Chapter Three of A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens: 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,
forever and forever, 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 neighbor 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 color 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 downhill 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 honored 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 someone 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 color, 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 plowed land, with a plow 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!”
End of chapter three.