Aethlos — A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens — Spencer Lord’s Weltanschauung

A Tale of Two Cities

by Charles Dickens

CONTENTS

Book the First--Recalled to Life

Chapter I The Period

Chapter II The Mail

Chapter III The Night Shadows

Chapter IV The Preparation

Chapter V The Wine-shop

Chapter VI The Shoemaker

Book the Second--the Golden Thread

Chapter I Five Years Later

Chapter II A Sight

Chapter III A Disappointment

Chapter IV Congratulatory

Chapter V The Jackal

Chapter VI Hundreds of People

Chapter VII Monseigneur in Town

Chapter VIII Monseigneur in the Country

Chapter IX The Gorgon's Head

Chapter X Two Promises

Chapter XI A Companion Picture

Chapter XII The Fellow of Delicacy

Chapter XIII The Fellow of no Delicacy

Chapter XIV The Honest Tradesman

Chapter XV Knitting

Chapter XVI Still Knitting

Chapter XVII One Night

Chapter XVIII Nine Days

Chapter XIX An Opinion

Chapter XX A Plea

Chapter XXI Echoing Footsteps

Chapter XXII The Sea Still Rises

Chapter XXIII Fire Rises

Chapter XXIV Drawn to the Loadstone Rock

Book the Third--the Track of a Storm

Chapter I In Secret

Chapter II The Grindstone

Chapter III The Shadow

Chapter IV Calm in Storm

Chapter V The Wood-sawyer

Chapter VI Triumph

Chapter VII A Knock at the Door

Chapter VIII A Hand at Cards

Chapter IX The Game Made

Chapter X The Substance of the Shadow

Chapter XI Dusk

Chapter XII Darkness

Chapter XIII Fifty-two

Chapter XIV The Knitting Done

Chapter XV The Footsteps Die Out For Ever

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 mail 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 mail 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 king's 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 remained 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,