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Great Expectations

by Charles Dickens · English · Gutenberg #1400 · 1,013,928 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Great Expectations

Author: Charles Dickens


        
Release date: July 1, 1998 [eBook #1400]
                Most recently updated: December 17, 2024

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1400

Credits: An Anonymous Volunteer and David Widger


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK GREAT EXPECTATIONS ***

[Illustration]




Great Expectations

[1867 Edition]

by Charles Dickens


Contents

 Chapter I.
 Chapter II.
 Chapter III.
 Chapter IV.
 Chapter V.
 Chapter VI.
 Chapter VII.
 Chapter VIII.
 Chapter IX.
 Chapter X.
 Chapter XI.
 Chapter XII.
 Chapter XIII.
 Chapter XIV.
 Chapter XV.
 Chapter XVI.
 Chapter XVII.
 Chapter XVIII.
 Chapter XIX.
 Chapter XX.
 Chapter XXI.
 Chapter XXII.
 Chapter XXIII.
 Chapter XXIV.
 Chapter XXV.
 Chapter XXVI.
 Chapter XXVII.
 Chapter XXVIII.
 Chapter XXIX.
 Chapter XXX.
 Chapter XXXI.
 Chapter XXXII.
 Chapter XXXIII.
 Chapter XXXIV.
 Chapter XXXV.
 Chapter XXXVI.
 Chapter XXXVII.
 Chapter XXXVIII.
 Chapter XXXIX.
 Chapter XL.
 Chapter XLI.
 Chapter XLII.
 Chapter XLIII.
 Chapter XLIV.
 Chapter XLV.
 Chapter XLVI.
 Chapter XLVII.
 Chapter XLVIII.
 Chapter XLIX.
 Chapter L.
 Chapter LI.
 Chapter LII.
 Chapter LIII.
 Chapter LIV.
 Chapter LV.
 Chapter LVI.
 Chapter LVII.
 Chapter LVIII.
 Chapter LIX.

[Illustration]




Chapter I.


My father’s family name being Pirrip, and my Christian name Philip, my
infant tongue could make of both names nothing longer or more explicit
than Pip. So, I called myself Pip, and came to be called Pip.

I give Pirrip as my father’s family name, on the authority of his
tombstone and my sister,—Mrs. Joe Gargery, who married the blacksmith.
As I never saw my father or my mother, and never saw any likeness of
either of them (for their days were long before the days of
photographs), my first fancies regarding what they were like were
unreasonably derived from their tombstones. The shape of the letters on
my father’s, gave me an odd idea that he was a square, stout, dark man,
with curly black hair. From the character and turn of the inscription,
“_Also Georgiana Wife of the Above_,” I drew a childish conclusion that
my mother was freckled and sickly. To five little stone lozenges, each
about a foot and a half long, which were arranged in a neat row beside
their grave, and were sacred to the memory of five little brothers of
mine,—who gave up trying to get a living, exceedingly early in that
universal struggle,—I am indebted for a belief I religiously
entertained that they had all been born on their backs with their hands
in their trousers-pockets, and had never taken them out in this state
of existence.

Ours was the marsh country, down by the river, within, as the river
wound, twenty miles of the sea. My first most vivid and broad
impression of the identity of things seems to me to have been gained on
a memorable raw afternoon towards evening. At such a time I found out
for certain that this bleak place overgrown with nettles was the
churchyard; and that Philip Pirrip, late of this parish, and also
Georgiana wife of the above, were dead and buried; and that Alexander,
Bartholomew, Abraham, Tobias, and Roger, infant children of the
aforesaid, were also dead and buried; and that the dark flat wilderness
beyond the churchyard, intersected with dikes and mounds and gates,
with scattered cattle feeding on it, was the marshes; and that the low
leaden line beyond was the river; and that the distant savage lair from
which the wind was rushing was the sea; and that the small bundle of
shivers growing afraid of it all and beginning to cry, was Pip.

“Hold your noise!” cried a terrible voice, as a man started up from
among the graves at the side of the church porch. “Keep still, you
little devil, or I’ll cut your throat!”

A fearful man, all in coarse grey, with a great iron on his leg. A man
with no hat, and with broken shoes, and with an old rag tied round his
head. A man who had been soaked in water, and smothered in mud, and
lamed by stones, and cut by flints, and stung by nettles, and torn by
briars; who limped, and shivered, and glared, and growled; and whose
teeth chattered in his head as he seized me by the chin.

“Oh! Don’t cut my throat, sir,” I pleaded in terror. “Pray don’t do it,
sir.”

“Tell us your name!” said the man. “Quick!”

“Pip, sir.”

“Once more,” said the man, staring at me. “Give it mouth!”

“Pip. Pip, sir.”

“Show us where you live,” said the man. “Pint out the place!”

I pointed to where our village lay, on the flat in-shore among the
alder-trees and pollards, a mile or more from the church.

The man, after looking at me for a moment, turned me upside down, and
emptied my pockets. There was nothing in them but a piece of bread.
When the church came to itself,—for he was so sudden and strong that he
made it go head over heels before me, and I saw the steeple under my
feet,—when the church came to itself, I say, I was seated on a high
tombstone, trembling while he ate the bread ravenously.

[Illustration]

“You young dog,” said the man, licking his lips, “what fat cheeks you
ha’ got.”

I believe they were fat, though I was at that time undersized for my
years, and not strong.

“Darn me if I couldn’t eat ’em,” said the man, with a threatening shake
of his head, “and if I han’t half a mind to’t!”

I earnestly expressed my hope that he wouldn’t, and held tighter to the
tombstone on which he had put me; partly, to keep myself upon it;
partly, to keep myself from crying.

“Now lookee here!” said the man. “Where’s your mother?”

“There, sir!” said I.

He started, made a short run, and stopped and looked over his shoulder.

“There, sir!” I timidly explained. “Also Georgiana. That’s my mother.”

“Oh!” said he, coming back. “And is that your father alonger your
mother?”

“Yes, sir,” said I; “him too; late of this parish.”

“Ha!” he muttered then, considering. “Who d’ye live with,—supposin’
you’re kindly let to live, which I han’t made up my mind about?”

“My sister, sir,—Mrs. Joe Gargery,—wife of Joe Gargery, the blacksmith,
sir.”

“Blacksmith, eh?” said he. And looked down at his leg.

After darkly looking at his leg and me several times, he came closer to
my tombstone, took me by both arms, and tilted me back as far as he
could hold me; so that his eyes looked most powerfully down into mine,
and mine looked most helplessly up into his.

“Now lookee here,” he said, “the question being whether you’re to be
let to live. You know what a file is?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And you know what wittles is?”

“Yes, sir.”

After each question he tilted me over a little more, so as to give me a
greater sense of helplessness and danger.

“You get me a file.” He tilted me again. “And you get me wittles.” He
tilted me again. “You bring ’em both to me.” He tilted me again. “Or
I’ll have your heart and liver out.” He tilted me again.

I was dreadfully frightened, and so giddy that I clung to him with both
hands, and said, “If you would kindly please to let me keep upright,
sir, perhaps I shouldn’t be sick, and perhaps I could attend more.”

He gave me a most tremendous dip and roll, so that the church jumped
over its own weathercock. Then, he held me by the arms, in an upright
position on the top of the stone, and went on in these fearful terms:—

“You bring me, to-morrow morning early, that file and them wittles. You
bring the lot to me, at that old Battery over yonder. You do it, and
you never dare to say a word or dare to make a sign concerning your
having seen such a person as me, or any person sumever, and you shall
be let to live. You fail, or you go from my words in any partickler, no
matter how small it is, and your heart and your liver shall be tore
out, roasted, and ate. Now, I ain’t alone, as you may think I am.
There’s a young man hid with me, in comparison with which young man I
am a Angel. That young man hears the words I speak. That young man has
a secret way pecooliar to himself, of getting at a boy, and at his
heart, and at his liver. It is in wain for a boy to attempt to hide
himself from that young man. A boy may lock his door, may be warm in
bed, may tuck himself up, may draw the clothes over his head, may think
himself comfortable and safe, but that young man will softly creep and
creep his way to him and tear him open. I am a keeping that young man
from harming of you at the present moment, with great difficulty. I
find it wery hard to hold that young man off of your inside. Now, what
do you say?”

I said that I would get him the file, and I would get him what broken
bits of food I could, and I would come to him at the Battery, early in
the morning.

“Say Lord strike you dead if you don’t!” said the man.

I said so, and he took me down.

“Now,” he pursued, “you remember what you’ve undertook, and you
remember that young man, and you get home!”

“Goo-good night, sir,” I faltered.

“Much of that!” said he, glancing about him over the cold wet flat. “I
wish I was a frog. Or a eel!”

At the same time, he hugged his shuddering body in both his
arms,—clasping himself, as if to hold himself together,—and limped
towards the low church wall. As I saw him go, picking his way among the
nettles, and among the brambles that bound the green mounds, he looked
in my young eyes as if he were eluding the hands of the dead people,
stretching up cautiously out of their graves, to get a twist upon his
ankle and pull him in.

When he came to the low church wall, he got over it, like a man whose
legs were numbed and stiff, and then turned round to look for me. When
I saw him turning, I set my face towards home, and made the best use of
my legs. But presently I looked over my shoulder, and saw him going on
again towards the river, still hugging himself in both arms, and
picking his way with his sore feet among the great stones dropped into
the marshes here and there, for stepping-places when the rains were
heavy or the tide was in.

The marshes were just a long black horizontal line then, as I stopped
to look after him; and the river was just another horizontal line, not
nearly so broad nor yet so black; and the sky was just a row of long
angry red lines and dense black lines intermixed. On the edge of the
river I could faintly make out the only two black things in all the
prospect that seemed to be standing upright; one of these was the
beacon by which the sailors steered,—like an unhooped cask upon a
pole,—an ugly thing when you were near it; the other, a gibbet, with
some chains hanging to it which had once held a pirate. The man was
limping on towards this latter, as if he were the pirate come to life,
and come down, and going back to hook himself up again. It gave me a
terrible turn when I thought so; and as I saw the cattle lifting their
heads to gaze after him, I wondered whether they thought so too. I
looked all round for the horrible young man, and could see no signs of
him. But now I was frightened again, and ran home without stopping.




Chapter II.


My sister, Mrs. Joe Gargery, was more than twenty years older than I,
and had established a great reputation with herself and the neighbours
because she had brought me up “by hand.” Having at that time to find
out for myself what the expression meant, and knowing her to have a
hard and heavy hand, and to be much in the habit of laying it upon her
husband as well as upon me, I supposed that Joe Gargery and I were both
brought up by hand.

She was not a good-looking woman, my sister; and I had a general
impression that she must have made Joe Gargery marry her by hand. Joe
was a fair man, with curls of flaxen hair on each side of his smooth
face, and with eyes of such a very undecided blue that they seemed to
have somehow got mixed with their own whites. He was a mild,
good-natured, sweet-tempered, easy-going, foolish, dear fellow,—a sort
of Hercules in strength, and also in weakness.

My sister, Mrs. Joe, with black hair and eyes, had such a prevailing
redness of skin that I sometimes used to wonder whether it was possible
she washed herself with a nutmeg-grater instead of soap. She was tall
and bony, and almost always wore a coarse apron, fastened over her
figure behind with two loops, and having a square impregnable bib in
front, that was stuck full of pins and needles. She made it a powerful
merit in herself, and a strong reproach against Joe, that she wore this
apron so much. Though I really see no reason why she should have worn
it at all; or why, if she did wear it at all, she should not have taken
it off, every day of her life.

Joe’s forge adjoined our house, which was a wooden house, as many of
the dwellings in our country were,—most of them, at that time. When I
ran home from the churchyard, the forge was shut up, and Joe was
sitting alone in the kitchen. Joe and I being fellow-sufferers, and
having confidences as such, Joe imparted a confidence to me, the moment
I raised the latch of the door and peeped in at him opposite to it,
sitting in the chimney corner.

“Mrs. Joe has been out a dozen times, looking for you, Pip. And she’s
out now, making it a baker’s dozen.”

“Is she?”

“Yes, Pip,” said Joe; “and what’s worse, she’s got Tickler with her.”

At this dismal intelligence, I twisted the only button on my waistcoat
round and round, and looked in great depression at the fire. Tickler
was a wax-ended piece of cane, worn smooth by collision with my tickled
frame.

“She sot down,” said Joe, “and she got up, and she made a grab at
Tickler, and she Ram-paged out. That’s what she did,” said Joe, slowly
clearing the fire between the lower bars with the poker, and looking at
it; “she Ram-paged out, Pip.”

“Has she been gone long, Joe?” I always treated him as a larger species
of child, and as no more than my equal.

“Well,” said Joe, glancing up at the Dutch clock, “she’s been on the
Ram-page, this last spell, about five minutes, Pip. She’s a-coming! Get
behind the door, old chap, and have the jack-towel betwixt you.”

I took the advice. My sister, Mrs. Joe, throwing the door wide open,
and finding an obstruction behind it, immediately divined the cause,
and applied Tickler to its further investigation. She concluded by
throwing me—I often served as a connubial missile—at Joe, who, glad to
get hold of me on any terms, passed me on into the chimney and quietly
fenced me up there with his great leg.

“Where have you been, you young monkey?” said Mrs. Joe, stamping her
foot. “Tell me directly what you’ve been doing to wear me away with
fret and fright and worrit, or I’d have you out of that corner if you
was fifty Pips, and he was five hundred Gargerys.”

“I have only been to the churchyard,” said I, from my stool, crying and
rubbing myself.

“Churchyard!” repeated my sister. “If it warn’t for me you’d have been
to the churchyard long ago, and stayed there. Who brought you up by
hand?”

“You did,” said I.

“And why did I do it, I should like to know?” exclaimed my sister.

I whimpered, “I don’t know.”

“_I_ don’t!” said my sister. “I’d never do it again! I know that. I may
truly say I’ve never had this apron of mine off since born you were.
It’s bad enough to be a blacksmith’s wife (and him a Gargery) without
being your mother.”

My thoughts strayed from that question as I looked disconsolately at
the fire. For the fugitive out on the marshes with the ironed leg, the
mysterious young man, the file, the food, and the dreadful pledge I was
under to commit a larceny on those sheltering premises, rose before me
in the avenging coals.

“Hah!” said Mrs. Joe, restoring Tickler to his station. “Churchyard,
indeed! You may well say churchyard, you two.” One of us, by the by,
had not said it at all. “You’ll drive _me_ to the churchyard betwixt
you, one of these days, and O, a pr-r-recious pair you’d be without
me!”

As she applied herself to set the tea-things, Joe peeped down at me
over his leg, as if he were mentally casting me and himself up, and
calculating what kind of pair we practically should make, under the
grievous circumstances foreshadowed. After that, he sat feeling his
right-side flaxen curls and whisker, and following Mrs. Joe about with
his blue eyes, as his manner always was at squally times.

My sister had a trenchant way of cutting our bread and butter for us,
that never varied. First, with her left hand she jammed the loaf hard
and fast against her bib,—where it sometimes got a pin into it, and
sometimes a needle, which we afterwards got into our mouths. Then she
took some butter (not too much) on a knife and spread it on the loaf,
in an apothecary kind of way, as if she were making a plaster,—using
both sides of the knife with a slapping dexterity, and trimming and
moulding the butter off round the crust. Then, she gave the knife a
final smart wipe on the edge of the plaster, and then sawed a very
thick round off the loaf: which she finally, before separating from the
loaf, hewed into two halves, of which Joe got one, and I the other.

On the present occasion, though I was hungry, I dared not eat my slice.
I felt that I must have something in reserve for my dreadful
acquaintance, and his ally the still more dreadful young man. I knew
Mrs. Joe’s housekeeping to be of the strictest kind, and that my
larcenous researches might find nothing available in the safe.
Therefore I resolved to put my hunk of bread and butter down the leg of
my trousers.

The effort of resolution necessary to the achievement of this purpose I
found to be quite awful. It was as if I had to make up my mind to leap
from the top of a high house, or plunge into a great depth of water.
And it was made the more difficult by the unconscious Joe. In our
already-mentioned freemasonry as fellow-sufferers, and in his
good-natured companionship with me, it was our evening habit to compare
the way we bit through our slices, by silently holding them up to each
other’s admiration now and then,—which stimulated us to new exertions.
To-night, Joe several times invited me, by the display of his fast
diminishing slice, to enter upon our usual friendly competition; but he
found me, each time, with my yellow mug of tea on one knee, and my
untouched bread and butter on the other. At last, I desperately
considered that the thing I contemplated must be done, and that it had
best be done in the least improbable manner consistent with the
circumstances. I took advantage of a moment when Joe had just looked at
me, and got my bread and butter down my leg.

Joe was evidently made uncomfortable by what he supposed to be my loss
of appetite, and took a thoughtful bite out of his slice, which he
didn’t seem to enjoy. He turned it about in his mouth much longer than
usual, pondering over it a good deal, and after all gulped it down like
a pill. He was about to take another bite, and had just got his head on
one side for a good purchase on it, when his eye fell on me, and he saw
that my bread and butter was gone.

The wonder and consternation with which Joe stopped on the threshold of
his bite and stared at me, were too evident to escape my sister’s
observation.

“What’s the matter _now_?” said she, smartly, as she put down her cup.

“I say, you know!” muttered Joe, shaking his head at me in very serious
remonstrance. “Pip, old chap! You’ll do yourself a mischief. It’ll
stick somewhere. You can’t have chawed it, Pip.”

“What’s the matter now?” repeated my sister, more sharply than before.

“If you can cough any trifle on it up, Pip, I’d recommend you to do
it,” said Joe, all aghast. “Manners is manners, but still your elth’s
your elth.”

By this time, my sister was quite desperate, so she pounced on Joe,
and, taking him by the two whiskers, knocked his head for a little
while against the wall behind him, while I sat in the corner, looking
guiltily on.

“Now, perhaps you’ll mention what’s the matter,” said my sister, out of
breath, “you staring great stuck pig.”

Joe looked at her in a helpless way, then took a helpless bite, and
looked at me again.

“You know, Pip,” said Joe, solemnly, with his last bite in his cheek,
and speaking in a confidential voice, as if we two were quite alone,
“you and me is always friends, and I’d be the last to tell upon you,
any time. But such a—” he moved his chair and looked about the floor
between us, and then again at me—“such a most oncommon Bolt as that!”

“Been bolting his food, has he?” cried my sister.

“You know, old chap,” said Joe, looking at me, and not at Mrs. Joe,
with his bite still in his cheek, “I Bolted, myself, when I was your
age—frequent—and as a boy I’ve been among a many Bolters; but I never
see your Bolting equal yet, Pip, and it’s a mercy you ain’t Bolted
dead.”

My sister made a dive at me, and fished me up by the hair, saying
nothing more than the awful words, “You come along and be dosed.”

Some medical beast had revived Tar-water in those days as a fine
medicine, and Mrs. Joe always kept a supply of it in the cupboard;
having a belief in its virtues correspondent to its nastiness. At the
best of times, so much of this elixir was administered to me as a
choice restorative, that I was conscious of going about, smelling like
a new fence. On this particular evening the urgency of my case demanded
a pint of this mixture, which was poured down my throat, for my greater
comfort, while Mrs. Joe held my head under her arm, as a boot would be
held in a bootjack. Joe got off with half a pint; but was made to
swallow that (much to his disturbance, as he sat slowly munching and
meditating before the fire), “because he had had a turn.” Judging from
myself, I should say he certainly had a turn afterwards, if he had had
none before.

Conscience is a dreadful thing when it accuses man or boy; but when, in
the case of a boy, that secret burden co-operates with another secret
burden down the leg of his trousers, it is (as I can testify) a great
punishment. The guilty knowledge that I was going to rob Mrs. Joe—I
never thought I was going to rob Joe, for I never thought of any of the
housekeeping property as his—united to the necessity of always keeping
one hand on my bread and butter as I sat, or when I was ordered about
the kitchen on any small errand, almost drove me out of my mind. Then,
as the marsh winds made the fire glow and flare, I thought I heard the
voice outside, of the man with the iron on his leg who had sworn me to
secrecy, declaring that he couldn’t and wouldn’t starve until
to-morrow, but must be fed now. At other times, I thought, What if the
young man who was with so much difficulty restrained from imbruing his
hands in me should yield to a constitutional impatience, or should
mistake the time, and should think himself accredited to my heart and
liver to-night, instead of to-morrow! If ever anybody’s hair stood on
end with terror, mine must have done so then. But, perhaps, nobody’s
ever did?

It was Christmas Eve, and I had to stir the pudding for next day, with
a copper-stick, from seven to eight by the Dutch clock. I tried it with
the load upon my leg (and that made me think afresh of the man with the
load on _his_ leg), and found the tendency of exercise to bring the
bread and butter out at my ankle, quite unmanageable. Happily I slipped
away, and deposited that part of my conscience in my garret bedroom.

“Hark!” said I, when I had done my stirring, and was taking a final
warm in the chimney corner before being sent up to bed; “was that great
guns, Joe?”

“Ah!” said Joe. “There’s another conwict off.”

“What does that mean, Joe?” said I.

Mrs. Joe, who always took explanations upon herself, said, snappishly,
“Escaped. Escaped.” Administering the definition like Tar-water.

While Mrs. Joe sat with her head bending over her needlework, I put my
mouth into the forms of saying to Joe, “What’s a convict?” Joe put
_his_ mouth into the forms of returning such a highly elaborate answer,
that I could make out nothing of it but the single word “Pip.”

“There was a conwict off last night,” said Joe, aloud, “after
sunset-gun. And they fired warning of him. And now it appears they’re
firing warning of another.”

“_Who’s_ firing?” said I.

“Drat that boy,” interposed my sister, frowning at me over her work,
“what a questioner he is. Ask no questions, and you’ll be told no
lies.”

