Great Expectations
“Biddy,” pursued Joe, “when I got home and asked her fur to write the
message to you, a little hung back. Biddy says, ‘I know he will be very
glad to have it by word of mouth, it is holiday time, you want to see
him, go!’ I have now concluded, sir,” said Joe, rising from his chair,
“and, Pip, I wish you ever well and ever prospering to a greater and a
greater height.”
“But you are not going now, Joe?”
“Yes I am,” said Joe.
“But you are coming back to dinner, Joe?”
“No I am not,” said Joe.
Our eyes met, and all the “Sir” melted out of that manly heart as he
gave me his hand.
“Pip, dear old chap, life is made of ever so many partings welded
together, as I may say, and one man’s a blacksmith, and one’s a
whitesmith, and one’s a goldsmith, and one’s a coppersmith. Diwisions
among such must come, and must be met as they come. If there’s been any
fault at all to-day, it’s mine. You and me is not two figures to be
together in London; nor yet anywheres else but what is private, and
beknown, and understood among friends. It ain’t that I am proud, but
that I want to be right, as you shall never see me no more in these
clothes. I’m wrong in these clothes. I’m wrong out of the forge, the
kitchen, or off th’ meshes. You won’t find half so much fault in me if
you think of me in my forge dress, with my hammer in my hand, or even
my pipe. You won’t find half so much fault in me if, supposing as you
should ever wish to see me, you come and put your head in at the forge
window and see Joe the blacksmith, there, at the old anvil, in the old
burnt apron, sticking to the old work. I’m awful dull, but I hope I’ve
beat out something nigh the rights of this at last. And so GOD bless
you, dear old Pip, old chap, GOD bless you!”
I had not been mistaken in my fancy that there was a simple dignity in
him. The fashion of his dress could no more come in its way when he
spoke these words than it could come in its way in Heaven. He touched
me gently on the forehead, and went out. As soon as I could recover
myself sufficiently, I hurried out after him and looked for him in the
neighbouring streets; but he was gone.
Chapter XXVIII.
It was clear that I must repair to our town next day, and in the first
flow of my repentance, it was equally clear that I must stay at Joe’s.
But, when I had secured my box-place by to-morrow’s coach, and had been
down to Mr. Pocket’s and back, I was not by any means convinced on the
last point, and began to invent reasons and make excuses for putting up
at the Blue Boar. I should be an inconvenience at Joe’s; I was not
expected, and my bed would not be ready; I should be too far from Miss
Havisham’s, and she was exacting and mightn’t like it. All other
swindlers upon earth are nothing to the self-swindlers, and with such
pretences did I cheat myself. Surely a curious thing. That I should
innocently take a bad half-crown of somebody else’s manufacture is
reasonable enough; but that I should knowingly reckon the spurious coin
of my own make as good money! An obliging stranger, under pretence of
compactly folding up my bank-notes for security’s sake, abstracts the
notes and gives me nutshells; but what is his sleight of hand to mine,
when I fold up my own nutshells and pass them on myself as notes!
Having settled that I must go to the Blue Boar, my mind was much
disturbed by indecision whether or not to take the Avenger. It was
tempting to think of that expensive Mercenary publicly airing his boots
in the archway of the Blue Boar’s posting-yard; it was almost solemn to
imagine him casually produced in the tailor’s shop, and confounding the
disrespectful senses of Trabb’s boy. On the other hand, Trabb’s boy
might worm himself into his intimacy and tell him things; or, reckless
and desperate wretch as I knew he could be, might hoot him in the High
Street. My patroness, too, might hear of him, and not approve. On the
whole, I resolved to leave the Avenger behind.
It was the afternoon coach by which I had taken my place, and, as
winter had now come round, I should not arrive at my destination until
two or three hours after dark. Our time of starting from the Cross Keys
was two o’clock. I arrived on the ground with a quarter of an hour to
spare, attended by the Avenger,—if I may connect that expression with
one who never attended on me if he could possibly help it.
At that time it was customary to carry Convicts down to the dock-yards
by stage-coach. As I had often heard of them in the capacity of outside
passengers, and had more than once seen them on the high road dangling
their ironed legs over the coach roof, I had no cause to be surprised
when Herbert, meeting me in the yard, came up and told me there were
two convicts going down with me. But I had a reason that was an old
reason now for constitutionally faltering whenever I heard the word
“convict.”
“You don’t mind them, Handel?” said Herbert.
“O no!”
“I thought you seemed as if you didn’t like them?”
“I can’t pretend that I do like them, and I suppose you don’t
particularly. But I don’t mind them.”
“See! There they are,” said Herbert, “coming out of the Tap. What a
degraded and vile sight it is!”
They had been treating their guard, I suppose, for they had a gaoler
with them, and all three came out wiping their mouths on their hands.
