Great Expectations
For a moment, with the fear of my sister’s working me before my eyes, I
had a desperate idea of starting round the room in the assumed
character of Mr. Pumblechook’s chaise-cart. But I felt myself so
unequal to the performance that I gave it up, and stood looking at Miss
Havisham in what I suppose she took for a dogged manner, inasmuch as
she said, when we had taken a good look at each other,—
“Are you sullen and obstinate?”
“No, ma’am, I am very sorry for you, and very sorry I can’t play just
now. If you complain of me I shall get into trouble with my sister, so
I would do it if I could; but it’s so new here, and so strange, and so
fine,—and melancholy—.” I stopped, fearing I might say too much, or had
already said it, and we took another look at each other.
Before she spoke again, she turned her eyes from me, and looked at the
dress she wore, and at the dressing-table, and finally at herself in
the looking-glass.
“So new to him,” she muttered, “so old to me; so strange to him, so
familiar to me; so melancholy to both of us! Call Estella.”
As she was still looking at the reflection of herself, I thought she
was still talking to herself, and kept quiet.
“Call Estella,” she repeated, flashing a look at me. “You can do that.
Call Estella. At the door.”
To stand in the dark in a mysterious passage of an unknown house,
bawling Estella to a scornful young lady neither visible nor
responsive, and feeling it a dreadful liberty so to roar out her name,
was almost as bad as playing to order. But she answered at last, and
her light came along the dark passage like a star.
Miss Havisham beckoned her to come close, and took up a jewel from the
table, and tried its effect upon her fair young bosom and against her
pretty brown hair. “Your own, one day, my dear, and you will use it
well. Let me see you play cards with this boy.”
“With this boy? Why, he is a common labouring-boy!”
I thought I overheard Miss Havisham answer,—only it seemed so
unlikely,—“Well? You can break his heart.”
“What do you play, boy?” asked Estella of myself, with the greatest
disdain.
“Nothing but beggar my neighbour, miss.”
“Beggar him,” said Miss Havisham to Estella. So we sat down to cards.
It was then I began to understand that everything in the room had
stopped, like the watch and the clock, a long time ago. I noticed that
Miss Havisham put down the jewel exactly on the spot from which she had
taken it up. As Estella dealt the cards, I glanced at the
dressing-table again, and saw that the shoe upon it, once white, now
yellow, had never been worn. I glanced down at the foot from which the
shoe was absent, and saw that the silk stocking on it, once white, now
yellow, had been trodden ragged. Without this arrest of everything,
this standing still of all the pale decayed objects, not even the
withered bridal dress on the collapsed form could have looked so like
grave-clothes, or the long veil so like a shroud.
So she sat, corpse-like, as we played at cards; the frillings and
trimmings on her bridal dress, looking like earthy paper. I knew
nothing then of the discoveries that are occasionally made of bodies
buried in ancient times, which fall to powder in the moment of being
distinctly seen; but, I have often thought since, that she must have
looked as if the admission of the natural light of day would have
struck her to dust.
“He calls the knaves Jacks, this boy!” said Estella with disdain,
before our first game was out. “And what coarse hands he has! And what
thick boots!”
I had never thought of being ashamed of my hands before; but I began to
consider them a very indifferent pair. Her contempt for me was so
strong, that it became infectious, and I caught it.
She won the game, and I dealt. I misdealt, as was only natural, when I
knew she was lying in wait for me to do wrong; and she denounced me for
a stupid, clumsy labouring-boy.
“You say nothing of her,” remarked Miss Havisham to me, as she looked
on. “She says many hard things of you, but you say nothing of her. What
do you think of her?”
“I don’t like to say,” I stammered.
“Tell me in my ear,” said Miss Havisham, bending down.
“I think she is very proud,” I replied, in a whisper.
“Anything else?”
“I think she is very pretty.”
“Anything else?”
“I think she is very insulting.” (She was looking at me then with a
look of supreme aversion.)
“Anything else?”
“I think I should like to go home.”
“And never see her again, though she is so pretty?”
“I am not sure that I shouldn’t like to see her again, but I should
like to go home now.”
“You shall go soon,” said Miss Havisham, aloud. “Play the game out.”
Saving for the one weird smile at first, I should have felt almost sure
that Miss Havisham’s face could not smile. It had dropped into a
watchful and brooding expression,—most likely when all the things about
her had become transfixed,—and it looked as if nothing could ever lift
it up again. Her chest had dropped, so that she stooped; and her voice
had dropped, so that she spoke low, and with a dead lull upon her;
altogether, she had the appearance of having dropped body and soul,
within and without, under the weight of a crushing blow.
I played the game to an end with Estella, and she beggared me. She
threw the cards down on the table when she had won them all, as if she
despised them for having been won of me.
“When shall I have you here again?” said Miss Havisham. “Let me think.”
I was beginning to remind her that to-day was Wednesday, when she
checked me with her former impatient movement of the fingers of her
right hand.
