Great Expectations
“You’re too late,” said Mr. Jaggers. “I am over the way.”
“Holy father, Mithter Jaggerth!” cried my excitable acquaintance,
turning white, “don’t thay you’re again Habraham Latharuth!”
“I am,” said Mr. Jaggers, “and there’s an end of it. Get out of the
way.”
“Mithter Jaggerth! Half a moment! My hown cuthen’th gone to Mithter
Wemmick at thith prethent minute, to hoffer him hany termth. Mithter
Jaggerth! Half a quarter of a moment! If you’d have the condethenthun
to be bought off from the t’other thide—at hany thuperior prithe!—money
no object!—Mithter Jaggerth—Mithter—!”
My guardian threw his supplicant off with supreme indifference, and
left him dancing on the pavement as if it were red hot. Without further
interruption, we reached the front office, where we found the clerk and
the man in velveteen with the fur cap.
“Here’s Mike,” said the clerk, getting down from his stool, and
approaching Mr. Jaggers confidentially.
“Oh!” said Mr. Jaggers, turning to the man, who was pulling a lock of
hair in the middle of his forehead, like the Bull in Cock Robin pulling
at the bell-rope; “your man comes on this afternoon. Well?”
“Well, Mas’r Jaggers,” returned Mike, in the voice of a sufferer from a
constitutional cold; “arter a deal o’ trouble, I’ve found one, sir, as
might do.”
“What is he prepared to swear?”
“Well, Mas’r Jaggers,” said Mike, wiping his nose on his fur cap this
time; “in a general way, anythink.”
Mr. Jaggers suddenly became most irate. “Now, I warned you before,”
said he, throwing his forefinger at the terrified client, “that if you
ever presumed to talk in that way here, I’d make an example of you. You
infernal scoundrel, how dare you tell ME that?”
The client looked scared, but bewildered too, as if he were unconscious
what he had done.
“Spooney!” said the clerk, in a low voice, giving him a stir with his
elbow. “Soft Head! Need you say it face to face?”
“Now, I ask you, you blundering booby,” said my guardian, very sternly,
“once more and for the last time, what the man you have brought here is
prepared to swear?”
Mike looked hard at my guardian, as if he were trying to learn a lesson
from his face, and slowly replied, “Ayther to character, or to having
been in his company and never left him all the night in question.”
“Now, be careful. In what station of life is this man?”
Mike looked at his cap, and looked at the floor, and looked at the
ceiling, and looked at the clerk, and even looked at me, before
beginning to reply in a nervous manner, “We’ve dressed him up like—”
when my guardian blustered out,—
“What? You WILL, will you?”
(“Spooney!” added the clerk again, with another stir.)
After some helpless casting about, Mike brightened and began again:—
“He is dressed like a ’spectable pieman. A sort of a pastry-cook.”
“Is he here?” asked my guardian.
“I left him,” said Mike, “a setting on some doorsteps round the
corner.”
“Take him past that window, and let me see him.”
The window indicated was the office window. We all three went to it,
behind the wire blind, and presently saw the client go by in an
accidental manner, with a murderous-looking tall individual, in a short
suit of white linen and a paper cap. This guileless confectioner was
not by any means sober, and had a black eye in the green stage of
recovery, which was painted over.
“Tell him to take his witness away directly,” said my guardian to the
clerk, in extreme disgust, “and ask him what he means by bringing such
a fellow as that.”
My guardian then took me into his own room, and while he lunched,
standing, from a sandwich-box and a pocket-flask of sherry (he seemed
to bully his very sandwich as he ate it), informed me what arrangements
he had made for me. I was to go to “Barnard’s Inn,” to young Mr.
Pocket’s rooms, where a bed had been sent in for my accommodation; I
was to remain with young Mr. Pocket until Monday; on Monday I was to go
with him to his father’s house on a visit, that I might try how I liked
it. Also, I was told what my allowance was to be,—it was a very liberal
one,—and had handed to me from one of my guardian’s drawers, the cards
of certain tradesmen with whom I was to deal for all kinds of clothes,
and such other things as I could in reason want. “You will find your
credit good, Mr. Pip,” said my guardian, whose flask of sherry smelt
like a whole caskful, as he hastily refreshed himself, “but I shall by
this means be able to check your bills, and to pull you up if I find
you outrunning the constable. Of course you’ll go wrong somehow, but
that’s no fault of mine.”
After I had pondered a little over this encouraging sentiment, I asked
Mr. Jaggers if I could send for a coach? He said it was not worth
while, I was so near my destination; Wemmick should walk round with me,
if I pleased.
I then found that Wemmick was the clerk in the next room. Another clerk
was rung down from upstairs to take his place while he was out, and I
accompanied him into the street, after shaking hands with my guardian.
We found a new set of people lingering outside, but Wemmick made a way
among them by saying coolly yet decisively, “I tell you it’s no use; he
won’t have a word to say to one of you;” and we soon got clear of them,
and went on side by side.
Chapter XXI.
Casting my eyes on Mr. Wemmick as we went along, to see what he was
like in the light of day, I found him to be a dry man, rather short in
stature, with a square wooden face, whose expression seemed to have
been imperfectly chipped out with a dull-edged chisel. There were some
marks in it that might have been dimples, if the material had been
softer and the instrument finer, but which, as it was, were only dints.
