Multimedia Mania/abacus-multimedia-mania.iso/dp/0063/00630.txt

Text File | 1993-07-27 | 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
at all!  Fell down so flat into the water, that he broke his breastbone, and
lived two days!"

     I asked Waterloo if there were a favourite side of his bridge for this
dreadful purpose?  He reflected, and thought yes, there was.  He should say
the Surrey side.

     Three decent looking men went through one day, soberly and quietly, and
went on abreast for about a dozen yards: when the middle one, he sung out, all
of a sudden, "Here goes, Jack!" and was over in a minute.

     Body found?  Well.  Waterloo didn't rightly recollect about that.  They
were compositors, they were.

     He considered it astonishing how quick people were!  Why there was a cab
came up one Boxing-night, with a young woman in it, who looked, according to
Waterloo's opinion of her, a little the worse for liquor; very handsome she
was too - very handsome.  She stopped the cab at the gate, and said she'd pay
the cabman then: which she did, though there was a little hankering about the
fare, because at first she didn't seem quite to know where she wanted to be
drove to.  However she paid the man, and the toll too, and looking Waterloo in
the face (he thought she knew him, don't you see!) said, "I'll finish it
somehow!" Well, the cab went off, leaving Waterloo a little doubtful in his
mind, and while it was going on at full speed the young woman jumped out,
never fell, hardly staggered, ran along the bridge pavement a little way,
passing several people, and jumped over from the second opening.  At the
inquest it was giv' in evidence that she had been quarrelling at the Hero of
Waterloo and it was brought in jealousy.  (One of the results of Waterloo's
experience was, that there was a deal of jealousy about.)

     "Do we ever get madmen?" said Waterloo, in answer to an inquiry of mine.
"Well, we do get madmen.  Yes, we have had one or two: escaped from 'Sylums, I
suppose.  One hadn't a halfpenny; and because I wouldn't let him through, he
went back a little way, stooped down, took a run, and butted at the hatch like
a ram.  He smashed his hat rarely, but his head didn't seem no worse - in my
opinion on account of his being wrong in it afore.  Sometimes people haven't
got a halfpenny.  If they are really tired and poor we give 'em one and let
'em through.  Other people will leave things - pocket-handkerchiefs mostly.  I
have taken cravats and gloves, pocket-knives, tooth-picks, studs, shirt pins,
rings (generally from young gents, early in the morning), but handkerchiefs is
the general thing."

     "Regular customers?" said Waterloo.  "Lord, yes!  We have regular
customers.  One, such a worn-out used-up old file as you can scarcely picter,
comes from the Surrey side as regular as ten o'clock at night comes; and goes
over, I think, to some flash house on the Middlesex side.  He comes back, he
does, as reg'lar as the clock strikes three in the morning, and then can
hardly drag one of his old legs after the other.  He always turns down the
water-stairs, comes up again, and then goes on down the Waterloo Road.  He
always does the same thing, and never varies a minute.  Does it every night -
even Sundays."

     I asked Waterloo if he had given his mind to the possibility of this
particular customer going down the water-stairs at three o'clock some morning,
and never coming up again?  He didn't think that of him, he replied. In fact,
it was Waterloo's opinion, founded on his observation of that file, that he
know'd a trick worth two of it.

     "There's another queer old customer," said Waterloo, "comes over, as
punctual as the almanack, at eleven o'clock on the sixth of January, at eleven
o'clock on the fifth of April, at eleven o'clock on the sixth of July, at
eleven o'clock on the tenth of October.  Drives a shaggy little rough pony, in
a sort of a rattle-trap arm-chair sort of a thing.  White hair he has, and
white whiskers, and muffles himself up with all manner of shawls. He comes
back again the same afternoon, and we never see more of him for three months.
He is a captain in the navy - retired - wery old - wery odd - and served with
Lord Nelson.  He is particular about drawing his pension at Somerset House
afore the clock strikes twelve every quarter.  I have heerd say that he thinks
it wouldn't be according to the Act of Parliament, if he didn't draw it afore
twelve."

