Charles Dickens 28 page could see me. I turned at the door, and he was still looking
hard at me, while the two vile casts on the shelf seemed to
be trying to get their eyelids open, and to force out of their
swollen throats, ‘O, what a man he is!’
Wemmick was out, and though he had been at his desk
he could have done nothing for me. I went straight back to
the Temple, where I found the terrible Provis drinking rum-
and-water and smoking negro-head, in safety.
Next day the clothes I had ordered, all came home, and
he put them on. Whatever he put on, became him less (it dis-
mally seemed to me) than what he had worn before. To my
thinking, there was something in him that made it hopeless
to attempt to disguise him. The more I dressed him and the
better I dressed him, the more he looked like the slouching
fugitive on the marshes. This effect on my anxious fancy
was partly referable, no doubt, to his old face and man-
ner growing more familiar to me; but I believe too that he
dragged one of his legs as if there were still a weight of iron
on it, and that from head to foot there was Convict in the
Great Expectations
very grain of the man.
The influences of his solitary hut-life were upon him be-
sides, and gave him a savage air that no dress could tame;
added to these, were the influences of his subsequent brand-
ed life among men, and, crowning all, his consciousness
that he was dodging and hiding now. In all his ways of sit-
ting and standing, and eating and drinking - of brooding
about, in a high-shouldered reluctant style - of taking out
his great horn-handled jack-knife and wiping it on his legs
and cutting his food - of lifting light glasses and cups to
his lips, as if they were clumsy pannikins - of chopping a
wedge off his bread, and soaking up with it the last frag-
ments of gravy round and round his plate, as if to make
the most of an allowance, and then drying his finger-ends
on it, and then swallowing it - in these ways and a thou-
sand other small nameless instances arising every minute
in the day, there was Prisoner, Felon, Bondsman, plain as
plain could be.
It had been his own idea to wear that touch of powder,
and I had conceded the powder after overcoming the shorts.
But I can compare the effect of it, when on, to nothing but
the probable effect of rouge upon the dead; so awful was the
manner in which everything in him that it was most desir-
able to repress, started through that thin layer of pretence,
and seemed to come blazing out at the crown of his head. It
was abandoned as soon as tried, and he wore his grizzled
hair cut short.
Words cannot tell what a sense I had, at the same time,
of the dreadful mystery that he was to me. When he fell
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asleep of an evening, with his knotted hands clenching the
sides of the easy-chair, and his bald head tattooed with deep
wrinkles falling forward on his breast, I would sit and look
at him, wondering what he had done, and loading him with
all the crimes in the Calendar, until the impulse was pow-
erful on me to start up and fly from him. Every hour so
increased my abhorrence of him, that I even think I might
have yielded to this impulse in the first agonies of being so
haunted, notwithstanding all he had done for me, and the
risk he ran, but for the knowledge that Herbert must soon
come back. Once, I actually did start out of bed in the night,
and begin to dress myself in my worst clothes, hurriedly in-
tending to leave him there with everything else I possessed,
and enlist for India as a private soldier.
I doubt if a ghost could have been more terrible to me, up
in those lonely rooms in the long evenings and long nights,
with the wind and the rain always rushing by. A ghost
could not have been taken and hanged on my account, and
the consideration that he could be, and the dread that he
would be, were no small addition to my horrors. When he
was not asleep, or playing a complicated kind of patience
with a ragged pack of cards of his own - a game that I never
saw before or since, and in which he recorded his winnings
by sticking his jack-knife into the table - when he was not
engaged in either of these pursuits, he would ask me to read
to him - ‘Foreign language, dear boy!’ While I complied, he,
not comprehending a single word, would stand before the
fire surveying me with the air of an Exhibitor, and I would
see him, between the fingers of the hand with which I shad-
Great Expectations
ed my face, appealing in dumb show to the furniture to take
notice of my proficiency. The imaginary student pursued
by the misshapen creature he had impiously made, was not
more wretched than I, pursued by the creature who had
made me, and recoiling from him with a stronger repulsion,
the more he admired me and the fonder he was of me.
