past Whitechapel Church, and was – rather inappropriately for an
Uncommercial Traveller – in the Commercial Road. Pleasantly
wallowing in the abundant mud of that thoroughfare, and greatly
enjoying the huge piles of building belonging to the sugar
refiners, the little masts and vanes in small back gardens in back
streets, the neighbouring canals and docks, the India vans
lumbering along their stone tramway, and the pawnbrokers’ shops
where hard-up Mates had pawned so many sextants and quadrants, that
I should have bought a few cheap if I had the least notion how to
use them, I at last began to file off to the right, towards
Wapping.
Not that I intended to take boat at Wapping Old Stairs, or that I
was going to look at the locality, because I believe (for I don’t)
in the constancy of the young woman who told her sea-going lover,
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Dickens, Charles – The Uncommercial Traveller
to such a beautiful old tune, that she had ever continued the same,
since she gave him the ‘baccer-box marked with his name; I am
afraid he usually got the worst of those transactions, and was
frightfully taken in. No, I was going to Wapping, because an
Eastern police magistrate had said, through the morning papers,
that there was no classification at the Wapping workhouse for
women, and that it was a disgrace and a shame, and divers other
hard names, and because I wished to see how the fact really stood.
For, that Eastern police magistrates are not always the wisest men
of the East, may be inferred from their course of procedure
respecting the fancy-dressing and pantomime-posturing at St.
George’s in that quarter: which is usually, to discuss the matter
at issue, in a state of mind betokening the weakest perplexity,
with all parties concerned and unconcerned, and, for a final
expedient, to consult the complainant as to what he thinks ought to
be done with the defendant, and take the defendant’s opinion as to
what he would recommend to be done with himself.
Long before I reached Wapping, I gave myself up as having lost my
way, and, abandoning myself to the narrow streets in a Turkish
frame of mind, relied on predestination to bring me somehow or
other to the place I wanted if I were ever to get there. When I
had ceased for an hour or so to take any trouble about the matter,
I found myself on a swing-bridge looking down at some dark locks in
some dirty water. Over against me, stood a creature remotely in
the likeness of a young man, with a puffed sallow face, and a
figure all dirty and shiny and slimy, who may have been the
youngest son of his filthy old father, Thames, or the drowned man
about whom there was a placard on the granite post like a large
thimble, that stood between us.
I asked this apparition what it called the place? Unto which, it
replied, with a ghastly grin and a sound like gurgling water in its
throat:
‘Mr. Baker’s trap.’
As it is a point of great sensitiveness with me on such occasions
to be equal to the intellectual pressure of the conversation, I
deeply considered the meaning of this speech, while I eyed the
apparition – then engaged in hugging and sucking a horizontal iron
bar at the top of the locks. Inspiration suggested to me that Mr.
Baker was the acting coroner of that neighbourhood.
‘A common place for suicide,’ said I, looking down at the locks.
‘Sue?’ returned the ghost, with a stare. ‘Yes! And Poll.
Likewise Emily. And Nancy. And Jane;’ he sucked the iron between
each name; ‘and all the bileing. Ketches off their bonnets or
shorls, takes a run, and headers down here, they doos. Always a
headerin’ down here, they is. Like one o’clock.’
‘And at about that hour of the morning, I suppose?’
‘Ah!’ said the apparition. ‘THEY an’t partickler. Two ‘ull do for
THEM. Three. All times o’ night. On’y mind you!’ Here the
apparition rested his profile on the bar, and gurgled in a
sarcastic manner. ‘There must be somebody comin’. They don’t go a
headerin’ down here, wen there an’t no Bobby nor gen’ral Cove, fur