A Tale of Two Cities

A Sight

“You know the Old Bailey, well, no doubt?” said one of the oldest of clerks to Jerry the messenger.

“Ye-es, sir,” returned Jerry, in something of a dogged manner.  “I do know the Bailey.”

“Just so.  And you know Mr. Lorry.”

“I know Mr. Lorry, sir, much better than I know the Bailey.  Much better,” said Jerry, not unlike a reluctant witness at the establishment in question, “than I, as a honest tradesman, wish to know the Bailey.”

“Very well.  Find the door where the witnesses go in, and show the door-keeper this note for Mr. Lorry.  He will then let you in.”

“Into the court, sir?”

“Into the court.”

Mr. Cruncher’s eyes seemed to get a little closer to one another, and to interchange the inquiry, “What do you think of this?”

“Am I to wait in the court, sir?” he asked, as the result of that conference.

“I am going to tell you.  The door-keeper will pass the note to Mr. Lorry, and do you make any gesture that will attract Mr. Lorry’s attention, and show him where you stand.  Then what you have to do, is, to remain there until he wants you.”

“Is that all, sir?”

“That’s all.  He wishes to have a messenger at hand.  This is to tell him you are there.”

As the ancient clerk deliberately folded and superscribed the note, Mr. Cruncher, after surveying him in silence until he came to the blotting-paper stage, remarked: 

“I suppose they’ll be trying Forgeries this morning?”

“Treason!”

“That’s quartering,” said Jerry.  “Barbarous!”

“It is the law,” remarked the ancient clerk, turning his surprised spectacles upon him.  “It is the law.”

“It’s hard in the law to spile a man, I think.  Ifs hard enough to kill him, but it’s wery hard to spile him, sir.”

“Not at all,” retained the ancient clerk.  “Speak well of the law.  Take care of your chest and voice, my good friend, and leave the law to take care of itself.  I give you that advice.”

“It’s the damp, sir, what settles on my chest and voice,” said Jerry.  “I leave you to judge what a damp way of earning a living mine is.”

“Well, well,” said the old clerk; “we all have our various ways of gaining a livelihood.  Some of us have damp ways, and some of us have dry ways.  Here is the letter.  Go along.”

Jerry took the letter, and, remarking to himself with less internal deference than he made an outward show of, “You are a lean old one, too,” made his bow, informed his son, in passing, of his destination, and went his way.

They hanged at Tyburn, in those days, so the street outside Newgate had not obtained one infamous notoriety that has since attached to it.  But, the gaol was a vile place, in which most kinds of debauchery and villainy were practised, and where dire diseases were bred, that came into court with the prisoners, and sometimes rushed straight from the dock at my Lord Chief Justice himself, and pulled him off the bench.  It had more than once happened, that the Judge in the black cap pronounced his own doom as certainly as the prisoner’s, and even died before him.  For the rest, the Old Bailey was famous as a kind of deadly inn-yard, from which pale travellers set out continually, in carts and coaches, on a violent passage into the other world:  traversing some two miles and a half of public street and road, and shaming few good citizens, if any.  So powerful is use, and so desirable to be good use in the beginning.  It was famous, too, for the pillory, a wise old institution, that inflicted a punishment of which no one could foresee the extent; also, for the whipping-post, another dear old institution, very humanising and softening to behold in action; also, for extensive transactions in blood-money, another fragment of ancestral wisdom, systematically leading to the most frightful mercenary crimes that could be committed under Heaven.  Altogether, the Old Bailey, at that date, was a choice illustration of the precept, that “Whatever is is right;” an aphorism that would be as final as it is lazy, did it not include the troublesome consequence, that nothing that ever was, was wrong.

Making his way through the tainted crowd, dispersed up and down this hideous scene of action, with the skill of a man accustomed to make his way quietly, the messenger found out the door he sought, and handed in his letter through a trap in it.  For, people then paid to see the play at the Old Bailey, just as they paid to see the play in Bedlam—­only the former entertainment was much the dearer.  Therefore, all the Old Bailey doors were well guarded—­except, indeed, the social doors by which the criminals got there, and those were always left wide open.

After some delay and demur, the door grudgingly turned on its hinges a very little way, and allowed Mr. Jerry Cruncher to squeeze himself into court.

“What’s on?” he asked, in a whisper, of the man he found himself next to.

“Nothing yet.”

“What’s coming on?”

“The Treason case.”

“The quartering one, eh?”

“Ah!” returned the man, with a relish; “he’ll be drawn on a hurdle to be half hanged, and then he’ll be taken down and sliced before his own face, and then his inside will be taken out and burnt while he looks on, and then his head will be chopped off, and he’ll be cut into quarters.  That’s the sentence.”

“If he’s found Guilty, you mean to say?” Jerry added, by way of proviso.

“Oh! they’ll find him guilty,” said the other.  “Don’t you be afraid of that.”

Mr. Cruncher’s attention was here diverted to the door-keeper, whom he saw making his way to Mr. Lorry, with the note in his hand.  Mr. Lorry sat at a table, among the gentlemen in wigs:  not far from a wigged gentleman, the prisoner’s counsel, who had a great bundle of papers before him:  and nearly opposite another wigged gentleman with his hands in his pockets, whose whole attention, when Mr. Cruncher looked at him then or afterwards, seemed to be concentrated on the ceiling of the court.  After some gruff coughing and rubbing of his chin and signing with his hand, Jerry attracted the notice of Mr. Lorry, who had stood up to look for him, and who quietly nodded and sat down again.

“What’s he got to do with the case?” asked the man he had spoken with.

“Blest if I know,” said Jerry.

“What have you got to do with it, then, if a person may inquire?”

“Blest if I know that either,” said Jerry.

