Great Expectations
“Once,” returned Joe. “Not that we wanted to take them, you understand;
we went out as lookers on; me, and Mr. Wopsle, and Pip. Didn’t us,
Pip?”
“Yes, Joe.”
The stranger looked at me again,—still cocking his eye, as if he were
expressly taking aim at me with his invisible gun,—and said, “He’s a
likely young parcel of bones that. What is it you call him?”
“Pip,” said Joe.
“Christened Pip?”
“No, not christened Pip.”
“Surname Pip?”
“No,” said Joe, “it’s a kind of family name what he gave himself when a
infant, and is called by.”
“Son of yours?”
“Well,” said Joe, meditatively, not, of course, that it could be in
anywise necessary to consider about it, but because it was the way at
the Jolly Bargemen to seem to consider deeply about everything that was
discussed over pipes,—“well—no. No, he ain’t.”
“Nevvy?” said the strange man.
“Well,” said Joe, with the same appearance of profound cogitation, “he
is not—no, not to deceive you, he is _not_—my nevvy.”
“What the Blue Blazes is he?” asked the stranger. Which appeared to me
to be an inquiry of unnecessary strength.
Mr. Wopsle struck in upon that; as one who knew all about
relationships, having professional occasion to bear in mind what female
relations a man might not marry; and expounded the ties between me and
Joe. Having his hand in, Mr. Wopsle finished off with a most
terrifically snarling passage from Richard the Third, and seemed to
think he had done quite enough to account for it when he added, “—as
the poet says.”
And here I may remark that when Mr. Wopsle referred to me, he
considered it a necessary part of such reference to rumple my hair and
poke it into my eyes. I cannot conceive why everybody of his standing
who visited at our house should always have put me through the same
inflammatory process under similar circumstances. Yet I do not call to
mind that I was ever in my earlier youth the subject of remark in our
social family circle, but some large-handed person took some such
ophthalmic steps to patronise me.
All this while, the strange man looked at nobody but me, and looked at
me as if he were determined to have a shot at me at last, and bring me
down. But he said nothing after offering his Blue Blazes observation,
until the glasses of rum and water were brought; and then he made his
shot, and a most extraordinary shot it was.
It was not a verbal remark, but a proceeding in dumb-show, and was
pointedly addressed to me. He stirred his rum and water pointedly at
me, and he tasted his rum and water pointedly at me. And he stirred it
and he tasted it; not with a spoon that was brought to him, but _with a
file_.
He did this so that nobody but I saw the file; and when he had done it
he wiped the file and put it in a breast-pocket. I knew it to be Joe’s
file, and I knew that he knew my convict, the moment I saw the
instrument. I sat gazing at him, spell-bound. But he now reclined on
his settle, taking very little notice of me, and talking principally
about turnips.
There was a delicious sense of cleaning-up and making a quiet pause
before going on in life afresh, in our village on Saturday nights,
which stimulated Joe to dare to stay out half an hour longer on
Saturdays than at other times. The half-hour and the rum and water
running out together, Joe got up to go, and took me by the hand.
“Stop half a moment, Mr. Gargery,” said the strange man. “I think I’ve
got a bright new shilling somewhere in my pocket, and if I have, the
boy shall have it.”
He looked it out from a handful of small change, folded it in some
crumpled paper, and gave it to me. “Yours!” said he. “Mind! Your own.”
I thanked him, staring at him far beyond the bounds of good manners,
and holding tight to Joe. He gave Joe good-night, and he gave Mr.
Wopsle good-night (who went out with us), and he gave me only a look
with his aiming eye,—no, not a look, for he shut it up, but wonders may
be done with an eye by hiding it.
On the way home, if I had been in a humour for talking, the talk must
have been all on my side, for Mr. Wopsle parted from us at the door of
the Jolly Bargemen, and Joe went all the way home with his mouth wide
open, to rinse the rum out with as much air as possible. But I was in a
manner stupefied by this turning up of my old misdeed and old
acquaintance, and could think of nothing else.
My sister was not in a very bad temper when we presented ourselves in
the kitchen, and Joe was encouraged by that unusual circumstance to
tell her about the bright shilling. “A bad un, I’ll be bound,” said
Mrs. Joe triumphantly, “or he wouldn’t have given it to the boy! Let’s
look at it.”
I took it out of the paper, and it proved to be a good one. “But what’s
this?” said Mrs. Joe, throwing down the shilling and catching up the
paper. “Two One-Pound notes?”
Nothing less than two fat sweltering one-pound notes that seemed to
have been on terms of the warmest intimacy with all the cattle-markets
in the county. Joe caught up his hat again, and ran with them to the
Jolly Bargemen to restore them to their owner. While he was gone, I sat
down on my usual stool and looked vacantly at my sister, feeling pretty
sure that the man would not be there.
Presently, Joe came back, saying that the man was gone, but that he,
Joe, had left word at the Three Jolly Bargemen concerning the notes.
Then my sister sealed them up in a piece of paper, and put them under
some dried rose-leaves in an ornamental teapot on the top of a press in
the state parlour. There they remained, a nightmare to me, many and
many a night and day.
