
encloses its own secret; that every room in every one of them encloses its own
secret; that every beating heart in the hundreds of thousands of breasts there,
is, in some of its imaginings, a secret to the heart nearest it! Something of
the awfulness, even of Death itself, is referable to this. No more can I turn
the leaves of this dear book that I loved, and vainly hope in time to read it
all. No more can I look into the depths of this unfathomable water, wherein, as
momentary lights glanced into it, I have had glimpses of buried treasure and
other things submerged. It was appointed that the book should shut with a
spring, for ever and for ever, when I had read but a page. It was appointed
that the water should be locked in an eternal frost, when the light was playing
on its surface, and I stood in ignorance on the shore. My friend is dead, my
neighbour is dead, my love, the darling of my soul, is dead; it is the
inexorable consolidation and perpetuation of the secret that was always in that
individuality, and which I shall carry in mine to my life's end. In any of the
burial-places of this city through which I pass, is there a sleeper more
inscrutable than its busy inhabitants are, in their innermost personality, to
me, or than I am to them?
As
to this, his natural and not to be alienated inheritance, the messenger on horseback
had exactly the same possessions as the King, the first Minister of State, or
the richest merchant in London. So with the three passengers shut up in the
narrow compass of one lumbering old mail coach; they were mysteries to one
another, as complete as if each had been in his own coach and six, or his own
coach and sixty, with the breadth of a county between him and the next.
The
messenger rode back at an easy trot, stopping pretty often at ale-houses by the
way to drink, but evincing a tendency to keep his own counsel, and to keep his
hat cocked over his eyes. He had eyes that assorted very well with that
decoration, being of a surface black, with no depth in the colour or form, and
much too near together--as if they were afraid of being found out in something,
singly, if they kept too far apart. They had a sinister expression, under an
old cocked-hat like a three-cornered spittoon, and over a great muffler for the
chin and throat, which descended nearly to the wearer's knees. When he stopped
for drink, he moved this muffler with his left hand, only while he poured his
liquor in with his right; as soon as that was done, he muffled again.
"No,
Jerry, no!" said the messenger, harping on one theme as he rode. "It wouldn't
do for you, Jerry. Jerry, you honest tradesman, it wouldn't suit YOUR line of
business! Recalled--! Bust me if I don't think he'd been a drinking!"
His
message perplexed his mind to that degree that he was fain, several times, to
take off his hat to scratch his head. Except on the crown, which was raggedly
bald, he had stiff, black hair, standing jaggedly all over it, and growing down
hill almost to his broad, blunt nose. It was so like Smith's work, so much more
like the top of a strongly spiked wall than a head of hair, that the best of
players at leap-frog might have declined him, as the most dangerous man in the
world to go over.
While
he trotted back with the message he was to deliver to the night watchman in his
box at the door of Tellson's Bank, by Temple Bar, who was to deliver it to
greater authorities within, the shadows of the night took such shapes to him as
arose out of the message, and took such shapes to the mare as arose out of HER
private topics of uneasiness. They seemed to be numerous, for she shied at
every shadow on the road.
What
time, the mail-coach lumbered, jolted, rattled, and bumped upon its tedious
way, with its three fellow-inscrutables inside. To whom, likewise, the shadows
of the night revealed themselves, in the forms their dozing eyes and wandering
thoughts suggested.
Tellson's
Bank had a run upon it in the mail. As the bank passenger—with an arm drawn
through the leathern strap, which did what lay in it to keep him from pounding
against the next passenger, and driving him into his corner, whenever the coach
got a special jolt--nodded in his place, with half-shut eyes, the little
coach-windows, and the coach-lamp dimly gleaming through them, and the bulky
bundle of opposite passenger, became the bank, and did a great stroke of
business. The rattle of the harness was the chink of money, and more drafts
were honoured in five minutes than even Tellson's, with all its foreign and
home connection, ever paid in thrice the time. Then the strong-rooms
underground, at Tellson's, with such of their valuable stores and secrets as
were known to the passenger (and it was not a little that he knew about them),
opened before him, and he went in among them with the great keys and the
feebly-burning candle, and found them safe, and strong, and sound, and still,
just as he had last seen them.
But,
though the bank was almost always with him, and though the coach (in a confused
way, like the presence of pain under an opiate) was always with him, there was
another current of impression that never ceased to run, all through the night.
He was on his way to dig some one out of a grave.
Now,
which of the multitude of faces that showed themselves before him was the true
face of the buried person, the shadows of the night did not indicate; but they
were all the faces of a man of five-and- forty by years, and they differed
principally in the passions they expressed, and in the ghastliness of their
worn and wasted state. Pride, contempt, defiance, stubbornness, submission,
lamentation, succeeded one another; so did varieties of sunken cheek,
cadaverous colour, emaciated hands and figures.
But
the face was in the main one face, and every head was prematurely white. A
hundred times the dozing passenger inquired of this spectre:
"Buried
how long?"
The
answer was always the same: "Almost eighteen years."
"You
had abandoned all hope of being dug out?"
"Long
ago."
"You
know that you are recalled to life?"
"They
tell me so."
"I
hope you care to live?"
"I
can't say."
"Shall
I show her to you? Will you come and see her?"
The
answers to this question were various and contradictory. Sometimes the broken
reply was, "Wait! It would kill me if I saw her too soon."
Sometimes,
it was given in a tender rain of tears, and then it was, "Take me to
her." Sometimes it was staring and bewildered, and then it was, "I
don't know her. I don't understand."
After
such imaginary discourse, the passenger in his fancy would dig, and dig,
dig--now with a spade, now with a great key, now with his hands—to dig this
wretched creature out. Got out at last, with earth hanging about his face and
hair, he would suddenly fan away to dust. The passenger would then start to
himself, and lower the window, to get the reality of mist and rain on his
cheek.
Yet
even when his eyes were opened on the mist and rain, on the moving patch of
light from the lamps, and the hedge at the roadside retreating by jerks, the
night shadows outside the coach would fall into the train of the night shadows
within. The real Banking-house by Temple Bar, the real business of the past
day, the real strong rooms, the real express sent after him, and the real
message returned, would all be there. Out of the midst of them, the ghostly
face would rise, and he would accost it again.
"Buried
how long?"
"Almost
eighteen years."
"I
hope you care to live?"
"I
can't say."
Dig--dig--dig--until
an impatient movement from one of the two passengers would admonish him to pull
up the window, draw his arm securely through the leathern strap, and speculate
upon the two slumbering forms, until his mind lost its hold of them, and they
again slid away into the bank and the grave.
"Buried
how long?"
"Almost
eighteen years."
"You
had abandoned all hope of being dug out?"
"Long
ago."
The
words were still in his hearing as just spoken--distinctly in his hearing as
ever spoken words had been in his life--when the weary passenger started to the
consciousness of daylight, and found that the shadows of the night were gone.
He
lowered the window, and looked out at the rising sun. There was a ridge of
ploughed land, with a plough upon it where it had been left last night when the
horses were unyoked; beyond, a quiet coppice-wood, in which many leaves of
burning red and golden yellow still remained upon the trees.
Though
the earth was cold and wet, the sky was clear, and the sun rose bright, placid,
and beautiful. "Eighteen years!" said the passenger, looking at the
sun. "Gracious
Creator of day! To be buried alive for eighteen years!"
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