This is written of, I am sensible, as if it had lasted a year.
It lasted about five days. Expecting Herbert all the time, I
dared not go out, except when I took Provis for an airing af-
ter dark. At length, one evening when dinner was over and
I had dropped into a slumber quite worn out - for my nights
had been agitated and my rest broken by fearful dreams - I
was roused by the welcome footstep on the staircase. Provis,
who had been asleep too, staggered up at the noise I made,
and in an instant I saw his jack-knife shining in his hand.
‘Quiet! It’s Herbert!’ I said; and Herbert came bursting
in, with the airy freshness of six hundred miles of France
upon him.
‘Handel, my dear fellow, how are you, and again how
are you, and again how are you? I seem to have been gone
a twelvemonth! Why, so I must have been, for you have
grown quite thin and pale! Handel, my - Halloa! I beg your
pardon.’
He was stopped in his running on and in his shaking
hands with me, by seeing Provis. Provis, regarding him
with a fixed attention, was slowly putting up his jack-knife,
and groping in another pocket for something else.
‘Herbert, my dear friend,’ said I, shutting the double
doors, while Herbert stood staring and wondering, ‘some-
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thing very strange has happened. This is - a visitor of mine.’
‘It’s all right, dear boy!’ said Provis coming forward, with
his little clasped black book, and then addressing himself to
Herbert. ‘Take it in your right hand. Lord strike you dead
on the spot, if ever you split in any way sumever! Kiss it!’
‘Do so, as he wishes it,’ I said to Herbert. So, Herbert,
looking at me with a friendly uneasiness and amazement,
complied, and Provis immediately shaking hands with him,
said, ‘Now you’re on your oath, you know. And never be-
lieve me on mine, if Pip shan’t make a gentleman on you!’
Great Expectations
Chapter 41
In vain should I attempt to describe the astonishment and
disquiet of Herbert, when he and I and Provis sat down
before the fire, and I recounted the whole of the secret.
Enough, that I saw my own feelings reflected in Herbert’s
face, and, not least among them, my repugnance towards
the man who had done so much for me.
What would alone have set a division between that man
and us, if there had been no other dividing circumstance,
was his triumph in my story. Saving his troublesome sense
of having been ‘low’ on one occasion since his return - on
which point he began to hold forth to Herbert, the moment
my revelation was finished - he had no perception of the
possibility of my finding any fault with my good fortune.
His boast that he had made me a gentleman, and that he
had come to see me support the character on his ample re-
sources, was made for me quite as much as for himself; and
that it was a highly agreeable boast to both of us, and that
we must both be very proud of it, was a conclusion quite es-
tablished in his own mind.
‘Though, look’ee here, Pip’s comrade,’ he said to Herbert,
after having discoursed for some time, ‘I know very well
that once since I come back - for half a minute - I’ve been
low. I said to Pip, I knowed as I had been low. But don’t you
fret yourself on that score. I ain’t made Pip a gentleman, and
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Pip ain’t a-going to make you a gentleman, not fur me not
to know what’s due to ye both. Dear boy, and Pip’s comrade,
you two may count upon me always having a gen-teel muz-
zle on. Muzzled I have been since that half a minute when I
was betrayed into lowness, muzzled I am at the present time,
muzzled I ever will be.’
Herbert said, ‘Certainly,’ but looked as if there were no
specific consolation in this, and remained perplexed and
dismayed. We were anxious for the time when he would go
to his lodging, and leave us together, but he was evidently
jealous of leaving us together, and sat late. It was midnight
before I took him round to Essex-street, and saw him safely
in at his own dark door. When it closed upon him, I experi-
enced the first moment of relief I had known since the night
of his arrival.