I had sadly broken sleep when I got to bed, through thinking of the
strange man taking aim at me with his invisible gun, and of the
guiltily coarse and common thing it was, to be on secret terms of
conspiracy with convicts,—a feature in my low career that I had
previously forgotten. I was haunted by the file too. A dread possessed
me that when I least expected it, the file would reappear. I coaxed
myself to sleep by thinking of Miss Havisham’s, next Wednesday; and in
my sleep I saw the file coming at me out of a door, without seeing who
held it, and I screamed myself awake.
Chapter XI.
At the appointed time I returned to Miss Havisham’s, and my hesitating
ring at the gate brought out Estella. She locked it after admitting me,
as she had done before, and again preceded me into the dark passage
where her candle stood. She took no notice of me until she had the
candle in her hand, when she looked over her shoulder, superciliously
saying, “You are to come this way to-day,” and took me to quite another
part of the house.
The passage was a long one, and seemed to pervade the whole square
basement of the Manor House. We traversed but one side of the square,
however, and at the end of it she stopped, and put her candle down and
opened a door. Here, the daylight reappeared, and I found myself in a
small paved courtyard, the opposite side of which was formed by a
detached dwelling-house, that looked as if it had once belonged to the
manager or head clerk of the extinct brewery. There was a clock in the
outer wall of this house. Like the clock in Miss Havisham’s room, and
like Miss Havisham’s watch, it had stopped at twenty minutes to nine.
We went in at the door, which stood open, and into a gloomy room with a
low ceiling, on the ground-floor at the back. There was some company in
the room, and Estella said to me as she joined it, “You are to go and
stand there boy, till you are wanted.” “There”, being the window, I
crossed to it, and stood “there,” in a very uncomfortable state of
mind, looking out.
It opened to the ground, and looked into a most miserable corner of the
neglected garden, upon a rank ruin of cabbage-stalks, and one box-tree
that had been clipped round long ago, like a pudding, and had a new
growth at the top of it, out of shape and of a different colour, as if
that part of the pudding had stuck to the saucepan and got burnt. This
was my homely thought, as I contemplated the box-tree. There had been
some light snow, overnight, and it lay nowhere else to my knowledge;
but, it had not quite melted from the cold shadow of this bit of
garden, and the wind caught it up in little eddies and threw it at the
window, as if it pelted me for coming there.
I divined that my coming had stopped conversation in the room, and that
its other occupants were looking at me. I could see nothing of the room
except the shining of the fire in the window-glass, but I stiffened in
all my joints with the consciousness that I was under close inspection.
There were three ladies in the room and one gentleman. Before I had
been standing at the window five minutes, they somehow conveyed to me
that they were all toadies and humbugs, but that each of them pretended
not to know that the others were toadies and humbugs: because the
admission that he or she did know it, would have made him or her out to
be a toady and humbug.
They all had a listless and dreary air of waiting somebody’s pleasure,
and the most talkative of the ladies had to speak quite rigidly to
repress a yawn. This lady, whose name was Camilla, very much reminded
me of my sister, with the difference that she was older, and (as I
found when I caught sight of her) of a blunter cast of features.
Indeed, when I knew her better I began to think it was a Mercy she had
any features at all, so very blank and high was the dead wall of her
face.
“Poor dear soul!” said this lady, with an abruptness of manner quite my
sister’s. “Nobody’s enemy but his own!”
“It would be much more commendable to be somebody else’s enemy,” said
the gentleman; “far more natural.”
“Cousin Raymond,” observed another lady, “we are to love our
neighbour.”
“Sarah Pocket,” returned Cousin Raymond, “if a man is not his own
neighbour, who is?”
Miss Pocket laughed, and Camilla laughed and said (checking a yawn),
“The idea!” But I thought they seemed to think it rather a good idea
too. The other lady, who had not spoken yet, said gravely and
emphatically, “_Very_ true!”
“Poor soul!” Camilla presently went on (I knew they had all been
looking at me in the mean time), “he is so very strange! Would anyone
believe that when Tom’s wife died, he actually could not be induced to
see the importance of the children’s having the deepest of trimmings to
their mourning? ‘Good Lord!’ says he, ‘Camilla, what can it signify so
long as the poor bereaved little things are in black?’ So like Matthew!
The idea!”
“Good points in him, good points in him,” said Cousin Raymond; “Heaven
forbid I should deny good points in him; but he never had, and he never
will have, any sense of the proprieties.”
“You know I was obliged,” said Camilla,—“I was obliged to be firm. I
said, ‘It WILL NOT DO, for the credit of the family.’ I told him that,
without deep trimmings, the family was disgraced. I cried about it from
breakfast till dinner. I injured my digestion. And at last he flung out
in his violent way, and said, with a D, ‘Then do as you like.’ Thank
Goodness it will always be a consolation to me to know that I instantly
went out in a pouring rain and bought the things.”
“_He_ paid for them, did he not?” asked Estella.
“It’s not the question, my dear child, who paid for them,” returned
Camilla. “_I_ bought them. And I shall often think of that with peace,
when I wake up in the night.”
The ringing of a distant bell, combined with the echoing of some cry or
call along the passage by which I had come, interrupted the
conversation and caused Estella to say to me, “Now, boy!” On my turning
round, they all looked at me with the utmost contempt, and, as I went
out, I heard Sarah Pocket say, “Well I am sure! What next!” and Camilla
add, with indignation, “Was there ever such a fancy! The i-d_e_-a!”