Great Expectations
impossibilities, geographical and social, solar and lunar. Yet in the
London streets so crowded with people and so brilliantly lighted in the
dusk of evening, there were depressing hints of reproaches for that I
had put the poor old kitchen at home so far away; and in the dead of
night, the footsteps of some incapable impostor of a porter mooning
about Barnard’s Inn, under pretence of watching it, fell hollow on my
heart.
On the Monday morning at a quarter before nine, Herbert went to the
counting-house to report himself,—to look about him, too, I
suppose,—and I bore him company. He was to come away in an hour or two
to attend me to Hammersmith, and I was to wait about for him. It
appeared to me that the eggs from which young Insurers were hatched
were incubated in dust and heat, like the eggs of ostriches, judging
from the places to which those incipient giants repaired on a Monday
morning. Nor did the counting-house where Herbert assisted, show in my
eyes as at all a good Observatory; being a back second floor up a yard,
of a grimy presence in all particulars, and with a look into another
back second floor, rather than a look out.
I waited about until it was noon, and I went upon ’Change, and I saw
fluey men sitting there under the bills about shipping, whom I took to
be great merchants, though I couldn’t understand why they should all be
out of spirits. When Herbert came, we went and had lunch at a
celebrated house which I then quite venerated, but now believe to have
been the most abject superstition in Europe, and where I could not help
noticing, even then, that there was much more gravy on the tablecloths
and knives and waiters’ clothes, than in the steaks. This collation
disposed of at a moderate price (considering the grease, which was not
charged for), we went back to Barnard’s Inn and got my little
portmanteau, and then took coach for Hammersmith. We arrived there at
two or three o’clock in the afternoon, and had very little way to walk
to Mr. Pocket’s house. Lifting the latch of a gate, we passed direct
into a little garden overlooking the river, where Mr. Pocket’s children
were playing about. And unless I deceive myself on a point where my
interests or prepossessions are certainly not concerned, I saw that Mr.
and Mrs. Pocket’s children were not growing up or being brought up, but
were tumbling up.
Mrs. Pocket was sitting on a garden chair under a tree, reading, with
her legs upon another garden chair; and Mrs. Pocket’s two nurse-maids
were looking about them while the children played. “Mamma,” said
Herbert, “this is young Mr. Pip.” Upon which Mrs. Pocket received me
with an appearance of amiable dignity.
“Master Alick and Miss Jane,” cried one of the nurses to two of the
children, “if you go a bouncing up against them bushes you’ll fall over
into the river and be drownded, and what’ll your pa say then?”
At the same time this nurse picked up Mrs. Pocket’s handkerchief, and
said, “If that don’t make six times you’ve dropped it, Mum!” Upon which
Mrs. Pocket laughed and said, “Thank you, Flopson,” and settling
herself in one chair only, resumed her book. Her countenance
immediately assumed a knitted and intent expression as if she had been
reading for a week, but before she could have read half a dozen lines,
she fixed her eyes upon me, and said, “I hope your mamma is quite
well?” This unexpected inquiry put me into such a difficulty that I
began saying in the absurdest way that if there had been any such
person I had no doubt she would have been quite well and would have
been very much obliged and would have sent her compliments, when the
nurse came to my rescue.
“Well!” she cried, picking up the pocket-handkerchief, “if that don’t
make seven times! What ARE you a-doing of this afternoon, Mum!” Mrs.
Pocket received her property, at first with a look of unutterable
surprise as if she had never seen it before, and then with a laugh of
recognition, and said, “Thank you, Flopson,” and forgot me, and went on
reading.
I found, now I had leisure to count them, that there were no fewer than
six little Pockets present, in various stages of tumbling up. I had
scarcely arrived at the total when a seventh was heard, as in the
region of air, wailing dolefully.
“If there ain’t Baby!” said Flopson, appearing to think it most
surprising. “Make haste up, Millers.”
Millers, who was the other nurse, retired into the house, and by
degrees the child’s wailing was hushed and stopped, as if it were a
young ventriloquist with something in its mouth. Mrs. Pocket read all
the time, and I was curious to know what the book could be.
We were waiting, I supposed, for Mr. Pocket to come out to us; at any
rate we waited there, and so I had an opportunity of observing the
remarkable family phenomenon that whenever any of the children strayed
near Mrs. Pocket in their play, they always tripped themselves up and
tumbled over her,—always very much to her momentary astonishment, and
their own more enduring lamentation. I was at a loss to account for
this surprising circumstance, and could not help giving my mind to
speculations about it, until by and by Millers came down with the baby,
which baby was handed to Flopson, which Flopson was handing it to Mrs.
Pocket, when she too went fairly head foremost over Mrs. Pocket, baby
and all, and was caught by Herbert and myself.
“Gracious me, Flopson!” said Mrs. Pocket, looking off her book for a
moment, “everybody’s tumbling!”
“Gracious you, indeed, Mum!” returned Flopson, very red in the face;
“what have you got there?”
“_I_ got here, Flopson?” asked Mrs. Pocket.
“Why, if it ain’t your footstool!” cried Flopson. “And if you keep it
under your skirts like that, who’s to help tumbling? Here! Take the
baby, Mum, and give me your book.”