It was not very polite to herself, I thought, to imply that I should be
told lies by her even if I did ask questions. But she never was polite
unless there was company.

At this point Joe greatly augmented my curiosity by taking the utmost
pains to open his mouth very wide, and to put it into the form of a
word that looked to me like “sulks.” Therefore, I naturally pointed to
Mrs. Joe, and put my mouth into the form of saying, “her?” But Joe
wouldn’t hear of that, at all, and again opened his mouth very wide,
and shook the form of a most emphatic word out of it. But I could make
nothing of the word.

“Mrs. Joe,” said I, as a last resort, “I should like to know—if you
wouldn’t much mind—where the firing comes from?”

“Lord bless the boy!” exclaimed my sister, as if she didn’t quite mean
that but rather the contrary. “From the Hulks!”

“Oh-h!” said I, looking at Joe. “Hulks!”

Joe gave a reproachful cough, as much as to say, “Well, I told you so.”

“And please, what’s Hulks?” said I.

“That’s the way with this boy!” exclaimed my sister, pointing me out
with her needle and thread, and shaking her head at me. “Answer him one
question, and he’ll ask you a dozen directly. Hulks are prison-ships,
right ’cross th’ meshes.” We always used that name for marshes, in our
country.

“I wonder who’s put into prison-ships, and why they’re put there?” said
I, in a general way, and with quiet desperation.

It was too much for Mrs. Joe, who immediately rose. “I tell you what,
young fellow,” said she, “I didn’t bring you up by hand to badger
people’s lives out. It would be blame to me and not praise, if I had.
People are put in the Hulks because they murder, and because they rob,
and forge, and do all sorts of bad; and they always begin by asking
questions. Now, you get along to bed!”

I was never allowed a candle to light me to bed, and, as I went
upstairs in the dark, with my head tingling,—from Mrs. Joe’s thimble
having played the tambourine upon it, to accompany her last words,—I
felt fearfully sensible of the great convenience that the hulks were
handy for me. I was clearly on my way there. I had begun by asking
questions, and I was going to rob Mrs. Joe.

Since that time, which is far enough away now, I have often thought
that few people know what secrecy there is in the young under terror.
No matter how unreasonable the terror, so that it be terror. I was in
mortal terror of the young man who wanted my heart and liver; I was in
mortal terror of my interlocutor with the iron leg; I was in mortal
terror of myself, from whom an awful promise had been extracted; I had
no hope of deliverance through my all-powerful sister, who repulsed me
at every turn; I am afraid to think of what I might have done on
requirement, in the secrecy of my terror.

If I slept at all that night, it was only to imagine myself drifting
down the river on a strong spring-tide, to the Hulks; a ghostly pirate
calling out to me through a speaking-trumpet, as I passed the
gibbet-station, that I had better come ashore and be hanged there at
once, and not put it off. I was afraid to sleep, even if I had been
inclined, for I knew that at the first faint dawn of morning I must rob
the pantry. There was no doing it in the night, for there was no
getting a light by easy friction then; to have got one I must have
struck it out of flint and steel, and have made a noise like the very
pirate himself rattling his chains.

As soon as the great black velvet pall outside my little window was
shot with grey, I got up and went downstairs; every board upon the way,
and every crack in every board calling after me, “Stop thief!” and “Get
up, Mrs. Joe!” In the pantry, which was far more abundantly supplied
than usual, owing to the season, I was very much alarmed by a hare
hanging up by the heels, whom I rather thought I caught, when my back
was half turned, winking. I had no time for verification, no time for
selection, no time for anything, for I had no time to spare. I stole
some bread, some rind of cheese, about half a jar of mincemeat (which I
tied up in my pocket-handkerchief with my last night’s slice), some
brandy from a stone bottle (which I decanted into a glass bottle I had
secretly used for making that intoxicating fluid,
Spanish-liquorice-water, up in my room: diluting the stone bottle from
a jug in the kitchen cupboard), a meat bone with very little on it, and
a beautiful round compact pork pie. I was nearly going away without the
pie, but I was tempted to mount upon a shelf, to look what it was that
was put away so carefully in a covered earthenware dish in a corner,
and I found it was the pie, and I took it in the hope that it was not
intended for early use, and would not be missed for some time.

There was a door in the kitchen, communicating with the forge; I
unlocked and unbolted that door, and got a file from among Joe’s tools.
Then I put the fastenings as I had found them, opened the door at which
I had entered when I ran home last night, shut it, and ran for the
misty marshes.




Chapter III.


It was a rimy morning, and very damp. I had seen the damp lying on the
outside of my little window, as if some goblin had been crying there
all night, and using the window for a pocket-handkerchief. Now, I saw
the damp lying on the bare hedges and spare grass, like a coarser sort
of spiders’ webs; hanging itself from twig to twig and blade to blade.
On every rail and gate, wet lay clammy, and the marsh mist was so
thick, that the wooden finger on the post directing people to our
village—a direction which they never accepted, for they never came
there—was invisible to me until I was quite close under it. Then, as I
looked up at it, while it dripped, it seemed to my oppressed conscience
like a phantom devoting me to the Hulks.

The mist was heavier yet when I got out upon the marshes, so that
instead of my running at everything, everything seemed to run at me.
This was very disagreeable to a guilty mind. The gates and dikes and
banks came bursting at me through the mist, as if they cried as plainly
as could be, “A boy with somebody else’s pork pie! Stop him!” The
cattle came upon me with like suddenness, staring out of their eyes,
and steaming out of their nostrils, “Halloa, young thief!” One black
ox, with a white cravat on,—who even had to my awakened conscience
something of a clerical air,—fixed me so obstinately with his eyes, and
moved his blunt head round in such an accusatory manner as I moved
round, that I blubbered out to him, “I couldn’t help it, sir! It wasn’t
for myself I took it!” Upon which he put down his head, blew a cloud of
smoke out of his nose, and vanished with a kick-up of his hind-legs and
a flourish of his tail.

All this time, I was getting on towards the river; but however fast I
went, I couldn’t warm my feet, to which the damp cold seemed riveted,
as the iron was riveted to the leg of the man I was running to meet. I
knew my way to the Battery, pretty straight, for I had been down there
on a Sunday with Joe, and Joe, sitting on an old gun, had told me that
when I was ’prentice to him, regularly bound, we would have such Larks
there! However, in the confusion of the mist, I found myself at last
too far to the right, and consequently had to try back along the
river-side, on the bank of loose stones above the mud and the stakes
that staked the tide out. Making my way along here with all despatch, I
had just crossed a ditch which I knew to be very near the Battery, and
had just scrambled up the mound beyond the ditch, when I saw the man
sitting before me. His back was towards me, and he had his arms folded,
and was nodding forward, heavy with sleep.

I thought he would be more glad if I came upon him with his breakfast,
in that unexpected manner, so I went forward softly and touched him on
the shoulder. He instantly jumped up, and it was not the same man, but
another man!

And yet this man was dressed in coarse grey, too, and had a great iron
on his leg, and was lame, and hoarse, and cold, and was everything that
the other man was; except that he had not the same face, and had a flat
broad-brimmed low-crowned felt hat on. All this I saw in a moment, for
I had only a moment to see it in: he swore an oath at me, made a hit at
me,—it was a round weak blow that missed me and almost knocked himself
down, for it made him stumble,—and then he ran into the mist, stumbling
twice as he went, and I lost him.

“It’s the young man!” I thought, feeling my heart shoot as I identified
him. I dare say I should have felt a pain in my liver, too, if I had
known where it was.

I was soon at the Battery after that, and there was the right
man,—hugging himself and limping to and fro, as if he had never all
night left off hugging and limping,—waiting for me. He was awfully
cold, to be sure. I half expected to see him drop down before my face
and die of deadly cold. His eyes looked so awfully hungry too, that
when I handed him the file and he laid it down on the grass, it
occurred to me he would have tried to eat it, if he had not seen my
bundle. He did not turn me upside down this time to get at what I had,
but left me right side upwards while I opened the bundle and emptied my
pockets.

“What’s in the bottle, boy?” said he.

“Brandy,” said I.

He was already handing mincemeat down his throat in the most curious
manner,—more like a man who was putting it away somewhere in a violent
hurry, than a man who was eating it,—but he left off to take some of
the liquor. He shivered all the while so violently, that it was quite
as much as he could do to keep the neck of the bottle between his
teeth, without biting it off.

“I think you have got the ague,” said I.

“I’m much of your opinion, boy,” said he.

“It’s bad about here,” I told him. “You’ve been lying out on the
meshes, and they’re dreadful aguish. Rheumatic too.”

“I’ll eat my breakfast afore they’re the death of me,” said he. “I’d do
that, if I was going to be strung up to that there gallows as there is
over there, directly afterwards. I’ll beat the shivers so far, I’ll bet
you.”

He was gobbling mincemeat, meatbone, bread, cheese, and pork pie, all
at once: staring distrustfully while he did so at the mist all round
us, and often stopping—even stopping his jaws—to listen. Some real or
fancied sound, some clink upon the river or breathing of beast upon the
marsh, now gave him a start, and he said, suddenly,—

“You’re not a deceiving imp? You brought no one with you?”

“No, sir! No!”

“Nor giv’ no one the office to follow you?”

“No!”

“Well,” said he, “I believe you. You’d be but a fierce young hound
indeed, if at your time of life you could help to hunt a wretched
warmint hunted as near death and dunghill as this poor wretched warmint
is!”

Something clicked in his throat as if he had works in him like a clock,
and was going to strike. And he smeared his ragged rough sleeve over
his eyes.

Pitying his desolation, and watching him as he gradually settled down
upon the pie, I made bold to say, “I am glad you enjoy it.”

“Did you speak?”

“I said I was glad you enjoyed it.”

“Thankee, my boy. I do.”

I had often watched a large dog of ours eating his food; and I now
noticed a decided similarity between the dog’s way of eating, and the
man’s. The man took strong sharp sudden bites, just like the dog. He
swallowed, or rather snapped up, every mouthful, too soon and too fast;
and he looked sideways here and there while he ate, as if he thought
there was danger in every direction of somebody’s coming to take the
pie away. He was altogether too unsettled in his mind over it, to
appreciate it comfortably I thought, or to have anybody to dine with
him, without making a chop with his jaws at the visitor. In all of
which particulars he was very like the dog.

“I am afraid you won’t leave any of it for him,” said I, timidly; after
a silence during which I had hesitated as to the politeness of making
the remark. “There’s no more to be got where that came from.” It was
the certainty of this fact that impelled me to offer the hint.

“Leave any for him? Who’s him?” said my friend, stopping in his
crunching of pie-crust.

“The young man. That you spoke of. That was hid with you.”

“Oh ah!” he returned, with something like a gruff laugh. “Him? Yes,
yes! _He_ don’t want no wittles.”

“I thought he looked as if he did,” said I.

The man stopped eating, and regarded me with the keenest scrutiny and
the greatest surprise.

“Looked? When?”

“Just now.”

“Where?”

“Yonder,” said I, pointing; “over there, where I found him nodding
asleep, and thought it was you.”

He held me by the collar and stared at me so, that I began to think his
first idea about cutting my throat had revived.

“Dressed like you, you know, only with a hat,” I explained, trembling;
“and—and”—I was very anxious to put this delicately—“and with—the same
reason for wanting to borrow a file. Didn’t you hear the cannon last
night?”

“Then there _was_ firing!” he said to himself.

“I wonder you shouldn’t have been sure of that,” I returned, “for we
heard it up at home, and that’s farther away, and we were shut in
besides.”

“Why, see now!” said he. “When a man’s alone on these flats, with a
light head and a light stomach, perishing of cold and want, he hears
nothin’ all night, but guns firing, and voices calling. Hears? He sees
the soldiers, with their red coats lighted up by the torches carried
afore, closing in round him. Hears his number called, hears himself
challenged, hears the rattle of the muskets, hears the orders ‘Make
ready! Present! Cover him steady, men!’ and is laid hands on—and
there’s nothin’! Why, if I see one pursuing party last night—coming up
in order, Damn ’em, with their tramp, tramp—I see a hundred. And as to
firing! Why, I see the mist shake with the cannon, arter it was broad
day,—But this man”; he had said all the rest, as if he had forgotten my
being there; “did you notice anything in him?”

“He had a badly bruised face,” said I, recalling what I hardly knew I
knew.

“Not here?” exclaimed the man, striking his left cheek mercilessly,
with the flat of his hand.

“Yes, there!”

“Where is he?” He crammed what little food was left, into the breast of
his grey jacket. “Show me the way he went. I’ll pull him down, like a
bloodhound. Curse this iron on my sore leg! Give us hold of the file,
boy.”

I indicated in what direction the mist had shrouded the other man, and
he looked up at it for an instant. But he was down on the rank wet
grass, filing at his iron like a madman, and not minding me or minding
his own leg, which had an old chafe upon it and was bloody, but which
he handled as roughly as if it had no more feeling in it than the file.
I was very much afraid of him again, now that he had worked himself
into this fierce hurry, and I was likewise very much afraid of keeping
away from home any longer. I told him I must go, but he took no notice,
so I thought the best thing I could do was to slip off. The last I saw
of him, his head was bent over his knee and he was working hard at his
fetter, muttering impatient imprecations at it and at his leg. The last
I heard of him, I stopped in the mist to listen, and the file was still
going.




Chapter IV.


I fully expected to find a Constable in the kitchen, waiting to take me
up. But not only was there no Constable there, but no discovery had yet
been made of the robbery. Mrs. Joe was prodigiously busy in getting the
house ready for the festivities of the day, and Joe had been put upon
the kitchen doorstep to keep him out of the dust-pan,—an article into
which his destiny always led him, sooner or later, when my sister was
vigorously reaping the floors of her establishment.

“And where the deuce ha’ _you_ been?” was Mrs. Joe’s Christmas
salutation, when I and my conscience showed ourselves.

I said I had been down to hear the Carols. “Ah! well!” observed Mrs.
Joe. “You might ha’ done worse.” Not a doubt of that I thought.

“Perhaps if I warn’t a blacksmith’s wife, and (what’s the same thing) a
slave with her apron never off, _I_ should have been to hear the
Carols,” said Mrs. Joe. “I’m rather partial to Carols, myself, and
that’s the best of reasons for my never hearing any.”

Joe, who had ventured into the kitchen after me as the dustpan had
retired before us, drew the back of his hand across his nose with a
conciliatory air, when Mrs. Joe darted a look at him, and, when her
eyes were withdrawn, secretly crossed his two forefingers, and
exhibited them to me, as our token that Mrs. Joe was in a cross temper.
This was so much her normal state, that Joe and I would often, for
weeks together, be, as to our fingers, like monumental Crusaders as to
their legs.

We were to have a superb dinner, consisting of a leg of pickled pork
and greens, and a pair of roast stuffed fowls. A handsome mince-pie had
been made yesterday morning (which accounted for the mincemeat not
being missed), and the pudding was already on the boil. These extensive
arrangements occasioned us to be cut off unceremoniously in respect of
breakfast; “for I ain’t,” said Mrs. Joe,—“I ain’t a-going to have no
formal cramming and busting and washing up now, with what I’ve got
before me, I promise you!”

So, we had our slices served out, as if we were two thousand troops on
a forced march instead of a man and boy at home; and we took gulps of
milk and water, with apologetic countenances, from a jug on the
dresser. In the meantime, Mrs. Joe put clean white curtains up, and
tacked a new flowered flounce across the wide chimney to replace the
old one, and uncovered the little state parlour across the passage,
which was never uncovered at any other time, but passed the rest of the
year in a cool haze of silver paper, which even extended to the four
little white crockery poodles on the mantel-shelf, each with a black
nose and a basket of flowers in his mouth, and each the counterpart of
the other. Mrs. Joe was a very clean housekeeper, but had an exquisite
art of making her cleanliness more uncomfortable and unacceptable than
dirt itself. Cleanliness is next to Godliness, and some people do the
same by their religion.

My sister, having so much to do, was going to church vicariously, that
is to say, Joe and I were going. In his working-clothes, Joe was a
well-knit characteristic-looking blacksmith; in his holiday clothes, he
was more like a scarecrow in good circumstances, than anything else.
Nothing that he wore then fitted him or seemed to belong to him; and
everything that he wore then grazed him. On the present festive
occasion he emerged from his room, when the blithe bells were going,
the picture of misery, in a full suit of Sunday penitentials. As to me,
I think my sister must have had some general idea that I was a young
offender whom an Accoucheur Policeman had taken up (on my birthday) and
delivered over to her, to be dealt with according to the outraged
majesty of the law. I was always treated as if I had insisted on being
born in opposition to the dictates of reason, religion, and morality,
and against the dissuading arguments of my best friends. Even when I
was taken to have a new suit of clothes, the tailor had orders to make
them like a kind of Reformatory, and on no account to let me have the
free use of my limbs.

Joe and I going to church, therefore, must have been a moving spectacle
for compassionate minds. Yet, what I suffered outside was nothing to
what I underwent within. The terrors that had assailed me whenever Mrs.
Joe had gone near the pantry, or out of the room, were only to be
equalled by the remorse with which my mind dwelt on what my hands had
done. Under the weight of my wicked secret, I pondered whether the
Church would be powerful enough to shield me from the vengeance of the
terrible young man, if I divulged to that establishment. I conceived
the idea that the time when the banns were read and when the clergyman
said, “Ye are now to declare it!” would be the time for me to rise and
propose a private conference in the vestry. I am far from being sure
that I might not have astonished our small congregation by resorting to
this extreme measure, but for its being Christmas Day and no Sunday.

Mr. Wopsle, the clerk at church, was to dine with us; and Mr. Hubble
the wheelwright and Mrs. Hubble; and Uncle Pumblechook (Joe’s uncle,
but Mrs. Joe appropriated him), who was a well-to-do cornchandler in
the nearest town, and drove his own chaise-cart. The dinner hour was
half-past one. When Joe and I got home, we found the table laid, and
Mrs. Joe dressed, and the dinner dressing, and the front door unlocked
(it never was at any other time) for the company to enter by, and
everything most splendid. And still, not a word of the robbery.

The time came, without bringing with it any relief to my feelings, and
the company came. Mr. Wopsle, united to a Roman nose and a large
shining bald forehead, had a deep voice which he was uncommonly proud
of; indeed it was understood among his acquaintance that if you could
only give him his head, he would read the clergyman into fits; he
himself confessed that if the Church was “thrown open,” meaning to
competition, he would not despair of making his mark in it. The Church
not being “thrown open,” he was, as I have said, our clerk. But he
punished the Amens tremendously; and when he gave out the psalm,—always
giving the whole verse,—he looked all round the congregation first, as
much as to say, “You have heard my friend overhead; oblige me with your
opinion of this style!”

I opened the door to the company,—making believe that it was a habit of
ours to open that door,—and I opened it first to Mr. Wopsle, next to
Mr. and Mrs. Hubble, and last of all to Uncle Pumblechook. N.B. _I_ was
not allowed to call him uncle, under the severest penalties.

“Mrs. Joe,” said Uncle Pumblechook, a large hard-breathing middle-aged
slow man, with a mouth like a fish, dull staring eyes, and sandy hair
standing upright on his head, so that he looked as if he had just been
all but choked, and had that moment come to, “I have brought you as the
compliments of the season—I have brought you, Mum, a bottle of sherry
wine—and I have brought you, Mum, a bottle of port wine.”

Every Christmas Day he presented himself, as a profound novelty, with
exactly the same words, and carrying the two bottles like dumb-bells.
Every Christmas Day, Mrs. Joe replied, as she now replied, “O, Un—cle
Pum-ble—chook! This _is_ kind!” Every Christmas Day, he retorted, as he
now retorted, “It’s no more than your merits. And now are you all
bobbish, and how’s Sixpennorth of halfpence?” meaning me.

We dined on these occasions in the kitchen, and adjourned, for the nuts
and oranges and apples to the parlour; which was a change very like
Joe’s change from his working-clothes to his Sunday dress. My sister
was uncommonly lively on the present occasion, and indeed was generally
more gracious in the society of Mrs. Hubble than in other company. I
remember Mrs. Hubble as a little curly sharp-edged person in sky-blue,
who held a conventionally juvenile position, because she had married
Mr. Hubble,—I don’t know at what remote period,—when she was much
younger than he. I remember Mr Hubble as a tough, high-shouldered,
stooping old man, of a sawdusty fragrance, with his legs
extraordinarily wide apart: so that in my short days I always saw some
miles of open country between them when I met him coming up the lane.

Among this good company I should have felt myself, even if I hadn’t
robbed the pantry, in a false position. Not because I was squeezed in
at an acute angle of the tablecloth, with the table in my chest, and
the Pumblechookian elbow in my eye, nor because I was not allowed to
speak (I didn’t want to speak), nor because I was regaled with the
scaly tips of the drumsticks of the fowls, and with those obscure
corners of pork of which the pig, when living, had had the least reason
to be vain. No; I should not have minded that, if they would only have
left me alone. But they wouldn’t leave me alone. They seemed to think
the opportunity lost, if they failed to point the conversation at me,
every now and then, and stick the point into me. I might have been an
unfortunate little bull in a Spanish arena, I got so smartingly touched
up by these moral goads.

It began the moment we sat down to dinner. Mr. Wopsle said grace with
theatrical declamation,—as it now appears to me, something like a
religious cross of the Ghost in Hamlet with Richard the Third,—and
ended with the very proper aspiration that we might be truly grateful.
Upon which my sister fixed me with her eye, and said, in a low
reproachful voice, “Do you hear that? Be grateful.”

“Especially,” said Mr. Pumblechook, “be grateful, boy, to them which
brought you up by hand.”

