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Charles Dickens 19 page

no more in these clothes. I’m wrong in these clothes. I’m

wrong out of the forge, the kitchen, or off th’ meshes. You

won’t find half so much fault in me if you think of me in my

forge dress, with my hammer in my hand, or even my pipe.

You won’t find half so much fault in me if, supposing as you

should ever wish to see me, you come and put your head in

at the forge window and see Joe the blacksmith, there, at the

old anvil, in the old burnt apron, sticking to the old work.

I’m awful dull, but I hope I’ve beat out something nigh the

rights of this at last. And so GOD bless you, dear old Pip,

old chap, GOD bless you!’

I had not been mistaken in my fancy that there was a

simple dignity in him. The fashion of his dress could no

more come in its way when he spoke these words, than it

could come in its way in Heaven. He touched me gently on

the forehead, and went out. As soon as I could recover my-

self sufficiently, I hurried out after him and looked for him

in the neighbouring streets; but he was gone.

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Chapter 28

It was clear that I must repair to our town next day, and

in the first flow of my repentance it was equally clear that

I must stay at Joe’s. But, when I had secured my box-place

by to-morrow’s coach and had been down to Mr. Pocket’s

and back, I was not by any means convinced on the last

point, and began to invent reasons and make excuses for

putting up at the Blue Boar. I should be an inconvenience

at Joe’s; I was not expected, and my bed would not be ready;

I should be too far from Miss Havisham’s, and she was ex-

acting and mightn’t like it. All other swindlers upon earth

are nothing to the self-swindlers, and with such pretenc-

es did I cheat myself. Surely a curious thing. That I should

innocently take a bad half-crown of somebody else’s manu-

facture, is reasonable enough; but that I should knowingly

reckon the spurious coin of my own make, as good money!

An obliging stranger, under pretence of compactly folding

up my bank-notes for security’s sake, abstracts the notes

and gives me nutshells; but what is his sleight of hand to

mine, when I fold up my own nutshells and pass them on

myself as notes!

Having settled that I must go to the Blue Boar, my mind

was much disturbed by indecision whether or not to take

the Avenger. It was tempting to think of that expensive

Mercenary publicly airing his boots in the archway of the

Great Expectations

Blue Boar’s posting-yard; it was almost solemn to imagine

him casually produced in the tailor’s shop and confounding

the disrespectful senses of Trabb’s boy. On the other hand,

Trabb’s boy might worm himself into his intimacy and tell

him things; or, reckless and desperate wretch as I knew he

could be, might hoot him in the High-street, My patroness,

too, might hear of him, and not approve. On the whole, I re-

solved to leave the Avenger behind.

It was the afternoon coach by which I had taken my place,

and, as winter had now come round, I should not arrive at



my destination until two or three hours after dark. Our time

of starting from the Cross Keys was two o’clock. I arrived

on the ground with a quarter of an hour to spare, attended

by the Avenger - if I may connect that expression with one

who never attended on me if he could possibly help it.

At that time it was customary to carry Convicts down to

the dockyards by stage-coach. As I had often heard of them

in the capacity of outside passengers, and had more than

once seen them on the high road dangling their ironed legs

over the coach roof, I had no cause to be surprised when

Herbert, meeting me in the yard, came up and told me there

were two convicts going down with me. But I had a reason

that was an old reason now, for constitutionally faltering

whenever I heard the word convict.

‘You don’t mind them, Handel?’ said Herbert.

‘Oh no!’

‘I thought you seemed as if you didn’t like them?’

‘I can’t pretend that I do like them, and I suppose you

don’t particularly. But I don’t mind them.’

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‘See! There they are,’ said Herbert, ‘coming out of the Tap.

What a degraded and vile sight it is!’

They had been treating their guard, I suppose, for they

had a gaoler with them, and all three came out wiping their

mouths on their hands. The two convicts were handcuffed

together, and had irons on their legs - irons of a pattern

that I knew well. They wore the dress that I likewise knew

well. Their keeper had a brace of pistols, and carried a thick-

knobbed bludgeon under his arm; but he was on terms of

good understanding with them, and stood, with them be-

side him, looking on at the putting-to of the horses, rather

with an air as if the convicts were an interesting Exhibition

not formally open at the moment, and he the Curator. One

was a taller and stouter man than the other, and appeared

as a matter of course, according to the mysterious ways of

the world both convict and free, to have had allotted to him

the smaller suit of clothes. His arms and legs were like great

pincushions of those shapes, and his attire disguised him

absurdly; but I knew his half-closed eye at one glance. There

stood the man whom I had seen on the settle at the Three

Jolly Bargemen on a Saturday night, and who had brought

me down with his invisible gun!

