Charles Dickens 5 page 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! Pret-
tily pointed! Good indeed! Now Joseph, you know the
case.’
‘No, Joseph,’ said my sister, still in a reproachful manner,
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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 Pum-
blechook, 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 har-
rowed, and rasped, until I really was quite beside myself.
(I may here remark that I suppose myself to be better ac-
quainted 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
Great Expectations
make all along: ‘Boy, be for ever 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 soap-suds, 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.
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Chapter 8
Mr. Pumblechook’s premises in the High-street of the
market town, were of a peppercorny and farinaceous
character, as the premises of a corn-chandler and seeds-
man 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 enter-
tained 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 affin-
ity 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 ap-
peared to transact his business by keeping his eye on the
Great Expectations
coach-maker, 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 watch-maker, al-
ways poring over a little desk with a magnifying glass at his
eye, and always inspected by a group of smock-frocks por-
ing 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 altogeth-
er - his conversation consisted of nothing but arithmetic.
On my politely bidding him Good morning, he said, pomp-
ously, ‘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 break-
fast. ‘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
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eating bacon and hot roll, in (if I may be allowed the expres-
sion) a gorging and gormandising 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 court-yard 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. Pum-
Great Expectations
blechook, 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 pro-
pound through the gate, ‘And sixteen?’ But he didn’t.
My young conductress locked the gate, and we went
across the court-yard. It was paved and clean, but grass was
growing in every crevice. The brewery buildings had a lit-
tle 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.
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As to strong beer, there’s enough of it in the cellars already,
to drown the Manor House.’
‘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 careless-
ness 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 scorn-
ful 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
Great Expectations
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 en-
tered, 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 ta-
ble 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 jew-
els 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,
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and a prayer-book, all confusedly heaped about the look-
ing-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 with-
in 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 impos-
sible 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.
Great Expectations
‘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 enor-
mous 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 read-
er, 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
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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 un-
known house, bawling Estella to a scornful young lady
neither visible nor responsive, and feeling it a dreadful lib-
erty 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
Great Expectations
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 ex-
actly 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 ob-
jects, not even the withered bridal dress on the collapsed
from 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 frill-
ings and trimmings on her bridal dress, looking like earthy
paper. I knew nothing then, of the discoveries that are oc-
casionally 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
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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 be-
fore; but I began to consider them a very indifferent pair.
Her contempt for me was so strong, that it became infec-
tious, 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 labour-
ing-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
Great Expectations
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 beg-
gared 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 Wednes-
day, 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 can-
dle up, and she stood it in the place where we had found
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it. Until she opened the side entrance, I had fancied, with-
out 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 disap-
peared and closed the door.
I took the opportunity of being alone in the court-yard,
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 vul-
gar 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 gen-
teelly 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 hu-
miliated, 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
Great Expectations
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 whoso-
ever brings them up, there is nothing so finely perceived
and so finely felt, as injustice. It may be only small injus-
tice 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 per-
petual 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 pro-
found conviction that her bringing me up by hand, gave
her no right to bring me up by jerks. Through all my pun-
ishments, disgraces, fasts and vigils, and other penitential
performances, I had nursed this assurance; and to my com-
muning 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 kick-
ing 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 ac-
ceptable, and the beer was warming and tingling, and I was
soon in spirits to look about me.
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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 pi-
geons 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 store-house, no smells of grains and beer in the cop-
per 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 gar-
den 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
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