Great Expectations
temper that if the Church had been thrown open, he would probably have
excommunicated the whole expedition, beginning with Joe and myself. In
his lay capacity, he persisted in sitting down in the damp to such an
insane extent, that when his coat was taken off to be dried at the
kitchen fire, the circumstantial evidence on his trousers would have
hanged him, if it had been a capital offence.
By that time, I was staggering on the kitchen floor like a little
drunkard, through having been newly set upon my feet, and through
having been fast asleep, and through waking in the heat and lights and
noise of tongues. As I came to myself (with the aid of a heavy thump
between the shoulders, and the restorative exclamation “Yah! Was there
ever such a boy as this!” from my sister,) I found Joe telling them
about the convict’s confession, and all the visitors suggesting
different ways by which he had got into the pantry. Mr. Pumblechook
made out, after carefully surveying the premises, that he had first got
upon the roof of the forge, and had then got upon the roof of the
house, and had then let himself down the kitchen chimney by a rope made
of his bedding cut into strips; and as Mr. Pumblechook was very
positive and drove his own chaise-cart—over everybody—it was agreed
that it must be so. Mr. Wopsle, indeed, wildly cried out, “No!” with
the feeble malice of a tired man; but, as he had no theory, and no coat
on, he was unanimously set at naught,—not to mention his smoking hard
behind, as he stood with his back to the kitchen fire to draw the damp
out: which was not calculated to inspire confidence.
This was all I heard that night before my sister clutched me, as a
slumberous offence to the company’s eyesight, and assisted me up to bed
with such a strong hand that I seemed to have fifty boots on, and to be
dangling them all against the edges of the stairs. My state of mind, as
I have described it, began before I was up in the morning, and lasted
long after the subject had died out, and had ceased to be mentioned
saving on exceptional occasions.
Chapter VII.
At the time when I stood in the churchyard reading the family
tombstones, I had just enough learning to be able to spell them out. My
construction even of their simple meaning was not very correct, for I
read “wife of the Above” as a complimentary reference to my father’s
exaltation to a better world; and if any one of my deceased relations
had been referred to as “Below,” I have no doubt I should have formed
the worst opinions of that member of the family. Neither were my
notions of the theological positions to which my Catechism bound me, at
all accurate; for, I have a lively remembrance that I supposed my
declaration that I was to “walk in the same all the days of my life,”
laid me under an obligation always to go through the village from our
house in one particular direction, and never to vary it by turning down
by the wheelwright’s or up by the mill.
When I was old enough, I was to be apprenticed to Joe, and until I
could assume that dignity I was not to be what Mrs. Joe called
“Pompeyed,” or (as I render it) pampered. Therefore, I was not only
odd-boy about the forge, but if any neighbour happened to want an extra
boy to frighten birds, or pick up stones, or do any such job, I was
favoured with the employment. In order, however, that our superior
position might not be compromised thereby, a money-box was kept on the
kitchen mantel-shelf, into which it was publicly made known that all my
earnings were dropped. I have an impression that they were to be
contributed eventually towards the liquidation of the National Debt,
but I know I had no hope of any personal participation in the treasure.
Mr. Wopsle’s great-aunt kept an evening school in the village; that is
to say, she was a ridiculous old woman of limited means and unlimited
infirmity, who used to go to sleep from six to seven every evening, in
the society of youth who paid two pence per week each, for the
improving opportunity of seeing her do it. She rented a small cottage,
and Mr. Wopsle had the room upstairs, where we students used to
overhear him reading aloud in a most dignified and terrific manner, and
occasionally bumping on the ceiling. There was a fiction that Mr.
Wopsle “examined” the scholars once a quarter. What he did on those
occasions was to turn up his cuffs, stick up his hair, and give us Mark
Antony’s oration over the body of Caesar. This was always followed by
Collins’s Ode on the Passions, wherein I particularly venerated Mr.
Wopsle as Revenge throwing his blood-stained sword in thunder down, and
taking the War-denouncing trumpet with a withering look. It was not
with me then, as it was in later life, when I fell into the society of
the Passions, and compared them with Collins and Wopsle, rather to the
disadvantage of both gentlemen.
Mr. Wopsle’s great-aunt, besides keeping this Educational Institution,
kept in the same room—a little general shop. She had no idea what stock
she had, or what the price of anything in it was; but there was a
little greasy memorandum-book kept in a drawer, which served as a
Catalogue of Prices, and by this oracle Biddy arranged all the shop
transactions. Biddy was Mr. Wopsle’s great-aunt’s granddaughter; I
confess myself quite unequal to the working out of the problem, what
relation she was to Mr. Wopsle. She was an orphan like myself; like me,
too, had been brought up by hand. She was most noticeable, I thought,
in respect of her extremities; for, her hair always wanted brushing,
her hands always wanted washing, and her shoes always wanted mending
and pulling up at heel. This description must be received with a
week-day limitation. On Sundays, she went to church elaborated.
Much of my unassisted self, and more by the help of Biddy than of Mr.
Wopsle’s great-aunt, I struggled through the alphabet as if it had been
a bramble-bush; getting considerably worried and scratched by every
letter. After that I fell among those thieves, the nine figures, who
seemed every evening to do something new to disguise themselves and
baffle recognition. But, at last I began, in a purblind groping way, to
read, write, and cipher, on the very smallest scale.