It was easy to make sure that as yet he knew me no more

than if he had never seen me in his life. He looked across at

me, and his eye appraised my watch-chain, and then he in-

cidentally spat and said something to the other convict, and

they laughed and slued themselves round with a clink of

their coupling manacle, and looked at something else. The

great numbers on their backs, as if they were street doors;

Great Expectations

their coarse mangy ungainly outer surface, as if they were

lower animals; their ironed legs, apologetically garlanded

with pocket-handkerchiefs; and the way in which all present

looked at them and kept from them; made them (as Herbert

had said) a most disagreeable and degraded spectacle.

But this was not the worst of it. It came out that the whole

of the back of the coach had been taken by a family remov-

ing from London, and that there were no places for the two

prisoners but on the seat in front, behind the coachman.

Hereupon, a choleric gentleman, who had taken the fourth

place on that seat, flew into a most violent passion, and said

that it was a breach of contract to mix him up with such vil-

lainous company, and that it was poisonous and pernicious

and infamous and shameful, and I don’t know what else.

At this time the coach was ready and the coachman impa-

tient, and we were all preparing to get up, and the prisoners

had come over with their keeper - bringing with them that

curious flavour of bread-poultice, baize, rope-yarn, and

hearthstone, which attends the convict presence.

‘Don’t take it so much amiss. sir,’ pleaded the keeper to

the angry passenger; ‘I’ll sit next you myself. I’ll put ‘em on

the outside of the row. They won’t interfere with you, sir.

You needn’t know they’re there.’

‘And don’t blame me,’ growled the convict I had recog-

nized. ‘I don’t want to go. I am quite ready to stay behind.

As fur as I am concerned any one’s welcome to my place.’

‘Or mine,’ said the other, gruffly. ‘I wouldn’t have incom-

moded none of you, if I’d had my way.’ Then, they both

laughed, and began cracking nuts, and spitting the shells

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about. - As I really think I should have liked to do myself, if

I had been in their place and so despised.

At length, it was voted that there was no help for the an-

gry gentleman, and that he must either go in his chance

company or remain behind. So, he got into his place, still

making complaints, and the keeper got into the place next

him, and the convicts hauled themselves up as well as they

could, and the convict I had recognized sat behind me with

his breath on the hair of my head.

‘Good-bye, Handel!’ Herbert called out as we started. I

thought what a blessed fortune it was, that he had found an-

other name for me than Pip.

It is impossible to express with what acuteness I felt the

convict’s breathing, not only on the back of my head, but all

along my spine. The sensation was like being touched in the

marrow with some pungent and searching acid, it set my

very teeth on edge. He seemed to have more breathing busi-

ness to do than another man, and to make more noise in

doing it; and I was conscious of growing high-shoulderd on

one side, in my shrinking endeavours to fend him off.

The weather was miserably raw, and the two cursed the

cold. It made us all lethargic before we had gone far, and

when we had left the Half-way House behind, we habitually

dozed and shivered and were silent. I dozed off, myself, in

considering the question whether I ought to restore a cou-

ple of pounds sterling to this creature before losing sight of

him, and how it could best be done. In the act of dipping

forward as if I were going to bathe among the horses, I woke

in a fright and took the question up again.

 

Great Expectations

But I must have lost it longer than I had thought, since,

although I could recognize nothing in the darkness and

the fitful lights and shadows of our lamps, I traced marsh

country in the cold damp wind that blew at us. Cower-

ing forward for warmth and to make me a screen against

the wind, the convicts were closer to me than before. They

very first words I heard them interchange as I became con-

scious were the words of my own thought, ‘Two One Pound

notes.’

‘How did he get ‘em?’ said the convict I had never seen.

‘How should I know?’ returned the other. ‘He had ‘em

stowed away somehows. Giv him by friends, I expect.’

‘I wish,’ said the other, with a bitter curse upon the cold,

‘that I had ‘em here.’

‘Two one pound notes, or friends?’

‘Two one pound notes. I’d sell all the friends I ever had,

for one, and think it a blessed good bargain. Well? So he

says - ?’

‘So he says,’ resumed the convict I had recognized - ‘it

was all said and done in half a minute, behind a pile of tim-

ber in the Dockyard - ‘You’re a-going to be discharged?’ Yes,

I was. Would I find out that boy that had fed him and kep

his secret, and give him them two one pound notes? Yes, I

would. And I did.’

‘More fool you,’ growled the other. ‘I’d have spent ‘em on

a Man, in wittles and drink. He must have been a green one.

Mean to say he knowed nothing of you?’