Never quite free from an uneasy remembrance of the
man on the stairs, I had always looked about me in taking
my guest out after dark, and in bringing him back; and I
looked about me now. Difficult as it is in a large city to avoid
the suspicion of being watched, when the mind is conscious
of danger in that regard, I could not persuade myself that
any of the people within sight cared about my movements.
The few who were passing, passed on their several ways, and
the street was empty when I turned back into the Temple.
Nobody had come out at the gate with us, nobody went in
at the gate with me. As I crossed by the fountain, I saw his
lighted back windows looking bright and quiet, and, when
I stood for a few moments in the doorway of the building
where I lived, before going up the stairs, Garden-court was
Great Expectations
as still and lifeless as the staircase was when I ascended it.
Herbert received me with open arms, and I had never
felt before, so blessedly, what it is to have a friend. When he
had spoken some sound words of sympathy and encourage-
ment, we sat down to consider the question, What was to
be done?
The chair that Provis had occupied still remaining where
it had stood - for he had a barrack way with him of hanging
about one spot, in one unsettled manner, and going through
one round of observances with his pipe and his negro-head
and his jack-knife and his pack of cards, and what not, as if
it were all put down for him on a slate - I say, his chair re-
maining where it had stood, Herbert unconsciously took it,
but next moment started out of it, pushed it away, and took
another. He had no occasion to say, after that, that he had
conceived an aversion for my patron, neither had I occasion
to confess my own. We interchanged that confidence with-
out shaping a syllable.
‘What,’ said I to Herbert, when he was safe in another
chair, ‘what is to be done?’
‘My poor dear Handel,’ he replied, holding his head, ‘I
am too stunned to think.’
‘So was I, Herbert, when the blow first fell. Still, some-
thing must be done. He is intent upon various new expenses
- horses, and carriages, and lavish appearances of all kinds.
He must be stopped somehow.’
‘You mean that you can’t accept—‘
‘How can I?’ I interposed, as Herbert paused. ‘Think of
him! Look at him!’
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An involuntary shudder passed over both of us.
‘Yet I am afraid the dreadful truth is, Herbert, that he
is attached to me, strongly attached to me. Was there ever
such a fate!’
‘My poor dear Handel,’ Herbert repeated.
‘Then,’ said I, ‘after all, stopping short here, never taking
another penny from him, think what I owe him already!
Then again: I am heavily in debt - very heavily for me, who
have now no expectations - and I have been bred to no call-
ing, and I am fit for nothing.’
‘Well, well, well!’ Herbert remonstrated. ‘Don’t say fit for
nothing.’
‘What am I fit for? I know only one thing that I am fit for,
and that is, to go for a soldier. And I might have gone, my
dear Herbert, but for the prospect of taking counsel with
your friendship and affection.’
Of course I broke down there: and of course Herbert,
beyond seizing a warm grip of my hand, pretended not to
know it.
‘Anyhow, my dear Handel,’ said he presently, ‘soldier-
ing won’t do. If you were to renounce this patronage and
these favours, I suppose you would do so with some faint
hope of one day repaying what you have already had. Not
very strong, that hope, if you went soldiering! Besides, it’s
absurd. You would be infinitely better in Clarriker’s house,
small as it is. I am working up towards a partnership, you
know.’
Poor fellow! He little suspected with whose money.
‘But there is another question,’ said Herbert. ‘This is an
Great Expectations
ignorant determined man, who has long had one fixed idea.
More than that, he seems to me (I may misjudge him) to be
a man of a desperate and fierce character.’
‘I know he is,’ I returned. ‘Let me tell you what evidence I
have seen of it.’ And I told him what I had not mentioned in
my narrative; of that encounter with the other convict.
‘See, then,’ said Herbert; ‘think of this! He comes here at
the peril of his life, for the realization of his fixed idea. In
the moment of realization, after all his toil and waiting, you
cut the ground from under his feet, destroy his idea, and
make his gains worthless to him. Do you see nothing that
he might do, under the disappointment?’