     Having related these anecdotes in a natural manner, which was the best
warranty in the world for their genuine nature, our friend Waterloo was
sinking deep into his shawl again, as having exhausted his communicative
powers and taken in enough east wind, when my other friend Pea in a moment
brought him to the surface by asking whether he had not been occasionally the
subject of assault and battery in the execution of his duty?  Waterloo
recovering his spirits, instantly dashed into a new branch of his subject. We
learnt how "both these teeth" - here he pointed to the places where two front
teeth were not - were knocked out by an ugly customer who one night made a
dash at him (Waterloo) while his (the ugly customer's) pal and coadjutor made
a dash at the toll-taking apron where the money pockets were; how Waterloo,
letting the teeth go (to Blazes, he observed indefinitely) grappled with the
apron-seizer, permitting the ugly one to run away; and how he saved the bank,
and captured his man, and consigned him to fine and imprisonment.  Also how,
on another night, "a Cove" laid hold of Waterloo, then presiding at the horse
gate of his bridge, and threw him unceremoniously over his knee, having first
cut his head open with his whip.  How Waterloo "got right," and started after
the Cove all down the Waterloo Road, through Stamford Street, and round to the
foot of Blackfriar's Bridge, where the Cove "cut into" a public house.  How
Waterloo cut in too; but how an aider and abettor of the Cove's, who happened
to be taking a promiscuous drain at the bar stopped Waterloo; and the Cove cut
out again, ran across the road down Holland Street, and where not, and into a
beer shop.  How Waterloo breaking away from his detainer was close upon the
Cove's heels, attended by no end of people who, seeing him running with the
blood streaming down his face, thought something worse was "up," and roared
Fire!  and Murder!  on the hopeful chance of the matter in hand being one or
both.  How the Cove was ignominiously taken, in a shed where he had run to
hide, and how at the Police Court they at first wanted to make a sessions job
of it; but eventually Waterloo was allowed to be "spoke to," and the Cove made
it square with Waterloo by paying his doctor's bill (W. was laid up for a
week) and giving him "Three, ten." Likewise we learnt what we had faintly
suspected before, that your sporting amateur on the Derby day, albeit a
captain, can be - "if he be," as Captain Bobadil observes, "so generously
minded" - anything but a man of honour and a gentleman; not sufficiently
gratifying his nice sense of humour by the witty scatterings of flour and
rotten eggs on obtuse civilians, but requiring the further excitement of
"bilking the toll," and "pitching into" Waterloo, and "cutting him about the
head with his whip;" finally being, when called upon to answer for the
assault, what Waterloo described as "Minus," or, as I humbly conceived it, not
to be found. Likewise did Waterloo inform us, in reply to my inquiries,
admiringly and deferentially preferred through my friend Pea, that the takings
at the Bridge had more than doubled in amount, since the reduction of the toll
one half. And being asked if the aforesaid takings included much bad money,
Waterloo responded, with a look far deeper than the deepest part of the river,
he should think not! - and so retired into his shawl for the rest of the
night.

     Then did Pea and I once more embark in our four-oared galley, and glide
swiftly down the river with the tide.  And while the shrewd East rasped and
notched us, as with jagged razors, did my friend Pea impart to me confidences
of interest relating to the Thames Police: we between whiles finding "duty
boats" hanging in dark corners under banks, like reeds - our own was a
"supervision boat" - and they, as they reported "all right!" flashing their
hidden light on us, and we flashing ours on them.  These duty boats had one
sitter in each: an Inspector: and were rowed "Ran-dan," which - for the
information of those who never graduated, as I was once proud to do, under a
fireman-waterman and winner of Kean's Prize Wherry: who, in the course of his
tuition, took hundreds of gallons of rum and egg (at my expense) at the
various houses of note above and below bridge; not by any means because he
liked it, but to cure a weakness in his liver, for which the faculty had
particularly recommended it - may be explained as rowed by three men, two
pulling an oar each, and one a pair of sculls.