The chisel had made three or four of these attempts at embellishment
over his nose, but had given them up without an effort to smooth them
off. I judged him to be a bachelor from the frayed condition of his
linen, and he appeared to have sustained a good many bereavements; for
he wore at least four mourning rings, besides a brooch representing a
lady and a weeping willow at a tomb with an urn on it. I noticed, too,
that several rings and seals hung at his watch-chain, as if he were
quite laden with remembrances of departed friends. He had glittering
eyes,—small, keen, and black,—and thin wide mottled lips. He had had
them, to the best of my belief, from forty to fifty years.
“So you were never in London before?” said Mr. Wemmick to me.
“No,” said I.
“_I_ was new here once,” said Mr. Wemmick. “Rum to think of now!”
“You are well acquainted with it now?”
“Why, yes,” said Mr. Wemmick. “I know the moves of it.”
“Is it a very wicked place?” I asked, more for the sake of saying
something than for information.
“You may get cheated, robbed, and murdered in London. But there are
plenty of people anywhere, who’ll do that for you.”
“If there is bad blood between you and them,” said I, to soften it off
a little.
“O! I don’t know about bad blood,” returned Mr. Wemmick; “there’s not
much bad blood about. They’ll do it, if there’s anything to be got by
it.”
“That makes it worse.”
“You think so?” returned Mr. Wemmick. “Much about the same, I should
say.”
He wore his hat on the back of his head, and looked straight before
him: walking in a self-contained way as if there were nothing in the
streets to claim his attention. His mouth was such a post-office of a
mouth that he had a mechanical appearance of smiling. We had got to the
top of Holborn Hill before I knew that it was merely a mechanical
appearance, and that he was not smiling at all.
“Do you know where Mr. Matthew Pocket lives?” I asked Mr. Wemmick.
“Yes,” said he, nodding in the direction. “At Hammersmith, west of
London.”
“Is that far?”
“Well! Say five miles.”
“Do you know him?”
“Why, you’re a regular cross-examiner!” said Mr. Wemmick, looking at me
with an approving air. “Yes, I know him. _I_ know him!”
There was an air of toleration or depreciation about his utterance of
these words that rather depressed me; and I was still looking sideways
at his block of a face in search of any encouraging note to the text,
when he said here we were at Barnard’s Inn. My depression was not
alleviated by the announcement, for, I had supposed that establishment
to be an hotel kept by Mr. Barnard, to which the Blue Boar in our town
was a mere public-house. Whereas I now found Barnard to be a
disembodied spirit, or a fiction, and his inn the dingiest collection
of shabby buildings ever squeezed together in a rank corner as a club
for Tom-cats.
We entered this haven through a wicket-gate, and were disgorged by an
introductory passage into a melancholy little square that looked to me
like a flat burying-ground. I thought it had the most dismal trees in
it, and the most dismal sparrows, and the most dismal cats, and the
most dismal houses (in number half a dozen or so), that I had ever
seen. I thought the windows of the sets of chambers into which those
houses were divided were in every stage of dilapidated blind and
curtain, crippled flower-pot, cracked glass, dusty decay, and miserable
makeshift; while To Let, To Let, To Let, glared at me from empty rooms,
as if no new wretches ever came there, and the vengeance of the soul of
Barnard were being slowly appeased by the gradual suicide of the
present occupants and their unholy interment under the gravel. A frowzy
mourning of soot and smoke attired this forlorn creation of Barnard,
and it had strewn ashes on its head, and was undergoing penance and
humiliation as a mere dust-hole. Thus far my sense of sight; while dry
rot and wet rot and all the silent rots that rot in neglected roof and
cellar,—rot of rat and mouse and bug and coaching-stables near at hand
besides—addressed themselves faintly to my sense of smell, and moaned,
“Try Barnard’s Mixture.”
So imperfect was this realisation of the first of my great
expectations, that I looked in dismay at Mr. Wemmick. “Ah!” said he,
mistaking me; “the retirement reminds you of the country. So it does
me.”
He led me into a corner and conducted me up a flight of stairs,—which
appeared to me to be slowly collapsing into sawdust, so that one of
those days the upper lodgers would look out at their doors and find
themselves without the means of coming down,—to a set of chambers on
the top floor. MR. POCKET, JUN., was painted on the door, and there was
a label on the letter-box, “Return shortly.”
“He hardly thought you’d come so soon,” Mr. Wemmick explained. “You
don’t want me any more?”
“No, thank you,” said I.
“As I keep the cash,” Mr. Wemmick observed, “we shall most likely meet
pretty often. Good day.”
“Good day.”
I put out my hand, and Mr. Wemmick at first looked at it as if he
thought I wanted something. Then he looked at me, and said, correcting
himself,—
“To be sure! Yes. You’re in the habit of shaking hands?”
I was rather confused, thinking it must be out of the London fashion,
but said yes.
“I have got so out of it!” said Mr. Wemmick,—“except at last. Very
glad, I’m sure, to make your acquaintance. Good day!”
When we had shaken hands and he was gone, I opened the staircase window
and had nearly beheaded myself, for, the lines had rotted away, and it
came down like the guillotine. Happily it was so quick that I had not
put my head out. After this escape, I was content to take a foggy view
of the Inn through the window’s encrusting dirt, and to stand dolefully
looking out, saying to myself that London was decidedly overrated.
Mr. Pocket, Junior’s, idea of Shortly was not mine, for I had nearly
maddened myself with looking out for half an hour, and had written my
name with my finger several times in the dirt of every pane in the