Chapter Eighteen.
My Patient in the River Police.
“Don’t you find it very dreary at night upon the river?” I said to one of my regular patients—a river policeman—who preferred my services to those of the divisional surgeon for a long bout of sciatica.
“Just like the old woman’s eels, sir, and the skinning: one gets used to it. It’s lonesome like of a night upwards; but there you have the lights on the bridges and there’s gas here and gas there; and a faint roar comes over the housetops from out of the streets. It’s when you’re below bridge that it seems dull; where the big vessels are moored in the black muddy stream, that goes hurrying by them with a low, rushing noise—creeping and leaping at their slimy sides, covering their anchor chains, or the buoy to which they swing, with all sorts of muddy refuse; and sometimes of a night there’ll be a body get hanging on somehow, ready for us to find and take ashore.
“Now, if I give you a bit of tight chain going from a ship’s bows to an anchor down in the mud, on one side; and if I give you a dead body floating along on the other side, you’d think directly as there’d be no chance of the one stopping by the other—you’d think as one would float down all slimy and horrible, touch against t’other, and then rising, it would ride far enough out to sea. But, Lor’ bless you, that’s where you’re wrong; for how it is I can’t tell you, but it always seems to me, and has seemed ever since I was in the river police, that dead bodies lash and hang themselves somehow against mooring chains, on purpose that they might be found, and get a decent burial. Else how could they stop as they do, over and over again? I can’t tell, nor you can’t tell, nor nobody can’t tell; it’s a nat’ral mystery, and mysteries is things as gets over all of us.
“Since I was nearly being found myself, hitched on to a mooring chain—for I’ll lay any money that if I had been bested I should have gone quite naturally all the same to where I’d seen so many before—I’ve got to take a little more than a business interest in such things. It’s very awful, you know; and though I’m an ignorant man, it often sets me thinking on the dark nights when our galley’s going slowly with the stream, floating along the black, rushing river—yes, it often sets me thinking about the state of affairs in our great city, and wondering whether all our great civilisation’s so good after all, when it brings down stream to-night a decently-dressed body with the pockets inside out, and marks as of blows on the swollen face; to-morrow night a well-dressed body with no marks, and money and watch and all there; next night the body of a young woman with an oldish face, but on that face a weary, despairing look, that seems to say there was no rest anywhere but in the river, and into the river she had come; next night, again, perhaps another well-dressed body, most likely with a bit of paper and a half washed-out address pinned inside the torn dress bosom—and this one, perhaps, would be young, and fair, and pale, and sometimes not at all horrible to look at.
“There, I’ve seen great, strong, rough men, used to all sorts of things, stand with their hats off by such sights, and speak in even choky voices, as if they could hardly keep back something that they would be ashamed for others to see, down by some river stairs, where the muddy tide has gone ‘lap, lap,’ at one, two, or three o’clock in the morning. Why, at such times I’ve often felt creepy myself; for people may say what they like, but you never do get used to death, and whenever you meet it you feel a strange sense of quietness stealing over you; and one of the first things generally done when we land a body is, old or young, to cover it with sheet or sack; and even then there’s a horrible sort of drawing of you in it; and I’ve sat before now watching, and unable to get away from the uncouth covered thing, with the stream of water trickling slowly away to get back to the river.
“But, there, I think you’ve had enough about what goes floating down the river and floating up the the river, backwards and forwards, with the tide grinding it against wharf, and pier, and buttress, till there’s no telling who or what it was. I dare say you’ve had enough; but it’s a thing I could go on talking about for hours—beginning with me, or one of my mates, or a River Jack finding of them, and then going on, through the giving notice, and the inquest, and all the rest of it; and it’s all going on day after day, month after month, year after year. Talk of the River Jacks, though, what a singular thing it is: they never by any chance find a body with any valuables about it; but always, when they come across it, watch, money, pins, brooches, they’re all gone; and when, quite serious-like, I’ve asked them how they can account for it, I’ve always got the same answer—a knowing wink of the left eye.