The two convicts were handcuffed together, and had irons on their
legs,—irons of a pattern that I knew well. They wore the dress that I
likewise knew well. Their keeper had a brace of pistols, and carried a
thick-knobbed bludgeon under his arm; but he was on terms of good
understanding with them, and stood with them beside him, looking on at
the putting-to of the horses, rather with an air as if the convicts
were an interesting Exhibition not formally open at the moment, and he
the Curator. One was a taller and stouter man than the other, and
appeared as a matter of course, according to the mysterious ways of the
world, both convict and free, to have had allotted to him the smaller
suit of clothes. His arms and legs were like great pincushions of those
shapes, and his attire disguised him absurdly; but I knew his
half-closed eye at one glance. There stood the man whom I had seen on
the settle at the Three Jolly Bargemen on a Saturday night, and who had
brought me down with his invisible gun!
It was easy to make sure that as yet he knew me no more than if he had
never seen me in his life. He looked across at me, and his eye
appraised my watch-chain, and then he incidentally spat and said
something to the other convict, and they laughed and slued themselves
round with a clink of their coupling manacle, and looked at something
else. The great numbers on their backs, as if they were street doors;
their coarse mangy ungainly outer surface, as if they were lower
animals; their ironed legs, apologetically garlanded with
pocket-handkerchiefs; and the way in which all present looked at them
and kept from them; made them (as Herbert had said) a most disagreeable
and degraded spectacle.
But this was not the worst of it. It came out that the whole of the
back of the coach had been taken by a family removing from London, and
that there were no places for the two prisoners but on the seat in
front behind the coachman. Hereupon, a choleric gentleman, who had
taken the fourth place on that seat, flew into a most violent passion,
and said that it was a breach of contract to mix him up with such
villainous company, and that it was poisonous, and pernicious, and
infamous, and shameful, and I don’t know what else. At this time the
coach was ready and the coachman impatient, and we were all preparing
to get up, and the prisoners had come over with their keeper,—bringing
with them that curious flavour of bread-poultice, baize, rope-yarn, and
hearthstone, which attends the convict presence.
“Don’t take it so much amiss, sir,” pleaded the keeper to the angry
passenger; “I’ll sit next you myself. I’ll put ’em on the outside of
the row. They won’t interfere with you, sir. You needn’t know they’re
there.”
“And don’t blame _me_,” growled the convict I had recognised. “_I_
don’t want to go. _I_ am quite ready to stay behind. As fur as I am
concerned any one’s welcome to _my_ place.”
“Or mine,” said the other, gruffly. “_I_ wouldn’t have incommoded none
of you, if I’d had _my_ way.” Then they both laughed, and began
cracking nuts, and spitting the shells about.—As I really think I
should have liked to do myself, if I had been in their place and so
despised.
At length, it was voted that there was no help for the angry gentleman,
and that he must either go in his chance company or remain behind. So
he got into his place, still making complaints, and the keeper got into
the place next him, and the convicts hauled themselves up as well as
they could, and the convict I had recognised sat behind me with his
breath on the hair of my head.
“Good-bye, Handel!” Herbert called out as we started. I thought what a
blessed fortune it was, that he had found another name for me than Pip.
It is impossible to express with what acuteness I felt the convict’s
breathing, not only on the back of my head, but all along my spine. The
sensation was like being touched in the marrow with some pungent and
searching acid, it set my very teeth on edge. He seemed to have more
breathing business to do than another man, and to make more noise in
doing it; and I was conscious of growing high-shouldered on one side,
in my shrinking endeavours to fend him off.
The weather was miserably raw, and the two cursed the cold. It made us
all lethargic before we had gone far, and when we had left the Half-way
House behind, we habitually dozed and shivered and were silent. I dozed
off, myself, in considering the question whether I ought to restore a
couple of pounds sterling to this creature before losing sight of him,
and how it could best be done. In the act of dipping forward as if I
were going to bathe among the horses, I woke in a fright and took the
question up again.
But I must have lost it longer than I had thought, since, although I
could recognise nothing in the darkness and the fitful lights and
shadows of our lamps, I traced marsh country in the cold damp wind that
blew at us. Cowering forward for warmth and to make me a screen against
the wind, the convicts were closer to me than before. The very first
words I heard them interchange as I became conscious, were the words of
my own thought, “Two One Pound notes.”
“How did he get ’em?” said the convict I had never seen.
“How should I know?” returned the other. “He had ’em stowed away
somehows. Giv him by friends, I expect.”
“I wish,” said the other, with a bitter curse upon the cold, “that I
had ’em here.”
“Two one pound notes, or friends?”
“Two one pound notes. I’d sell all the friends I ever had for one, and
think it a blessed good bargain. Well? So he says—?”
“So he says,” resumed the convict I had recognised,—“it was all said
and done in half a minute, behind a pile of timber in the
Dock-yard,—‘You’re a-going to be discharged?’ Yes, I was. Would I find
out that boy that had fed him and kep his secret, and give him them two
one pound notes? Yes, I would. And I did.”
“More fool you,” growled the other. “I’d have spent ’em on a Man, in
wittles and drink. He must have been a green one. Mean to say he knowed
nothing of you?”
“Not a ha’porth. Different gangs and different ships. He was tried
again for prison breaking, and got made a Lifer.”
“And was that—Honour!—the only time you worked out, in this part of the
country?”
“The only time.”
“What might have been your opinion of the place?”
“A most beastly place. Mudbank, mist, swamp, and work; work, swamp,
mist, and mudbank.”