Great Expectations
with that inexplicable feeling I had had before; and when we were out
of it, I was as much dazed for a few moments as if I had been in
lightning.
So we fell into other talk, and it was principally about the way by
which we were travelling, and about what parts of London lay on this
side of it, and what on that. The great city was almost new to her, she
told me, for she had never left Miss Havisham’s neighbourhood until she
had gone to France, and she had merely passed through London then in
going and returning. I asked her if my guardian had any charge of her
while she remained here? To that she emphatically said “God forbid!”
and no more.
It was impossible for me to avoid seeing that she cared to attract me;
that she made herself winning, and would have won me even if the task
had needed pains. Yet this made me none the happier, for even if she
had not taken that tone of our being disposed of by others, I should
have felt that she held my heart in her hand because she wilfully chose
to do it, and not because it would have wrung any tenderness in her to
crush it and throw it away.
When we passed through Hammersmith, I showed her where Mr. Matthew
Pocket lived, and said it was no great way from Richmond, and that I
hoped I should see her sometimes.
“O yes, you are to see me; you are to come when you think proper; you
are to be mentioned to the family; indeed you are already mentioned.”
I inquired was it a large household she was going to be a member of?
“No; there are only two; mother and daughter. The mother is a lady of
some station, though not averse to increasing her income.”
“I wonder Miss Havisham could part with you again so soon.”
“It is a part of Miss Havisham’s plans for me, Pip,” said Estella, with
a sigh, as if she were tired; “I am to write to her constantly and see
her regularly and report how I go on,—I and the jewels,—for they are
nearly all mine now.”
It was the first time she had ever called me by my name. Of course she
did so purposely, and knew that I should treasure it up.
We came to Richmond all too soon, and our destination there was a house
by the green,—a staid old house, where hoops and powder and patches,
embroidered coats, rolled stockings, ruffles and swords, had had their
court days many a time. Some ancient trees before the house were still
cut into fashions as formal and unnatural as the hoops and wigs and
stiff skirts; but their own allotted places in the great procession of
the dead were not far off, and they would soon drop into them and go
the silent way of the rest.
A bell with an old voice—which I dare say in its time had often said to
the house, Here is the green farthingale, Here is the diamond-hilted
sword, Here are the shoes with red heels and the blue solitaire—sounded
gravely in the moonlight, and two cherry-coloured maids came fluttering
out to receive Estella. The doorway soon absorbed her boxes, and she
gave me her hand and a smile, and said good-night, and was absorbed
likewise. And still I stood looking at the house, thinking how happy I
should be if I lived there with her, and knowing that I never was happy
with her, but always miserable.
I got into the carriage to be taken back to Hammersmith, and I got in
with a bad heart-ache, and I got out with a worse heart-ache. At our
own door, I found little Jane Pocket coming home from a little party
escorted by her little lover; and I envied her little lover, in spite
of his being subject to Flopson.
Mr. Pocket was out lecturing; for, he was a most delightful lecturer on
domestic economy, and his treatises on the management of children and
servants were considered the very best text-books on those themes. But
Mrs. Pocket was at home, and was in a little difficulty, on account of
the baby’s having been accommodated with a needle-case to keep him
quiet during the unaccountable absence (with a relative in the Foot
Guards) of Millers. And more needles were missing than it could be
regarded as quite wholesome for a patient of such tender years either
to apply externally or to take as a tonic.
Mr. Pocket being justly celebrated for giving most excellent practical
advice, and for having a clear and sound perception of things and a
highly judicious mind, I had some notion in my heart-ache of begging
him to accept my confidence. But happening to look up at Mrs. Pocket as
she sat reading her book of dignities after prescribing Bed as a
sovereign remedy for baby, I thought—Well—No, I wouldn’t.
Chapter XXXIV.
As I had grown accustomed to my expectations, I had insensibly begun to
notice their effect upon myself and those around me. Their influence on
my own character I disguised from my recognition as much as possible,
but I knew very well that it was not all good. I lived in a state of
chronic uneasiness respecting my behaviour to Joe. My conscience was
not by any means comfortable about Biddy. When I woke up in the
night,—like Camilla,—I used to think, with a weariness on my spirits,
that I should have been happier and better if I had never seen Miss
Havisham’s face, and had risen to manhood content to be partners with
Joe in the honest old forge. Many a time of an evening, when I sat
alone looking at the fire, I thought, after all there was no fire like
the forge fire and the kitchen fire at home.