Mrs. Hubble shook her head, and contemplating me with a mournful
presentiment that I should come to no good, asked, “Why is it that the
young are never grateful?” This moral mystery seemed too much for the
company until Mr. Hubble tersely solved it by saying, “Naterally
wicious.” Everybody then murmured “True!” and looked at me in a
particularly unpleasant and personal manner.

Joe’s station and influence were something feebler (if possible) when
there was company than when there was none. But he always aided and
comforted me when he could, in some way of his own, and he always did
so at dinner-time by giving me gravy, if there were any. There being
plenty of gravy to-day, Joe spooned into my plate, at this point, about
half a pint.

A little later on in the dinner, Mr. Wopsle reviewed the sermon with
some severity, and intimated—in the usual hypothetical case of the
Church being “thrown open”—what kind of sermon _he_ would have given
them. After favouring them with some heads of that discourse, he
remarked that he considered the subject of the day’s homily, ill
chosen; which was the less excusable, he added, when there were so many
subjects “going about.”

“True again,” said Uncle Pumblechook. “You’ve hit it, sir! Plenty of
subjects going about, for them that know how to put salt upon their
tails. That’s what’s wanted. A man needn’t go far to find a subject, if
he’s ready with his salt-box.” Mr. Pumblechook added, after a short
interval of reflection, “Look at Pork alone. There’s a subject! If you
want a subject, look at Pork!”

“True, sir. Many a moral for the young,” returned Mr. Wopsle,—and I
knew he was going to lug me in, before he said it; “might be deduced
from that text.”

(“You listen to this,” said my sister to me, in a severe parenthesis.)

Joe gave me some more gravy.

“Swine,” pursued Mr. Wopsle, in his deepest voice, and pointing his
fork at my blushes, as if he were mentioning my Christian name,—“swine
were the companions of the prodigal. The gluttony of Swine is put
before us, as an example to the young.” (I thought this pretty well in
him who had been praising up the pork for being so plump and juicy.)
“What is detestable in a pig is more detestable in a boy.”

“Or girl,” suggested Mr. Hubble.

“Of course, or girl, Mr. Hubble,” assented Mr. Wopsle, rather
irritably, “but there is no girl present.”

“Besides,” said Mr. Pumblechook, turning sharp on me, “think what
you’ve got to be grateful for. If you’d been born a Squeaker—”

“He _was_, if ever a child was,” said my sister, most emphatically.

Joe gave me some more gravy.

“Well, but I mean a four-footed Squeaker,” said Mr. Pumblechook. “If
you had been born such, would you have been here now? Not you—”

“Unless in that form,” said Mr. Wopsle, nodding towards the dish.

“But I don’t mean in that form, sir,” returned Mr. Pumblechook, who had
an objection to being interrupted; “I mean, enjoying himself with his
elders and betters, and improving himself with their conversation, and
rolling in the lap of luxury. Would he have been doing that? No, he
wouldn’t. And what would have been your destination?” turning on me
again. “You would have been disposed of for so many shillings according
to the market price of the article, and Dunstable the butcher would
have come up to you as you lay in your straw, and he would have whipped
you under his left arm, and with his right he would have tucked up his
frock to get a penknife from out of his waistcoat-pocket, and he would
have shed your blood and had your life. No bringing up by hand then.
Not a bit of it!”

Joe offered me more gravy, which I was afraid to take.

“He was a world of trouble to you, ma’am,” said Mrs. Hubble,
commiserating my sister.

“Trouble?” echoed my sister; “trouble?” and then entered on a fearful
catalogue of all the illnesses I had been guilty of, and all the acts
of sleeplessness I had committed, and all the high places I had tumbled
from, and all the low places I had tumbled into, and all the injuries I
had done myself, and all the times she had wished me in my grave, and I
had contumaciously refused to go there.

I think the Romans must have aggravated one another very much, with
their noses. Perhaps, they became the restless people they were, in
consequence. Anyhow, Mr. Wopsle’s Roman nose so aggravated me, during
the recital of my misdemeanours, that I should have liked to pull it
until he howled. But, all I had endured up to this time was nothing in
comparison with the awful feelings that took possession of me when the
pause was broken which ensued upon my sister’s recital, and in which
pause everybody had looked at me (as I felt painfully conscious) with
indignation and abhorrence.

“Yet,” said Mr. Pumblechook, leading the company gently back to the
theme from which they had strayed, “Pork—regarded as biled—is rich,
too; ain’t it?”

“Have a little brandy, uncle,” said my sister.

O Heavens, it had come at last! He would find it was weak, he would say
it was weak, and I was lost! I held tight to the leg of the table under
the cloth, with both hands, and awaited my fate.

My sister went for the stone bottle, came back with the stone bottle,
and poured his brandy out: no one else taking any. The wretched man
trifled with his glass,—took it up, looked at it through the light, put
it down,—prolonged my misery. All this time Mrs. Joe and Joe were
briskly clearing the table for the pie and pudding.

I couldn’t keep my eyes off him. Always holding tight by the leg of the
table with my hands and feet, I saw the miserable creature finger his
glass playfully, take it up, smile, throw his head back, and drink the
brandy off. Instantly afterwards, the company were seized with
unspeakable consternation, owing to his springing to his feet, turning
round several times in an appalling spasmodic whooping-cough dance, and
rushing out at the door; he then became visible through the window,
violently plunging and expectorating, making the most hideous faces,
and apparently out of his mind.

I held on tight, while Mrs. Joe and Joe ran to him. I didn’t know how I
had done it, but I had no doubt I had murdered him somehow. In my
dreadful situation, it was a relief when he was brought back, and
surveying the company all round as if _they_ had disagreed with him,
sank down into his chair with the one significant gasp, “Tar!”

I had filled up the bottle from the tar-water jug. I knew he would be
worse by and by. I moved the table, like a Medium of the present day,
by the vigor of my unseen hold upon it.

“Tar!” cried my sister, in amazement. “Why, how ever could Tar come
there?”

But, Uncle Pumblechook, who was omnipotent in that kitchen, wouldn’t
hear the word, wouldn’t hear of the subject, imperiously waved it all
away with his hand, and asked for hot gin and water. My sister, who had
begun to be alarmingly meditative, had to employ herself actively in
getting the gin, the hot water, the sugar, and the lemon-peel, and
mixing them. For the time being at least, I was saved. I still held on
to the leg of the table, but clutched it now with the fervor of
gratitude.

By degrees, I became calm enough to release my grasp and partake of
pudding. Mr. Pumblechook partook of pudding. All partook of pudding.
The course terminated, and Mr. Pumblechook had begun to beam under the
genial influence of gin and water. I began to think I should get over
the day, when my sister said to Joe, “Clean plates,—cold.”

I clutched the leg of the table again immediately, and pressed it to my
bosom as if it had been the companion of my youth and friend of my
soul. I foresaw what was coming, and I felt that this time I really was
gone.

“You must taste,” said my sister, addressing the guests with her best
grace—“you must taste, to finish with, such a delightful and delicious
present of Uncle Pumblechook’s!”

Must they! Let them not hope to taste it!

“You must know,” said my sister, rising, “it’s a pie; a savory pork
pie.”

The company murmured their compliments. Uncle Pumblechook, sensible of
having deserved well of his fellow-creatures, said,—quite vivaciously,
all things considered,—“Well, Mrs. Joe, we’ll do our best endeavours;
let us have a cut at this same pie.”

My sister went out to get it. I heard her steps proceed to the pantry.
I saw Mr. Pumblechook balance his knife. I saw reawakening appetite in
the Roman nostrils of Mr. Wopsle. I heard Mr. Hubble remark that “a bit
of savory pork pie would lay atop of anything you could mention, and do
no harm,” and I heard Joe say, “You shall have some, Pip.” I have never
been absolutely certain whether I uttered a shrill yell of terror,
merely in spirit, or in the bodily hearing of the company. I felt that
I could bear no more, and that I must run away. I released the leg of
the table, and ran for my life.

But I ran no farther than the house door, for there I ran head-foremost
into a party of soldiers with their muskets, one of whom held out a
pair of handcuffs to me, saying, “Here you are, look sharp, come on!”




Chapter V.


The apparition of a file of soldiers ringing down the but-ends of their
loaded muskets on our door-step, caused the dinner-party to rise from
table in confusion, and caused Mrs. Joe re-entering the kitchen
empty-handed, to stop short and stare, in her wondering lament of
“Gracious goodness gracious me, what’s gone—with the—pie!”

The sergeant and I were in the kitchen when Mrs. Joe stood staring; at
which crisis I partially recovered the use of my senses. It was the
sergeant who had spoken to me, and he was now looking round at the
company, with his handcuffs invitingly extended towards them in his
right hand, and his left on my shoulder.

“Excuse me, ladies and gentleman,” said the sergeant, “but as I have
mentioned at the door to this smart young shaver,” (which he hadn’t),
“I am on a chase in the name of the king, and I want the blacksmith.”

“And pray what might you want with _him_?” retorted my sister, quick to
resent his being wanted at all.

“Missis,” returned the gallant sergeant, “speaking for myself, I should
reply, the honour and pleasure of his fine wife’s acquaintance;
speaking for the king, I answer, a little job done.”

This was received as rather neat in the sergeant; insomuch that Mr.
Pumblechook cried audibly, “Good again!”

“You see, blacksmith,” said the sergeant, who had by this time picked
out Joe with his eye, “we have had an accident with these, and I find
the lock of one of ’em goes wrong, and the coupling don’t act pretty.
As they are wanted for immediate service, will you throw your eye over
them?”

Joe threw his eye over them, and pronounced that the job would
necessitate the lighting of his forge fire, and would take nearer two
hours than one. “Will it? Then will you set about it at once,
blacksmith?” said the off-hand sergeant, “as it’s on his Majesty’s
service. And if my men can bear a hand anywhere, they’ll make
themselves useful.” With that, he called to his men, who came trooping
into the kitchen one after another, and piled their arms in a corner.
And then they stood about, as soldiers do; now, with their hands
loosely clasped before them; now, resting a knee or a shoulder; now,
easing a belt or a pouch; now, opening the door to spit stiffly over
their high stocks, out into the yard.

All these things I saw without then knowing that I saw them, for I was
in an agony of apprehension. But beginning to perceive that the
handcuffs were not for me, and that the military had so far got the
better of the pie as to put it in the background, I collected a little
more of my scattered wits.

“Would you give me the time?” said the sergeant, addressing himself to
Mr. Pumblechook, as to a man whose appreciative powers justified the
inference that he was equal to the time.

“It’s just gone half past two.”

“That’s not so bad,” said the sergeant, reflecting; “even if I was
forced to halt here nigh two hours, that’ll do. How far might you call
yourselves from the marshes, hereabouts? Not above a mile, I reckon?”

“Just a mile,” said Mrs. Joe.

“That’ll do. We begin to close in upon ’em about dusk. A little before
dusk, my orders are. That’ll do.”

“Convicts, sergeant?” asked Mr. Wopsle, in a matter-of-course way.

“Ay!” returned the sergeant, “two. They’re pretty well known to be out
on the marshes still, and they won’t try to get clear of ’em before
dusk. Anybody here seen anything of any such game?”

Everybody, myself excepted, said no, with confidence. Nobody thought of
me.

“Well!” said the sergeant, “they’ll find themselves trapped in a
circle, I expect, sooner than they count on. Now, blacksmith! If you’re
ready, his Majesty the King is.”

Joe had got his coat and waistcoat and cravat off, and his leather
apron on, and passed into the forge. One of the soldiers opened its
wooden windows, another lighted the fire, another turned to at the
bellows, the rest stood round the blaze, which was soon roaring. Then
Joe began to hammer and clink, hammer and clink, and we all looked on.

The interest of the impending pursuit not only absorbed the general
attention, but even made my sister liberal. She drew a pitcher of beer
from the cask for the soldiers, and invited the sergeant to take a
glass of brandy. But Mr. Pumblechook said, sharply, “Give him wine,
Mum. I’ll engage there’s no tar in that:” so, the sergeant thanked him
and said that as he preferred his drink without tar, he would take
wine, if it was equally convenient. When it was given him, he drank his
Majesty’s health and compliments of the season, and took it all at a
mouthful and smacked his lips.

“Good stuff, eh, sergeant?” said Mr. Pumblechook.

“I’ll tell you something,” returned the sergeant; “I suspect that
stuff’s of _your_ providing.”

Mr. Pumblechook, with a fat sort of laugh, said, “Ay, ay? Why?”

“Because,” returned the sergeant, clapping him on the shoulder, “you’re
a man that knows what’s what.”

“D’ye think so?” said Mr. Pumblechook, with his former laugh. “Have
another glass!”

“With you. Hob and nob,” returned the sergeant. “The top of mine to the
foot of yours,—the foot of yours to the top of mine,—Ring once, ring
twice,—the best tune on the Musical Glasses! Your health. May you live
a thousand years, and never be a worse judge of the right sort than you
are at the present moment of your life!”

The sergeant tossed off his glass again and seemed quite ready for
another glass. I noticed that Mr. Pumblechook in his hospitality
appeared to forget that he had made a present of the wine, but took the
bottle from Mrs. Joe and had all the credit of handing it about in a
gush of joviality. Even I got some. And he was so very free of the wine
that he even called for the other bottle, and handed that about with
the same liberality, when the first was gone.

As I watched them while they all stood clustering about the forge,
enjoying themselves so much, I thought what terrible good sauce for a
dinner my fugitive friend on the marshes was. They had not enjoyed
themselves a quarter so much, before the entertainment was brightened
with the excitement he furnished. And now, when they were all in lively
anticipation of “the two villains” being taken, and when the bellows
seemed to roar for the fugitives, the fire to flare for them, the smoke
to hurry away in pursuit of them, Joe to hammer and clink for them, and
all the murky shadows on the wall to shake at them in menace as the
blaze rose and sank, and the red-hot sparks dropped and died, the pale
afternoon outside almost seemed in my pitying young fancy to have
turned pale on their account, poor wretches.

At last, Joe’s job was done, and the ringing and roaring stopped. As
Joe got on his coat, he mustered courage to propose that some of us
should go down with the soldiers and see what came of the hunt. Mr.
Pumblechook and Mr. Hubble declined, on the plea of a pipe and ladies’
society; but Mr. Wopsle said he would go, if Joe would. Joe said he was
agreeable, and would take me, if Mrs. Joe approved. We never should
have got leave to go, I am sure, but for Mrs. Joe’s curiosity to know
all about it and how it ended. As it was, she merely stipulated, “If
you bring the boy back with his head blown to bits by a musket, don’t
look to me to put it together again.”

The sergeant took a polite leave of the ladies, and parted from Mr.
Pumblechook as from a comrade; though I doubt if he were quite as fully
sensible of that gentleman’s merits under arid conditions, as when
something moist was going. His men resumed their muskets and fell in.
Mr. Wopsle, Joe, and I, received strict charge to keep in the rear, and
to speak no word after we reached the marshes. When we were all out in
the raw air and were steadily moving towards our business, I
treasonably whispered to Joe, “I hope, Joe, we shan’t find them.” and
Joe whispered to me, “I’d give a shilling if they had cut and run,
Pip.”

We were joined by no stragglers from the village, for the weather was
cold and threatening, the way dreary, the footing bad, darkness coming
on, and the people had good fires in-doors and were keeping the day. A
few faces hurried to glowing windows and looked after us, but none came
out. We passed the finger-post, and held straight on to the churchyard.
There we were stopped a few minutes by a signal from the sergeant’s
hand, while two or three of his men dispersed themselves among the
graves, and also examined the porch. They came in again without finding
anything, and then we struck out on the open marshes, through the gate
at the side of the churchyard. A bitter sleet came rattling against us
here on the east wind, and Joe took me on his back.

Now that we were out upon the dismal wilderness where they little
thought I had been within eight or nine hours and had seen both men
hiding, I considered for the first time, with great dread, if we should
come upon them, would my particular convict suppose that it was I who
had brought the soldiers there? He had asked me if I was a deceiving
imp, and he had said I should be a fierce young hound if I joined the
hunt against him. Would he believe that I was both imp and hound in
treacherous earnest, and had betrayed him?

It was of no use asking myself this question now. There I was, on Joe’s
back, and there was Joe beneath me, charging at the ditches like a
hunter, and stimulating Mr. Wopsle not to tumble on his Roman nose, and
to keep up with us. The soldiers were in front of us, extending into a
pretty wide line with an interval between man and man. We were taking
the course I had begun with, and from which I had diverged in the mist.
Either the mist was not out again yet, or the wind had dispelled it.
Under the low red glare of sunset, the beacon, and the gibbet, and the
mound of the Battery, and the opposite shore of the river, were plain,
though all of a watery lead colour.

With my heart thumping like a blacksmith at Joe’s broad shoulder, I
looked all about for any sign of the convicts. I could see none, I
could hear none. Mr. Wopsle had greatly alarmed me more than once, by
his blowing and hard breathing; but I knew the sounds by this time, and
could dissociate them from the object of pursuit. I got a dreadful
start, when I thought I heard the file still going; but it was only a
sheep-bell. The sheep stopped in their eating and looked timidly at us;
and the cattle, their heads turned from the wind and sleet, stared
angrily as if they held us responsible for both annoyances; but, except
these things, and the shudder of the dying day in every blade of grass,
there was no break in the bleak stillness of the marshes.

The soldiers were moving on in the direction of the old Battery, and we
were moving on a little way behind them, when, all of a sudden, we all
stopped. For there had reached us on the wings of the wind and rain, a
long shout. It was repeated. It was at a distance towards the east, but
it was long and loud. Nay, there seemed to be two or more shouts raised
together,—if one might judge from a confusion in the sound.

To this effect the sergeant and the nearest men were speaking under
their breath, when Joe and I came up. After another moment’s listening,
Joe (who was a good judge) agreed, and Mr. Wopsle (who was a bad judge)
agreed. The sergeant, a decisive man, ordered that the sound should not
be answered, but that the course should be changed, and that his men
should make towards it “at the double.” So we slanted to the right
(where the East was), and Joe pounded away so wonderfully, that I had
to hold on tight to keep my seat.

It was a run indeed now, and what Joe called, in the only two words he
spoke all the time, “a Winder.” Down banks and up banks, and over
gates, and splashing into dikes, and breaking among coarse rushes: no
man cared where he went. As we came nearer to the shouting, it became
more and more apparent that it was made by more than one voice.
Sometimes, it seemed to stop altogether, and then the soldiers stopped.
When it broke out again, the soldiers made for it at a greater rate
than ever, and we after them. After a while, we had so run it down,
that we could hear one voice calling “Murder!” and another voice,
“Convicts! Runaways! Guard! This way for the runaway convicts!” Then
both voices would seem to be stifled in a struggle, and then would
break out again. And when it had come to this, the soldiers ran like
deer, and Joe too.

The sergeant ran in first, when we had run the noise quite down, and
two of his men ran in close upon him. Their pieces were cocked and
levelled when we all ran in.

“Here are both men!” panted the sergeant, struggling at the bottom of a
ditch. “Surrender, you two! and confound you for two wild beasts! Come
asunder!”

Water was splashing, and mud was flying, and oaths were being sworn,
and blows were being struck, when some more men went down into the
ditch to help the sergeant, and dragged out, separately, my convict and
the other one. Both were bleeding and panting and execrating and
struggling; but of course I knew them both directly.

“Mind!” said my convict, wiping blood from his face with his ragged
sleeves, and shaking torn hair from his fingers: “_I_ took him! _I_
give him up to you! Mind that!”

“It’s not much to be particular about,” said the sergeant; “it’ll do
you small good, my man, being in the same plight yourself. Handcuffs
there!”

“I don’t expect it to do me any good. I don’t want it to do me more
good than it does now,” said my convict, with a greedy laugh. “I took
him. He knows it. That’s enough for me.”

The other convict was livid to look at, and, in addition to the old
bruised left side of his face, seemed to be bruised and torn all over.
He could not so much as get his breath to speak, until they were both
separately handcuffed, but leaned upon a soldier to keep himself from
falling.

“Take notice, guard,—he tried to murder me,” were his first words.

“Tried to murder him?” said my convict, disdainfully. “Try, and not do
it? I took him, and giv’ him up; that’s what I done. I not only
prevented him getting off the marshes, but I dragged him here,—dragged
him this far on his way back. He’s a gentleman, if you please, this
villain. Now, the Hulks has got its gentleman again, through me. Murder
him? Worth my while, too, to murder him, when I could do worse and drag
him back!”

The other one still gasped, “He tried—he tried-to—murder me. Bear—bear
witness.”

“Lookee here!” said my convict to the sergeant. “Single-handed I got
clear of the prison-ship; I made a dash and I done it. I could ha’ got
clear of these death-cold flats likewise—look at my leg: you won’t find
much iron on it—if I hadn’t made the discovery that _he_ was here. Let
_him_ go free? Let _him_ profit by the means as I found out? Let _him_
make a tool of me afresh and again? Once more? No, no, no. If I had
died at the bottom there,” and he made an emphatic swing at the ditch
with his manacled hands, “I’d have held to him with that grip, that you
should have been safe to find him in my hold.”

The other fugitive, who was evidently in extreme horror of his
companion, repeated, “He tried to murder me. I should have been a dead
man if you had not come up.”

“He lies!” said my convict, with fierce energy. “He’s a liar born, and
he’ll die a liar. Look at his face; ain’t it written there? Let him
turn those eyes of his on me. I defy him to do it.”

The other, with an effort at a scornful smile, which could not,
however, collect the nervous working of his mouth into any set
expression, looked at the soldiers, and looked about at the marshes and
at the sky, but certainly did not look at the speaker.

“Do you see him?” pursued my convict. “Do you see what a villain he is?
Do you see those grovelling and wandering eyes? That’s how he looked
when we were tried together. He never looked at me.”

