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Minasan oideyasu. This is Yukkuri demasu!
Changing the name from Souji to Sougé, and
Demon Lord Territory to Demon Lord Dominion.
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Author:
Charles Dickens(チャールズ・ジョン・ハファム・ディケンズ)
Translator:
NONE
Editor:
NONE
Enlightenment Arc
Chapter 5 As a Person F
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.
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, 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!”
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!”
Author:
Dozeumaru(どぜう丸)
Translator:
Yukkuri Oniisan
Editor:
Mehdi and Yukkuri
Discord Channel’s Members
Enlightenment Arc
Chapter 5 As a Person F