Mrs. Pocket acted on the advice, and inexpertly danced the infant a
little in her lap, while the other children played about it. This had
lasted but a very short time, when Mrs. Pocket issued summary orders
that they were all to be taken into the house for a nap. Thus I made
the second discovery on that first occasion, that the nurture of the
little Pockets consisted of alternately tumbling up and lying down.
Under these circumstances, when Flopson and Millers had got the
children into the house, like a little flock of sheep, and Mr. Pocket
came out of it to make my acquaintance, I was not much surprised to
find that Mr. Pocket was a gentleman with a rather perplexed expression
of face, and with his very grey hair disordered on his head, as if he
didn’t quite see his way to putting anything straight.
Chapter XXIII.
Mr. Pocket said he was glad to see me, and he hoped I was not sorry to
see him. “For, I really am not,” he added, with his son’s smile, “an
alarming personage.” He was a young-looking man, in spite of his
perplexities and his very grey hair, and his manner seemed quite
natural. I use the word natural, in the sense of its being unaffected;
there was something comic in his distraught way, as though it would
have been downright ludicrous but for his own perception that it was
very near being so. When he had talked with me a little, he said to
Mrs. Pocket, with a rather anxious contraction of his eyebrows, which
were black and handsome, “Belinda, I hope you have welcomed Mr. Pip?”
And she looked up from her book, and said, “Yes.” She then smiled upon
me in an absent state of mind, and asked me if I liked the taste of
orange-flower water? As the question had no bearing, near or remote, on
any foregone or subsequent transaction, I consider it to have been
thrown out, like her previous approaches, in general conversational
condescension.
I found out within a few hours, and may mention at once, that Mrs.
Pocket was the only daughter of a certain quite accidental deceased
Knight, who had invented for himself a conviction that his deceased
father would have been made a Baronet but for somebody’s determined
opposition arising out of entirely personal motives,—I forget whose, if
I ever knew,—the Sovereign’s, the Prime Minister’s, the Lord
Chancellor’s, the Archbishop of Canterbury’s, anybody’s,—and had tacked
himself on to the nobles of the earth in right of this quite
supposititious fact. I believe he had been knighted himself for
storming the English grammar at the point of the pen, in a desperate
address engrossed on vellum, on the occasion of the laying of the first
stone of some building or other, and for handing some Royal Personage
either the trowel or the mortar. Be that as it may, he had directed
Mrs. Pocket to be brought up from her cradle as one who in the nature
of things must marry a title, and who was to be guarded from the
acquisition of plebeian domestic knowledge.
So successful a watch and ward had been established over the young lady
by this judicious parent, that she had grown up highly ornamental, but
perfectly helpless and useless. With her character thus happily formed,
in the first bloom of her youth she had encountered Mr. Pocket: who was
also in the first bloom of youth, and not quite decided whether to
mount to the Woolsack, or to roof himself in with a mitre. As his doing
the one or the other was a mere question of time, he and Mrs. Pocket
had taken Time by the forelock (when, to judge from its length, it
would seem to have wanted cutting), and had married without the
knowledge of the judicious parent. The judicious parent, having nothing
to bestow or withhold but his blessing, had handsomely settled that
dower upon them after a short struggle, and had informed Mr. Pocket
that his wife was “a treasure for a Prince.” Mr. Pocket had invested
the Prince’s treasure in the ways of the world ever since, and it was
supposed to have brought him in but indifferent interest. Still, Mrs.
Pocket was in general the object of a queer sort of respectful pity,
because she had not married a title; while Mr. Pocket was the object of
a queer sort of forgiving reproach, because he had never got one.
Mr. Pocket took me into the house and showed me my room: which was a
pleasant one, and so furnished as that I could use it with comfort for
my own private sitting-room. He then knocked at the doors of two other
similar rooms, and introduced me to their occupants, by name Drummle
and Startop. Drummle, an old-looking young man of a heavy order of
architecture, was whistling. Startop, younger in years and appearance,
was reading and holding his head, as if he thought himself in danger of
exploding it with too strong a charge of knowledge.
Both Mr. and Mrs. Pocket had such a noticeable air of being in somebody
else’s hands, that I wondered who really was in possession of the house
and let them live there, until I found this unknown power to be the
servants. It was a smooth way of going on, perhaps, in respect of
saving trouble; but it had the appearance of being expensive, for the
servants felt it a duty they owed to themselves to be nice in their
eating and drinking, and to keep a deal of company downstairs. They
allowed a very liberal table to Mr. and Mrs. Pocket, yet it always
appeared to me that by far the best part of the house to have boarded
in would have been the kitchen,—always supposing the boarder capable of
self-defence, for, before I had been there a week, a neighbouring lady
with whom the family were personally unacquainted, wrote in to say that
she had seen Millers slapping the baby. This greatly distressed Mrs.
Pocket, who burst into tears on receiving the note, and said that it
was an extraordinary thing that the neighbours couldn’t mind their own
business.
By degrees I learnt, and chiefly from Herbert, that Mr. Pocket had been
educated at Harrow and at Cambridge, where he had distinguished
himself; but that when he had had the happiness of marrying Mrs. Pocket