The other, always working and working his dry lips and turning his eyes
restlessly about him far and near, did at last turn them for a moment
on the speaker, with the words, “You are not much to look at,” and with
a half-taunting glance at the bound hands. At that point, my convict
became so frantically exasperated, that he would have rushed upon him
but for the interposition of the soldiers. “Didn’t I tell you,” said
the other convict then, “that he would murder me, if he could?” And any
one could see that he shook with fear, and that there broke out upon
his lips curious white flakes, like thin snow.

“Enough of this parley,” said the sergeant. “Light those torches.”

As one of the soldiers, who carried a basket in lieu of a gun, went
down on his knee to open it, my convict looked round him for the first
time, and saw me. I had alighted from Joe’s back on the brink of the
ditch when we came up, and had not moved since. I looked at him eagerly
when he looked at me, and slightly moved my hands and shook my head. I
had been waiting for him to see me that I might try to assure him of my
innocence. It was not at all expressed to me that he even comprehended
my intention, for he gave me a look that I did not understand, and it
all passed in a moment. But if he had looked at me for an hour or for a
day, I could not have remembered his face ever afterwards, as having
been more attentive.

The soldier with the basket soon got a light, and lighted three or four
torches, and took one himself and distributed the others. It had been
almost dark before, but now it seemed quite dark, and soon afterwards
very dark. Before we departed from that spot, four soldiers standing in
a ring, fired twice into the air. Presently we saw other torches
kindled at some distance behind us, and others on the marshes on the
opposite bank of the river. “All right,” said the sergeant. “March.”

We had not gone far when three cannon were fired ahead of us with a
sound that seemed to burst something inside my ear. “You are expected
on board,” said the sergeant to my convict; “they know you are coming.
Don’t straggle, my man. Close up here.”

The two were kept apart, and each walked surrounded by a separate
guard. I had hold of Joe’s hand now, and Joe carried one of the
torches. Mr. Wopsle had been for going back, but Joe was resolved to
see it out, so we went on with the party. There was a reasonably good
path now, mostly on the edge of the river, with a divergence here and
there where a dike came, with a miniature windmill on it and a muddy
sluice-gate. When I looked round, I could see the other lights coming
in after us. The torches we carried dropped great blotches of fire upon
the track, and I could see those, too, lying smoking and flaring. I
could see nothing else but black darkness. Our lights warmed the air
about us with their pitchy blaze, and the two prisoners seemed rather
to like that, as they limped along in the midst of the muskets. We
could not go fast, because of their lameness; and they were so spent,
that two or three times we had to halt while they rested.

After an hour or so of this travelling, we came to a rough wooden hut
and a landing-place. There was a guard in the hut, and they challenged,
and the sergeant answered. Then, we went into the hut, where there was
a smell of tobacco and whitewash, and a bright fire, and a lamp, and a
stand of muskets, and a drum, and a low wooden bedstead, like an
overgrown mangle without the machinery, capable of holding about a
dozen soldiers all at once. Three or four soldiers who lay upon it in
their great-coats were not much interested in us, but just lifted their
heads and took a sleepy stare, and then lay down again. The sergeant
made some kind of report, and some entry in a book, and then the
convict whom I call the other convict was drafted off with his guard,
to go on board first.

My convict never looked at me, except that once. While we stood in the
hut, he stood before the fire looking thoughtfully at it, or putting up
his feet by turns upon the hob, and looking thoughtfully at them as if
he pitied them for their recent adventures. Suddenly, he turned to the
sergeant, and remarked,—

“I wish to say something respecting this escape. It may prevent some
persons laying under suspicion alonger me.”

“You can say what you like,” returned the sergeant, standing coolly
looking at him with his arms folded, “but you have no call to say it
here. You’ll have opportunity enough to say about it, and hear about
it, before it’s done with, you know.”

“I know, but this is another pint, a separate matter. A man can’t
starve; at least _I_ can’t. I took some wittles, up at the willage over
yonder,—where the church stands a’most out on the marshes.”

“You mean stole,” said the sergeant.

“And I’ll tell you where from. From the blacksmith’s.”

“Halloa!” said the sergeant, staring at Joe.

“Halloa, Pip!” said Joe, staring at me.

“It was some broken wittles—that’s what it was—and a dram of liquor,
and a pie.”

“Have you happened to miss such an article as a pie, blacksmith?” asked
the sergeant, confidentially.

“My wife did, at the very moment when you came in. Don’t you know,
Pip?”

“So,” said my convict, turning his eyes on Joe in a moody manner, and
without the least glance at me,—“so you’re the blacksmith, are you?
Than I’m sorry to say, I’ve eat your pie.”

“God knows you’re welcome to it,—so far as it was ever mine,” returned
Joe, with a saving remembrance of Mrs. Joe. “We don’t know what you
have done, but we wouldn’t have you starved to death for it, poor
miserable fellow-creatur.—Would us, Pip?”

The something that I had noticed before, clicked in the man’s throat
again, and he turned his back. The boat had returned, and his guard
were ready, so we followed him to the landing-place made of rough
stakes and stones, and saw him put into the boat, which was rowed by a
crew of convicts like himself. No one seemed surprised to see him, or
interested in seeing him, or glad to see him, or sorry to see him, or
spoke a word, except that somebody in the boat growled as if to dogs,
“Give way, you!” which was the signal for the dip of the oars. By the
light of the torches, we saw the black Hulk lying out a little way from
the mud of the shore, like a wicked Noah’s ark. Cribbed and barred and
moored by massive rusty chains, the prison-ship seemed in my young eyes
to be ironed like the prisoners. We saw the boat go alongside, and we
saw him taken up the side and disappear. Then, the ends of the torches
were flung hissing into the water, and went out, as if it were all over
with him.




Chapter VI.


My state of mind regarding the pilfering from which I had been so
unexpectedly exonerated did not impel me to frank disclosure; but I
hope it had some dregs of good at the bottom of it.

I do not recall that I felt any tenderness of conscience in reference
to Mrs. Joe, when the fear of being found out was lifted off me. But I
loved Joe,—perhaps for no better reason in those early days than
because the dear fellow let me love him,—and, as to him, my inner self
was not so easily composed. It was much upon my mind (particularly when
I first saw him looking about for his file) that I ought to tell Joe
the whole truth. Yet I did not, and for the reason that I mistrusted
that if I did, he would think me worse than I was. The fear of losing
Joe’s confidence, and of thenceforth sitting in the chimney corner at
night staring drearily at my forever lost companion and friend, tied up
my tongue. I morbidly represented to myself that if Joe knew it, I
never afterwards could see him at the fireside feeling his fair
whisker, without thinking that he was meditating on it. That, if Joe
knew it, I never afterwards could see him glance, however casually, at
yesterday’s meat or pudding when it came on to-day’s table, without
thinking that he was debating whether I had been in the pantry. That,
if Joe knew it, and at any subsequent period of our joint domestic life
remarked that his beer was flat or thick, the conviction that he
suspected tar in it, would bring a rush of blood to my face. In a word,
I was too cowardly to do what I knew to be right, as I had been too
cowardly to avoid doing what I knew to be wrong. I had had no
intercourse with the world at that time, and I imitated none of its
many inhabitants who act in this manner. Quite an untaught genius, I
made the discovery of the line of action for myself.

As I was sleepy before we were far away from the prison-ship, Joe took
me on his back again and carried me home. He must have had a tiresome
journey of it, for Mr. Wopsle, being knocked up, was in such a very bad
temper that if the Church had been thrown open, he would probably have
excommunicated the whole expedition, beginning with Joe and myself. In
his lay capacity, he persisted in sitting down in the damp to such an
insane extent, that when his coat was taken off to be dried at the
kitchen fire, the circumstantial evidence on his trousers would have
hanged him, if it had been a capital offence.

By that time, I was staggering on the kitchen floor like a little
drunkard, through having been newly set upon my feet, and through
having been fast asleep, and through waking in the heat and lights and
noise of tongues. As I came to myself (with the aid of a heavy thump
between the shoulders, and the restorative exclamation “Yah! Was there
ever such a boy as this!” from my sister,) I found Joe telling them
about the convict’s confession, and all the visitors suggesting
different ways by which he had got into the pantry. Mr. Pumblechook
made out, after carefully surveying the premises, that he had first got
upon the roof of the forge, and had then got upon the roof of the
house, and had then let himself down the kitchen chimney by a rope made
of his bedding cut into strips; and as Mr. Pumblechook was very
positive and drove his own chaise-cart—over everybody—it was agreed
that it must be so. Mr. Wopsle, indeed, wildly cried out, “No!” with
the feeble malice of a tired man; but, as he had no theory, and no coat
on, he was unanimously set at naught,—not to mention his smoking hard
behind, as he stood with his back to the kitchen fire to draw the damp
out: which was not calculated to inspire confidence.

This was all I heard that night before my sister clutched me, as a
slumberous offence to the company’s eyesight, and assisted me up to bed
with such a strong hand that I seemed to have fifty boots on, and to be
dangling them all against the edges of the stairs. My state of mind, as
I have described it, began before I was up in the morning, and lasted
long after the subject had died out, and had ceased to be mentioned
saving on exceptional occasions.




Chapter VII.


At the time when I stood in the churchyard reading the family
tombstones, I had just enough learning to be able to spell them out. My
construction even of their simple meaning was not very correct, for I
read “wife of the Above” as a complimentary reference to my father’s
exaltation to a better world; and if any one of my deceased relations
had been referred to as “Below,” I have no doubt I should have formed
the worst opinions of that member of the family. Neither were my
notions of the theological positions to which my Catechism bound me, at
all accurate; for, I have a lively remembrance that I supposed my
declaration that I was to “walk in the same all the days of my life,”
laid me under an obligation always to go through the village from our
house in one particular direction, and never to vary it by turning down
by the wheelwright’s or up by the mill.

When I was old enough, I was to be apprenticed to Joe, and until I
could assume that dignity I was not to be what Mrs. Joe called
“Pompeyed,” or (as I render it) pampered. Therefore, I was not only
odd-boy about the forge, but if any neighbour happened to want an extra
boy to frighten birds, or pick up stones, or do any such job, I was
favoured with the employment. In order, however, that our superior
position might not be compromised thereby, a money-box was kept on the
kitchen mantel-shelf, into which it was publicly made known that all my
earnings were dropped. I have an impression that they were to be
contributed eventually towards the liquidation of the National Debt,
but I know I had no hope of any personal participation in the treasure.

Mr. Wopsle’s great-aunt kept an evening school in the village; that is
to say, she was a ridiculous old woman of limited means and unlimited
infirmity, who used to go to sleep from six to seven every evening, in
the society of youth who paid two pence per week each, for the
improving opportunity of seeing her do it. She rented a small cottage,
and Mr. Wopsle had the room upstairs, where we students used to
overhear him reading aloud in a most dignified and terrific manner, and
occasionally bumping on the ceiling. There was a fiction that Mr.
Wopsle “examined” the scholars once a quarter. What he did on those
occasions was to turn up his cuffs, stick up his hair, and give us Mark
Antony’s oration over the body of Caesar. This was always followed by
Collins’s Ode on the Passions, wherein I particularly venerated Mr.
Wopsle as Revenge throwing his blood-stained sword in thunder down, and
taking the War-denouncing trumpet with a withering look. It was not
with me then, as it was in later life, when I fell into the society of
the Passions, and compared them with Collins and Wopsle, rather to the
disadvantage of both gentlemen.

Mr. Wopsle’s great-aunt, besides keeping this Educational Institution,
kept in the same room—a little general shop. She had no idea what stock
she had, or what the price of anything in it was; but there was a
little greasy memorandum-book kept in a drawer, which served as a
Catalogue of Prices, and by this oracle Biddy arranged all the shop
transactions. Biddy was Mr. Wopsle’s great-aunt’s granddaughter; I
confess myself quite unequal to the working out of the problem, what
relation she was to Mr. Wopsle. She was an orphan like myself; like me,
too, had been brought up by hand. She was most noticeable, I thought,
in respect of her extremities; for, her hair always wanted brushing,
her hands always wanted washing, and her shoes always wanted mending
and pulling up at heel. This description must be received with a
week-day limitation. On Sundays, she went to church elaborated.

Much of my unassisted self, and more by the help of Biddy than of Mr.
Wopsle’s great-aunt, I struggled through the alphabet as if it had been
a bramble-bush; getting considerably worried and scratched by every
letter. After that I fell among those thieves, the nine figures, who
seemed every evening to do something new to disguise themselves and
baffle recognition. But, at last I began, in a purblind groping way, to
read, write, and cipher, on the very smallest scale.

One night I was sitting in the chimney corner with my slate, expending
great efforts on the production of a letter to Joe. I think it must
have been a full year after our hunt upon the marshes, for it was a
long time after, and it was winter and a hard frost. With an alphabet
on the hearth at my feet for reference, I contrived in an hour or two
to print and smear this epistle:—

“MI DEER JO i OPE U R KRWITE WELL i OPE i SHAL SON B HABELL 4 2 TEEDGE
U JO AN THEN WE SHORL B SO GLODD AN WEN i M PRENGTD 2 U JO WOT LARX AN
BLEVE ME INF XN PIP.”


There was no indispensable necessity for my communicating with Joe by
letter, inasmuch as he sat beside me and we were alone. But I delivered
this written communication (slate and all) with my own hand, and Joe
received it as a miracle of erudition.

“I say, Pip, old chap!” cried Joe, opening his blue eyes wide, “what a
scholar you are! An’t you?”

“I should like to be,” said I, glancing at the slate as he held it;
with a misgiving that the writing was rather hilly.

“Why, here’s a J,” said Joe, “and a O equal to anythink! Here’s a J and
a O, Pip, and a J-O, Joe.”

[Illustration]

I had never heard Joe read aloud to any greater extent than this
monosyllable, and I had observed at church last Sunday, when I
accidentally held our Prayer-Book upside down, that it seemed to suit
his convenience quite as well as if it had been all right. Wishing to
embrace the present occasion of finding out whether in teaching Joe, I
should have to begin quite at the beginning, I said, “Ah! But read the
rest, Jo.”

“The rest, eh, Pip?” said Joe, looking at it with a slow, searching
eye, “One, two, three. Why, here’s three Js, and three Os, and three
J-O, Joes in it, Pip!”

I leaned over Joe, and, with the aid of my forefinger read him the
whole letter.

“Astonishing!” said Joe, when I had finished. “You ARE a scholar.”

“How do you spell Gargery, Joe?” I asked him, with a modest patronage.

“I don’t spell it at all,” said Joe.

“But supposing you did?”

“It _can’t_ be supposed,” said Joe. “Tho’ I’m uncommon fond of reading,
too.”

“Are you, Joe?”

“On-common. Give me,” said Joe, “a good book, or a good newspaper, and
sit me down afore a good fire, and I ask no better. Lord!” he
continued, after rubbing his knees a little, “when you _do_ come to a J
and a O, and says you, ‘Here, at last, is a J-O, Joe,’ how interesting
reading is!”

I derived from this, that Joe’s education, like Steam, was yet in its
infancy. Pursuing the subject, I inquired,—

“Didn’t you ever go to school, Joe, when you were as little as me?”

“No, Pip.”

“Why didn’t you ever go to school, Joe, when you were as little as me?”

“Well, Pip,” said Joe, taking up the poker, and settling himself to his
usual occupation when he was thoughtful, of slowly raking the fire
between the lower bars; “I’ll tell you. My father, Pip, he were given
to drink, and when he were overtook with drink, he hammered away at my
mother, most onmerciful. It were a’most the only hammering he did,
indeed, ’xcepting at myself. And he hammered at me with a wigor only to
be equalled by the wigor with which he didn’t hammer at his
anwil.—You’re a listening and understanding, Pip?”

“Yes, Joe.”

“Consequence, my mother and me we ran away from my father several
times; and then my mother she’d go out to work, and she’d say, “Joe,”
she’d say, “now, please God, you shall have some schooling, child,” and
she’d put me to school. But my father were that good in his hart that
he couldn’t abear to be without us. So, he’d come with a most
tremenjous crowd and make such a row at the doors of the houses where
we was, that they used to be obligated to have no more to do with us
and to give us up to him. And then he took us home and hammered us.
Which, you see, Pip,” said Joe, pausing in his meditative raking of the
fire, and looking at me, “were a drawback on my learning.”

“Certainly, poor Joe!”

“Though mind you, Pip,” said Joe, with a judicial touch or two of the
poker on the top bar, “rendering unto all their doo, and maintaining
equal justice betwixt man and man, my father were that good in his
hart, don’t you see?”

I didn’t see; but I didn’t say so.

“Well!” Joe pursued, “somebody must keep the pot a-biling, Pip, or the
pot won’t bile, don’t you know?”

I saw that, and said so.

“Consequence, my father didn’t make objections to my going to work; so
I went to work at my present calling, which were his too, if he would
have followed it, and I worked tolerable hard, I assure _you_, Pip. In
time I were able to keep him, and I kep him till he went off in a
purple leptic fit. And it were my intentions to have had put upon his
tombstone that, Whatsume’er the failings on his part, Remember reader
he were that good in his heart.”

Joe recited this couplet with such manifest pride and careful
perspicuity, that I asked him if he had made it himself.

“I made it,” said Joe, “my own self. I made it in a moment. It was like
striking out a horseshoe complete, in a single blow. I never was so
much surprised in all my life,—couldn’t credit my own ed,—to tell you
the truth, hardly believed it _were_ my own ed. As I was saying, Pip,
it were my intentions to have had it cut over him; but poetry costs
money, cut it how you will, small or large, and it were not done. Not
to mention bearers, all the money that could be spared were wanted for
my mother. She were in poor elth, and quite broke. She weren’t long of
following, poor soul, and her share of peace come round at last.”

Joe’s blue eyes turned a little watery; he rubbed first one of them,
and then the other, in a most uncongenial and uncomfortable manner,
with the round knob on the top of the poker.

“It were but lonesome then,” said Joe, “living here alone, and I got
acquainted with your sister. Now, Pip,”—Joe looked firmly at me as if
he knew I was not going to agree with him;—“your sister is a fine
figure of a woman.”

I could not help looking at the fire, in an obvious state of doubt.

“Whatever family opinions, or whatever the world’s opinions, on that
subject may be, Pip, your sister is,” Joe tapped the top bar with the
poker after every word following, “a-fine-figure—of—a—woman!”

I could think of nothing better to say than “I am glad you think so,
Joe.”

“So am I,” returned Joe, catching me up. “_I_ am glad I think so, Pip.
A little redness or a little matter of Bone, here or there, what does
it signify to Me?”

I sagaciously observed, if it didn’t signify to him, to whom did it
signify?

“Certainly!” assented Joe. “That’s it. You’re right, old chap! When I
got acquainted with your sister, it were the talk how she was bringing
you up by hand. Very kind of her too, all the folks said, and I said,
along with all the folks. As to you,” Joe pursued with a countenance
expressive of seeing something very nasty indeed, “if you could have
been aware how small and flabby and mean you was, dear me, you’d have
formed the most contemptible opinion of yourself!”

Not exactly relishing this, I said, “Never mind me, Joe.”

“But I did mind you, Pip,” he returned with tender simplicity. “When I
offered to your sister to keep company, and to be asked in church at
such times as she was willing and ready to come to the forge, I said to
her, ‘And bring the poor little child. God bless the poor little
child,’ I said to your sister, ‘there’s room for _him_ at the forge!’”

I broke out crying and begging pardon, and hugged Joe round the neck:
who dropped the poker to hug me, and to say, “Ever the best of friends;
an’t us, Pip? Don’t cry, old chap!”

When this little interruption was over, Joe resumed:—

“Well, you see, Pip, and here we are! That’s about where it lights;
here we are! Now, when you take me in hand in my learning, Pip (and I
tell you beforehand I am awful dull, most awful dull), Mrs. Joe mustn’t
see too much of what we’re up to. It must be done, as I may say, on the
sly. And why on the sly? I’ll tell you why, Pip.”

He had taken up the poker again; without which, I doubt if he could
have proceeded in his demonstration.

“Your sister is given to government.”

“Given to government, Joe?” I was startled, for I had some shadowy idea
(and I am afraid I must add, hope) that Joe had divorced her in a
favour of the Lords of the Admiralty, or Treasury.

“Given to government,” said Joe. “Which I meantersay the government of
you and myself.”

“Oh!”

“And she an’t over partial to having scholars on the premises,” Joe
continued, “and in partickler would not be over partial to my being a
scholar, for fear as I might rise. Like a sort of rebel, don’t you
see?”

I was going to retort with an inquiry, and had got as far as “Why—”
when Joe stopped me.

“Stay a bit. I know what you’re a-going to say, Pip; stay a bit! I
don’t deny that your sister comes the Mo-gul over us, now and again. I
don’t deny that she do throw us back-falls, and that she do drop down
upon us heavy. At such times as when your sister is on the Ram-page,
Pip,” Joe sank his voice to a whisper and glanced at the door, “candour
compels fur to admit that she is a Buster.”

Joe pronounced this word, as if it began with at least twelve capital
Bs.

“Why don’t I rise? That were your observation when I broke it off,
Pip?”

“Yes, Joe.”

“Well,” said Joe, passing the poker into his left hand, that he might
feel his whisker; and I had no hope of him whenever he took to that
placid occupation; “your sister’s a master-mind. A master-mind.”

“What’s that?” I asked, in some hope of bringing him to a stand. But
Joe was readier with his definition than I had expected, and completely
stopped me by arguing circularly, and answering with a fixed look,
“Her.”

“And I ain’t a master-mind,” Joe resumed, when he had unfixed his look,
and got back to his whisker. “And last of all, Pip,—and this I want to
say very serious to you, old chap,—I see so much in my poor mother, of
a woman drudging and slaving and breaking her honest hart and never
getting no peace in her mortal days, that I’m dead afeerd of going
wrong in the way of not doing what’s right by a woman, and I’d fur
rather of the two go wrong the t’other way, and be a little
ill-conwenienced myself. I wish it was only me that got put out, Pip; I
wish there warn’t no Tickler for you, old chap; I wish I could take it
all on myself; but this is the up-and-down-and-straight on it, Pip, and
I hope you’ll overlook shortcomings.”

