Multimedia Mania/abacus-multimedia-mania.iso/dp/0065/00655.txt

Text File | 1993-07-27 | 10KB | 200 lines

$Unique_ID{bob00655}
$Pretitle{}
$Title{(A) Tale Of Two Cities
Chapter III}
$Subtitle{}
$Author{Dickens, Charles}
$Affiliation{}
$Subject{night
passenger
dig
every
shadows
bank
buried
coach
upon
years}
$Date{}
$Log{}
Title:       (A) Tale Of Two Cities
Book:        Book The First: Recalled to Life
Author:      Dickens, Charles

Chapter 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 leeper 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 connexion, 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 fall 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!"