‘Not a ha’porth. Different gangs and different ships. He

was tried again for prison breaking, and got made a Lifer.’

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‘And was that - Honour! - the only time you worked out,

in this part of the country?’

‘The only time.’

‘What might have been your opinion of the place?’

‘A most beastly place. Mudbank, mist, swamp, and work;

work, swamp, mist, and mudbank.’

They both execrated the place in very strong language,

and gradually growled themselves out, and had nothing left

to say.

After overhearing this dialogue, I should assuredly have

got down and been left in the solitude and darkness of the

highway, but for feeling certain that the man had no suspi-

cion of my identity. Indeed, I was not only so changed in the

course of nature, but so differently dressed and so different-

ly circumstanced, that it was not at all likely he could have

known me without accidental help. Still, the coincidence of

our being together on the coach, was sufficiently strange to

fill me with a dread that some other coincidence might at

any moment connect me, in his hearing, with my name. For

this reason, I resolved to alight as soon as we touched the

town, and put myself out of his hearing. This device I ex-

ecuted successfully. My little portmanteau was in the boot

under my feet; I had but to turn a hinge to get it out: I threw

it down before me, got down after it, and was left at the first

lamp on the first stones of the town pavement. As to the

convicts, they went their way with the coach, and I knew

at what point they would be spirited off to the river. In my

fancy, I saw the boat with its convict crew waiting for them

at the slime-washed stairs, - again heard the gruff ‘Give way,

 

Great Expectations

you!’ like and order to dogs - again saw the wicked Noah’s

Ark lying out on the black water.

I could not have said what I was afraid of, for my fear

was altogether undefined and vague, but there was great

fear upon me. As I walked on to the hotel, I felt that a dread,

much exceeding the mere apprehension of a painful or dis-

agreeable recognition, made me tremble. I am confident

that it took no distinctness of shape, and that it was the re-

vival for a few minutes of the terror of childhood.

The coffee-room at the Blue Boar was empty, and I had

not only ordered my dinner there, but had sat down to it,

before the waiter knew me. As soon as he had apologized

for the remissness of his memory, he asked me if he should

send Boots for Mr. Pumblechook?

‘No,’ said I, ‘certainly not.’

The waiter (it was he who had brought up the Great Re-

monstrance from the Commercials, on the day when I

was bound) appeared surprised, and took the earliest op-

portunity of putting a dirty old copy of a local newspaper

so directly in my way, that I took it up and read this para-

graph:

Our readers will learn, not altogether without interest, in

reference to the recent romantic rise in fortune of a young

artificer in iron of this neighbourhood (what a theme, by

the way, for the magic pen of our as yet not universally ac-

knowledged townsman TOOBY, the poet of our columns!)

that the youth’s earliest patron, companion, and friend,

was a highly-respected individual not entirely unconnected

with the corn and seed trade, and whose eminently conve-

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nient and commodious business premises are situate within

a hundred miles of the High-street. It is not wholly irre-

spective of our personal feelings that we record HIM as the

Mentor of our young Telemachus, for it is good to know

that our town produced the founder of the latter’s fortunes.

Does the thoughtcontracted brow of the local Sage or the

lustrous eye of local Beauty inquire whose fortunes? We

believe that Quintin Matsys was the BLACKSMITH of An-

twerp. VERB. SAP.

I entertain a conviction, based upon large experience,

that if in the days of my prosperity I had gone to the North

Pole, I should have met somebody there, wandering Es-

quimaux or civilized man, who would have told me that

Pumblechook was my earliest patron and the founder of my

fortunes.

 

Great Expectations

Chapter 29

Betimes in the morning I was up and out. It was too early

yet to go to Miss Havisham’s, so I loitered into the coun-

try on Miss Havisham’s side of town - which was not Joe’s

side; I could go there to-morrow - thinking about my pa-

troness, and painting brilliant pictures of her plans for me.

She had adopted Estella, she had as good as adopted me,

and it could not fail to be her intention to bring us together.

She reserved it for me to restore the desolate house, admit

the sunshine into the dark rooms, set the clocks a-going

and the cold hearths a-blazing, tear down the cobwebs, de-

stroy the vermin - in short, do all the shining deeds of the

young Knight of romance, and marry the Princess. I had

stopped to look at the house as I passed; and its seared red

brick walls, blocked windows, and strong green ivy clasp-

ing even the stacks of chimneys with its twigs and tendons,

as if with sinewy old arms, had made up a rich attractive

mystery, of which I was the hero. Estella was the inspira-

tion of it, and the heart of it, of course. But, though she had

taken such strong possession of me, though my fancy and

my hope were so set upon her, though her influence on my

boyish life and character had been all-powerful, I did not,

even that romantic morning, invest her with any attributes

save those she possessed. I mention this in this place, of a

fixed purpose, because it is the clue by which I am to be fol-

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lowed into my poor labyrinth. According to my experience,

the conventional notion of a lover cannot be always true.

