As it seldom happened that I came in at that Whitefriars
gate after the Temple was closed, and as I was very
muddy and weary, I did not take it ill that the night-porter
examined me with much attention as he held the gate
a little way open for me to pass in. To help
his memory I mentioned my name.
“I was not quite sure, sir, but I thought so.
Here’s a note, sir. The messenger that
brought it, said would you be so good as read it by
my lantern?”
Much surprised by the request, I took the note.
It was directed to Philip Pip, Esquire, and on the
top of the superscription were the words, “Please
read this, here.” I opened
it, the watchman holding up his light, and read inside,
in Wemmick’s writing:
“Don’t go home.”
Turning from the Temple gate as soon as I had read
the warning, I made the best of my way to Fleet-street,
and there got a late hackney chariot and drove to
the Hummums in Covent Garden. In those times
a bed was always to be got there at any hour of the
night, and the chamberlain, letting me in at his ready
wicket, lighted the candle next in order on his shelf,
and showed me straight into the bedroom next in order
on his list. It was a sort of vault on the ground
floor at the back, with a despotic monster of a four-post
bedstead in it, straddling over the whole place, putting
one of his arbitrary legs into the fire-place and
another into the doorway, and squeezing the wretched
little washing-stand in quite a Divinely Righteous
manner.
As I had asked for a night-light, the chamberlain
had brought me in, before he left me, the good old
constitutional rush-light of those virtuous days —
an object like the ghost of a walking-cane, which
instantly broke its back if it were touched, which
nothing could ever be lighted at, and which was placed
in solitary confinement at the bottom of a high tin
tower, perforated with round holes that made a staringly
wide-awake pattern on the walls. When I had got
into bed, and lay there footsore, weary, and wretched,
I found that I could no more close my own eyes than
I could close the eyes of this foolish Argus.
And thus, in the gloom and death of the night, we
stared at one another.
What a doleful night! How anxious, how dismal,
how long! There was an inhospitable smell in
the room, of cold soot and hot dust; and, as I looked
up into the corners of the tester over my head, I
thought what a number of blue-bottle flies from the
butchers’, and earwigs from the market, and
grubs from the country, must be holding on up there,
lying by for next summer. This led me to speculate
whether any of them ever tumbled down, and then I fancied
that I felt light falls on my face — a disagreeable
turn of thought, suggesting other and more objectionable
approaches up my back. When I had lain awake
a little while, those extraordinary voices with which
silence teems, began to make themselves audible.
The closet whispered, the fireplace sighed, the little
washing-stand ticked, and one guitar-string played
occasionally in the chest of drawers. At about
the same time, the eyes on the wall acquired a new
expression, and in every one of those staring rounds
I saw written, don’t go home.
