Down with the Tide

"Down with the Tide" is not a known work by Charles Dickens. It is possible that you may be confusing the title with another work by Dickens or that it is a lesser-known story. Charles Dickens is renowned for novels such as "A Tale of Two Cities," "Great Expectations," and "Oliver Twist," which explore themes of social injustice, hardship, and the complexities of human nature. If you have a specific work in mind or need information on a particular aspect of Dickens's literature, feel free to ask!

• Short story

								
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 Saone; and the St. Lawrence, 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 teasing 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, lying on our oars in the
deep shadow of Southwark Bridge—under the corner arch on 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 rowlocks.  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 a going 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

								Rate this book:0.0 / 0 votes