     Thus, floating down our black highway, sullenly frowned upon by the
knitted brows of Blackfriars, Southwark, and London, each in his lowering
turn, I was shown by my friend Pea that there are, in the Thames Police Force,
whose district extends from Battersea to Barking Creek, ninety-eight men,
eight duty boats, and two supervision boats; and that these go about so
silently, and lie in wait in such dark places, and so seem to be nowhere, and
so may be anywhere, that they have gradually become a police of prevention,
keeping the river almost clear of any great crimes, even while the increased
vigilance on shore has made it much harder than of yore to live by "thieving"
in the streets.  And as to the various kinds of water thieves, said my friend
Pea, there were the Tier-rangers, who silently dropped alongside the tiers of
shipping in the Pool, by night, and who, going to the companion-head, listened
for two snores - snore number one, the skipper's; snore number two, the mate's
- mates and skippers always snoring great guns, and being dead sure to be hard
at it if they had turned in and were asleep.  Hearing the double fire, down
went the Rangers into the skippers' cabins; groped for the skippers'
inexpressibles, which it was the custom of those gentlemen to shake off,
watch, money, braces, boots, and all together, on the floor; and therewith
made off as silently as might be.  Then there were the Lumpers, or labourers
employed to unload vessels.  They wore loose canvas jackets with a broad hem
in the bottom, turned inside, so as to form a large circular pocket in which
they could conceal, like clowns in pantomimes, packages of surprising sizes.
A great deal of property was stolen in this manner (Pea confided to me) from
steamers; first, because steamers carry a larger number of small packages than
other ships; next, because of the extreme rapidity with which they are obliged
to be unladen for their return voyages.  The Lumpers dispose of their booty
easily to marine store dealers, and the only remedy to be suggested is that
the marine store shops should be licensed, and thus brought under the eye of
the police as rigidly as public-houses. Lumpers also smuggle goods ashore for
the crews of vessels.  The smuggling of tobacco is so considerable, that it is
well worth the while of the sellers of smuggled tobacco to use hydraulic
presses, to squeeze a single pound into a package small enough to be contained
in an ordinary pocket.  Next, said my friend Pea, there were the Truckers -
less thieves than smugglers, whose business it was to land more considerable
parcels of goods than the Lumpers could manage.  They sometimes sold articles
of grocery, and so forth, to the crews, in order to cloak their real calling,
and get aboard without suspicion.  Many of them had boats of their own, and
made money.  Besides these, there were the Dredgermen, who, under pretence of
dredging up coals and such like from the bottom of the river, hung about
barges and other undecked craft, and when they saw an opportunity, threw any
property they could lay their hands on overboard; in order slyly to dredge it
up when the vessel was gone.  Sometimes, they dexterously used their dredges
to whip away anything that might lie within reach.  Some of them were mighty
neat at this, and the accomplishment was called dry dredging.  Then, there was
a vast deal of property, such as copper nails, sheathing, hard-wood, &c.,
habitually brought away by shipwrights and other workmen from their employers'
yards, and disposed of to marine store dealers, many of whom escaped detection
through hard swearing, and their extraordinary artful ways of accounting for
the possession of stolen property.  Like-wise, there were special - pleading
practitioners, for whom barges "drifted away of their own selves" - they
having no hand in it, except first cutting them loose, and afterwards
plundering them - innocents, meaning no harm, who had the misfortune to
observe those foundlings wandering about the Thames.

     We were now going in and out, with little noise and great nicety, among
the tiers and shipping, whose many hulls, lying close together, rose out of
the water like black streets.  Here and there, a Scotch, an Irish, or a
foreign steamer, getting up her steam as the tide made, looked, with her great
chimney and high sides, like a quiet factory among the common buildings.  Now,
the streets opened into clearer spaces, now contracted into alleys; but the
tiers were so like houses, in the dark, that I could almost have believed
myself in the narrower bye-ways of Venice.  Everything was wonderfully still;
for, it wanted full three hours of flood, and nothing seemed awake but a dog
here and there.

     So we took no Tier-rangers captive, nor any Lumpers, nor Truckers, nor
Dredgermen, nor other evil-disposed person or persons; but went ashore at
Wapping, where the old Thames Police office is now a station-house, and where
the old Court, with its cabin windows looking on the river, is a quaint charge
room: with nothing worse in it usually than a stuffed cat in a glass case, and
a portrait, pleasant to behold, of a rare old Thames Police officer, Mr.
Superintendent Evans, now succeeded by his son.  We looked over the charge
books, admirably kept, and found the prevention so good, that there were not
five hundred entries (including drunken and disorderly) in a whole year.
Then, we looked into the store-room; where there was an oakum smell, and a
nautical seasoning of dreadnaught clothing, rope yarn, boat hooks, sculls and
oars, spare stretchers, rudders, pistols, cutlasses, and the like.  Then, into
the cell, aired high up in the wooden wall through an opening like a kitchen
plate-rack: wherein there was a drunken man, not at all warm, and very wishful
to know if it were morning yet.  Then, into a better sort of watch and ward
room, where there was a squadron of stone bottles drawn up, ready to be filled
with hot water and applied to any unfortunate creature who might be brought in
apparently drowned.  Finally we shook hands with our worthy friend Pea, and
ran all the way to Tower Hill, under strong Police suspicion occasionally,
before we got warm.