The Best of the Bureau/The_Best_of_the_Bureau_Bureau_Development_Inc._1992.iso/dp/0063/00630.txt

Text File | 1992-08-07 | 23KB | 376 lines

$Unique_ID{bob00630}
$Pretitle{}
$Title{Anthology Of Shorter Works
Down With The Tide}
$Subtitle{}
$Author{Dickens, Charles}
$Affiliation{}
$Subject{waterloo
pea
black
bridge
how
like
friend
night
police
upon}
$Date{}
$Log{}
Title:       Anthology Of Shorter Works
Book:        Down With The Tide
Author:      Dickens, Charles

Down With The Tide

     A very dark night it was, and bitter cold; the east wind blowing bleak,
and bringing with it stinging particles from marsh, and moor, and fen - from
the Great Desert and Old Egypt, may be.  Some of the component parts of the
sharp-edged vapour that came flying up the Thames at London might be
mummy-dust, dry atoms from the Temple at Jerusalem, camels' foot-prints,
crocodiles' hatching places, loosened grains of expression from the visages of
blunt-nosed sphynxes, waifs and strays from caravans of turbaned merchants,
vegetation from jungles, frozen snow from the Himalayas. - O!  It was very
very dark upon the Thames, and it was bitter bitter cold.

     "And yet," said the voice within the great pea-coat at my side, "you'll
have seen a good many rivers too, I dare say?"

     "Truly," said I, "when I come to think of it, not a few.  From the
Niagara, downward to the mountain rivers of Italy, which are like the national
spirit - very tame, or chafing suddenly and bursting bounds, only to dwindle
away again.  The Moselle, and the Rhine, and the Rhone; and the Seine, and the
Seine, and the St. Lawrence, and Mississippi, and Ohio; and the Tiber, the Po,
and the Arno; and the -"

     Peacoat coughing, as if he had had enough of that, I said no more.  I
could have carried the catalogue on to a teazing length, though, if I had been
in the cruel mind.

     "And after all," said he, "this looks so dismal?"

     "So awful," I returned, "at night.  The Seine at Paris is very gloomy
too, at such a time, and is probably the scene of far more crime and greater
wickedness; but this river looks so broad and vast, so murky and silent, seems
such an image of death in the midst of the great city's life, that -"

     That Peacoat coughed again.  He could not stand my holding forth.

     We were in a four-oared Thames Police Galley, lyingon our oars in the
deep shadow of Southwark Bridge - under the corner arch of the Surrey side -
having come down with the tide from Vauxhall.  We were fain to hold on pretty
tight though close in shore, for the river was swollen, and the tide running
down very strong.  We were watching certain water-rats of human growth, and
lay in the deep shade as quiet as mice; our light hidden and our scraps of
conversation carried on in whispers.  Above us the massive iron girders of the
arch were faintly visible, and below us its ponderous shadow seemed to sink
down to the bottom of the stream.

     We had been lying here some half an hour.  With our backs to the wind, it
is true; but the wind being in a determined temper blew straight through us,
and would not take the trouble to go round.  I would have boarded a fireship
to get into action, and mildly suggested as much to my friend Pea.

     "No doubt," says he as patiently as possible; "but shore-going tactics
wouldn't do with us.  River thieves can always get rid of stolen property in a
moment by dropping it overboard.  We want to take them with the property, so
we lurk about and come out upon 'em sharp.  If they see us or hear us over it
goes."

     Pea's wisdom being indisputable, there was nothing for it but to sit
there and be blown through, for another half hour.  The water-rats thinking it
wise to abscond at the end of that time without commission of felony, we shot
out, disappointed, with the tide.

     "Grim they look, don't they?" said Pea, seeing me glance over my shoulder
at the lights upon the bridge, and downward at their long crooked reflections
in the river.

     "Very," said I, "and make one think with a shudder of Suicides.  What a
night for a dreadful leap from that parapet!"

     "Aye, but Waterloo's the favourite bridge for making holes in the water
from," returned Pea.  "By the bye - avast pulling lads! - would you like to
speak to Waterloo on the subject?"

     My face confessing a surprised desire to have some friendly conversation
with Waterloo Bridge, and my friend Pea being the most obliging of men, we put
about, pulled out of the force of the stream, and in place of going at great
speed with the tide began to strive against it, close in shore again. Every
colour but black seemed to have departed from the world.  The air was black,
the water was black, the barges and hulks were black, the piles were black,
the buildings were black, the shadows were only a deeper shade of black upon a
black ground.  Here and there, a coal fire in an iron cresset blazed upon a
wharf; but, one knew that it too had been black a little while ago, and would
be black again soon.  Uncomfortable rushes of water, suggestive of gurgling
and drowning, ghostly rattlings of iron chains, dismal clankings of discordant
engines, formed the music that accompanied the dip of our oars and their
rattling in the rullocks.  Even the noises had a black sound to me - as the
trumpet sounded red to the blind man.

     Our dexterous boat's crew made nothing of the tide, and pulled us
gallantly up to Waterloo Bridge.  Here Pea and I disembarked, passed under the
black stone archway, and climbed the steep stone steps.  Within a few feet of
their summit, Pea presented me to Waterloo (or an eminent toll-taker
representing that structure), muffled up to the eyes in a thick shawl, and
amply great-coated and fur-capped.

     Waterloo received us with cordiality, and observed of the night that it
was "a Searcher." He had been originally called the Strand Bridge, he informed
us, but had received his present name at the suggestion of the proprietors,
when Parliament had resolved to vote three hundred thousand pound for the
erection of a monument in honour of the victory, Parliament took the hint
(said Waterloo, with the least flavour of misanthropy) and saved the money.
Of course the late Duke of Wellington was the first passenger, and of course
he paid his penny, and of course a noble lord preserved it evermore.  The
treadle and index at the toll-house (a most ingenious contrivance for
rendering fraud impossible), were invented by Mr. Lethbridge, then
property-man at Drury Lane Theatre.

     Was it suicide, we wanted to know about?  said Waterloo.  Ha!  Well, he
had seen a good deal of that work, he did assure us.  He had prevented some.
Why, one day a woman, poorish looking, came in between the hatch, slapped down
a penny and wanted to go on without the change!  Waterloo suspected this, and
says to his mate, "Give an eye to the gate," and bolted after her. She had got
to the third seat between the piers, and was on the parapet just agoing over,
when he caught her and gave her in charge.  At the police office next morning,
she said it was along of trouble and a bad husband.

     "Likely enough," observed Waterloo to Pea and myself, as he adjusted his
chin in his shawl.  "There's a deal of trouble about, you see - and bad
husbands too!"

     Another time, a young woman at twelve o'clock in the open day, got
through, darted along; and, before Waterloo could come near her, jumped upon
the parapet, and shot herself over sideways.  Alarm given, watermen put off,
lucky escape.  - Clothes buoyed her up.

     "This is where it is," said Waterloo.  "If people jump off straight
forwards from the middle of the parapet of the bays of the bridge, they are
seldom killed by drowning, but are smashed, poor things; that's what they are;
they dash themselves upon the buttress of the bridge.  But, you jump off,"
said Waterloo to me, putting his forefinger in a button hole of my great coat;
"you jump off from the side of the bay, and you'll tumble, true, into the
stream under the arch.  What you have got to do, is to mind how you jump in!
There was poor Tom Steele from Dublin.  Didn't dive!  Bless you, didn't dive