Young as I was, I believe that I dated a new admiration of Joe from
that night. We were equals afterwards, as we had been before; but,
afterwards at quiet times when I sat looking at Joe and thinking about
him, I had a new sensation of feeling conscious that I was looking up
to Joe in my heart.

“However,” said Joe, rising to replenish the fire; “here’s the
Dutch-clock a-working himself up to being equal to strike Eight of ’em,
and she’s not come home yet! I hope Uncle Pumblechook’s mare mayn’t
have set a forefoot on a piece o’ ice, and gone down.”

Mrs. Joe made occasional trips with Uncle Pumblechook on market-days,
to assist him in buying such household stuffs and goods as required a
woman’s judgment; Uncle Pumblechook being a bachelor and reposing no
confidences in his domestic servant. This was market-day, and Mrs. Joe
was out on one of these expeditions.

Joe made the fire and swept the hearth, and then we went to the door to
listen for the chaise-cart. It was a dry cold night, and the wind blew
keenly, and the frost was white and hard. A man would die to-night of
lying out on the marshes, I thought. And then I looked at the stars,
and considered how awful it would be for a man to turn his face up to
them as he froze to death, and see no help or pity in all the
glittering multitude.

“Here comes the mare,” said Joe, “ringing like a peal of bells!”

The sound of her iron shoes upon the hard road was quite musical, as
she came along at a much brisker trot than usual. We got a chair out,
ready for Mrs. Joe’s alighting, and stirred up the fire that they might
see a bright window, and took a final survey of the kitchen that
nothing might be out of its place. When we had completed these
preparations, they drove up, wrapped to the eyes. Mrs. Joe was soon
landed, and Uncle Pumblechook was soon down too, covering the mare with
a cloth, and we were soon all in the kitchen, carrying so much cold air
in with us that it seemed to drive all the heat out of the fire.

“Now,” said Mrs. Joe, unwrapping herself with haste and excitement, and
throwing her bonnet back on her shoulders where it hung by the strings,
“if this boy ain’t grateful this night, he never will be!”

I looked as grateful as any boy possibly could, who was wholly
uninformed why he ought to assume that expression.

“It’s only to be hoped,” said my sister, “that he won’t be Pompeyed.
But I have my fears.”

“She ain’t in that line, Mum,” said Mr. Pumblechook. “She knows
better.”

She? I looked at Joe, making the motion with my lips and eyebrows,
“She?” Joe looked at me, making the motion with _his_ lips and
eyebrows, “She?” My sister catching him in the act, he drew the back of
his hand across his nose with his usual conciliatory air on such
occasions, and looked at her.

“Well?” said my sister, in her snappish way. “What are you staring at?
Is the house afire?”

“—Which some individual,” Joe politely hinted, “mentioned—she.”

“And she is a she, I suppose?” said my sister. “Unless you call Miss
Havisham a he. And I doubt if even you’ll go so far as that.”

“Miss Havisham, up town?” said Joe.

“Is there any Miss Havisham down town?” returned my sister.

“She wants this boy to go and play there. And of course he’s going. And
he had better play there,” said my sister, shaking her head at me as an
encouragement to be extremely light and sportive, “or I’ll work him.”

I had heard of Miss Havisham up town,—everybody for miles round had
heard of Miss Havisham up town,—as an immensely rich and grim lady who
lived in a large and dismal house barricaded against robbers, and who
led a life of seclusion.

“Well to be sure!” said Joe, astounded. “I wonder how she come to know
Pip!”

“Noodle!” cried my sister. “Who said she knew him?”

“—Which some individual,” Joe again politely hinted, “mentioned that
she wanted him to go and play there.”

“And couldn’t she ask Uncle Pumblechook if he knew of a boy to go and
play there? Isn’t it just barely possible that Uncle Pumblechook may be
a tenant of hers, and that he may sometimes—we won’t say quarterly or
half-yearly, for that would be requiring too much of you—but
sometimes—go there to pay his rent? And couldn’t she then ask Uncle
Pumblechook if he knew of a boy to go and play there? And couldn’t
Uncle Pumblechook, being always considerate and thoughtful for
us—though you may not think it, Joseph,” in a tone of the deepest
reproach, as if he were the most callous of nephews, “then mention this
boy, standing Prancing here”—which I solemnly declare I was not
doing—“that I have for ever been a willing slave to?”

“Good again!” cried Uncle Pumblechook. “Well put! Prettily pointed!
Good indeed! Now Joseph, you know the case.”

“No, Joseph,” said my sister, still in a reproachful manner, while Joe
apologetically drew the back of his hand across and across his nose,
“you do not yet—though you may not think it—know the case. You may
consider that you do, but you do _not_, Joseph. For you do not know
that Uncle Pumblechook, being sensible that for anything we can tell,
this boy’s fortune may be made by his going to Miss Havisham’s, has
offered to take him into town to-night in his own chaise-cart, and to
keep him to-night, and to take him with his own hands to Miss
Havisham’s to-morrow morning. And Lor-a-mussy me!” cried my sister,
casting off her bonnet in sudden desperation, “here I stand talking to
mere Mooncalfs, with Uncle Pumblechook waiting, and the mare catching
cold at the door, and the boy grimed with crock and dirt from the hair
of his head to the sole of his foot!”

With that, she pounced upon me, like an eagle on a lamb, and my face
was squeezed into wooden bowls in sinks, and my head was put under taps
of water-butts, and I was soaped, and kneaded, and towelled, and
thumped, and harrowed, and rasped, until I really was quite beside
myself. (I may here remark that I suppose myself to be better
acquainted than any living authority, with the ridgy effect of a
wedding-ring, passing unsympathetically over the human countenance.)

When my ablutions were completed, I was put into clean linen of the
stiffest character, like a young penitent into sackcloth, and was
trussed up in my tightest and fearfullest suit. I was then delivered
over to Mr. Pumblechook, who formally received me as if he were the
Sheriff, and who let off upon me the speech that I knew he had been
dying to make all along: “Boy, be forever grateful to all friends, but
especially unto them which brought you up by hand!”

“Good-bye, Joe!”

“God bless you, Pip, old chap!”

I had never parted from him before, and what with my feelings and what
with soapsuds, I could at first see no stars from the chaise-cart. But
they twinkled out one by one, without throwing any light on the
questions why on earth I was going to play at Miss Havisham’s, and what
on earth I was expected to play at.




Chapter VIII.


Mr. Pumblechook’s premises in the High Street of the market town, were
of a peppercorny and farinaceous character, as the premises of a
cornchandler and seedsman should be. It appeared to me that he must be
a very happy man indeed, to have so many little drawers in his shop;
and I wondered when I peeped into one or two on the lower tiers, and
saw the tied-up brown paper packets inside, whether the flower-seeds
and bulbs ever wanted of a fine day to break out of those jails, and
bloom.

It was in the early morning after my arrival that I entertained this
speculation. On the previous night, I had been sent straight to bed in
an attic with a sloping roof, which was so low in the corner where the
bedstead was, that I calculated the tiles as being within a foot of my
eyebrows. In the same early morning, I discovered a singular affinity
between seeds and corduroys. Mr. Pumblechook wore corduroys, and so did
his shopman; and somehow, there was a general air and flavour about the
corduroys, so much in the nature of seeds, and a general air and
flavour about the seeds, so much in the nature of corduroys, that I
hardly knew which was which. The same opportunity served me for
noticing that Mr. Pumblechook appeared to conduct his business by
looking across the street at the saddler, who appeared to transact
_his_ business by keeping his eye on the coachmaker, who appeared to
get on in life by putting his hands in his pockets and contemplating
the baker, who in his turn folded his arms and stared at the grocer,
who stood at his door and yawned at the chemist. The watchmaker, always
poring over a little desk with a magnifying-glass at his eye, and
always inspected by a group of smock-frocks poring over him through the
glass of his shop-window, seemed to be about the only person in the
High Street whose trade engaged his attention.

Mr. Pumblechook and I breakfasted at eight o’clock in the parlour
behind the shop, while the shopman took his mug of tea and hunch of
bread and butter on a sack of peas in the front premises. I considered
Mr. Pumblechook wretched company. Besides being possessed by my
sister’s idea that a mortifying and penitential character ought to be
imparted to my diet,—besides giving me as much crumb as possible in
combination with as little butter, and putting such a quantity of warm
water into my milk that it would have been more candid to have left the
milk out altogether,—his conversation consisted of nothing but
arithmetic. On my politely bidding him Good-morning, he said,
pompously, “Seven times nine, boy?” And how should _I_ be able to
answer, dodged in that way, in a strange place, on an empty stomach! I
was hungry, but before I had swallowed a morsel, he began a running sum
that lasted all through the breakfast. “Seven?” “And four?” “And
eight?” “And six?” “And two?” “And ten?” And so on. And after each
figure was disposed of, it was as much as I could do to get a bite or a
sup, before the next came; while he sat at his ease guessing nothing,
and eating bacon and hot roll, in (if I may be allowed the expression)
a gorging and gormandizing manner.

For such reasons, I was very glad when ten o’clock came and we started
for Miss Havisham’s; though I was not at all at my ease regarding the
manner in which I should acquit myself under that lady’s roof. Within a
quarter of an hour we came to Miss Havisham’s house, which was of old
brick, and dismal, and had a great many iron bars to it. Some of the
windows had been walled up; of those that remained, all the lower were
rustily barred. There was a courtyard in front, and that was barred; so
we had to wait, after ringing the bell, until some one should come to
open it. While we waited at the gate, I peeped in (even then Mr.
Pumblechook said, “And fourteen?” but I pretended not to hear him), and
saw that at the side of the house there was a large brewery. No brewing
was going on in it, and none seemed to have gone on for a long long
time.

A window was raised, and a clear voice demanded “What name?” To which
my conductor replied, “Pumblechook.” The voice returned, “Quite right,”
and the window was shut again, and a young lady came across the
court-yard, with keys in her hand.

“This,” said Mr. Pumblechook, “is Pip.”

“This is Pip, is it?” returned the young lady, who was very pretty and
seemed very proud; “come in, Pip.”

Mr. Pumblechook was coming in also, when she stopped him with the gate.

“Oh!” she said. “Did you wish to see Miss Havisham?”

“If Miss Havisham wished to see me,” returned Mr. Pumblechook,
discomfited.

“Ah!” said the girl; “but you see she don’t.”

She said it so finally, and in such an undiscussible way, that Mr.
Pumblechook, though in a condition of ruffled dignity, could not
protest. But he eyed me severely,—as if _I_ had done anything to
him!—and departed with the words reproachfully delivered: “Boy! Let
your behaviour here be a credit unto them which brought you up by
hand!” I was not free from apprehension that he would come back to
propound through the gate, “And sixteen?” But he didn’t.

My young conductress locked the gate, and we went across the courtyard.
It was paved and clean, but grass was growing in every crevice. The
brewery buildings had a little lane of communication with it, and the
wooden gates of that lane stood open, and all the brewery beyond stood
open, away to the high enclosing wall; and all was empty and disused.
The cold wind seemed to blow colder there than outside the gate; and it
made a shrill noise in howling in and out at the open sides of the
brewery, like the noise of wind in the rigging of a ship at sea.

She saw me looking at it, and she said, “You could drink without hurt
all the strong beer that’s brewed there now, boy.”

“I should think I could, miss,” said I, in a shy way.

“Better not try to brew beer there now, or it would turn out sour, boy;
don’t you think so?”

“It looks like it, miss.”

“Not that anybody means to try,” she added, “for that’s all done with,
and the place will stand as idle as it is till it falls. As to strong
beer, there’s enough of it in the cellars already, to drown the Manor
House.”

[Illustration]

“Is that the name of this house, miss?”

“One of its names, boy.”

“It has more than one, then, miss?”

“One more. Its other name was Satis; which is Greek, or Latin, or
Hebrew, or all three—or all one to me—for enough.”

“Enough House,” said I; “that’s a curious name, miss.”

“Yes,” she replied; “but it meant more than it said. It meant, when it
was given, that whoever had this house could want nothing else. They
must have been easily satisfied in those days, I should think. But
don’t loiter, boy.”

Though she called me “boy” so often, and with a carelessness that was
far from complimentary, she was of about my own age. She seemed much
older than I, of course, being a girl, and beautiful and
self-possessed; and she was as scornful of me as if she had been
one-and-twenty, and a queen.

We went into the house by a side door, the great front entrance had two
chains across it outside,—and the first thing I noticed was, that the
passages were all dark, and that she had left a candle burning there.
She took it up, and we went through more passages and up a staircase,
and still it was all dark, and only the candle lighted us.

At last we came to the door of a room, and she said, “Go in.”

I answered, more in shyness than politeness, “After you, miss.”

To this she returned: “Don’t be ridiculous, boy; I am not going in.”
And scornfully walked away, and—what was worse—took the candle with
her.

This was very uncomfortable, and I was half afraid. However, the only
thing to be done being to knock at the door, I knocked, and was told
from within to enter. I entered, therefore, and found myself in a
pretty large room, well lighted with wax candles. No glimpse of
daylight was to be seen in it. It was a dressing-room, as I supposed
from the furniture, though much of it was of forms and uses then quite
unknown to me. But prominent in it was a draped table with a gilded
looking-glass, and that I made out at first sight to be a fine lady’s
dressing-table.

Whether I should have made out this object so soon if there had been no
fine lady sitting at it, I cannot say. In an arm-chair, with an elbow
resting on the table and her head leaning on that hand, sat the
strangest lady I have ever seen, or shall ever see.

She was dressed in rich materials,—satins, and lace, and silks,—all of
white. Her shoes were white. And she had a long white veil dependent
from her hair, and she had bridal flowers in her hair, but her hair was
white. Some bright jewels sparkled on her neck and on her hands, and
some other jewels lay sparkling on the table. Dresses, less splendid
than the dress she wore, and half-packed trunks, were scattered about.
She had not quite finished dressing, for she had but one shoe on,—the
other was on the table near her hand,—her veil was but half arranged,
her watch and chain were not put on, and some lace for her bosom lay
with those trinkets, and with her handkerchief, and gloves, and some
flowers, and a Prayer-Book all confusedly heaped about the
looking-glass.

It was not in the first few moments that I saw all these things, though
I saw more of them in the first moments than might be supposed. But I
saw that everything within my view which ought to be white, had been
white long ago, and had lost its lustre and was faded and yellow. I saw
that the bride within the bridal dress had withered like the dress, and
like the flowers, and had no brightness left but the brightness of her
sunken eyes. I saw that the dress had been put upon the rounded figure
of a young woman, and that the figure upon which it now hung loose had
shrunk to skin and bone. Once, I had been taken to see some ghastly
waxwork at the Fair, representing I know not what impossible personage
lying in state. Once, I had been taken to one of our old marsh churches
to see a skeleton in the ashes of a rich dress that had been dug out of
a vault under the church pavement. Now, waxwork and skeleton seemed to
have dark eyes that moved and looked at me. I should have cried out, if
I could.

“Who is it?” said the lady at the table.

“Pip, ma’am.”

“Pip?”

“Mr. Pumblechook’s boy, ma’am. Come—to play.”

“Come nearer; let me look at you. Come close.”

It was when I stood before her, avoiding her eyes, that I took note of
the surrounding objects in detail, and saw that her watch had stopped
at twenty minutes to nine, and that a clock in the room had stopped at
twenty minutes to nine.

“Look at me,” said Miss Havisham. “You are not afraid of a woman who
has never seen the sun since you were born?”

I regret to state that I was not afraid of telling the enormous lie
comprehended in the answer “No.”

“Do you know what I touch here?” she said, laying her hands, one upon
the other, on her left side.

“Yes, ma’am.” (It made me think of the young man.)

“What do I touch?”

“Your heart.”

“Broken!”

She uttered the word with an eager look, and with strong emphasis, and
with a weird smile that had a kind of boast in it. Afterwards she kept
her hands there for a little while, and slowly took them away as if
they were heavy.

“I am tired,” said Miss Havisham. “I want diversion, and I have done
with men and women. Play.”

I think it will be conceded by my most disputatious reader, that she
could hardly have directed an unfortunate boy to do anything in the
wide world more difficult to be done under the circumstances.

“I sometimes have sick fancies,” she went on, “and I have a sick fancy
that I want to see some play. There, there!” with an impatient movement
of the fingers of her right hand; “play, play, play!”

For a moment, with the fear of my sister’s working me before my eyes, I
had a desperate idea of starting round the room in the assumed
character of Mr. Pumblechook’s chaise-cart. But I felt myself so
unequal to the performance that I gave it up, and stood looking at Miss
Havisham in what I suppose she took for a dogged manner, inasmuch as
she said, when we had taken a good look at each other,—

“Are you sullen and obstinate?”

“No, ma’am, I am very sorry for you, and very sorry I can’t play just
now. If you complain of me I shall get into trouble with my sister, so
I would do it if I could; but it’s so new here, and so strange, and so
fine,—and melancholy—.” I stopped, fearing I might say too much, or had
already said it, and we took another look at each other.

Before she spoke again, she turned her eyes from me, and looked at the
dress she wore, and at the dressing-table, and finally at herself in
the looking-glass.

“So new to him,” she muttered, “so old to me; so strange to him, so
familiar to me; so melancholy to both of us! Call Estella.”

As she was still looking at the reflection of herself, I thought she
was still talking to herself, and kept quiet.

“Call Estella,” she repeated, flashing a look at me. “You can do that.
Call Estella. At the door.”

To stand in the dark in a mysterious passage of an unknown house,
bawling Estella to a scornful young lady neither visible nor
responsive, and feeling it a dreadful liberty so to roar out her name,
was almost as bad as playing to order. But she answered at last, and
her light came along the dark passage like a star.

Miss Havisham beckoned her to come close, and took up a jewel from the
table, and tried its effect upon her fair young bosom and against her
pretty brown hair. “Your own, one day, my dear, and you will use it
well. Let me see you play cards with this boy.”

“With this boy? Why, he is a common labouring-boy!”

I thought I overheard Miss Havisham answer,—only it seemed so
unlikely,—“Well? You can break his heart.”

“What do you play, boy?” asked Estella of myself, with the greatest
disdain.

“Nothing but beggar my neighbour, miss.”

“Beggar him,” said Miss Havisham to Estella. So we sat down to cards.

It was then I began to understand that everything in the room had
stopped, like the watch and the clock, a long time ago. I noticed that
Miss Havisham put down the jewel exactly on the spot from which she had
taken it up. As Estella dealt the cards, I glanced at the
dressing-table again, and saw that the shoe upon it, once white, now
yellow, had never been worn. I glanced down at the foot from which the
shoe was absent, and saw that the silk stocking on it, once white, now
yellow, had been trodden ragged. Without this arrest of everything,
this standing still of all the pale decayed objects, not even the
withered bridal dress on the collapsed form could have looked so like
grave-clothes, or the long veil so like a shroud.

So she sat, corpse-like, as we played at cards; the frillings and
trimmings on her bridal dress, looking like earthy paper. I knew
nothing then of the discoveries that are occasionally made of bodies
buried in ancient times, which fall to powder in the moment of being
distinctly seen; but, I have often thought since, that she must have
looked as if the admission of the natural light of day would have
struck her to dust.

“He calls the knaves Jacks, this boy!” said Estella with disdain,
before our first game was out. “And what coarse hands he has! And what
thick boots!”

I had never thought of being ashamed of my hands before; but I began to
consider them a very indifferent pair. Her contempt for me was so
strong, that it became infectious, and I caught it.

She won the game, and I dealt. I misdealt, as was only natural, when I
knew she was lying in wait for me to do wrong; and she denounced me for
a stupid, clumsy labouring-boy.

“You say nothing of her,” remarked Miss Havisham to me, as she looked
on. “She says many hard things of you, but you say nothing of her. What
do you think of her?”

“I don’t like to say,” I stammered.

“Tell me in my ear,” said Miss Havisham, bending down.

“I think she is very proud,” I replied, in a whisper.

“Anything else?”

“I think she is very pretty.”

“Anything else?”

“I think she is very insulting.” (She was looking at me then with a
look of supreme aversion.)

“Anything else?”

“I think I should like to go home.”

“And never see her again, though she is so pretty?”

“I am not sure that I shouldn’t like to see her again, but I should
like to go home now.”

“You shall go soon,” said Miss Havisham, aloud. “Play the game out.”

Saving for the one weird smile at first, I should have felt almost sure
that Miss Havisham’s face could not smile. It had dropped into a
watchful and brooding expression,—most likely when all the things about
her had become transfixed,—and it looked as if nothing could ever lift
it up again. Her chest had dropped, so that she stooped; and her voice
had dropped, so that she spoke low, and with a dead lull upon her;
altogether, she had the appearance of having dropped body and soul,
within and without, under the weight of a crushing blow.

I played the game to an end with Estella, and she beggared me. She
threw the cards down on the table when she had won them all, as if she
despised them for having been won of me.

“When shall I have you here again?” said Miss Havisham. “Let me think.”

I was beginning to remind her that to-day was Wednesday, when she
checked me with her former impatient movement of the fingers of her
right hand.

“There, there! I know nothing of days of the week; I know nothing of
weeks of the year. Come again after six days. You hear?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Estella, take him down. Let him have something to eat, and let him
roam and look about him while he eats. Go, Pip.”

I followed the candle down, as I had followed the candle up, and she
stood it in the place where we had found it. Until she opened the side
entrance, I had fancied, without thinking about it, that it must
necessarily be night-time. The rush of the daylight quite confounded
me, and made me feel as if I had been in the candlelight of the strange
room many hours.

