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

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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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