I thought so. I knew how it would end. A row, of course. That big Postillon de Longjumeau has borne it with admirable temper for hours; but the conduct of the Charles the Second Cavalier has been beyond human forbearance. She—the cavalier is a she—has incited the Pierrot (an Englishman, for a wonder, and hopelessly gone in champagne) to knock the postilion down. He wept piteously at first, but, gathering courage, and not liking, perhaps, to be humiliated in the eyes of a débardeur in claret-coloured velvet, he kicked up wildly at the aggressor with his boots. Then the cavalier scratched his face; then the claret-coloured débardeur fainted; then Mr. Edward Clyfaker, of Charles Street, Drury Lane, thief, cut in cleverly from between the wheels of a carriage, and picked Lord Holloway’s pocket of Miss Claypainter’s cambric handkerchief; then A 22 drew his truncheon and hit an inoffensive fox-hunter a violent blow on the head; then four medical students called out “Fire!” and an inebriated costermonger, who had not been to the masquerade at all, but was quietly reeling home, challenged Lord Claude Miffin to single combat; then Ned Raggabones and Robin Barelegs, street Arabs, threw “cart-wheels” into the midst of the throng; then the police came down in great force, and, after knocking a great many people about who were not in the slightest degree implicated in the disturbance, at last pitched upon the right parties, and bore the pugnacious Pierrot and the disorderly Cavalier off to the station-house. It is but due to the managers of the masquerade to state, that no such scandalous melées take place within the precincts of the theatre itself. The masters of the ceremonies and the police on duty take care of that: but such little accidents will happen, outside, after the best-regulated masquerades.
THREE O’CLOCK A.M.: THE NIGHT CHARGES AT BOW STREET.
To the station-house, then, to the abode of captivity and the hall of justice. The complaining postilion and his friends, accompanied by a motley procession of tag-rag and bob-tail, press triumphantly forward. Shall we follow also?
In a commodious gas-lit box, surrounded by books and papers, and with a mighty folio of loose leaves open before him—a book of Fate, in truth—sits a Rhadamanthine man, buttoned up in a great-coat often; for be it blazing July or frigid December, it is always cold at three o’clock in the morning. Not a very pleasant duty his: sitting through the long night before that folio, smoking prohibited, warm alcoholic liquids only, I should suppose, to be surreptitiously indulged in: sitting only diversified by an occasional sally into the night air, to visit the policemen on their various beats, and learn what wicked deeds are doing this night and morning—a deputy taking charge of the folio meanwhile. Duty perhaps as onerous as that of the Speaker of the House of Commons: but, ah! not half so wearisome. For the Rhadamanthine man in the great-coat has betimes to listen to tales of awful murder, of desperate burglaries, of harrowing suicides, of poverty and misery that make your soul to shudder and your heart to grow sick; and sometimes to more jocund narratives—harum-scarum escapades, drunken freaks, impudent tricks, ingenious swindles, absurd jealousy, quarrels, and the like. But they all—be the case murder, or be it mouse-trap stealing—are entered on that vast loose folio, which is the charge-sheet, in fact; Rhadamanthine man in great-coat being but the inspector of police on night duty, sitting here at his grim task for some fifty or sixty shillings a week. Harder task than sub-editing a newspaper even, I am of opinion.
He has had a busy time since nine last evening. One by one the “charges” were brought in, and hour after hour, and set before him in that little iron-railed dock. Some were felonious charges: scowling, beetle-browed, under-hung charges, who had been there many times before, and were likely to come there many times again. A multiplicity of Irish charges, too: beggars, brawlers, pavement-obstructors—all terribly voluble and abusive of tongue; many with squalid babies in their arms. One or two such charges are lying now, contentedly drunken heaps of rags, in the women’s cells. Plenty of juvenile charges, mere children, God help them! swept in and swept out; sometimes shot into cells—their boxes of fusees, or jagged broom-stumps, taken from them. A wife-beating charge; ruffianly carver, who has been beating his wife with the leg of a pianoforte. The wretched woman, all blood and tears, is very reluctant, even now, to give evidence, and entreats the inspector to “let Bill go; he didn’t mean no harm.” But he is locked up, departing to durance with the comforting assurance to his wife that he will, “do for her,” at the first convenient opportunity. I daresay he will, when his six months’ hard labour are over. There was a swell-mob charge, too, a dandy de première force, who swaggered, and twisted his eye-glass, and sucked his diamond ring while in the dock, and declared he knew nothing of the gentleman’s watch, he was “shaw.” He broke down, however, while being searched, and on the discovery of the watch—for he had missed the confederate who usually “covered” him—subsided into bad language, and the expression of a hope that he might not be tried by “old Bramwell,” meaning the learned judge of that name. Short work has been made with some of these charges, while the disposal of others has occupied a considerable time. As the night grew older, the drunk and disorderly and drunk and incapable charges began to drop in; but one by one they have been disposed of in a calm, business-like manner, and the “charges” are either released, or, if sufficient cause were apparent for their detention, are sleeping off their liquor, or chewing the cud of sweet and bitter fancies, in the adjacent cells.
“I thought the ball masky would bring us some work,” the inspector remarks to the sergeant, as the Pierrot is carried, and the cavalier is dragged, and the postilion and his friend stalk indignantly—the whole accompanied by a posse of police, into the station: “Now, then, F 29, what is it?”
F, or X, or Z, or whatever may be his distinguishing letter or numeral, gives a succinct narrative of the row, so far as he is acquainted with its phases, very much in the style of the Act d’Accusation of a French procureur imperial, which is always as damaging as it conveniently can be made against the person in custody. The postilion follows with his statement, the cavalier breaks in with an indignant denial of all he has said, violently insists upon charging the postilion with murder and assault, and ultimately expresses a desire to know what he, the inspector, thinks of himself, a wish to tear F 29’s eyes out, and ardent ambition to “polish off the whole lot.” “Don’t all speak at once,” remonstrates the inspector, but they will all speak at once, and the Pierrot, waking up from an intoxicated trance, asseverates, in broken accents, that he is a “p-p-p-p-pro-f-f-fessional man, and highly res-pe-pe-p-pectable,” and then sinks quiescent over the front of the dock, in an attitude very much resembling that sometimes assumed by the celebrated Mr. Punch.