One night I was sitting in the chimney corner with my slate, expending
great efforts on the production of a letter to Joe. I think it must
have been a full year after our hunt upon the marshes, for it was a
long time after, and it was winter and a hard frost. With an alphabet
on the hearth at my feet for reference, I contrived in an hour or two
to print and smear this epistle:—
“MI DEER JO i OPE U R KRWITE WELL i OPE i SHAL SON B HABELL 4 2 TEEDGE
U JO AN THEN WE SHORL B SO GLODD AN WEN i M PRENGTD 2 U JO WOT LARX AN
BLEVE ME INF XN PIP.”
There was no indispensable necessity for my communicating with Joe by
letter, inasmuch as he sat beside me and we were alone. But I delivered
this written communication (slate and all) with my own hand, and Joe
received it as a miracle of erudition.
“I say, Pip, old chap!” cried Joe, opening his blue eyes wide, “what a
scholar you are! An’t you?”
“I should like to be,” said I, glancing at the slate as he held it;
with a misgiving that the writing was rather hilly.
“Why, here’s a J,” said Joe, “and a O equal to anythink! Here’s a J and
a O, Pip, and a J-O, Joe.”
I had never heard Joe read aloud to any greater extent than this
monosyllable, and I had observed at church last Sunday, when I
accidentally held our Prayer-Book upside down, that it seemed to suit
his convenience quite as well as if it had been all right. Wishing to
embrace the present occasion of finding out whether in teaching Joe, I
should have to begin quite at the beginning, I said, “Ah! But read the
rest, Jo.”
“The rest, eh, Pip?” said Joe, looking at it with a slow, searching
eye, “One, two, three. Why, here’s three Js, and three Os, and three
J-O, Joes in it, Pip!”
I leaned over Joe, and, with the aid of my forefinger read him the
whole letter.
“Astonishing!” said Joe, when I had finished. “You ARE a scholar.”
“How do you spell Gargery, Joe?” I asked him, with a modest patronage.
“I don’t spell it at all,” said Joe.
“But supposing you did?”
“It _can’t_ be supposed,” said Joe. “Tho’ I’m uncommon fond of reading,
too.”
“Are you, Joe?”
“On-common. Give me,” said Joe, “a good book, or a good newspaper, and
sit me down afore a good fire, and I ask no better. Lord!” he
continued, after rubbing his knees a little, “when you _do_ come to a J
and a O, and says you, ‘Here, at last, is a J-O, Joe,’ how interesting
reading is!”
I derived from this, that Joe’s education, like Steam, was yet in its
infancy. Pursuing the subject, I inquired,—
“Didn’t you ever go to school, Joe, when you were as little as me?”
“No, Pip.”
“Why didn’t you ever go to school, Joe, when you were as little as me?”
“Well, Pip,” said Joe, taking up the poker, and settling himself to his
usual occupation when he was thoughtful, of slowly raking the fire
between the lower bars; “I’ll tell you. My father, Pip, he were given
to drink, and when he were overtook with drink, he hammered away at my
mother, most onmerciful. It were a’most the only hammering he did,
indeed, ’xcepting at myself. And he hammered at me with a wigor only to
be equalled by the wigor with which he didn’t hammer at his
anwil.—You’re a listening and understanding, Pip?”
“Yes, Joe.”
“Consequence, my mother and me we ran away from my father several
times; and then my mother she’d go out to work, and she’d say, “Joe,”
she’d say, “now, please God, you shall have some schooling, child,” and
she’d put me to school. But my father were that good in his hart that
he couldn’t abear to be without us. So, he’d come with a most
tremenjous crowd and make such a row at the doors of the houses where
we was, that they used to be obligated to have no more to do with us
and to give us up to him. And then he took us home and hammered us.
Which, you see, Pip,” said Joe, pausing in his meditative raking of the
fire, and looking at me, “were a drawback on my learning.”
“Certainly, poor Joe!”
“Though mind you, Pip,” said Joe, with a judicial touch or two of the
poker on the top bar, “rendering unto all their doo, and maintaining
equal justice betwixt man and man, my father were that good in his
hart, don’t you see?”
I didn’t see; but I didn’t say so.
“Well!” Joe pursued, “somebody must keep the pot a-biling, Pip, or the
pot won’t bile, don’t you know?”
I saw that, and said so.
“Consequence, my father didn’t make objections to my going to work; so
I went to work at my present calling, which were his too, if he would
have followed it, and I worked tolerable hard, I assure _you_, Pip. In
time I were able to keep him, and I kep him till he went off in a
purple leptic fit. And it were my intentions to have had put upon his
tombstone that, Whatsume’er the failings on his part, Remember reader
he were that good in his heart.”
Joe recited this couplet with such manifest pride and careful
perspicuity, that I asked him if he had made it himself.
“I made it,” said Joe, “my own self. I made it in a moment. It was like
striking out a horseshoe complete, in a single blow. I never was so
much surprised in all my life,—couldn’t credit my own ed,—to tell you
the truth, hardly believed it _were_ my own ed. As I was saying, Pip,
it were my intentions to have had it cut over him; but poetry costs
money, cut it how you will, small or large, and it were not done. Not
to mention bearers, all the money that could be spared were wanted for
my mother. She were in poor elth, and quite broke. She weren’t long of
following, poor soul, and her share of peace come round at last.”