‘I have seen it, Herbert, and dreamed of it, ever since the
fatal night of his arrival. Nothing has been in my thoughts
so distinctly, as his putting himself in the way of being tak-
en.’‘Then you may rely upon it,’ said Herbert, ‘that there
would be great danger of his doing it. That is his power over
you as long as he remains in England, and that would be his
reckless course if you forsook him.’
I was so struck by the horror of this idea, which had
weighed upon me from the first, and the working out of
which would make me regard myself, in some sort, as his
murderer, that I could not rest in my chair but began pacing
to and fro. I said to Herbert, meanwhile, that even if Pro-
vis were recognized and taken, in spite of himself, I should
be wretched as the cause, however innocently. Yes; even
though I was so wretched in having him at large and near
me, and even though I would far far rather have worked at
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the forge all the days of my life than I would ever have come
to this!
But there was no staving off the question, What was to
be done?
‘The first and the main thing to be done,’ said Herbert,
‘is to get him out of England. You will have to go with him,
and then he may be induced to go.’
‘But get him where I will, could I prevent his coming
back?’
‘My good Handel, is it not obvious that with Newgate
in the next street, there must be far greater hazard in your
breaking your mind to him and making him reckless, here,
than elsewhere. If a pretext to get him away could be made
out of that other convict, or out of anything else in his life,
now.’
‘There, again!’ said I, stopping before Herbert, with my
open hands held out, as if they contained the desperation of
the case. ‘I know nothing of his life. It has almost made me
mad to sit here of a night and see him before me, so bound
up with my fortunes and misfortunes, and yet so unknown
to me, except as the miserable wretch who terrified me two
days in my childhood!’
Herbert got up, and linked his arm in mine, and we slow-
ly walked to and fro together, studying the carpet.
‘Handel,’ said Herbert, stopping, ‘you feel convinced that
you can take no further benefits from him; do you?’
‘Fully. Surely you would, too, if you were in my place?’
‘And you feel convinced that you must break with him?’
‘Herbert, can you ask me?’
Great Expectations
‘And you have, and are bound to have, that tenderness
for the life he has risked on your account, that you must
save him, if possible, from throwing it away. Then you must
get him out of England before you stir a finger to extricate
yourself. That done, extricate yourself, in Heaven’s name,
and we’ll see it out together, dear old boy.’
It was a comfort to shake hands upon it, and walk up and
down again, with only that done.
‘Now, Herbert,’ said I, ‘with reference to gaining some
knowledge of his history. There is but one way that I know
of. I must ask him point-blank.’
‘Yes. Ask him,’ said Herbert, ‘when we sit at breakfast in
the morning.’ For, he had said, on taking leave of Herbert,
that he would come to breakfast with us.
With this project formed, we went to bed. I had the wild-
est dreams concerning him, and woke unrefreshed; I woke,
too, to recover the fear which I had lost in the night, of his
being found out as a returned transport. Waking, I never
lost that fear.
He came round at the appointed time, took out his jack-
knife, and sat down to his meal. He was full of plans ‘for his
gentleman’s coming out strong, and like a gentleman,’ and
urged me to begin speedily upon the pocket-book, which he
had left in my possession. He considered the chambers and
his own lodging as temporary residences, and advised me
to look out at once for a ‘fashionable crib’ near Hyde Park,
in which he could have ‘a shake-down’. When he had made
an end of his breakfast, and was wiping his knife on his leg,
I said to him, without a word of preface:
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‘After you were gone last night, I told my friend of the
struggle that the soldiers found you engaged in on the
marshes, when we came up. You remember?’
‘Remember!’ said he. ‘I think so!’
‘We want to know something about that man - and about
you. It is strange to know no more about either, and particu-
larly you, than I was able to tell last night. Is not this as good
a time as another for our knowing more?’
‘Well!’ he said, after consideration. ‘You’re on your oath,
you know, Pip’s comrade?’
‘Assuredly,’ replied Herbert.
‘As to anything I say, you know,’ he insisted. ‘The oath
applies to all.’
