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
breast-bone, 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
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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 waterstairs,
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