The unqualified truth is, that when I loved Estella with the

love of a man, I loved her simply because I found her irre-

sistible. Once for all; I knew to my sorrow, often and often,

if not always, that I loved her against reason, against prom-

ise, against peace, against hope, against happiness, against

all discouragement that could be. Once for all; I loved her

none the less because I knew it, and it had no more influ-

ence in restraining me, than if I had devoutly believed her

to be human perfection.

I so shaped out my walk as to arrive at the gate at my old

time. When I had rung at the bell with an unsteady hand, I

turned my back upon the gate, while I tried to get my breath

and keep the beating of my heart moderately quiet. I heard

the side door open, and steps come across the court-yard;

but I pretended not to hear, even when the gate swung on

its rusty hinges.

Being at last touched on the shoulder, I started and

turned. I started much more naturally then, to find myself

confronted by a man in a sober grey dress. The last man I

should have expected to see in that place of porter at Miss

Havisham’s door.

‘Orlick!’

‘Ah, young master, there’s more changes than yours. But

come in, come in. It’s opposed to my orders to hold the gate

open.’

I entered and he swung it, and locked it, and took the key

out. ‘Yes!’ said he, facing round, after doggedly preceding

 

Great Expectations

me a few steps towards the house. ‘Here I am!’

‘How did you come here?’

‘I come her,’ he retorted, ‘on my legs. I had my box brought

alongside me in a barrow.’

‘Are you here for good?’

‘I ain’t her for harm, young master, I suppose?’

I was not so sure of that. I had leisure to entertain the

retort in my mind, while he slowly lifted his heavy glance

from the pavement, up my legs and arms, to my face.

‘Then you have left the forge?’ I said.

‘Do this look like a forge?’ replied Orlick, sending his

glance all round him with an air of injury. ‘Now, do it look

like it?’

I asked him how long he had left Gargery’s forge?

‘One day is so like another here,’ he replied, ‘that I don’t

know without casting it up. However, I come her some time

since you left.’

‘I could have told you that, Orlick.’

‘Ah!’ said he, drily. ‘But then you’ve got to be a scholar.’

By this time we had come to the house, where I found his

room to be one just within the side door, with a little win-

dow in it looking on the court-yard. In its small proportions,

it was not unlike the kind of place usually assigned to a gate-

porter in Paris. Certain keys were hanging on the wall, to

which he now added the gate-key; and his patchwork-cov-

ered bed was in a little inner division or recess. The whole

had a slovenly confined and sleepy look, like a cage for a

human dormouse: while he, looming dark and heavy in the

shadow of a corner by the window, looked like the human

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dormouse for whom it was fitted up - as indeed he was.

‘I never saw this room before,’ I remarked; ‘but there

used to be no Porter here.’

‘No,’ said he; ‘not till it got about that there was no pro-

tection on the premises, and it come to be considered

dangerous, with convicts and Tag and Rag and Bobtail

going up and down. And then I was recommended to the

place as a man who could give another man as good as he

brought, and I took it. It’s easier than bellowsing and ham-

mering. - That’s loaded, that is.’

My eye had been caught by a gun with a brass bound

stock over the chimney-piece, and his eye had followed

mine.

‘Well,’ said I, not desirous of more conversation, ‘shall I

go up to Miss Havisham?’

‘Burn me, if I know!’ he retorted, first stretching him-

self and then shaking himself; ‘my orders ends here, young

master. I give this here bell a rap with this here hammer,

and you go on along the passage till you meet somebody.’

‘I am expected, I believe?’

‘Burn me twice over, if I can say!’ said he.

Upon that, I turned down the long passage which I had

first trodden in my thick boots, and he made his bell sound.

At the end of the passage, while the bell was still reverber-

ating, I found Sarah Pocket: who appeared to have now

become constitutionally green and yellow by reason of me.

‘Oh!’ said she. ‘You, is it, Mr. Pip?’

‘It is, Miss Pocket. I am glad to tell you that Mr. Pocket

and family are all well.’

Great Expectations

‘Are they any wiser?’ said Sarah, with a dismal shake of

the head; ‘they had better be wiser, than well. Ah, Matthew,

Matthew! You know your way, sir?’