The entrance of the Judge, and a consequent great stir and settling down in the court, stopped the dialogue.  Presently, the dock became the central point of interest.  Two gaolers, who had been standing there, went out, and the prisoner was brought in, and put to the bar.

Everybody present, except the one wigged gentleman who looked at the ceiling, stared at him.  All the human breath in the place, rolled at him, like a sea, or a wind, or a fire.  Eager faces strained round pillars and corners, to get a sight of him; spectators in back rows stood up, not to miss a hair of him; people on the floor of the court, laid their hands on the shoulders of the people before them, to help themselves, at anybody’s cost, to a view of him—­stood a-tiptoe, got upon ledges, stood upon next to nothing, to see every inch of him.  Conspicuous among these latter, like an animated bit of the spiked wall of Newgate, Jerry stood:  aiming at the prisoner the beery breath of a whet he had taken as he came along, and discharging it to mingle with the waves of other beer, and gin, and tea, and coffee, and what not, that flowed at him, and already broke upon the great windows behind him in an impure mist and rain.

The object of all this staring and blaring, was a young man of about five-and-twenty, well-grown and well-looking, with a sunburnt cheek and a dark eye.  His condition was that of a young gentleman.  He was plainly dressed in black, or very dark grey, and his hair, which was long and dark, was gathered in a ribbon at the back of his neck; more to be out of his way than for ornament.  As an emotion of the mind will express itself through any covering of the body, so the paleness which his situation engendered came through the brown upon his cheek, showing the soul to be stronger than the sun.  He was otherwise quite self-possessed, bowed to the Judge, and stood quiet.

The sort of interest with which this man was stared and breathed at, was not a sort that elevated humanity.  Had he stood in peril of a less horrible sentence—­had there been a chance of any one of its savage details being spared—­by just so much would he have lost in his fascination.  The form that was to be doomed to be so shamefully mangled, was the sight; the immortal creature that was to be so butchered and torn asunder, yielded the sensation.  Whatever gloss the various spectators put upon the interest, according to their several arts and powers of self-deceit, the interest was, at the root of it, Ogreish.

Silence in the court!  Charles Darnay had yesterday pleaded Not Guilty to an indictment denouncing him (with infinite jingle and jangle) for that he was a false traitor to our serene, illustrious, excellent, and so forth, prince, our Lord the King, by reason of his having, on divers occasions, and by divers means and ways, assisted Lewis, the French King, in his wars against our said serene, illustrious, excellent, and so forth; that was to say, by coming and going, between the dominions of our said serene, illustrious, excellent, and so forth, and those of the said French Lewis, and wickedly, falsely, traitorously, and otherwise evil-adverbiously, revealing to the said French Lewis what forces our said serene, illustrious, excellent, and so forth, had in preparation to send to Canada and North America.  This much, Jerry, with his head becoming more and more spiky as the law terms bristled it, made out with huge satisfaction, and so arrived circuitously at the understanding that the aforesaid, and over and over again aforesaid, Charles Darnay, stood there before him upon his trial; that the jury were swearing in; and that Mr. Attorney-General was making ready to speak.

The accused, who was (and who knew he was) being mentally hanged, beheaded, and quartered, by everybody there, neither flinched from the situation, nor assumed any theatrical air in it.  He was quiet and attentive; watched the opening proceedings with a grave interest; and stood with his hands resting on the slab of wood before him, so composedly, that they had not displaced a leaf of the herbs with which it was strewn.  The court was all bestrewn with herbs and sprinkled with vinegar, as a precaution against gaol air and gaol fever.

Over the prisoner’s head there was a mirror, to throw the light down upon him.  Crowds of the wicked and the wretched had been reflected in it, and had passed from its surface and this earth’s together.  Haunted in a most ghastly manner that abominable place would have been, if the glass could ever have rendered back its reflections, as the ocean is one day to give up its dead.  Some passing thought of the infamy and disgrace for which it had been reserved, may have struck the prisoner’s mind.  Be that as it may, a change in his position making him conscious of a bar of light across his face, he looked up; and when he saw the glass his face flushed, and his right hand pushed the herbs away.

It happened, that the action turned his face to that side of the court which was on his left.  About on a level with his eyes, there sat, in that corner of the Judge’s bench, two persons upon whom his look immediately rested; so immediately, and so much to the changing of his aspect, that all the eyes that were turned upon him, turned to them.

The spectators saw in the two figures, a young lady of little more than twenty, and a gentleman who was evidently her father; a man of a very remarkable appearance in respect of the absolute whiteness of his hair, and a certain indescribable intensity of face:  not of an active kind, but pondering and self-communing.  When this expression was upon him, he looked as if he were old; but when it was stirred and broken up—­as it was now, in a moment, on his speaking to his daughter—­he became a handsome man, not past the prime of life.

His daughter had one of her hands drawn through his arm, as she sat by him, and the other pressed upon it.  She had drawn close to him, in her dread of the scene, and in her pity for the prisoner.  Her forehead had been strikingly expressive of an engrossing terror and compassion that saw nothing but the peril of the accused.  This had been so very noticeable, so very powerfully and naturally shown, that starers who had had no pity for him were touched by her; and the whisper went about, “Who are they?”

Jerry, the messenger, who had made his own observations, in his own manner, and who had been sucking the rust off his fingers in his absorption, stretched his neck to hear who they were.  The crowd about him had pressed and passed the inquiry on to the nearest attendant, and from him it had been more slowly pressed and passed back; at last it got to Jerry: 

“Witnesses.”

“For which side?”

“Against.”

“Against what side?”

“The prisoner’s.”

The Judge, whose eyes had gone in the general direction, recalled them, leaned back in his seat, and looked steadily at the man whose life was in his hand, as Mr. Attorney-General rose to spin the rope, grind the axe, and hammer the nails into the scaffold.