Now crowds, freed from their cramped postures in the playhouse, rush out upon the wild waste of the dripping Strand.
Here, roaring, fighting, pushing, elbowing each other into the howling fury of the night. Hither come chattering voices from the stalls, pit, and recesses of the theatre, where the chairs remain sole occupants of the place, and seem to say, “Ah, ha, here we are, snug for the night!”
Here in the eagerness of regained liberty, they storm and push each other, while the tempest falls in sheets of water, and howls above them. On and on in countless crowds they rush, like human billows. Men and women, hats, bonnets, and umbrellas, draggled dresses in one rushing wet mass. Pursuit of cabs, and fruitless return to the shelter of the passage; savage struggle of humanity enlivening the black night; little forbearance, but eternal fighting. On and on they surge, backwards and forwards, and darker grows the night, fiercer falls the hail, louder roars the thunder, more clamorous and angry the numberless voices in the street, when a wild cry goes forth, “A cab!” Onward it comes, fighting its way through the elements, the crazy door rattling; onward it comes, now free as the surging crowd falls back, now overwhelmed in a sea of human forms. And every voice in the multitude, answered by storm-voices in the air, shrieks more loudly, “A cab!”
Still he comes driving on, and at the boldness and determination of one man the angry crowd rise up, peering over each other’s heads, and round about the cab they press upon him, forcing each other down, and starting up and rushing forward in reckless eagerness.
Round it they surge and roar, and, giving way to others, moodily depart, still this one fights on bravely….
At last the eager multitude fall back, and dawn of day discovers the happy occupant within, with the elements still pouring their fury upon the devoted driver in an eternity of hail and rain, as on and on he goes into the far suburbs, with his dim lamps burning, and the fare inside asleep and snoring, as if there were no tempest trying every chink and cranny of the shaky vehicle, and no half-drowned cabby outside with only a moist billycock on his head, and sleepily yawning so wide that the spirits of the air, if they could exist on such a night, might look into the unfathomable depths below.
Robert le Diable.
The Age of Lawn-Tennis.
(After Charles Dickens’s “Pickwick.” A fragment.)
CHAPTER I.