‘I understand it to do so.’
‘And look’ee here! Wotever I done, is worked out and
paid for,’ he insisted again.
‘So be it.’
He took out his black pipe and was going to fill it with ne-
grohead, when, looking at the tangle of tobacco in his hand,
he seemed to think it might perplex the thread of his narra-
tive. He put it back again, stuck his pipe in a button-hole of
his coat, spread a hand on each knee, and, after turning an
angry eye on the fire for a few silent moments, looked round
at us and said what follows.
Great Expectations
Chapter 42
‘Dear boy and Pip’s comrade. I am not a-going fur to tell you
my life, like a song or a story-book. But to give it you short
and handy, I’ll put it at once into a mouthful of English. In
jail and out of jail, in jail and out of jail, in jail and out of jail.
There, you got it. That’s my life pretty much, down to such
times as I got shipped off, arter Pip stood my friend.
‘I’ve been done everything to, pretty well - except hanged.
I’ve been locked up, as much as a silver tea-kettle. I’ve been
carted here and carted there, and put out of this town and
put out of that town, and stuck in the stocks, and whipped
and worried and drove. I’ve no more notion where I was
born, than you have - if so much. I first become aware of
myself, down in Essex, a thieving turnips for my living.
Summun had run away from me - a man - a tinker - and
he’d took the fire with him, and left me wery cold.
‘I know’d my name to be Magwitch, chrisen’d Abel. How
did I know it? Much as I know’d the birds’ names in the
hedges to be chaffinch, sparrer, thrush. I might have thought
it was all lies together, only as the birds’ names come out
true, I supposed mine did.
‘So fur as I could find, there warn’t a soul that see young
Abel Magwitch, with us little on him as in him, but wot
caught fright at him, and either drove him off, or took him
up. I was took up, took up, took up, to that extent that I
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reg’larly grow’d up took up.
‘This is the way it was, that when I was a ragged little cree-
tur as much to be pitied as ever I see (not that I looked in
the glass, for there warn’t many insides of furnished houses
known to me), I got the name of being hardened. ‘This is a
terrible hardened one,’ they says to prison wisitors, pick-
ing out me. ‘May be said to live in jails, this boy. ‘Then they
looked at me, and I looked at them, and they measured my
head, some on ‘em - they had better a-measured my stom-
ach - and others on ‘em giv me tracts what I couldn’t read,
and made me speeches what I couldn’t understand. They al-
ways went on agen me about the Devil. But what the Devil
was I to do? I must put something into my stomach, mustn’t
I? - Howsomever, I’m a getting low, and I know what’s due.
Dear boy and Pip’s comrade, don’t you be afeerd of me be-
ing low.
‘Tramping, begging, thieving, working sometimes when
I could - though that warn’t as often as you may think, till
you put the question whether you would ha’ been over-
ready to give me work yourselves - a bit of a poacher, a bit
of a labourer, a bit of a waggoner, a bit of a haymaker, a bit
of a hawker, a bit of most things that don’t pay and lead to
trouble, I got to be a man. A deserting soldier in a Travel-
ler’s Rest, what lay hid up to the chin under a lot of taturs,
learnt me to read; and a travelling Giant what signed his
name at a penny a time learnt me to write. I warn’t locked
up as often now as formerly, but I wore out my good share
of keymetal still.
‘At Epsom races, a matter of over twenty years ago, I got
Great Expectations
acquainted wi’ a man whose skull I’d crack wi’ this poker,
like the claw of a lobster, if I’d got it on this hob. His right
name was Compeyson; and that’s the man, dear boy, what
you see me a-pounding in the ditch, according to what you
truly told your comrade arter I was gone last night.
‘He set up fur a gentleman, this Compeyson, and he’d
been to a public boarding-school and had learning. He was
a smooth one to talk, and was a dab at the ways of gentle-
folks. He was good-looking too. It was the night afore the
great race, when I found him on the heath, in a booth that
I know’d on. Him and some more was a sitting among the
tables when I went in, and the landlord (which had a knowl-
edge of me, and was a sporting one) called him out, and
said, ‘I think this is a man that might suit you’ - meaning
I was.