“You are to wait here, you boy,” said Estella; and disappeared and
closed the door.

I took the opportunity of being alone in the courtyard to look at my
coarse hands and my common boots. My opinion of those accessories was
not favourable. They had never troubled me before, but they troubled me
now, as vulgar appendages. I determined to ask Joe why he had ever
taught me to call those picture-cards Jacks, which ought to be called
knaves. I wished Joe had been rather more genteelly brought up, and
then I should have been so too.

She came back, with some bread and meat and a little mug of beer. She
put the mug down on the stones of the yard, and gave me the bread and
meat without looking at me, as insolently as if I were a dog in
disgrace. I was so humiliated, hurt, spurned, offended, angry, sorry,—I
cannot hit upon the right name for the smart—God knows what its name
was,—that tears started to my eyes. The moment they sprang there, the
girl looked at me with a quick delight in having been the cause of
them. This gave me power to keep them back and to look at her: so, she
gave a contemptuous toss—but with a sense, I thought, of having made
too sure that I was so wounded—and left me.

But when she was gone, I looked about me for a place to hide my face
in, and got behind one of the gates in the brewery-lane, and leaned my
sleeve against the wall there, and leaned my forehead on it and cried.
As I cried, I kicked the wall, and took a hard twist at my hair; so
bitter were my feelings, and so sharp was the smart without a name,
that needed counteraction.

My sister’s bringing up had made me sensitive. In the little world in
which children have their existence whosoever brings them up, there is
nothing so finely perceived and so finely felt as injustice. It may be
only small injustice that the child can be exposed to; but the child is
small, and its world is small, and its rocking-horse stands as many
hands high, according to scale, as a big-boned Irish hunter. Within
myself, I had sustained, from my babyhood, a perpetual conflict with
injustice. I had known, from the time when I could speak, that my
sister, in her capricious and violent coercion, was unjust to me. I had
cherished a profound conviction that her bringing me up by hand gave
her no right to bring me up by jerks. Through all my punishments,
disgraces, fasts, and vigils, and other penitential performances, I had
nursed this assurance; and to my communing so much with it, in a
solitary and unprotected way, I in great part refer the fact that I was
morally timid and very sensitive.

I got rid of my injured feelings for the time by kicking them into the
brewery wall, and twisting them out of my hair, and then I smoothed my
face with my sleeve, and came from behind the gate. The bread and meat
were acceptable, and the beer was warming and tingling, and I was soon
in spirits to look about me.

To be sure, it was a deserted place, down to the pigeon-house in the
brewery-yard, which had been blown crooked on its pole by some high
wind, and would have made the pigeons think themselves at sea, if there
had been any pigeons there to be rocked by it. But there were no
pigeons in the dove-cot, no horses in the stable, no pigs in the sty,
no malt in the storehouse, no smells of grains and beer in the copper
or the vat. All the uses and scents of the brewery might have
evaporated with its last reek of smoke. In a by-yard, there was a
wilderness of empty casks, which had a certain sour remembrance of
better days lingering about them; but it was too sour to be accepted as
a sample of the beer that was gone,—and in this respect I remember
those recluses as being like most others.

Behind the furthest end of the brewery, was a rank garden with an old
wall; not so high but that I could struggle up and hold on long enough
to look over it, and see that the rank garden was the garden of the
house, and that it was overgrown with tangled weeds, but that there was
a track upon the green and yellow paths, as if some one sometimes
walked there, and that Estella was walking away from me even then. But
she seemed to be everywhere. For when I yielded to the temptation
presented by the casks, and began to walk on them, I saw _her_ walking
on them at the end of the yard of casks. She had her back towards me,
and held her pretty brown hair spread out in her two hands, and never
looked round, and passed out of my view directly. So, in the brewery
itself,—by which I mean the large paved lofty place in which they used
to make the beer, and where the brewing utensils still were. When I
first went into it, and, rather oppressed by its gloom, stood near the
door looking about me, I saw her pass among the extinguished fires, and
ascend some light iron stairs, and go out by a gallery high overhead,
as if she were going out into the sky.

It was in this place, and at this moment, that a strange thing happened
to my fancy. I thought it a strange thing then, and I thought it a
stranger thing long afterwards. I turned my eyes—a little dimmed by
looking up at the frosty light—towards a great wooden beam in a low
nook of the building near me on my right hand, and I saw a figure
hanging there by the neck. A figure all in yellow white, with but one
shoe to the feet; and it hung so, that I could see that the faded
trimmings of the dress were like earthy paper, and that the face was
Miss Havisham’s, with a movement going over the whole countenance as if
she were trying to call to me. In the terror of seeing the figure, and
in the terror of being certain that it had not been there a moment
before, I at first ran from it, and then ran towards it. And my terror
was greatest of all when I found no figure there.

Nothing less than the frosty light of the cheerful sky, the sight of
people passing beyond the bars of the court-yard gate, and the reviving
influence of the rest of the bread and meat and beer, would have
brought me round. Even with those aids, I might not have come to myself
as soon as I did, but that I saw Estella approaching with the keys, to
let me out. She would have some fair reason for looking down upon me, I
thought, if she saw me frightened; and she would have no fair reason.

She gave me a triumphant glance in passing me, as if she rejoiced that
my hands were so coarse and my boots were so thick, and she opened the
gate, and stood holding it. I was passing out without looking at her,
when she touched me with a taunting hand.

“Why don’t you cry?”

“Because I don’t want to.”

“You do,” said she. “You have been crying till you are half blind, and
you are near crying again now.”

She laughed contemptuously, pushed me out, and locked the gate upon me.
I went straight to Mr. Pumblechook’s, and was immensely relieved to
find him not at home. So, leaving word with the shopman on what day I
was wanted at Miss Havisham’s again, I set off on the four-mile walk to
our forge; pondering, as I went along, on all I had seen, and deeply
revolving that I was a common labouring-boy; that my hands were coarse;
that my boots were thick; that I had fallen into a despicable habit of
calling knaves Jacks; that I was much more ignorant than I had
considered myself last night, and generally that I was in a low-lived
bad way.




Chapter IX.


When I reached home, my sister was very curious to know all about Miss
Havisham’s, and asked a number of questions. And I soon found myself
getting heavily bumped from behind in the nape of the neck and the
small of the back, and having my face ignominiously shoved against the
kitchen wall, because I did not answer those questions at sufficient
length.

If a dread of not being understood be hidden in the breasts of other
young people to anything like the extent to which it used to be hidden
in mine,—which I consider probable, as I have no particular reason to
suspect myself of having been a monstrosity,—it is the key to many
reservations. I felt convinced that if I described Miss Havisham’s as
my eyes had seen it, I should not be understood. Not only that, but I
felt convinced that Miss Havisham too would not be understood; and
although she was perfectly incomprehensible to me, I entertained an
impression that there would be something coarse and treacherous in my
dragging her as she really was (to say nothing of Miss Estella) before
the contemplation of Mrs. Joe. Consequently, I said as little as I
could, and had my face shoved against the kitchen wall.

The worst of it was that that bullying old Pumblechook, preyed upon by
a devouring curiosity to be informed of all I had seen and heard, came
gaping over in his chaise-cart at tea-time, to have the details
divulged to him. And the mere sight of the torment, with his fishy eyes
and mouth open, his sandy hair inquisitively on end, and his waistcoat
heaving with windy arithmetic, made me vicious in my reticence.

“Well, boy,” Uncle Pumblechook began, as soon as he was seated in the
chair of honour by the fire. “How did you get on up town?”

I answered, “Pretty well, sir,” and my sister shook her fist at me.

“Pretty well?” Mr. Pumblechook repeated. “Pretty well is no answer.
Tell us what you mean by pretty well, boy?”

Whitewash on the forehead hardens the brain into a state of obstinacy
perhaps. Anyhow, with whitewash from the wall on my forehead, my
obstinacy was adamantine. I reflected for some time, and then answered
as if I had discovered a new idea, “I mean pretty well.”

My sister with an exclamation of impatience was going to fly at me,—I
had no shadow of defence, for Joe was busy in the forge,—when Mr.
Pumblechook interposed with “No! Don’t lose your temper. Leave this lad
to me, ma’am; leave this lad to me.” Mr. Pumblechook then turned me
towards him, as if he were going to cut my hair, and said,—

“First (to get our thoughts in order): Forty-three pence?”

I calculated the consequences of replying “Four Hundred Pound,” and
finding them against me, went as near the answer as I could—which was
somewhere about eightpence off. Mr. Pumblechook then put me through my
pence-table from “twelve pence make one shilling,” up to “forty pence
make three and fourpence,” and then triumphantly demanded, as if he had
done for me, “_Now!_ How much is forty-three pence?” To which I
replied, after a long interval of reflection, “I don’t know.” And I was
so aggravated that I almost doubt if I did know.

Mr. Pumblechook worked his head like a screw to screw it out of me, and
said, “Is forty-three pence seven and sixpence three fardens, for
instance?”

“Yes!” said I. And although my sister instantly boxed my ears, it was
highly gratifying to me to see that the answer spoilt his joke, and
brought him to a dead stop.

“Boy! What like is Miss Havisham?” Mr. Pumblechook began again when he
had recovered; folding his arms tight on his chest and applying the
screw.

“Very tall and dark,” I told him.

“Is she, uncle?” asked my sister.

Mr. Pumblechook winked assent; from which I at once inferred that he
had never seen Miss Havisham, for she was nothing of the kind.

“Good!” said Mr. Pumblechook conceitedly. (“This is the way to have
him! We are beginning to hold our own, I think, Mum?”)

“I am sure, uncle,” returned Mrs. Joe, “I wish you had him always; you
know so well how to deal with him.”

“Now, boy! What was she a-doing of, when you went in today?” asked Mr.
Pumblechook.

“She was sitting,” I answered, “in a black velvet coach.”

Mr. Pumblechook and Mrs. Joe stared at one another—as they well
might—and both repeated, “In a black velvet coach?”

“Yes,” said I. “And Miss Estella—that’s her niece, I think—handed her
in cake and wine at the coach-window, on a gold plate. And we all had
cake and wine on gold plates. And I got up behind the coach to eat
mine, because she told me to.”

“Was anybody else there?” asked Mr. Pumblechook.

“Four dogs,” said I.

“Large or small?”

“Immense,” said I. “And they fought for veal-cutlets out of a silver
basket.”

Mr. Pumblechook and Mrs. Joe stared at one another again, in utter
amazement. I was perfectly frantic,—a reckless witness under the
torture,—and would have told them anything.

“Where _was_ this coach, in the name of gracious?” asked my sister.

“In Miss Havisham’s room.” They stared again. “But there weren’t any
horses to it.” I added this saving clause, in the moment of rejecting
four richly caparisoned coursers which I had had wild thoughts of
harnessing.

“Can this be possible, uncle?” asked Mrs. Joe. “What can the boy mean?”

“I’ll tell you, Mum,” said Mr. Pumblechook. “My opinion is, it’s a
sedan-chair. She’s flighty, you know,—very flighty,—quite flighty
enough to pass her days in a sedan-chair.”

“Did you ever see her in it, uncle?” asked Mrs. Joe.

“How could I,” he returned, forced to the admission, “when I never see
her in my life? Never clapped eyes upon her!”

“Goodness, uncle! And yet you have spoken to her?”

“Why, don’t you know,” said Mr. Pumblechook, testily, “that when I have
been there, I have been took up to the outside of her door, and the
door has stood ajar, and she has spoke to me that way. Don’t say you
don’t know _that_, Mum. Howsever, the boy went there to play. What did
you play at, boy?”

“We played with flags,” I said. (I beg to observe that I think of
myself with amazement, when I recall the lies I told on this occasion.)

“Flags!” echoed my sister.

“Yes,” said I. “Estella waved a blue flag, and I waved a red one, and
Miss Havisham waved one sprinkled all over with little gold stars, out
at the coach-window. And then we all waved our swords and hurrahed.”

“Swords!” repeated my sister. “Where did you get swords from?”

“Out of a cupboard,” said I. “And I saw pistols in it,—and jam,—and
pills. And there was no daylight in the room, but it was all lighted up
with candles.”

“That’s true, Mum,” said Mr. Pumblechook, with a grave nod. “That’s the
state of the case, for that much I’ve seen myself.” And then they both
stared at me, and I, with an obtrusive show of artlessness on my
countenance, stared at them, and plaited the right leg of my trousers
with my right hand.

If they had asked me any more questions, I should undoubtedly have
betrayed myself, for I was even then on the point of mentioning that
there was a balloon in the yard, and should have hazarded the statement
but for my invention being divided between that phenomenon and a bear
in the brewery. They were so much occupied, however, in discussing the
marvels I had already presented for their consideration, that I
escaped. The subject still held them when Joe came in from his work to
have a cup of tea. To whom my sister, more for the relief of her own
mind than for the gratification of his, related my pretended
experiences.

Now, when I saw Joe open his blue eyes and roll them all round the
kitchen in helpless amazement, I was overtaken by penitence; but only
as regarded him,—not in the least as regarded the other two. Towards
Joe, and Joe only, I considered myself a young monster, while they sat
debating what results would come to me from Miss Havisham’s
acquaintance and favour. They had no doubt that Miss Havisham would “do
something” for me; their doubts related to the form that something
would take. My sister stood out for “property.” Mr. Pumblechook was in
favour of a handsome premium for binding me apprentice to some genteel
trade,—say, the corn and seed trade, for instance. Joe fell into the
deepest disgrace with both, for offering the bright suggestion that I
might only be presented with one of the dogs who had fought for the
veal-cutlets. “If a fool’s head can’t express better opinions than
that,” said my sister, “and you have got any work to do, you had better
go and do it.” So he went.

After Mr. Pumblechook had driven off, and when my sister was washing
up, I stole into the forge to Joe, and remained by him until he had
done for the night. Then I said, “Before the fire goes out, Joe, I
should like to tell you something.”

“Should you, Pip?” said Joe, drawing his shoeing-stool near the forge.
“Then tell us. What is it, Pip?”

“Joe,” said I, taking hold of his rolled-up shirt sleeve, and twisting
it between my finger and thumb, “you remember all that about Miss
Havisham’s?”

“Remember?” said Joe. “I believe you! Wonderful!”

“It’s a terrible thing, Joe; it ain’t true.”

“What are you telling of, Pip?” cried Joe, falling back in the greatest
amazement. “You don’t mean to say it’s—”

“Yes I do; it’s lies, Joe.”

“But not all of it? Why sure you don’t mean to say, Pip, that there was
no black welwet co—eh?” For, I stood shaking my head. “But at least
there was dogs, Pip? Come, Pip,” said Joe, persuasively, “if there
warn’t no weal-cutlets, at least there was dogs?”

“No, Joe.”

“A dog?” said Joe. “A puppy? Come?”

“No, Joe, there was nothing at all of the kind.”

As I fixed my eyes hopelessly on Joe, Joe contemplated me in dismay.
“Pip, old chap! This won’t do, old fellow! I say! Where do you expect
to go to?”

“It’s terrible, Joe; ain’t it?”

“Terrible?” cried Joe. “Awful! What possessed you?”

“I don’t know what possessed me, Joe,” I replied, letting his shirt
sleeve go, and sitting down in the ashes at his feet, hanging my head;
“but I wish you hadn’t taught me to call Knaves at cards Jacks; and I
wish my boots weren’t so thick nor my hands so coarse.”

And then I told Joe that I felt very miserable, and that I hadn’t been
able to explain myself to Mrs. Joe and Pumblechook, who were so rude to
me, and that there had been a beautiful young lady at Miss Havisham’s
who was dreadfully proud, and that she had said I was common, and that
I knew I was common, and that I wished I was not common, and that the
lies had come of it somehow, though I didn’t know how.

This was a case of metaphysics, at least as difficult for Joe to deal
with as for me. But Joe took the case altogether out of the region of
metaphysics, and by that means vanquished it.

“There’s one thing you may be sure of, Pip,” said Joe, after some
rumination, “namely, that lies is lies. Howsever they come, they didn’t
ought to come, and they come from the father of lies, and work round to
the same. Don’t you tell no more of ’em, Pip. _That_ ain’t the way to
get out of being common, old chap. And as to being common, I don’t make
it out at all clear. You are oncommon in some things. You’re oncommon
small. Likewise you’re a oncommon scholar.”

“No, I am ignorant and backward, Joe.”

“Why, see what a letter you wrote last night! Wrote in print even! I’ve
seen letters—Ah! and from gentlefolks!—that I’ll swear weren’t wrote in
print,” said Joe.

“I have learnt next to nothing, Joe. You think much of me. It’s only
that.”

“Well, Pip,” said Joe, “be it so or be it son’t, you must be a common
scholar afore you can be a oncommon one, I should hope! The king upon
his throne, with his crown upon his ed, can’t sit and write his acts of
Parliament in print, without having begun, when he were a unpromoted
Prince, with the alphabet.—Ah!” added Joe, with a shake of the head
that was full of meaning, “and begun at A too, and worked his way to Z.
And _I_ know what that is to do, though I can’t say I’ve exactly done
it.”

There was some hope in this piece of wisdom, and it rather encouraged
me.

“Whether common ones as to callings and earnings,” pursued Joe,
reflectively, “mightn’t be the better of continuing for to keep company
with common ones, instead of going out to play with oncommon
ones,—which reminds me to hope that there were a flag, perhaps?”

“No, Joe.”

“(I’m sorry there weren’t a flag, Pip). Whether that might be or
mightn’t be, is a thing as can’t be looked into now, without putting
your sister on the Rampage; and that’s a thing not to be thought of as
being done intentional. Lookee here, Pip, at what is said to you by a
true friend. Which this to you the true friend say. If you can’t get to
be oncommon through going straight, you’ll never get to do it through
going crooked. So don’t tell no more on ’em, Pip, and live well and die
happy.”

“You are not angry with me, Joe?”

“No, old chap. But bearing in mind that them were which I meantersay of
a stunning and outdacious sort,—alluding to them which bordered on
weal-cutlets and dog-fighting,—a sincere well-wisher would adwise, Pip,
their being dropped into your meditations, when you go upstairs to bed.
That’s all, old chap, and don’t never do it no more.”

When I got up to my little room and said my prayers, I did not forget
Joe’s recommendation, and yet my young mind was in that disturbed and
unthankful state, that I thought long after I laid me down, how common
Estella would consider Joe, a mere blacksmith; how thick his boots, and
how coarse his hands. I thought how Joe and my sister were then sitting
in the kitchen, and how I had come up to bed from the kitchen, and how
Miss Havisham and Estella never sat in a kitchen, but were far above
the level of such common doings. I fell asleep recalling what I “used
to do” when I was at Miss Havisham’s; as though I had been there weeks
or months, instead of hours; and as though it were quite an old subject
of remembrance, instead of one that had arisen only that day.

That was a memorable day to me, for it made great changes in me. But it
is the same with any life. Imagine one selected day struck out of it,
and think how different its course would have been. Pause you who read
this, and think for a moment of the long chain of iron or gold, of
thorns or flowers, that would never have bound you, but for the
formation of the first link on one memorable day.




Chapter X.


The felicitous idea occurred to me a morning or two later when I woke,
that the best step I could take towards making myself uncommon was to
get out of Biddy everything she knew. In pursuance of this luminous
conception I mentioned to Biddy when I went to Mr. Wopsle’s
great-aunt’s at night, that I had a particular reason for wishing to
get on in life, and that I should feel very much obliged to her if she
would impart all her learning to me. Biddy, who was the most obliging
of girls, immediately said she would, and indeed began to carry out her
promise within five minutes.

The Educational scheme or Course established by Mr. Wopsle’s great-aunt
may be resolved into the following synopsis. The pupils ate apples and
put straws down one another’s backs, until Mr. Wopsle’s great-aunt
collected her energies, and made an indiscriminate totter at them with
a birch-rod. After receiving the charge with every mark of derision,
the pupils formed in line and buzzingly passed a ragged book from hand
to hand. The book had an alphabet in it, some figures and tables, and a
little spelling,—that is to say, it had had once. As soon as this
volume began to circulate, Mr. Wopsle’s great-aunt fell into a state of
coma, arising either from sleep or a rheumatic paroxysm. The pupils
then entered among themselves upon a competitive examination on the
subject of Boots, with the view of ascertaining who could tread the
hardest upon whose toes. This mental exercise lasted until Biddy made a
rush at them and distributed three defaced Bibles (shaped as if they
had been unskilfully cut off the chump end of something), more
illegibly printed at the best than any curiosities of literature I have
since met with, speckled all over with ironmould, and having various
specimens of the insect world smashed between their leaves. This part
of the Course was usually lightened by several single combats between
Biddy and refractory students. When the fights were over, Biddy gave
out the number of a page, and then we all read aloud what we could,—or
what we couldn’t—in a frightful chorus; Biddy leading with a high,
shrill, monotonous voice, and none of us having the least notion of, or
reverence for, what we were reading about. When this horrible din had
lasted a certain time, it mechanically awoke Mr. Wopsle’s great-aunt,
who staggered at a boy fortuitously, and pulled his ears. This was
understood to terminate the Course for the evening, and we emerged into
the air with shrieks of intellectual victory. It is fair to remark that
there was no prohibition against any pupil’s entertaining himself with
a slate or even with the ink (when there was any), but that it was not
easy to pursue that branch of study in the winter season, on account of
the little general shop in which the classes were holden—and which was
also Mr. Wopsle’s great-aunt’s sitting-room and bedchamber—being but
faintly illuminated through the agency of one low-spirited dip-candle
and no snuffers.

It appeared to me that it would take time to become uncommon, under
these circumstances: nevertheless, I resolved to try it, and that very
evening Biddy entered on our special agreement, by imparting some
information from her little catalogue of Prices, under the head of
moist sugar, and lending me, to copy at home, a large old English D
which she had imitated from the heading of some newspaper, and which I
supposed, until she told me what it was, to be a design for a buckle.

