Great Expectations
the country for some weeks, and he certainly had not returned in the
night, because we had seen his door with his seal on it as we came
upstairs.
“The night being so bad, sir,” said the watchman, as he gave me back my
glass, “uncommon few have come in at my gate. Besides them three
gentlemen that I have named, I don’t call to mind another since about
eleven o’clock, when a stranger asked for you.”
“My uncle,” I muttered. “Yes.”
“You saw him, sir?”
“Yes. Oh yes.”
“Likewise the person with him?”
“Person with him!” I repeated.
“I judged the person to be with him,” returned the watchman. “The
person stopped, when he stopped to make inquiry of me, and the person
took this way when he took this way.”
“What sort of person?”
The watchman had not particularly noticed; he should say a working
person; to the best of his belief, he had a dust-coloured kind of
clothes on, under a dark coat. The watchman made more light of the
matter than I did, and naturally; not having my reason for attaching
weight to it.
When I had got rid of him, which I thought it well to do without
prolonging explanations, my mind was much troubled by these two
circumstances taken together. Whereas they were easy of innocent
solution apart,—as, for instance, some diner out or diner at home, who
had not gone near this watchman’s gate, might have strayed to my
staircase and dropped asleep there,—and my nameless visitor might have
brought some one with him to show him the way,—still, joined, they had
an ugly look to one as prone to distrust and fear as the changes of a
few hours had made me.
I lighted my fire, which burnt with a raw pale flare at that time of
the morning, and fell into a doze before it. I seemed to have been
dozing a whole night when the clocks struck six. As there was full an
hour and a half between me and daylight, I dozed again; now, waking up
uneasily, with prolix conversations about nothing, in my ears; now,
making thunder of the wind in the chimney; at length, falling off into
a profound sleep from which the daylight woke me with a start.
All this time I had never been able to consider my own situation, nor
could I do so yet. I had not the power to attend to it. I was greatly
dejected and distressed, but in an incoherent wholesale sort of way. As
to forming any plan for the future, I could as soon have formed an
elephant. When I opened the shutters and looked out at the wet wild
morning, all of a leaden hue; when I walked from room to room; when I
sat down again shivering, before the fire, waiting for my laundress to
appear; I thought how miserable I was, but hardly knew why, or how long
I had been so, or on what day of the week I made the reflection, or
even who I was that made it.
At last, the old woman and the niece came in,—the latter with a head
not easily distinguishable from her dusty broom,—and testified surprise
at sight of me and the fire. To whom I imparted how my uncle had come
in the night and was then asleep, and how the breakfast preparations
were to be modified accordingly. Then I washed and dressed while they
knocked the furniture about and made a dust; and so, in a sort of dream
or sleep-waking, I found myself sitting by the fire again, waiting
for—Him—to come to breakfast.
By and by, his door opened and he came out. I could not bring myself to
bear the sight of him, and I thought he had a worse look by daylight.
“I do not even know,” said I, speaking low as he took his seat at the
table, “by what name to call you. I have given out that you are my
uncle.”
“That’s it, dear boy! Call me uncle.”
“You assumed some name, I suppose, on board ship?”
“Yes, dear boy. I took the name of Provis.”
“Do you mean to keep that name?”
“Why, yes, dear boy, it’s as good as another,—unless you’d like
another.”
“What is your real name?” I asked him in a whisper.
“Magwitch,” he answered, in the same tone; “chrisen’d Abel.”
“What were you brought up to be?”
“A warmint, dear boy.”
He answered quite seriously, and used the word as if it denoted some
profession.
“When you came into the Temple last night—” said I, pausing to wonder
whether that could really have been last night, which seemed so long
ago.
“Yes, dear boy?”
“When you came in at the gate and asked the watchman the way here, had
you any one with you?”
“With me? No, dear boy.”
“But there was some one there?”
“I didn’t take particular notice,” he said, dubiously, “not knowing the
ways of the place. But I think there _was_ a person, too, come in
alonger me.”
“Are you known in London?”
“I hope not!” said he, giving his neck a jerk with his forefinger that
made me turn hot and sick.
“Were you known in London, once?”
“Not over and above, dear boy. I was in the provinces mostly.”
“Were you—tried—in London?”
“Which time?” said he, with a sharp look.
“The last time.”
He nodded. “First knowed Mr. Jaggers that way. Jaggers was for me.”
It was on my lips to ask him what he was tried for, but he took up a
knife, gave it a flourish, and with the words, “And what I done is
worked out and paid for!” fell to at his breakfast.
He ate in a ravenous way that was very disagreeable, and all his
actions were uncouth, noisy, and greedy. Some of his teeth had failed
him since I saw him eat on the marshes, and as he turned his food in
his mouth, and turned his head sideways to bring his strongest fangs to
bear upon it, he looked terribly like a hungry old dog. If I had begun
with any appetite, he would have taken it away, and I should have sat
much as I did,—repelled from him by an insurmountable aversion, and
gloomily looking at the cloth.
“I’m a heavy grubber, dear boy,” he said, as a polite kind of apology
when he made an end of his meal, “but I always was. If it had been in
my constitution to be a lighter grubber, I might ha’ got into lighter
trouble. Similarly, I must have my smoke. When I was first hired out as
shepherd t’other side the world, it’s my belief I should ha’ turned
into a molloncolly-mad sheep myself, if I hadn’t a had my smoke.”
