Great Expectations
wish my boots weren’t so thick nor my hands so coarse.”
And then I told Joe that I felt very miserable, and that I hadn’t been
able to explain myself to Mrs. Joe and Pumblechook, who were so rude to
me, and that there had been a beautiful young lady at Miss Havisham’s
who was dreadfully proud, and that she had said I was common, and that
I knew I was common, and that I wished I was not common, and that the
lies had come of it somehow, though I didn’t know how.
This was a case of metaphysics, at least as difficult for Joe to deal
with as for me. But Joe took the case altogether out of the region of
metaphysics, and by that means vanquished it.
“There’s one thing you may be sure of, Pip,” said Joe, after some
rumination, “namely, that lies is lies. Howsever they come, they didn’t
ought to come, and they come from the father of lies, and work round to
the same. Don’t you tell no more of ’em, Pip. _That_ ain’t the way to
get out of being common, old chap. And as to being common, I don’t make
it out at all clear. You are oncommon in some things. You’re oncommon
small. Likewise you’re a oncommon scholar.”
“No, I am ignorant and backward, Joe.”
“Why, see what a letter you wrote last night! Wrote in print even! I’ve
seen letters—Ah! and from gentlefolks!—that I’ll swear weren’t wrote in
print,” said Joe.
“I have learnt next to nothing, Joe. You think much of me. It’s only
that.”
“Well, Pip,” said Joe, “be it so or be it son’t, you must be a common
scholar afore you can be a oncommon one, I should hope! The king upon
his throne, with his crown upon his ed, can’t sit and write his acts of
Parliament in print, without having begun, when he were a unpromoted
Prince, with the alphabet.—Ah!” added Joe, with a shake of the head
that was full of meaning, “and begun at A too, and worked his way to Z.
And _I_ know what that is to do, though I can’t say I’ve exactly done
it.”
There was some hope in this piece of wisdom, and it rather encouraged
me.
“Whether common ones as to callings and earnings,” pursued Joe,
reflectively, “mightn’t be the better of continuing for to keep company
with common ones, instead of going out to play with oncommon
ones,—which reminds me to hope that there were a flag, perhaps?”
“No, Joe.”
“(I’m sorry there weren’t a flag, Pip). Whether that might be or
mightn’t be, is a thing as can’t be looked into now, without putting
your sister on the Rampage; and that’s a thing not to be thought of as
being done intentional. Lookee here, Pip, at what is said to you by a
true friend. Which this to you the true friend say. If you can’t get to
be oncommon through going straight, you’ll never get to do it through
going crooked. So don’t tell no more on ’em, Pip, and live well and die
happy.”
“You are not angry with me, Joe?”
“No, old chap. But bearing in mind that them were which I meantersay of
a stunning and outdacious sort,—alluding to them which bordered on
weal-cutlets and dog-fighting,—a sincere well-wisher would adwise, Pip,
their being dropped into your meditations, when you go upstairs to bed.
That’s all, old chap, and don’t never do it no more.”
When I got up to my little room and said my prayers, I did not forget
Joe’s recommendation, and yet my young mind was in that disturbed and
unthankful state, that I thought long after I laid me down, how common
Estella would consider Joe, a mere blacksmith; how thick his boots, and
how coarse his hands. I thought how Joe and my sister were then sitting
in the kitchen, and how I had come up to bed from the kitchen, and how
Miss Havisham and Estella never sat in a kitchen, but were far above
the level of such common doings. I fell asleep recalling what I “used
to do” when I was at Miss Havisham’s; as though I had been there weeks
or months, instead of hours; and as though it were quite an old subject
of remembrance, instead of one that had arisen only that day.
That was a memorable day to me, for it made great changes in me. But it
is the same with any life. Imagine one selected day struck out of it,
and think how different its course would have been. Pause you who read
this, and think for a moment of the long chain of iron or gold, of
thorns or flowers, that would never have bound you, but for the
formation of the first link on one memorable day.
Chapter X.
The felicitous idea occurred to me a morning or two later when I woke,
that the best step I could take towards making myself uncommon was to
get out of Biddy everything she knew. In pursuance of this luminous
conception I mentioned to Biddy when I went to Mr. Wopsle’s
great-aunt’s at night, that I had a particular reason for wishing to
get on in life, and that I should feel very much obliged to her if she
would impart all her learning to me. Biddy, who was the most obliging
of girls, immediately said she would, and indeed began to carry out her
promise within five minutes.