‘Compeyson, he looks at me very noticing, and I look at
him. He has a watch and a chain and a ring and a breast-pin
and a handsome suit of clothes.
‘ To judge from appearances, you’re out of luck,’ says
Compeyson to me.
‘ Yes, master, and I’ve never been in it much.’ (I had come
out of Kingston Jail last on a vagrancy committal. Not but
what it might have been for something else; but it warn’t.)
‘ Luck changes,’ says Compeyson; ‘perhaps yours is go-
ing to change.’
‘I says, ‘I hope it may be so. There’s room.’
‘ What can you do?’ says Compeyson.
‘ Eat and drink,’ I says; ‘if you’ll find the materials.’
‘Compeyson laughed, looked at me again very noticing,
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giv me five shillings, and appointed me for next night. Same
place.
‘I went to Compeyson next night, same place, and Com-
peyson took me on to be his man and pardner. And what
was Compeyson’s business in which we was to go pardners?
Compeyson’s business was the swindling, handwriting
forging, stolen bank-note passing, and such-like. All sorts
of traps as Compeyson could set with his head, and keep
his own legs out of and get the profits from and let another
man in for, was Compeyson’s business. He’d no more heart
than a iron file, he was as cold as death, and he had the head
of the Devil afore mentioned.
‘There was another in with Compeyson, as was called
Arthur - not as being so chrisen’d, but as a surname. He
was in a Decline, and was a shadow to look at. Him and
Compeyson had been in a bad thing with a rich lady some
years afore, and they’d made a pot of money by it; but Com-
peyson betted and gamed, and he’d have run through the
king’s taxes. So, Arthur was a-dying, and a-dying poor and
with the horrors on him, and Compeyson’s wife (which
Compeyson kicked mostly) was a-having pity on him when
she could, and Compeyson was a-having pity on nothing
and nobody.
‘I might a-took warning by Arthur, but I didn’t; and I
won’t pretend I was partick’ler - for where ‘ud be the good
on it, dear boy and comrade? So I begun wi’ Compeyson,
and a poor tool I was in his hands. Arthur lived at the top
of Compeyson’s house (over nigh Brentford it was), and
Compeyson kept a careful account agen him for board and
Great Expectations
lodging, in case he should ever get better to work it out. But
Arthur soon settled the account. The second or third time
as ever I see him, he come a-tearing down into Compey-
son’s parlour late at night, in only a flannel gown, with his
hair all in a sweat, and he says to Compeyson’s wife, ‘Sally,
she really is upstairs alonger me, now, and I can’t get rid
of her. She’s all in white,’ he says, ‘wi’ white flowers in her
hair, and she’s awful mad, and she’s got a shroud hanging
over her arm, and she says she’ll put it on me at five in the
morning.’
‘Says Compeyson: ‘Why, you fool, don’t you know she’s
got a living body? And how should she be up there, without
coming through the door, or in at the window, and up the
stairs?’
‘ I don’t know how she’s there,’ says Arthur, shivering
dreadful with the horrors, ‘but she’s standing in the cor-
ner at the foot of the bed, awful mad. And over where her
heart’s brook - you broke it! - there’s drops of blood.’
‘Compeyson spoke hardy, but he was always a coward.
‘Go up alonger this drivelling sick man,’ he says to his wife,
‘and Magwitch, lend her a hand, will you?’ But he never
come nigh himself.
‘Compeyson’s wife and me took him up to bed agen, and
he raved most dreadful. ‘Why look at her!’ he cries out.
‘She’s a-shaking the shroud at me! Don’t you see her? Look
at her eyes! Ain’t it awful to see her so mad?’ Next, he cries,
‘She’ll put it on me, and then I’m done for! Take it away from
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