The Uncommercial Traveller | Page 9

this life I don't know when, and whose coaches are all
gone I don't know where; and I had come out again into the age of
railways, and I had got 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, 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 to hear the splash.'
According to my interpretation of these words, I was myself a General
Cove, or member of the miscellaneous public. In which modest
character I remarked:
'They are often taken out, are they, and restored?'
'I dunno about restored,' said the apparition, who, for some occult
reason, very much objected to that word; 'they're carried into the
werkiss and put into a 'ot bath, and brought round. But I dunno about
restored,'