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Updated: May 17, 2025
Theater façades making a jangle of light through the storm. Entrances, exits, cars clanging, figures hurrying, signs sputtering confusion in the snow. All familiar, all a part of the great tick-tock of the city. Hazlitt stopped and stared at the familiar night of the streets. A gleam and a flurry were sweeping his eyes. Snow. But faces and buildings and lights were a part of it.
Absolute silence reigned. The sudden arrival of the long-expected crisis was terrifying. They sat like statues, staring in front of them, and listening eagerly to every sound. The monotonous ticking of the clock on the mantelpiece was terrifying the clock on the wall by the door seemed to run a race. The "tick-tock" grew faster and faster at last it was as if both clocks were screaming aloud.
"Tell me, mother, how is Granny in health?" "She seems all right. When you went away that time with Sasha and the telegram came from you, Granny fell on the floor as she read it; for three days she lay without moving. After that she was always praying and crying. But now she is all right again." She got up and walked about the room. "Tick-tock," tapped the watchman. "Tick-tock, tick-tock. . . ."
When she had finished her work, wiped down the table, dusted the mantelpiece and put the plates on the high dresser close to the wooden clock with its loud tick-tock, she drew a long breath, as she felt rather oppressed, without exactly knowing why.
I didn't mean to " Miss Benton turned around her head to look up at me, and the others near us looked too, and down at the foot of the stairs the crowd packed in front of the bulletin board sort of quieted for a minute and seemed to be listening and watching us. And up on the wall over their heads the big clock went tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock, and its long pendulum swung to and fro.
The searchers gathered about the chest that had been pulled out of the heap of rubbish. It was ironbound and made of heavy planking. "It gets me!" murmured the officer. Just then the sound started again: "Tick-tock! Tick-tock! Tick-tock!" "It don't come from that box!" declared one man. Whistler stooped and put his hand on the cover. "Wait!" he said suddenly. "Just feel this, sir."
Somehow the work was terribly irksome to her, and the house looked so still and dim and lonesome, and the tick-tock of the kitchen-clock was insufferable, and Sally let her work fall in her lap and looked out of the open window, far to the open ocean, where a fresh breeze was blowing toward her, and her eyes grew deep and dreamy following the gliding ship sails. Sally was getting romantic.
Streets and windows, paintings of the Virgin Mary, beds of the fifty-cent prostitutes, cannon at Verdun and police whistles on crossings; the Pope in Rome, the President in Washington, the man hunting the alleys for a handout, the languorous women breeding in ornamental beds all say a tick-tock.
Behind the arrangements of words, confusion strikes a posture of guilt, strikes a posture of innocence. God Himself were a dolt to interfere. For if the song of the angels is somehow other than the tick-tock of men, the song of the angels is a music for heaven and the tick-tock of men is a restful drone in which the city hides the mysteries non-essential to the progress and pattern of its streets.
And that old clock" her voice sank to the tenderness of musing retrospect "why, Davie's father set it up the day we were married and came here and set up housekeeping and it's been ticking ever since. Davie used to say 'tick-tock' when he heard it, when he first learned to talk. I like that old clock most as much as if it were something alive.
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