Tolerably, for I had gone up the staircase in the dark,

many a time. I ascended it now, in lighter boots than of yore,

and tapped in my old way at the door of Miss Havisham’s

room. ‘Pip’s rap,’ I heard her say, immediately; ‘come in,

Pip.’She was in her chair near the old table, in the old dress,

with her two hands crossed on her stick, her chin resting

on them, and her eyes on the fire. Sitting near her, with the

white shoe that had never been worn, in her hand, and her

head bent as she looked at it, was an elegant lady whom I

had never seen.

‘Come in, Pip,’ Miss Havisham continued to mutter,

without looking round or up; ‘come in, Pip, how do you do,

Pip? so you kiss my hand as if I were a queen, eh? - Well?’

She looked up at me suddenly, only moving her eyes, and

repeated in a grimly playful manner,

‘Well?’

‘I heard, Miss Havisham,’ said I, rather at a loss, ‘that you

were so kind as to wish me to come and see you, and I came

directly.’

‘Well?’

The lady whom I had never seen before, lifted up her eyes

and looked archly at me, and then I saw that the eyes were

Estella’s eyes. But she was so much changed, was so much

more beautiful, so much more womanly, in all things win-

ning admiration had made such wonderful advance, that I

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seemed to have made none. I fancied, as I looked at her, that

I slipped hopelessly back into the coarse and common boy

again. O the sense of distance and disparity that came upon

me, and the inaccessibility that came about her!

She gave me her hand. I stammered something about

the pleasure I felt in seeing her again, and about my having

looked forward to it for a long, long time.

‘Do you find her much changed, Pip?’ asked Miss Hav-

isham, with her greedy look, and striking her stick upon a

chair that stood between them, as a sign to me to sit down

there.

‘When I came in, Miss Havisham, I thought there was

nothing of Estella in the face or figure; but now it all settles

down so curiously into the old—‘

‘What? You are not going to say into the old Estella?’ Miss

Havisham interrupted. ‘She was proud and insulting, and

you wanted to go away from her. Don’t you remember?’

I said confusedly that that was long ago, and that I knew

no better then, and the like. Estella smiled with perfect

composure, and said she had no doubt of my having been

quite right, and of her having been very disagreeable.

‘Is he changed?’ Miss Havisham asked her.

‘Very much,’ said Estella, looking at me.

‘Less coarse and common?’ said Miss Havisham, playing

with Estella’s hair.

Estella laughed, and looked at the shoe in her hand, and

laughed again, and looked at me, and put the shoe down.

She treated me as a boy still, but she lured me on.

We sat in the dreamy room among the old strange influ-

 

Great Expectations

ences which had so wrought upon me, and I learnt that she

had but just come home from France, and that she was go-

ing to London. Proud and wilful as of old, she had brought

those qualities into such subjection to her beauty that it was

impossible and out of nature - or I thought so - to separate

them from her beauty. Truly it was impossible to dissoci-

ate her presence from all those wretched hankerings after

money and gentility that had disturbed my boyhood - from

all those ill-regulated aspirations that had first made me

ashamed of home and Joe - from all those visions that had

raised her face in the glowing fire, struck it out of the iron

on the anvil, extracted it from the darkness of night to look

in at the wooden window of the forge and flit away. In a

word, it was impossible for me to separate her, in the past or

in the present, from the innermost life of my life.

It was settled that I should stay there all the rest of the

day, and return to the hotel at night, and to London to-mor-

row. When we had conversed for a while, Miss Havisham

sent us two out to walk in the neglected garden: on our

coming in by-and-by, she said, I should wheel her about a

little as in times of yore.

So, Estella and I went out into the garden by the gate

through which I had strayed to my encounter with the pale

young gentleman, now Herbert; I, trembling in spirit and

worshipping the very hem of her dress; she, quite composed

and most decidedly not worshipping the hem of mine. As

we drew near to the place of encounter, she stopped and

said:

‘I must have been a singular little creature to hide and see

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that fight that day: but I did, and I enjoyed it very much.’

‘You rewarded me very much.’

‘Did I?’ she replied, in an incidental and forgetful way. ‘I

remember I entertained a great objection to your adversary,

because I took it ill that he should be brought here to pester

me with his company.’

‘He and I are great friends now.’

‘Are you? I think I recollect though, that you read with

his father?’

‘Yes.’

I made the admission with reluctance, for it seemed to

have a boyish look, and she already treated me more than

enough like a boy.

‘Since your change of fortune and prospects, you have

changed your companions,’ said Estella.

‘Naturally,’ said I.

‘And necessarily,’ she added, in a haughty tone; ‘what was

fit company for you once, would be quite unfit company for

you now.’

In my conscience, I doubt very much whether I had any

lingering intention left, of going to see Joe; but if I had, this

observation put it to flight.


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