The Educational scheme or Course established by Mr. Wopsle’s great-aunt
may be resolved into the following synopsis. The pupils ate apples and
put straws down one another’s backs, until Mr. Wopsle’s great-aunt
collected her energies, and made an indiscriminate totter at them with
a birch-rod. After receiving the charge with every mark of derision,
the pupils formed in line and buzzingly passed a ragged book from hand
to hand. The book had an alphabet in it, some figures and tables, and a
little spelling,—that is to say, it had had once. As soon as this
volume began to circulate, Mr. Wopsle’s great-aunt fell into a state of
coma, arising either from sleep or a rheumatic paroxysm. The pupils
then entered among themselves upon a competitive examination on the
subject of Boots, with the view of ascertaining who could tread the
hardest upon whose toes. This mental exercise lasted until Biddy made a
rush at them and distributed three defaced Bibles (shaped as if they
had been unskilfully cut off the chump end of something), more
illegibly printed at the best than any curiosities of literature I have
since met with, speckled all over with ironmould, and having various
specimens of the insect world smashed between their leaves. This part
of the Course was usually lightened by several single combats between
Biddy and refractory students. When the fights were over, Biddy gave
out the number of a page, and then we all read aloud what we could,—or
what we couldn’t—in a frightful chorus; Biddy leading with a high,
shrill, monotonous voice, and none of us having the least notion of, or
reverence for, what we were reading about. When this horrible din had
lasted a certain time, it mechanically awoke Mr. Wopsle’s great-aunt,
who staggered at a boy fortuitously, and pulled his ears. This was
understood to terminate the Course for the evening, and we emerged into
the air with shrieks of intellectual victory. It is fair to remark that
there was no prohibition against any pupil’s entertaining himself with
a slate or even with the ink (when there was any), but that it was not
easy to pursue that branch of study in the winter season, on account of
the little general shop in which the classes were holden—and which was
also Mr. Wopsle’s great-aunt’s sitting-room and bedchamber—being but
faintly illuminated through the agency of one low-spirited dip-candle
and no snuffers.
It appeared to me that it would take time to become uncommon, under
these circumstances: nevertheless, I resolved to try it, and that very
evening Biddy entered on our special agreement, by imparting some
information from her little catalogue of Prices, under the head of
moist sugar, and lending me, to copy at home, a large old English D
which she had imitated from the heading of some newspaper, and which I
supposed, until she told me what it was, to be a design for a buckle.
Of course there was a public-house in the village, and of course Joe
liked sometimes to smoke his pipe there. I had received strict orders
from my sister to call for him at the Three Jolly Bargemen, that
evening, on my way from school, and bring him home at my peril. To the
Three Jolly Bargemen, therefore, I directed my steps.
There was a bar at the Jolly Bargemen, with some alarmingly long chalk
scores in it on the wall at the side of the door, which seemed to me to
be never paid off. They had been there ever since I could remember, and
had grown more than I had. But there was a quantity of chalk about our
country, and perhaps the people neglected no opportunity of turning it
to account.
It being Saturday night, I found the landlord looking rather grimly at
these records; but as my business was with Joe and not with him, I
merely wished him good evening, and passed into the common room at the
end of the passage, where there was a bright large kitchen fire, and
where Joe was smoking his pipe in company with Mr. Wopsle and a
stranger. Joe greeted me as usual with “Halloa, Pip, old chap!” and the
moment he said that, the stranger turned his head and looked at me.
He was a secret-looking man whom I had never seen before. His head was
all on one side, and one of his eyes was half shut up, as if he were
taking aim at something with an invisible gun. He had a pipe in his
mouth, and he took it out, and, after slowly blowing all his smoke away
and looking hard at me all the time, nodded. So, I nodded, and then he
nodded again, and made room on the settle beside him that I might sit
down there.
But as I was used to sit beside Joe whenever I entered that place of
resort, I said “No, thank you, sir,” and fell into the space Joe made
for me on the opposite settle. The strange man, after glancing at Joe,
and seeing that his attention was otherwise engaged, nodded to me again
when I had taken my seat, and then rubbed his leg—in a very odd way, as
it struck me.
“You was saying,” said the strange man, turning to Joe, “that you was a
blacksmith.”
“Yes. I said it, you know,” said Joe.
“What’ll you drink, Mr.—? You didn’t mention your name, by the bye.”
Joe mentioned it now, and the strange man called him by it. “What’ll
you drink, Mr. Gargery? At my expense? To top up with?”
“Well,” said Joe, “to tell you the truth, I ain’t much in the habit of
drinking at anybody’s expense but my own.”
“Habit? No,” returned the stranger, “but once and away, and on a
Saturday night too. Come! Put a name to it, Mr. Gargery.”
“I wouldn’t wish to be stiff company,” said Joe. “Rum.”
“Rum,” repeated the stranger. “And will the other gentleman originate a
sentiment.”
“Rum,” said Mr. Wopsle.
“Three Rums!” cried the stranger, calling to the landlord. “Glasses
round!”
“This other gentleman,” observed Joe, by way of introducing Mr. Wopsle,
“is a gentleman that you would like to hear give it out. Our clerk at
church.”
“Aha!” said the stranger, quickly, and cocking his eye at me. “The
lonely church, right out on the marshes, with graves round it!”
“That’s it,” said Joe.
The stranger, with a comfortable kind of grunt over his pipe, put his
legs up on the settle that he had to himself. He wore a flapping
broad-brimmed traveller’s hat, and under it a handkerchief tied over
his head in the manner of a cap: so that he showed no hair. As he
looked at the fire, I thought I saw a cunning expression, followed by a
half-laugh, come into his face.
“I am not acquainted with this country, gentlemen, but it seems a
solitary country towards the river.”
“Most marshes is solitary,” said Joe.
“No doubt, no doubt. Do you find any gypsies, now, or tramps, or
vagrants of any sort, out there?”
“No,” said Joe; “none but a runaway convict now and then. And we don’t
find _them_, easy. Eh, Mr. Wopsle?”
Mr. Wopsle, with a majestic remembrance of old discomfiture, assented;
but not warmly.
“Seems you have been out after such?” asked the stranger.