Of course there was a public-house in the village, and of course Joe
liked sometimes to smoke his pipe there. I had received strict orders
from my sister to call for him at the Three Jolly Bargemen, that
evening, on my way from school, and bring him home at my peril. To the
Three Jolly Bargemen, therefore, I directed my steps.

There was a bar at the Jolly Bargemen, with some alarmingly long chalk
scores in it on the wall at the side of the door, which seemed to me to
be never paid off. They had been there ever since I could remember, and
had grown more than I had. But there was a quantity of chalk about our
country, and perhaps the people neglected no opportunity of turning it
to account.

It being Saturday night, I found the landlord looking rather grimly at
these records; but as my business was with Joe and not with him, I
merely wished him good evening, and passed into the common room at the
end of the passage, where there was a bright large kitchen fire, and
where Joe was smoking his pipe in company with Mr. Wopsle and a
stranger. Joe greeted me as usual with “Halloa, Pip, old chap!” and the
moment he said that, the stranger turned his head and looked at me.

He was a secret-looking man whom I had never seen before. His head was
all on one side, and one of his eyes was half shut up, as if he were
taking aim at something with an invisible gun. He had a pipe in his
mouth, and he took it out, and, after slowly blowing all his smoke away
and looking hard at me all the time, nodded. So, I nodded, and then he
nodded again, and made room on the settle beside him that I might sit
down there.

But as I was used to sit beside Joe whenever I entered that place of
resort, I said “No, thank you, sir,” and fell into the space Joe made
for me on the opposite settle. The strange man, after glancing at Joe,
and seeing that his attention was otherwise engaged, nodded to me again
when I had taken my seat, and then rubbed his leg—in a very odd way, as
it struck me.

“You was saying,” said the strange man, turning to Joe, “that you was a
blacksmith.”

“Yes. I said it, you know,” said Joe.

“What’ll you drink, Mr.—? You didn’t mention your name, by the bye.”

Joe mentioned it now, and the strange man called him by it. “What’ll
you drink, Mr. Gargery? At my expense? To top up with?”

“Well,” said Joe, “to tell you the truth, I ain’t much in the habit of
drinking at anybody’s expense but my own.”

“Habit? No,” returned the stranger, “but once and away, and on a
Saturday night too. Come! Put a name to it, Mr. Gargery.”

“I wouldn’t wish to be stiff company,” said Joe. “Rum.”

“Rum,” repeated the stranger. “And will the other gentleman originate a
sentiment.”

“Rum,” said Mr. Wopsle.

“Three Rums!” cried the stranger, calling to the landlord. “Glasses
round!”

“This other gentleman,” observed Joe, by way of introducing Mr. Wopsle,
“is a gentleman that you would like to hear give it out. Our clerk at
church.”

“Aha!” said the stranger, quickly, and cocking his eye at me. “The
lonely church, right out on the marshes, with graves round it!”

“That’s it,” said Joe.

The stranger, with a comfortable kind of grunt over his pipe, put his
legs up on the settle that he had to himself. He wore a flapping
broad-brimmed traveller’s hat, and under it a handkerchief tied over
his head in the manner of a cap: so that he showed no hair. As he
looked at the fire, I thought I saw a cunning expression, followed by a
half-laugh, come into his face.

“I am not acquainted with this country, gentlemen, but it seems a
solitary country towards the river.”

“Most marshes is solitary,” said Joe.

“No doubt, no doubt. Do you find any gypsies, now, or tramps, or
vagrants of any sort, out there?”

“No,” said Joe; “none but a runaway convict now and then. And we don’t
find _them_, easy. Eh, Mr. Wopsle?”

Mr. Wopsle, with a majestic remembrance of old discomfiture, assented;
but not warmly.

“Seems you have been out after such?” asked the stranger.

“Once,” returned Joe. “Not that we wanted to take them, you understand;
we went out as lookers on; me, and Mr. Wopsle, and Pip. Didn’t us,
Pip?”

“Yes, Joe.”

The stranger looked at me again,—still cocking his eye, as if he were
expressly taking aim at me with his invisible gun,—and said, “He’s a
likely young parcel of bones that. What is it you call him?”

“Pip,” said Joe.

“Christened Pip?”

“No, not christened Pip.”

“Surname Pip?”

“No,” said Joe, “it’s a kind of family name what he gave himself when a
infant, and is called by.”

“Son of yours?”

“Well,” said Joe, meditatively, not, of course, that it could be in
anywise necessary to consider about it, but because it was the way at
the Jolly Bargemen to seem to consider deeply about everything that was
discussed over pipes,—“well—no. No, he ain’t.”

“Nevvy?” said the strange man.

“Well,” said Joe, with the same appearance of profound cogitation, “he
is not—no, not to deceive you, he is _not_—my nevvy.”

“What the Blue Blazes is he?” asked the stranger. Which appeared to me
to be an inquiry of unnecessary strength.

Mr. Wopsle struck in upon that; as one who knew all about
relationships, having professional occasion to bear in mind what female
relations a man might not marry; and expounded the ties between me and
Joe. Having his hand in, Mr. Wopsle finished off with a most
terrifically snarling passage from Richard the Third, and seemed to
think he had done quite enough to account for it when he added, “—as
the poet says.”

And here I may remark that when Mr. Wopsle referred to me, he
considered it a necessary part of such reference to rumple my hair and
poke it into my eyes. I cannot conceive why everybody of his standing
who visited at our house should always have put me through the same
inflammatory process under similar circumstances. Yet I do not call to
mind that I was ever in my earlier youth the subject of remark in our
social family circle, but some large-handed person took some such
ophthalmic steps to patronise me.

All this while, the strange man looked at nobody but me, and looked at
me as if he were determined to have a shot at me at last, and bring me
down. But he said nothing after offering his Blue Blazes observation,
until the glasses of rum and water were brought; and then he made his
shot, and a most extraordinary shot it was.

It was not a verbal remark, but a proceeding in dumb-show, and was
pointedly addressed to me. He stirred his rum and water pointedly at
me, and he tasted his rum and water pointedly at me. And he stirred it
and he tasted it; not with a spoon that was brought to him, but _with a
file_.

He did this so that nobody but I saw the file; and when he had done it
he wiped the file and put it in a breast-pocket. I knew it to be Joe’s
file, and I knew that he knew my convict, the moment I saw the
instrument. I sat gazing at him, spell-bound. But he now reclined on
his settle, taking very little notice of me, and talking principally
about turnips.

There was a delicious sense of cleaning-up and making a quiet pause
before going on in life afresh, in our village on Saturday nights,
which stimulated Joe to dare to stay out half an hour longer on
Saturdays than at other times. The half-hour and the rum and water
running out together, Joe got up to go, and took me by the hand.

“Stop half a moment, Mr. Gargery,” said the strange man. “I think I’ve
got a bright new shilling somewhere in my pocket, and if I have, the
boy shall have it.”

He looked it out from a handful of small change, folded it in some
crumpled paper, and gave it to me. “Yours!” said he. “Mind! Your own.”

I thanked him, staring at him far beyond the bounds of good manners,
and holding tight to Joe. He gave Joe good-night, and he gave Mr.
Wopsle good-night (who went out with us), and he gave me only a look
with his aiming eye,—no, not a look, for he shut it up, but wonders may
be done with an eye by hiding it.

On the way home, if I had been in a humour for talking, the talk must
have been all on my side, for Mr. Wopsle parted from us at the door of
the Jolly Bargemen, and Joe went all the way home with his mouth wide
open, to rinse the rum out with as much air as possible. But I was in a
manner stupefied by this turning up of my old misdeed and old
acquaintance, and could think of nothing else.

My sister was not in a very bad temper when we presented ourselves in
the kitchen, and Joe was encouraged by that unusual circumstance to
tell her about the bright shilling. “A bad un, I’ll be bound,” said
Mrs. Joe triumphantly, “or he wouldn’t have given it to the boy! Let’s
look at it.”

I took it out of the paper, and it proved to be a good one. “But what’s
this?” said Mrs. Joe, throwing down the shilling and catching up the
paper. “Two One-Pound notes?”

Nothing less than two fat sweltering one-pound notes that seemed to
have been on terms of the warmest intimacy with all the cattle-markets
in the county. Joe caught up his hat again, and ran with them to the
Jolly Bargemen to restore them to their owner. While he was gone, I sat
down on my usual stool and looked vacantly at my sister, feeling pretty
sure that the man would not be there.

Presently, Joe came back, saying that the man was gone, but that he,
Joe, had left word at the Three Jolly Bargemen concerning the notes.
Then my sister sealed them up in a piece of paper, and put them under
some dried rose-leaves in an ornamental teapot on the top of a press in
the state parlour. There they remained, a nightmare to me, many and
many a night and day.

I had sadly broken sleep when I got to bed, through thinking of the
strange man taking aim at me with his invisible gun, and of the
guiltily coarse and common thing it was, to be on secret terms of
conspiracy with convicts,—a feature in my low career that I had
previously forgotten. I was haunted by the file too. A dread possessed
me that when I least expected it, the file would reappear. I coaxed
myself to sleep by thinking of Miss Havisham’s, next Wednesday; and in
my sleep I saw the file coming at me out of a door, without seeing who
held it, and I screamed myself awake.




Chapter XI.


At the appointed time I returned to Miss Havisham’s, and my hesitating
ring at the gate brought out Estella. She locked it after admitting me,
as she had done before, and again preceded me into the dark passage
where her candle stood. She took no notice of me until she had the
candle in her hand, when she looked over her shoulder, superciliously
saying, “You are to come this way to-day,” and took me to quite another
part of the house.

The passage was a long one, and seemed to pervade the whole square
basement of the Manor House. We traversed but one side of the square,
however, and at the end of it she stopped, and put her candle down and
opened a door. Here, the daylight reappeared, and I found myself in a
small paved courtyard, the opposite side of which was formed by a
detached dwelling-house, that looked as if it had once belonged to the
manager or head clerk of the extinct brewery. There was a clock in the
outer wall of this house. Like the clock in Miss Havisham’s room, and
like Miss Havisham’s watch, it had stopped at twenty minutes to nine.

We went in at the door, which stood open, and into a gloomy room with a
low ceiling, on the ground-floor at the back. There was some company in
the room, and Estella said to me as she joined it, “You are to go and
stand there boy, till you are wanted.” “There”, being the window, I
crossed to it, and stood “there,” in a very uncomfortable state of
mind, looking out.

It opened to the ground, and looked into a most miserable corner of the
neglected garden, upon a rank ruin of cabbage-stalks, and one box-tree
that had been clipped round long ago, like a pudding, and had a new
growth at the top of it, out of shape and of a different colour, as if
that part of the pudding had stuck to the saucepan and got burnt. This
was my homely thought, as I contemplated the box-tree. There had been
some light snow, overnight, and it lay nowhere else to my knowledge;
but, it had not quite melted from the cold shadow of this bit of
garden, and the wind caught it up in little eddies and threw it at the
window, as if it pelted me for coming there.

I divined that my coming had stopped conversation in the room, and that
its other occupants were looking at me. I could see nothing of the room
except the shining of the fire in the window-glass, but I stiffened in
all my joints with the consciousness that I was under close inspection.

There were three ladies in the room and one gentleman. Before I had
been standing at the window five minutes, they somehow conveyed to me
that they were all toadies and humbugs, but that each of them pretended
not to know that the others were toadies and humbugs: because the
admission that he or she did know it, would have made him or her out to
be a toady and humbug.

They all had a listless and dreary air of waiting somebody’s pleasure,
and the most talkative of the ladies had to speak quite rigidly to
repress a yawn. This lady, whose name was Camilla, very much reminded
me of my sister, with the difference that she was older, and (as I
found when I caught sight of her) of a blunter cast of features.
Indeed, when I knew her better I began to think it was a Mercy she had
any features at all, so very blank and high was the dead wall of her
face.

“Poor dear soul!” said this lady, with an abruptness of manner quite my
sister’s. “Nobody’s enemy but his own!”

“It would be much more commendable to be somebody else’s enemy,” said
the gentleman; “far more natural.”

“Cousin Raymond,” observed another lady, “we are to love our
neighbour.”

“Sarah Pocket,” returned Cousin Raymond, “if a man is not his own
neighbour, who is?”

Miss Pocket laughed, and Camilla laughed and said (checking a yawn),
“The idea!” But I thought they seemed to think it rather a good idea
too. The other lady, who had not spoken yet, said gravely and
emphatically, “_Very_ true!”

“Poor soul!” Camilla presently went on (I knew they had all been
looking at me in the mean time), “he is so very strange! Would anyone
believe that when Tom’s wife died, he actually could not be induced to
see the importance of the children’s having the deepest of trimmings to
their mourning? ‘Good Lord!’ says he, ‘Camilla, what can it signify so
long as the poor bereaved little things are in black?’ So like Matthew!
The idea!”

“Good points in him, good points in him,” said Cousin Raymond; “Heaven
forbid I should deny good points in him; but he never had, and he never
will have, any sense of the proprieties.”

“You know I was obliged,” said Camilla,—“I was obliged to be firm. I
said, ‘It WILL NOT DO, for the credit of the family.’ I told him that,
without deep trimmings, the family was disgraced. I cried about it from
breakfast till dinner. I injured my digestion. And at last he flung out
in his violent way, and said, with a D, ‘Then do as you like.’ Thank
Goodness it will always be a consolation to me to know that I instantly
went out in a pouring rain and bought the things.”

“_He_ paid for them, did he not?” asked Estella.

“It’s not the question, my dear child, who paid for them,” returned
Camilla. “_I_ bought them. And I shall often think of that with peace,
when I wake up in the night.”

The ringing of a distant bell, combined with the echoing of some cry or
call along the passage by which I had come, interrupted the
conversation and caused Estella to say to me, “Now, boy!” On my turning
round, they all looked at me with the utmost contempt, and, as I went
out, I heard Sarah Pocket say, “Well I am sure! What next!” and Camilla
add, with indignation, “Was there ever such a fancy! The i-d_e_-a!”

As we were going with our candle along the dark passage, Estella
stopped all of a sudden, and, facing round, said in her taunting
manner, with her face quite close to mine,—

“Well?”

“Well, miss?” I answered, almost falling over her and checking myself.

She stood looking at me, and, of course, I stood looking at her.

“Am I pretty?”

“Yes; I think you are very pretty.”

“Am I insulting?”

“Not so much so as you were last time,” said I.

“Not so much so?”

“No.”

She fired when she asked the last question, and she slapped my face
with such force as she had, when I answered it.

“Now?” said she. “You little coarse monster, what do you think of me
now?”

“I shall not tell you.”

“Because you are going to tell upstairs. Is that it?”

“No,” said I, “that’s not it.”

“Why don’t you cry again, you little wretch?”

“Because I’ll never cry for you again,” said I. Which was, I suppose,
as false a declaration as ever was made; for I was inwardly crying for
her then, and I know what I know of the pain she cost me afterwards.

We went on our way upstairs after this episode; and, as we were going
up, we met a gentleman groping his way down.

“Whom have we here?” asked the gentleman, stopping and looking at me.

“A boy,” said Estella.

He was a burly man of an exceedingly dark complexion, with an
exceedingly large head, and a corresponding large hand. He took my chin
in his large hand and turned up my face to have a look at me by the
light of the candle. He was prematurely bald on the top of his head,
and had bushy black eyebrows that wouldn’t lie down but stood up
bristling. His eyes were set very deep in his head, and were
disagreeably sharp and suspicious. He had a large watch-chain, and
strong black dots where his beard and whiskers would have been if he
had let them. He was nothing to me, and I could have had no foresight
then, that he ever would be anything to me, but it happened that I had
this opportunity of observing him well.

“Boy of the neighbourhood? Hey?” said he.

“Yes, sir,” said I.

“How do _you_ come here?”

“Miss Havisham sent for me, sir,” I explained.

“Well! Behave yourself. I have a pretty large experience of boys, and
you’re a bad set of fellows. Now mind!” said he, biting the side of his
great forefinger as he frowned at me, “you behave yourself!”

With those words, he released me—which I was glad of, for his hand
smelt of scented soap—and went his way downstairs. I wondered whether
he could be a doctor; but no, I thought; he couldn’t be a doctor, or he
would have a quieter and more persuasive manner. There was not much
time to consider the subject, for we were soon in Miss Havisham’s room,
where she and everything else were just as I had left them. Estella
left me standing near the door, and I stood there until Miss Havisham
cast her eyes upon me from the dressing-table.

“So!” she said, without being startled or surprised: “the days have
worn away, have they?”

“Yes, ma’am. To-day is—”

“There, there, there!” with the impatient movement of her fingers. “I
don’t want to know. Are you ready to play?”

I was obliged to answer in some confusion, “I don’t think I am, ma’am.”

“Not at cards again?” she demanded, with a searching look.

“Yes, ma’am; I could do that, if I was wanted.”

“Since this house strikes you old and grave, boy,” said Miss Havisham,
impatiently, “and you are unwilling to play, are you willing to work?”

I could answer this inquiry with a better heart than I had been able to
find for the other question, and I said I was quite willing.

“Then go into that opposite room,” said she, pointing at the door
behind me with her withered hand, “and wait there till I come.”

I crossed the staircase landing, and entered the room she indicated.
From that room, too, the daylight was completely excluded, and it had
an airless smell that was oppressive. A fire had been lately kindled in
the damp old-fashioned grate, and it was more disposed to go out than
to burn up, and the reluctant smoke which hung in the room seemed
colder than the clearer air,—like our own marsh mist. Certain wintry
branches of candles on the high chimney-piece faintly lighted the
chamber; or it would be more expressive to say, faintly troubled its
darkness. It was spacious, and I dare say had once been handsome, but
every discernible thing in it was covered with dust and mould, and
dropping to pieces. The most prominent object was a long table with a
tablecloth spread on it, as if a feast had been in preparation when the
house and the clocks all stopped together. An epergne or centre-piece
of some kind was in the middle of this cloth; it was so heavily
overhung with cobwebs that its form was quite undistinguishable; and,
as I looked along the yellow expanse out of which I remember its
seeming to grow, like a black fungus, I saw speckle-legged spiders with
blotchy bodies running home to it, and running out from it, as if some
circumstances of the greatest public importance had just transpired in
the spider community.

I heard the mice too, rattling behind the panels, as if the same
occurrence were important to their interests. But the black beetles
took no notice of the agitation, and groped about the hearth in a
ponderous elderly way, as if they were short-sighted and hard of
hearing, and not on terms with one another.

These crawling things had fascinated my attention, and I was watching
them from a distance, when Miss Havisham laid a hand upon my shoulder.
In her other hand she had a crutch-headed stick on which she leaned,
and she looked like the Witch of the place.

“This,” said she, pointing to the long table with her stick, “is where
I will be laid when I am dead. They shall come and look at me here.”

With some vague misgiving that she might get upon the table then and
there and die at once, the complete realisation of the ghastly waxwork
at the Fair, I shrank under her touch.

“What do you think that is?” she asked me, again pointing with her
stick; “that, where those cobwebs are?”

“I can’t guess what it is, ma’am.”

“It’s a great cake. A bride-cake. Mine!”

She looked all round the room in a glaring manner, and then said,
leaning on me while her hand twitched my shoulder, “Come, come, come!
Walk me, walk me!”

I made out from this, that the work I had to do, was to walk Miss
Havisham round and round the room. Accordingly, I started at once, and
she leaned upon my shoulder, and we went away at a pace that might have
been an imitation (founded on my first impulse under that roof) of Mr.
Pumblechook’s chaise-cart.

She was not physically strong, and after a little time said, “Slower!”
Still, we went at an impatient fitful speed, and as we went, she
twitched the hand upon my shoulder, and worked her mouth, and led me to
believe that we were going fast because her thoughts went fast. After a
while she said, “Call Estella!” so I went out on the landing and roared
that name as I had done on the previous occasion. When her light
appeared, I returned to Miss Havisham, and we started away again round
and round the room.

If only Estella had come to be a spectator of our proceedings, I should
have felt sufficiently discontented; but as she brought with her the
three ladies and the gentleman whom I had seen below, I didn’t know
what to do. In my politeness, I would have stopped; but Miss Havisham
twitched my shoulder, and we posted on,—with a shame-faced
consciousness on my part that they would think it was all my doing.

“Dear Miss Havisham,” said Miss Sarah Pocket. “How well you look!”

“I do not,” returned Miss Havisham. “I am yellow skin and bone.”

Camilla brightened when Miss Pocket met with this rebuff; and she
murmured, as she plaintively contemplated Miss Havisham, “Poor dear
soul! Certainly not to be expected to look well, poor thing. The idea!”

“And how are _you_?” said Miss Havisham to Camilla. As we were close to
Camilla then, I would have stopped as a matter of course, only Miss
Havisham wouldn’t stop. We swept on, and I felt that I was highly
obnoxious to Camilla.

“Thank you, Miss Havisham,” she returned, “I am as well as can be
expected.”

“Why, what’s the matter with you?” asked Miss Havisham, with exceeding
sharpness.

“Nothing worth mentioning,” replied Camilla. “I don’t wish to make a
display of my feelings, but I have habitually thought of you more in
the night than I am quite equal to.”

“Then don’t think of me,” retorted Miss Havisham.

“Very easily said!” remarked Camilla, amiably repressing a sob, while a
hitch came into her upper lip, and her tears overflowed. “Raymond is a
witness what ginger and sal volatile I am obliged to take in the night.
Raymond is a witness what nervous jerkings I have in my legs. Chokings
and nervous jerkings, however, are nothing new to me when I think with
anxiety of those I love. If I could be less affectionate and sensitive,
I should have a better digestion and an iron set of nerves. I am sure I
wish it could be so. But as to not thinking of you in the night—The
idea!” Here, a burst of tears.