“There, there! I know nothing of days of the week; I know nothing of
weeks of the year. Come again after six days. You hear?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Estella, take him down. Let him have something to eat, and let him
roam and look about him while he eats. Go, Pip.”
I followed the candle down, as I had followed the candle up, and she
stood it in the place where we had found it. Until she opened the side
entrance, I had fancied, without thinking about it, that it must
necessarily be night-time. The rush of the daylight quite confounded
me, and made me feel as if I had been in the candlelight of the strange
room many hours.
“You are to wait here, you boy,” said Estella; and disappeared and
closed the door.
I took the opportunity of being alone in the courtyard to look at my
coarse hands and my common boots. My opinion of those accessories was
not favourable. They had never troubled me before, but they troubled me
now, as vulgar appendages. I determined to ask Joe why he had ever
taught me to call those picture-cards Jacks, which ought to be called
knaves. I wished Joe had been rather more genteelly brought up, and
then I should have been so too.
She came back, with some bread and meat and a little mug of beer. She
put the mug down on the stones of the yard, and gave me the bread and
meat without looking at me, as insolently as if I were a dog in
disgrace. I was so humiliated, hurt, spurned, offended, angry, sorry,—I
cannot hit upon the right name for the smart—God knows what its name
was,—that tears started to my eyes. The moment they sprang there, the
girl looked at me with a quick delight in having been the cause of
them. This gave me power to keep them back and to look at her: so, she
gave a contemptuous toss—but with a sense, I thought, of having made
too sure that I was so wounded—and left me.
But when she was gone, I looked about me for a place to hide my face
in, and got behind one of the gates in the brewery-lane, and leaned my
sleeve against the wall there, and leaned my forehead on it and cried.
As I cried, I kicked the wall, and took a hard twist at my hair; so
bitter were my feelings, and so sharp was the smart without a name,
that needed counteraction.
My sister’s bringing up had made me sensitive. In the little world in
which children have their existence whosoever brings them up, there is
nothing so finely perceived and so finely felt as injustice. It may be
only small injustice that the child can be exposed to; but the child is
small, and its world is small, and its rocking-horse stands as many
hands high, according to scale, as a big-boned Irish hunter. Within
myself, I had sustained, from my babyhood, a perpetual conflict with
injustice. I had known, from the time when I could speak, that my
sister, in her capricious and violent coercion, was unjust to me. I had
cherished a profound conviction that her bringing me up by hand gave
her no right to bring me up by jerks. Through all my punishments,
disgraces, fasts, and vigils, and other penitential performances, I had
nursed this assurance; and to my communing so much with it, in a
solitary and unprotected way, I in great part refer the fact that I was
morally timid and very sensitive.
I got rid of my injured feelings for the time by kicking them into the
brewery wall, and twisting them out of my hair, and then I smoothed my
face with my sleeve, and came from behind the gate. The bread and meat
were acceptable, and the beer was warming and tingling, and I was soon
in spirits to look about me.
To be sure, it was a deserted place, down to the pigeon-house in the
brewery-yard, which had been blown crooked on its pole by some high
wind, and would have made the pigeons think themselves at sea, if there
had been any pigeons there to be rocked by it. But there were no
pigeons in the dove-cot, no horses in the stable, no pigs in the sty,
no malt in the storehouse, no smells of grains and beer in the copper
or the vat. All the uses and scents of the brewery might have
evaporated with its last reek of smoke. In a by-yard, there was a
wilderness of empty casks, which had a certain sour remembrance of
better days lingering about them; but it was too sour to be accepted as
a sample of the beer that was gone,—and in this respect I remember
those recluses as being like most others.
Behind the furthest end of the brewery, was a rank garden with an old
wall; not so high but that I could struggle up and hold on long enough
to look over it, and see that the rank garden was the garden of the
house, and that it was overgrown with tangled weeds, but that there was
a track upon the green and yellow paths, as if some one sometimes
walked there, and that Estella was walking away from me even then. But
she seemed to be everywhere. For when I yielded to the temptation
presented by the casks, and began to walk on them, I saw _her_ walking
on them at the end of the yard of casks. She had her back towards me,
and held her pretty brown hair spread out in her two hands, and never
looked round, and passed out of my view directly. So, in the brewery
itself,—by which I mean the large paved lofty place in which they used
to make the beer, and where the brewing utensils still were. When I
first went into it, and, rather oppressed by its gloom, stood near the
door looking about me, I saw her pass among the extinguished fires, and
ascend some light iron stairs, and go out by a gallery high overhead,
as if she were going out into the sky.
It was in this place, and at this moment, that a strange thing happened
to my fancy. I thought it a strange thing then, and I thought it a
stranger thing long afterwards. I turned my eyes—a little dimmed by
looking up at the frosty light—towards a great wooden beam in a low
nook of the building near me on my right hand, and I saw a figure
hanging there by the neck. A figure all in yellow white, with but one
shoe to the feet; and it hung so, that I could see that the faded
trimmings of the dress were like earthy paper, and that the face was
Miss Havisham’s, with a movement going over the whole countenance as if
she were trying to call to me. In the terror of seeing the figure, and