Great Expectations

One afternoon, late in the month of February, I came ashore at the wharf

at dusk. I had pulled down as far as Greenwich with the ebb tide, and

had turned with the tide. It had been a fine bright day, but had become

foggy as the sun dropped, and I had had to feel my way back among the

shipping, pretty carefully. Both in going and returning, I had seen the

signal in his window, All well.

As it was a raw evening, and I was cold, I thought I would comfort

myself with dinner at once; and as I had hours of dejection and solitude

before me if I went home to the Temple, I thought I would afterwards go

to the play. The theatre where Mr. Wopsle had achieved his questionable

triumph was in that water-side neighborhood (it is nowhere now), and

to that theatre I resolved to go. I was aware that Mr. Wopsle had

not succeeded in reviving the Drama, but, on the contrary, had rather

partaken of its decline. He had been ominously heard of, through the

play-bills, as a faithful Black, in connection with a little girl of

noble birth, and a monkey. And Herbert had seen him as a predatory

Tartar of comic propensities, with a face like a red brick, and an

outrageous hat all over bells.

I dined at what Herbert and I used to call a geographical chop-house,

where there were maps of the world in porter-pot rims on every half-yard

of the tablecloths, and charts of gravy on every one of the knives,--to

this day there is scarcely a single chop-house within the Lord Mayor's

dominions which is not geographical,--and wore out the time in dozing

over crumbs, staring at gas, and baking in a hot blast of dinners. By

and by, I roused myself, and went to the play.

There, I found a virtuous boatswain in His Majesty's service,--a most

excellent man, though I could have wished his trousers not quite so

tight in some places, and not quite so loose in others,--who knocked all

the little men's hats over their eyes, though he was very generous and

brave, and who wouldn't hear of anybody's paying taxes, though he was

very patriotic. He had a bag of money in his pocket, like a pudding in

the cloth, and on that property married a young person in bed-furniture,

with great rejoicings; the whole population of Portsmouth (nine in

number at the last census) turning out on the beach to rub their own

hands and shake everybody else's, and sing "Fill, fill!" A certain

dark-complexioned Swab, however, who wouldn't fill, or do anything else

that was proposed to him, and whose heart was openly stated (by the

boatswain) to be as black as his figure-head, proposed to two other

Swabs to get all mankind into difficulties; which was so effectually

done (the Swab family having considerable political influence) that it

took half the evening to set things right, and then it was only brought

about through an honest little grocer with a white hat, black gaiters,

and red nose, getting into a clock, with a gridiron, and listening, and

coming out, and knocking everybody down from behind with the gridiron

whom he couldn't confute with what he had overheard. This led to Mr.

Wopsle's (who had never been heard of before) coming in with a star

and garter on, as a plenipotentiary of great power direct from the

Admiralty, to say that the Swabs were all to go to prison on the spot,

and that he had brought the boatswain down the Union Jack, as a slight

acknowledgment of his public services. The boatswain, unmanned for the

first time, respectfully dried his eyes on the Jack, and then cheering

up, and addressing Mr. Wopsle as Your Honor, solicited permission to

take him by the fin. Mr. Wopsle, conceding his fin with a gracious

dignity, was immediately shoved into a dusty corner, while everybody

danced a hornpipe; and from that corner, surveying the public with a

discontented eye, became aware of me.