As he said so, he got up from table, and putting his hand into the
breast of the pea-coat he wore, brought out a short black pipe, and a
handful of loose tobacco of the kind that is called Negro-head. Having
filled his pipe, he put the surplus tobacco back again, as if his
pocket were a drawer. Then, he took a live coal from the fire with the
tongs, and lighted his pipe at it, and then turned round on the
hearth-rug with his back to the fire, and went through his favourite
action of holding out both his hands for mine.
“And this,” said he, dandling my hands up and down in his, as he puffed
at his pipe,—“and this is the gentleman what I made! The real genuine
One! It does me good fur to look at you, Pip. All I stip’late, is, to
stand by and look at you, dear boy!”
I released my hands as soon as I could, and found that I was beginning
slowly to settle down to the contemplation of my condition. What I was
chained to, and how heavily, became intelligible to me, as I heard his
hoarse voice, and sat looking up at his furrowed bald head with its
iron grey hair at the sides.
“I mustn’t see my gentleman a footing it in the mire of the streets;
there mustn’t be no mud on _his_ boots. My gentleman must have horses,
Pip! Horses to ride, and horses to drive, and horses for his servant to
ride and drive as well. Shall colonists have their horses (and blood
’uns, if you please, good Lord!) and not my London gentleman? No, no.
We’ll show ’em another pair of shoes than that, Pip; won’t us?”
He took out of his pocket a great thick pocket-book, bursting with
papers, and tossed it on the table.
“There’s something worth spending in that there book, dear boy. It’s
yourn. All I’ve got ain’t mine; it’s yourn. Don’t you be afeerd on it.
There’s more where that come from. I’ve come to the old country fur to
see my gentleman spend his money _like_ a gentleman. That’ll be _my_
pleasure. _My_ pleasure ’ull be fur to see him do it. And blast you
all!” he wound up, looking round the room and snapping his fingers once
with a loud snap, “blast you every one, from the judge in his wig, to
the colonist a stirring up the dust, I’ll show a better gentleman than
the whole kit on you put together!”
“Stop!” said I, almost in a frenzy of fear and dislike, “I want to
speak to you. I want to know what is to be done. I want to know how you
are to be kept out of danger, how long you are going to stay, what
projects you have.”
“Look’ee here, Pip,” said he, laying his hand on my arm in a suddenly
altered and subdued manner; “first of all, look’ee here. I forgot
myself half a minute ago. What I said was low; that’s what it was; low.
Look’ee here, Pip. Look over it. I ain’t a-going to be low.”
“First,” I resumed, half groaning, “what precautions can be taken
against your being recognised and seized?”
“No, dear boy,” he said, in the same tone as before, “that don’t go
first. Lowness goes first. I ain’t took so many year to make a
gentleman, not without knowing what’s due to him. Look’ee here, Pip. I
was low; that’s what I was; low. Look over it, dear boy.”
Some sense of the grimly-ludicrous moved me to a fretful laugh, as I
replied, “I _have_ looked over it. In Heaven’s name, don’t harp upon
it!”
“Yes, but look’ee here,” he persisted. “Dear boy, I ain’t come so fur,
not fur to be low. Now, go on, dear boy. You was a saying—”
“How are you to be guarded from the danger you have incurred?”
“Well, dear boy, the danger ain’t so great. Without I was informed
agen, the danger ain’t so much to signify. There’s Jaggers, and there’s
Wemmick, and there’s you. Who else is there to inform?”
“Is there no chance person who might identify you in the street?” said
I.
“Well,” he returned, “there ain’t many. Nor yet I don’t intend to
advertise myself in the newspapers by the name of A.M. come back from
Botany Bay; and years have rolled away, and who’s to gain by it? Still,
look’ee here, Pip. If the danger had been fifty times as great, I
should ha’ come to see you, mind you, just the same.”
“And how long do you remain?”
“How long?” said he, taking his black pipe from his mouth, and dropping
his jaw as he stared at me. “I’m not a-going back. I’ve come for good.”
“Where are you to live?” said I. “What is to be done with you? Where
will you be safe?”
“Dear boy,” he returned, “there’s disguising wigs can be bought for
money, and there’s hair powder, and spectacles, and black
clothes,—shorts and what not. Others has done it safe afore, and what
others has done afore, others can do agen. As to the where and how of
living, dear boy, give me your own opinions on it.”
“You take it smoothly now,” said I, “but you were very serious last
night, when you swore it was Death.”
“And so I swear it is Death,” said he, putting his pipe back in his
mouth, “and Death by the rope, in the open street not fur from this,
and it’s serious that you should fully understand it to be so. What
then, when that’s once done? Here I am. To go back now ’ud be as bad as
to stand ground—worse. Besides, Pip, I’m here, because I’ve meant it by
you, years and years. As to what I dare, I’m a old bird now, as has
dared all manner of traps since first he was fledged, and I’m not
afeerd to perch upon a scarecrow. If there’s Death hid inside of it,
there is, and let him come out, and I’ll face him, and then I’ll
believe in him and not afore. And now let me have a look at my
gentleman agen.”
Once more, he took me by both hands and surveyed me with an air of
admiring proprietorship: smoking with great complacency all the while.
It appeared to me that I could do no better than secure him some quiet
lodging hard by, of which he might take possession when Herbert