Yet Estella was so inseparable from all my restlessness and disquiet of
mind, that I really fell into confusion as to the limits of my own part
in its production. That is to say, supposing I had had no expectations,
and yet had had Estella to think of, I could not make out to my
satisfaction that I should have done much better. Now, concerning the
influence of my position on others, I was in no such difficulty, and so
I perceived—though dimly enough perhaps—that it was not beneficial to
anybody, and, above all, that it was not beneficial to Herbert. My
lavish habits led his easy nature into expenses that he could not
afford, corrupted the simplicity of his life, and disturbed his peace
with anxieties and regrets. I was not at all remorseful for having
unwittingly set those other branches of the Pocket family to the poor
arts they practised; because such littlenesses were their natural bent,
and would have been evoked by anybody else, if I had left them
slumbering. But Herbert’s was a very different case, and it often
caused me a twinge to think that I had done him evil service in
crowding his sparely furnished chambers with incongruous upholstery
work, and placing the Canary-breasted Avenger at his disposal.
So now, as an infallible way of making little ease great ease, I began
to contract a quantity of debt. I could hardly begin but Herbert must
begin too, so he soon followed. At Startop’s suggestion, we put
ourselves down for election into a club called The Finches of the
Grove: the object of which institution I have never divined, if it were
not that the members should dine expensively once a fortnight, to
quarrel among themselves as much as possible after dinner, and to cause
six waiters to get drunk on the stairs. I know that these gratifying
social ends were so invariably accomplished, that Herbert and I
understood nothing else to be referred to in the first standing toast
of the society: which ran “Gentlemen, may the present promotion of good
feeling ever reign predominant among the Finches of the Grove.”
The Finches spent their money foolishly (the Hotel we dined at was in
Covent Garden), and the first Finch I saw when I had the honour of
joining the Grove was Bentley Drummle, at that time floundering about
town in a cab of his own, and doing a great deal of damage to the posts
at the street corners. Occasionally, he shot himself out of his
equipage headforemost over the apron; and I saw him on one occasion
deliver himself at the door of the Grove in this unintentional way—like
coals. But here I anticipate a little, for I was not a Finch, and could
not be, according to the sacred laws of the society, until I came of
age.
In my confidence in my own resources, I would willingly have taken
Herbert’s expenses on myself; but Herbert was proud, and I could make
no such proposal to him. So he got into difficulties in every
direction, and continued to look about him. When we gradually fell into
keeping late hours and late company, I noticed that he looked about him
with a desponding eye at breakfast-time; that he began to look about
him more hopefully about midday; that he drooped when he came into
dinner; that he seemed to descry Capital in the distance, rather
clearly, after dinner; that he all but realised Capital towards
midnight; and that at about two o’clock in the morning, he became so
deeply despondent again as to talk of buying a rifle and going to
America, with a general purpose of compelling buffaloes to make his
fortune.
I was usually at Hammersmith about half the week, and when I was at
Hammersmith I haunted Richmond, whereof separately by and by. Herbert
would often come to Hammersmith when I was there, and I think at those
seasons his father would occasionally have some passing perception that
the opening he was looking for, had not appeared yet. But in the
general tumbling up of the family, his tumbling out in life somewhere,
was a thing to transact itself somehow. In the meantime Mr. Pocket grew
greyer, and tried oftener to lift himself out of his perplexities by
the hair. While Mrs. Pocket tripped up the family with her footstool,
read her book of dignities, lost her pocket-handkerchief, told us about
her grandpapa, and taught the young idea how to shoot, by shooting it
into bed whenever it attracted her notice.
As I am now generalising a period of my life with the object of
clearing my way before me, I can scarcely do so better than by at once
completing the description of our usual manners and customs at
Barnard’s Inn.
We spent as much money as we could, and got as little for it as people
could make up their minds to give us. We were always more or less
miserable, and most of our acquaintance were in the same condition.
There was a gay fiction among us that we were constantly enjoying
ourselves, and a skeleton truth that we never did. To the best of my
belief, our case was in the last aspect a rather common one.
Every morning, with an air ever new, Herbert went into the City to look
about him. I often paid him a visit in the dark back-room in which he
consorted with an ink-jar, a hat-peg, a coal-box, a string-box, an
almanac, a desk and stool, and a ruler; and I do not remember that I
ever saw him do anything else but look about him. If we all did what we
undertake to do, as faithfully as Herbert did, we might live in a
Republic of the Virtues. He had nothing else to do, poor fellow, except
at a certain hour of every afternoon to “go to Lloyd’s”—in observance
of a ceremony of seeing his principal, I think. He never did anything
else in connection with Lloyd’s that I could find out, except come back
again. When he felt his case unusually serious, and that he positively
must find an opening, he would go on ’Change at a busy time, and walk
in and out, in a kind of gloomy country dance figure, among the
assembled magnates. “For,” says Herbert to me, coming home to dinner on
one of those special occasions, “I find the truth to be, Handel, that
an opening won’t come to one, but one must go to it,—so I have been.”
If we had been less attached to one another, I think we must have hated
one another regularly every morning. I detested the chambers beyond
expression at that period of repentance, and could not endure the sight
of the Avenger’s livery; which had a more expensive and a less
remunerative appearance then than at any other time in the
four-and-twenty hours. As we got more and more into debt, breakfast