Transcribed from the 1905 Chapman & Hall edition (TheWorks of Charles Dickens, volume 28) , email
To be Read at Dusk
By CHARLES DICKENS
LONDON: CHAPMAN & HALL, LD.
NEW YORK: CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
1905
One, two, three, four, five. There were five of them.
Five couriers, sitting on a bench outside the convent on thesummit of the Great St. Bernard in Switzerland, looking at theremote heights, stained by the setting sun as if a mightyquantity of red wine had been broached upon the mountain top, andhad not yet had time to sink into the snow.
This is not my simile. It was made for the occasion bythe stoutest courier, who was a German. None of the otherstook any more notice of it than they took of me, sitting onanother bench on the other side of the convent door, smoking mycigar, like them, and—also like them—looking at thereddened snow, and at the lonely shed hard by, where the bodiesof belated travellers, dug out of it, slowly wither away, knowingno corruption in that cold region.
The wine upon the mountain top soaked in as we looked; themountain became white; the sky, a very dark blue; the wind rose;and the air turned piercing cold. The five couriersbuttoned their rough coats. There being no safer man toimitate in all such proceedings than a courier, I buttonedmine.
The mountain in the sunset had stopped the five couriers in aconversation. It is a sublime sight, likely to stopconversation. The mountain being now out of the sunset,they resumed. Not that I had heard any part of theirprevious discourse; for indeed, I had not then broken away fromthe American gentleman, in the travellers’ parlour of theconvent, who, sitting with his face to the fire, had undertakento realise to me the whole progress of events which had led tothe accumulation by the Honourable Ananias Dodger of one of thelargest acquisitions of dollars ever made in our country.
‘My God!’ said the Swiss courier, speaking inFrench, which I do not hold (as some authors appear to do) to besuch an all-sufficient excuse for a naughty word, that I haveonly to write it in that language to make it innocent; ‘ifyou talk of ghosts—’
‘But I don’t talk of ghosts,’ saidthe German.
‘Of what then?’ asked the Swiss.
‘If I knew of what then,’ said the German,‘I should probably know a great deal more.’
It was a good answer, I thought, and it made me curious. So, I moved my position to that corner of my bench which wasnearest to them, and leaning my back against the convent wall,heard perfectly, without appearing to attend.
‘Thunder and lightning!’ said the German, warming,‘when a certain man is coming to see you, unexpectedly;and, without his own knowledge, sends some invisible messenger,to put the idea of him into your head all day, what do you callthat? When you walk along a crowded street—atFrankfort, Milan, London, Paris—and think that a passingstranger is like your friend Heinrich, and then that anotherpassing stranger is like your friend Heinrich, and so begin tohave a strange foreknowledge that presently you’ll meetyour friend Heinrich—which you do, though you believed himat Trieste—what do you call that?’
‘It’s not uncommon, either,’ murmured theSwiss and the other three.
‘Uncommon!’ said the German.