The Raymond referred to, I understood to be the gentleman present, and
him I understood to be Mr. Camilla. He came to the rescue at this
point, and said in a consolatory and complimentary voice, “Camilla, my
dear, it is well known that your family feelings are gradually
undermining you to the extent of making one of your legs shorter than
the other.”

“I am not aware,” observed the grave lady whose voice I had heard but
once, “that to think of any person is to make a great claim upon that
person, my dear.”

Miss Sarah Pocket, whom I now saw to be a little dry, brown, corrugated
old woman, with a small face that might have been made of
walnut-shells, and a large mouth like a cat’s without the whiskers,
supported this position by saying, “No, indeed, my dear. Hem!”

“Thinking is easy enough,” said the grave lady.

“What is easier, you know?” assented Miss Sarah Pocket.

“Oh, yes, yes!” cried Camilla, whose fermenting feelings appeared to
rise from her legs to her bosom. “It’s all very true! It’s a weakness
to be so affectionate, but I can’t help it. No doubt my health would be
much better if it was otherwise, still I wouldn’t change my disposition
if I could. It’s the cause of much suffering, but it’s a consolation to
know I possess it, when I wake up in the night.” Here another burst of
feeling.

Miss Havisham and I had never stopped all this time, but kept going
round and round the room; now brushing against the skirts of the
visitors, now giving them the whole length of the dismal chamber.

“There’s Matthew!” said Camilla. “Never mixing with any natural ties,
never coming here to see how Miss Havisham is! I have taken to the sofa
with my staylace cut, and have lain there hours insensible, with my
head over the side, and my hair all down, and my feet I don’t know
where—”

(“Much higher than your head, my love,” said Mr. Camilla.)

“I have gone off into that state, hours and hours, on account of
Matthew’s strange and inexplicable conduct, and nobody has thanked me.”

“Really I must say I should think not!” interposed the grave lady.

“You see, my dear,” added Miss Sarah Pocket (a blandly vicious
personage), “the question to put to yourself is, who did you expect to
thank you, my love?”

“Without expecting any thanks, or anything of the sort,” resumed
Camilla, “I have remained in that state, hours and hours, and Raymond
is a witness of the extent to which I have choked, and what the total
inefficacy of ginger has been, and I have been heard at the piano-forte
tuner’s across the street, where the poor mistaken children have even
supposed it to be pigeons cooing at a distance,—and now to be told—”
Here Camilla put her hand to her throat, and began to be quite chemical
as to the formation of new combinations there.

When this same Matthew was mentioned, Miss Havisham stopped me and
herself, and stood looking at the speaker. This change had a great
influence in bringing Camilla’s chemistry to a sudden end.

“Matthew will come and see me at last,” said Miss Havisham, sternly,
“when I am laid on that table. That will be his place,—there,” striking
the table with her stick, “at my head! And yours will be there! And
your husband’s there! And Sarah Pocket’s there! And Georgiana’s there!
Now you all know where to take your stations when you come to feast
upon me. And now go!”

At the mention of each name, she had struck the table with her stick in
a new place. She now said, “Walk me, walk me!” and we went on again.

“I suppose there’s nothing to be done,” exclaimed Camilla, “but comply
and depart. It’s something to have seen the object of one’s love and
duty for even so short a time. I shall think of it with a melancholy
satisfaction when I wake up in the night. I wish Matthew could have
that comfort, but he sets it at defiance. I am determined not to make a
display of my feelings, but it’s very hard to be told one wants to
feast on one’s relations,—as if one was a Giant,—and to be told to go.
The bare idea!”

Mr. Camilla interposing, as Mrs. Camilla laid her hand upon her heaving
bosom, that lady assumed an unnatural fortitude of manner which I
supposed to be expressive of an intention to drop and choke when out of
view, and kissing her hand to Miss Havisham, was escorted forth. Sarah
Pocket and Georgiana contended who should remain last; but Sarah was
too knowing to be outdone, and ambled round Georgiana with that artful
slipperiness that the latter was obliged to take precedence. Sarah
Pocket then made her separate effect of departing with, “Bless you,
Miss Havisham dear!” and with a smile of forgiving pity on her
walnut-shell countenance for the weaknesses of the rest.

While Estella was away lighting them down, Miss Havisham still walked
with her hand on my shoulder, but more and more slowly. At last she
stopped before the fire, and said, after muttering and looking at it
some seconds,—

“This is my birthday, Pip.”

I was going to wish her many happy returns, when she lifted her stick.

“I don’t suffer it to be spoken of. I don’t suffer those who were here
just now, or any one to speak of it. They come here on the day, but
they dare not refer to it.”

Of course _I_ made no further effort to refer to it.

“On this day of the year, long before you were born, this heap of
decay,” stabbing with her crutched stick at the pile of cobwebs on the
table, but not touching it, “was brought here. It and I have worn away
together. The mice have gnawed at it, and sharper teeth than teeth of
mice have gnawed at me.”

She held the head of her stick against her heart as she stood looking
at the table; she in her once white dress, all yellow and withered; the
once white cloth all yellow and withered; everything around in a state
to crumble under a touch.

“When the ruin is complete,” said she, with a ghastly look, “and when
they lay me dead, in my bride’s dress on the bride’s table,—which shall
be done, and which will be the finished curse upon him,—so much the
better if it is done on this day!”

She stood looking at the table as if she stood looking at her own
figure lying there. I remained quiet. Estella returned, and she too
remained quiet. It seemed to me that we continued thus for a long time.
In the heavy air of the room, and the heavy darkness that brooded in
its remoter corners, I even had an alarming fancy that Estella and I
might presently begin to decay.

At length, not coming out of her distraught state by degrees, but in an
instant, Miss Havisham said, “Let me see you two play cards; why have
you not begun?” With that, we returned to her room, and sat down as
before; I was beggared, as before; and again, as before, Miss Havisham
watched us all the time, directed my attention to Estella’s beauty, and
made me notice it the more by trying her jewels on Estella’s breast and
hair.

Estella, for her part, likewise treated me as before, except that she
did not condescend to speak. When we had played some half-dozen games,
a day was appointed for my return, and I was taken down into the yard
to be fed in the former dog-like manner. There, too, I was again left
to wander about as I liked.

It is not much to the purpose whether a gate in that garden wall which
I had scrambled up to peep over on the last occasion was, on that last
occasion, open or shut. Enough that I saw no gate then, and that I saw
one now. As it stood open, and as I knew that Estella had let the
visitors out,—for she had returned with the keys in her hand,—I
strolled into the garden, and strolled all over it. It was quite a
wilderness, and there were old melon-frames and cucumber-frames in it,
which seemed in their decline to have produced a spontaneous growth of
weak attempts at pieces of old hats and boots, with now and then a
weedy offshoot into the likeness of a battered saucepan.

When I had exhausted the garden and a greenhouse with nothing in it but
a fallen-down grape-vine and some bottles, I found myself in the dismal
corner upon which I had looked out of the window. Never questioning for
a moment that the house was now empty, I looked in at another window,
and found myself, to my great surprise, exchanging a broad stare with a
pale young gentleman with red eyelids and light hair.

This pale young gentleman quickly disappeared, and reappeared beside
me. He had been at his books when I had found myself staring at him,
and I now saw that he was inky.

“Halloa!” said he, “young fellow!”

Halloa being a general observation which I had usually observed to be
best answered by itself, _I_ said, “Halloa!” politely omitting young
fellow.

“Who let _you_ in?” said he.

“Miss Estella.”

“Who gave you leave to prowl about?”

“Miss Estella.”

“Come and fight,” said the pale young gentleman.

What could I do but follow him? I have often asked myself the question
since; but what else could I do? His manner was so final, and I was so
astonished, that I followed where he led, as if I had been under a
spell.

“Stop a minute, though,” he said, wheeling round before we had gone
many paces. “I ought to give you a reason for fighting, too. There it
is!” In a most irritating manner he instantly slapped his hands against
one another, daintily flung one of his legs up behind him, pulled my
hair, slapped his hands again, dipped his head, and butted it into my
stomach.

The bull-like proceeding last mentioned, besides that it was
unquestionably to be regarded in the light of a liberty, was
particularly disagreeable just after bread and meat. I therefore hit
out at him and was going to hit out again, when he said, “Aha! Would
you?” and began dancing backwards and forwards in a manner quite
unparalleled within my limited experience.

“Laws of the game!” said he. Here, he skipped from his left leg on to
his right. “Regular rules!” Here, he skipped from his right leg on to
his left. “Come to the ground, and go through the preliminaries!” Here,
he dodged backwards and forwards, and did all sorts of things while I
looked helplessly at him.

I was secretly afraid of him when I saw him so dexterous; but I felt
morally and physically convinced that his light head of hair could have
had no business in the pit of my stomach, and that I had a right to
consider it irrelevant when so obtruded on my attention. Therefore, I
followed him without a word, to a retired nook of the garden, formed by
the junction of two walls and screened by some rubbish. On his asking
me if I was satisfied with the ground, and on my replying Yes, he
begged my leave to absent himself for a moment, and quickly returned
with a bottle of water and a sponge dipped in vinegar. “Available for
both,” he said, placing these against the wall. And then fell to
pulling off, not only his jacket and waistcoat, but his shirt too, in a
manner at once light-hearted, business-like, and bloodthirsty.

Although he did not look very healthy,—having pimples on his face, and
a breaking out at his mouth,—these dreadful preparations quite appalled
me. I judged him to be about my own age, but he was much taller, and he
had a way of spinning himself about that was full of appearance. For
the rest, he was a young gentleman in a grey suit (when not denuded for
battle), with his elbows, knees, wrists, and heels considerably in
advance of the rest of him as to development.

My heart failed me when I saw him squaring at me with every
demonstration of mechanical nicety, and eyeing my anatomy as if he were
minutely choosing his bone. I never have been so surprised in my life,
as I was when I let out the first blow, and saw him lying on his back,
looking up at me with a bloody nose and his face exceedingly
fore-shortened.

But, he was on his feet directly, and after sponging himself with a
great show of dexterity began squaring again. The second greatest
surprise I have ever had in my life was seeing him on his back again,
looking up at me out of a black eye.

His spirit inspired me with great respect. He seemed to have no
strength, and he never once hit me hard, and he was always knocked
down; but he would be up again in a moment, sponging himself or
drinking out of the water-bottle, with the greatest satisfaction in
seconding himself according to form, and then came at me with an air
and a show that made me believe he really was going to do for me at
last. He got heavily bruised, for I am sorry to record that the more I
hit him, the harder I hit him; but he came up again and again and
again, until at last he got a bad fall with the back of his head
against the wall. Even after that crisis in our affairs, he got up and
turned round and round confusedly a few times, not knowing where I was;
but finally went on his knees to his sponge and threw it up: at the
same time panting out, “That means you have won.”

He seemed so brave and innocent, that although I had not proposed the
contest, I felt but a gloomy satisfaction in my victory. Indeed, I go
so far as to hope that I regarded myself while dressing as a species of
savage young wolf or other wild beast. However, I got dressed, darkly
wiping my sanguinary face at intervals, and I said, “Can I help you?”
and he said “No thankee,” and I said “Good afternoon,” and _he_ said
“Same to you.”

When I got into the courtyard, I found Estella waiting with the keys.
But she neither asked me where I had been, nor why I had kept her
waiting; and there was a bright flush upon her face, as though
something had happened to delight her. Instead of going straight to the
gate, too, she stepped back into the passage, and beckoned me.

“Come here! You may kiss me, if you like.”

I kissed her cheek as she turned it to me. I think I would have gone
through a great deal to kiss her cheek. But I felt that the kiss was
given to the coarse common boy as a piece of money might have been, and
that it was worth nothing.

What with the birthday visitors, and what with the cards, and what with
the fight, my stay had lasted so long, that when I neared home the
light on the spit of sand off the point on the marshes was gleaming
against a black night-sky, and Joe’s furnace was flinging a path of
fire across the road.




Chapter XII.


My mind grew very uneasy on the subject of the pale young gentleman.
The more I thought of the fight, and recalled the pale young gentleman
on his back in various stages of puffy and incrimsoned countenance, the
more certain it appeared that something would be done to me. I felt
that the pale young gentleman’s blood was on my head, and that the Law
would avenge it. Without having any definite idea of the penalties I
had incurred, it was clear to me that village boys could not go
stalking about the country, ravaging the houses of gentlefolks and
pitching into the studious youth of England, without laying themselves
open to severe punishment. For some days, I even kept close at home,
and looked out at the kitchen door with the greatest caution and
trepidation before going on an errand, lest the officers of the County
Jail should pounce upon me. The pale young gentleman’s nose had stained
my trousers, and I tried to wash out that evidence of my guilt in the
dead of night. I had cut my knuckles against the pale young gentleman’s
teeth, and I twisted my imagination into a thousand tangles, as I
devised incredible ways of accounting for that damnatory circumstance
when I should be haled before the Judges.

When the day came round for my return to the scene of the deed of
violence, my terrors reached their height. Whether myrmidons of
Justice, especially sent down from London, would be lying in ambush
behind the gate;—whether Miss Havisham, preferring to take personal
vengeance for an outrage done to her house, might rise in those
grave-clothes of hers, draw a pistol, and shoot me dead:—whether
suborned boys—a numerous band of mercenaries—might be engaged to fall
upon me in the brewery, and cuff me until I was no more;—it was high
testimony to my confidence in the spirit of the pale young gentleman,
that I never imagined _him_ accessory to these retaliations; they
always came into my mind as the acts of injudicious relatives of his,
goaded on by the state of his visage and an indignant sympathy with the
family features.

However, go to Miss Havisham’s I must, and go I did. And behold!
nothing came of the late struggle. It was not alluded to in any way,
and no pale young gentleman was to be discovered on the premises. I
found the same gate open, and I explored the garden, and even looked in
at the windows of the detached house; but my view was suddenly stopped
by the closed shutters within, and all was lifeless. Only in the corner
where the combat had taken place could I detect any evidence of the
young gentleman’s existence. There were traces of his gore in that
spot, and I covered them with garden-mould from the eye of man.

On the broad landing between Miss Havisham’s own room and that other
room in which the long table was laid out, I saw a garden-chair,—a
light chair on wheels, that you pushed from behind. It had been placed
there since my last visit, and I entered, that same day, on a regular
occupation of pushing Miss Havisham in this chair (when she was tired
of walking with her hand upon my shoulder) round her own room, and
across the landing, and round the other room. Over and over and over
again, we would make these journeys, and sometimes they would last as
long as three hours at a stretch. I insensibly fall into a general
mention of these journeys as numerous, because it was at once settled
that I should return every alternate day at noon for these purposes,
and because I am now going to sum up a period of at least eight or ten
months.

As we began to be more used to one another, Miss Havisham talked more
to me, and asked me such questions as what had I learnt and what was I
going to be? I told her I was going to be apprenticed to Joe, I
believed; and I enlarged upon my knowing nothing and wanting to know
everything, in the hope that she might offer some help towards that
desirable end. But she did not; on the contrary, she seemed to prefer
my being ignorant. Neither did she ever give me any money,—or anything
but my daily dinner,—nor ever stipulate that I should be paid for my
services.

Estella was always about, and always let me in and out, but never told
me I might kiss her again. Sometimes, she would coldly tolerate me;
sometimes, she would condescend to me; sometimes, she would be quite
familiar with me; sometimes, she would tell me energetically that she
hated me. Miss Havisham would often ask me in a whisper, or when we
were alone, “Does she grow prettier and prettier, Pip?” And when I said
yes (for indeed she did), would seem to enjoy it greedily. Also, when
we played at cards Miss Havisham would look on, with a miserly relish
of Estella’s moods, whatever they were. And sometimes, when her moods
were so many and so contradictory of one another that I was puzzled
what to say or do, Miss Havisham would embrace her with lavish
fondness, murmuring something in her ear that sounded like “Break their
hearts my pride and hope, break their hearts and have no mercy!”

There was a song Joe used to hum fragments of at the forge, of which
the burden was Old Clem. This was not a very ceremonious way of
rendering homage to a patron saint, but I believe Old Clem stood in
that relation towards smiths. It was a song that imitated the measure
of beating upon iron, and was a mere lyrical excuse for the
introduction of Old Clem’s respected name. Thus, you were to hammer
boys round—Old Clem! With a thump and a sound—Old Clem! Beat it out,
beat it out—Old Clem! With a clink for the stout—Old Clem! Blow the
fire, blow the fire—Old Clem! Roaring dryer, soaring higher—Old Clem!
One day soon after the appearance of the chair, Miss Havisham suddenly
saying to me, with the impatient movement of her fingers, “There,
there, there! Sing!” I was surprised into crooning this ditty as I
pushed her over the floor. It happened so to catch her fancy that she
took it up in a low brooding voice as if she were singing in her sleep.
After that, it became customary with us to have it as we moved about,
and Estella would often join in; though the whole strain was so
subdued, even when there were three of us, that it made less noise in
the grim old house than the lightest breath of wind.

What could I become with these surroundings? How could my character
fail to be influenced by them? Is it to be wondered at if my thoughts
were dazed, as my eyes were, when I came out into the natural light
from the misty yellow rooms?

Perhaps I might have told Joe about the pale young gentleman, if I had
not previously been betrayed into those enormous inventions to which I
had confessed. Under the circumstances, I felt that Joe could hardly
fail to discern in the pale young gentleman, an appropriate passenger
to be put into the black velvet coach; therefore, I said nothing of
him. Besides, that shrinking from having Miss Havisham and Estella
discussed, which had come upon me in the beginning, grew much more
potent as time went on. I reposed complete confidence in no one but
Biddy; but I told poor Biddy everything. Why it came natural to me to
do so, and why Biddy had a deep concern in everything I told her, I did
not know then, though I think I know now.

Meanwhile, councils went on in the kitchen at home, fraught with almost
insupportable aggravation to my exasperated spirit. That ass,
Pumblechook, used often to come over of a night for the purpose of
discussing my prospects with my sister; and I really do believe (to
this hour with less penitence than I ought to feel), that if these
hands could have taken a linchpin out of his chaise-cart, they would
have done it. The miserable man was a man of that confined stolidity of
mind, that he could not discuss my prospects without having me before
him,—as it were, to operate upon,—and he would drag me up from my stool
(usually by the collar) where I was quiet in a corner, and, putting me
before the fire as if I were going to be cooked, would begin by saying,
“Now, Mum, here is this boy! Here is this boy which you brought up by
hand. Hold up your head, boy, and be forever grateful unto them which
so did do. Now, Mum, with respections to this boy!” And then he would
rumple my hair the wrong way,—which from my earliest remembrance, as
already hinted, I have in my soul denied the right of any
fellow-creature to do,—and would hold me before him by the sleeve,—a
spectacle of imbecility only to be equalled by himself.

Then, he and my sister would pair off in such nonsensical speculations
about Miss Havisham, and about what she would do with me and for me,
that I used to want—quite painfully—to burst into spiteful tears, fly
at Pumblechook, and pummel him all over. In these dialogues, my sister
spoke to me as if she were morally wrenching one of my teeth out at
every reference; while Pumblechook himself, self-constituted my patron,
would sit supervising me with a depreciatory eye, like the architect of
my fortunes who thought himself engaged on a very unremunerative job.

In these discussions, Joe bore no part. But he was often talked at,
while they were in progress, by reason of Mrs. Joe’s perceiving that he
was not favourable to my being taken from the forge. I was fully old
enough now to be apprenticed to Joe; and when Joe sat with the poker on
his knees thoughtfully raking out the ashes between the lower bars, my
sister would so distinctly construe that innocent action into
opposition on his part, that she would dive at him, take the poker out
of his hands, shake him, and put it away. There was a most irritating
end to every one of these debates. All in a moment, with nothing to
lead up to it, my sister would stop herself in a yawn, and catching
sight of me as it were incidentally, would swoop upon me with, “Come!
there’s enough of _you_! _You_ get along to bed; _you_’ve given trouble
enough for one night, I hope!” As if I had besought them as a favour to
bother my life out.

We went on in this way for a long time, and it seemed likely that we
should continue to go on in this way for a long time, when one day Miss
Havisham stopped short as she and I were walking, she leaning on my
shoulder; and said with some displeasure,—

“You are growing tall, Pip!”

I thought it best to hint, through the medium of a meditative look,
that this might be occasioned by circumstances over which I had no
control.

She said no more at the time; but she presently stopped and looked at
me again; and presently again; and after that, looked frowning and
moody. On the next day of my attendance, when our usual exercise was
over, and I had landed her at her dressing-table, she stayed me with a
movement of her impatient fingers:—

“Tell me the name again of that blacksmith of yours.”

“Joe Gargery, ma’am.”

“Meaning the master you were to be apprenticed to?”

“Yes, Miss Havisham.”

“You had better be apprenticed at once. Would Gargery come here with
you, and bring your indentures, do you think?”

I signified that I had no doubt he would take it as an honour to be
asked.

“Then let him come.”

“At any particular time, Miss Havisham?”

“There, there! I know nothing about times. Let him come soon, and come
along with you.”

When I got home at night, and delivered this message for Joe, my sister
“went on the Rampage,” in a more alarming degree than at any previous
period. She asked me and Joe whether we supposed she was door-mats
under our feet, and how we dared to use her so, and what company we
graciously thought she _was_ fit for? When she had exhausted a torrent
of such inquiries, she threw a candlestick at Joe, burst into a loud
sobbing, got out the dustpan,—which was always a very bad sign,—put on
her coarse apron, and began cleaning up to a terrible extent. Not
satisfied with a dry cleaning, she took to a pail and scrubbing-brush,
and cleaned us out of house and home, so that we stood shivering in the
back-yard. It was ten o’clock at night before we ventured to creep in
again, and then she asked Joe why he hadn’t 

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