Chapter II
My sister, Mrs. Joe Gargery, was more than twenty years
older than I, and had established a great reputation with
herself and the neighbors because she had brought me up "by
hand." Having at that time to find out for myself what the
expression meant, and knowing her to have a hard and heavy
hand, and to be much in the habit of laying it upon her
husband as well as upon me, I supposed that Joe Gargery and
I were both brought up by hand.
She was not a good-looking woman, my sister; and I had a
general impression that she must have made Joe Gargery marry
her by hand. Joe was a fair man, with curls of flaxen hair
on each side of his smooth face, and with eyes of such a
very undecided blue that they seemed to have somehow got
mixed with their own whites. He was a mild, good-natured,
sweet-tempered, easy-going, foolish, dear fellow,—a sort of
Hercules in strength, and also in weakness.
My sister, Mrs. Joe, with black hair and eyes, had such a
prevailing redness of skin that I sometimes used to wonder
whether it was possible she washed herself with a
nutmeg-grater instead of soap. She was tall and bony, and
almost always wore a coarse apron, fastened over her figure
behind with two loops, and having a square impregnable bib
in front, that was stuck full of pins and needles. She made
it a powerful merit in herself, and a strong reproach
against Joe, that she wore this apron so much. Though I
really see no reason why she should have worn it at all; or
why, if she did wear it at all, she should not have taken it
off, every day of her life.
Joe's forge adjoined our house, which was a wooden house,
as many of the dwellings in our country were,—most of them,
at that time. When I ran home from the churchyard, the forge
was shut up, and Joe was sitting alone in the kitchen. Joe
and I being fellow-sufferers, and having confidences as
such, Joe imparted a confidence to me, the moment I raised
the latch of the door and peeped in at him opposite to it,
sitting in the chimney corner.
"Mrs. Joe has been out a dozen times, looking for you,
Pip. And she's out now, making it a baker's dozen."
"Is she?"
"Yes, Pip," said Joe; "and what's worse, she's got
Tickler with her."
At this dismal intelligence, I twisted the only button on
my waistcoat round and round, and looked in great depression
at the fire. Tickler was a wax-ended piece of cane, worn
smooth by collision with my tickled frame.
"She sot down," said Joe, "and she got up, and she made a
grab at Tickler, and she Ram-paged out. That's what she
did," said Joe, slowly clearing the fire between the lower
bars with the poker, and looking at it; "she Ram-paged out,
Pip."
"Has she been gone long, Joe?" I always treated him as a
larger species of child, and as no more than my equal.
"Well," said Joe, glancing up at the Dutch clock, "she's
been on the Ram-page, this last spell, about five minutes,
Pip. She's a coming! Get behind the door, old chap, and have
the jack-towel betwixt you."
I took the advice. My sister, Mrs. Joe, throwing the door
wide open, and finding an obstruction behind it, immediately
divined the cause, and applied Tickler to its further
investigation. She concluded by throwing me—I often served
as a connubial missile—at Joe, who, glad to get hold of me
on any terms, passed me on into the chimney and quietly
fenced me up there with his great leg.
"Where have you been, you young monkey?" said Mrs. Joe,
stamping her foot. "Tell me directly what you've been doing
to wear me away with fret and fright and worrit, or I'd have
you out of that corner if you was fifty Pips, and he was
five hundred Gargerys."
"I have only been to the churchyard," said I, from my
stool, crying and rubbing myself.
"Churchyard!" repeated my sister. "If it warn't for me
you'd have been to the churchyard long ago, and stayed
there. Who brought you up by hand?"
"You did," said I.
"And why did I do it, I should like to know?" exclaimed
my sister.
I whimpered, "I don't know."
"I don't!" said my sister. "I'd never do it again! I know
that. I may truly say I've never had this apron of mine off
since born you were. It's bad enough to be a blacksmith's
wife (and him a Gargery) without being your mother."
My thoughts strayed from that question as I looked
disconsolately at the fire. For the fugitive out on the
marshes with the ironed leg, the mysterious young man, the
file, the food, and the dreadful pledge I was under to
commit a larceny on those sheltering premises, rose before
me in the avenging coals.
"Hah!" said Mrs. Joe, restoring Tickler to his station.
"Churchyard, indeed! You may well say churchyard, you two."
One of us, by the by, had not said it at all. "You'll drive
me to the churchyard betwixt you, one of these days, and O,
a pr-r-recious pair you'd be without me!"
As she applied herself to set the tea-things, Joe peeped
down at me over his leg, as if he were mentally casting me
and himself up, and calculating what kind of pair we
practically should make, under the grievous circumstances
foreshadowed. After that, he sat feeling his right-side
flaxen curls and whisker, and following Mrs. Joe about with
his blue eyes, as his manner always was at squally times.
My sister had a trenchant way of cutting our bread and
butter for us, that never varied. First, with her left hand
she jammed the loaf hard and fast against her bib,—where it
sometimes got a pin into it, and sometimes a needle, which
we afterwards got into our mouths. Then she took some butter
(not too much) on a knife and spread it on the loaf, in an
apothecary kind of way, as if she were making a
plaster,—using both sides of the knife with a slapping
dexterity, and trimming and moulding the butter off round
the crust. Then, she gave the knife a final smart wipe on
the edge of the plaster, and then sawed a very thick round
off the loaf: which she finally, before separating from the
loaf, hewed into two halves, of which Joe got one, and I the
other.
On the present occasion, though I was hungry, I dared not
eat my slice. I felt that I must have something in reserve
for my dreadful acquaintance, and his ally the still more
dreadful young man. I knew Mrs. Joe's housekeeping to be of
the strictest kind, and that my larcenous researches might
find nothing available in the safe. Therefore I resolved to
put my hunk of bread and butter down the leg of my trousers.
The effort of resolution necessary to the achievement of
this purpose I found to be quite awful. It was as if I had
to make up my mind to leap from the top of a high house, or
plunge into a great depth of water. And it was made the more
difficult by the unconscious Joe. In our already-mentioned
freemasonry as fellow-sufferers, and in his good-natured
companionship with me, it was our evening habit to compare
the way we bit through our slices, by silently holding them
up to each other's admiration now and then,—which stimulated
us to new exertions. To-night, Joe several times invited me,
by the display of his fast diminishing slice, to enter upon
our usual friendly competition; but he found me, each time,
with my yellow mug of tea on one knee, and my untouched
bread and butter on the other. At last, I desperately
considered that the thing I contemplated must be done, and
that it had best be done in the least improbable manner
consistent with the circumstances. I took advantage of a
moment when Joe had just looked at me, and got my bread and
butter down my leg.
Joe was evidently made uncomfortable by what he supposed
to be my loss of appetite, and took a thoughtful bite out of
his slice, which he didn't seem to enjoy. He turned it about
in his mouth much longer than usual, pondering over it a
good deal, and after all gulped it down like a pill. He was
about to take another bite, and had just got his head on one
side for a good purchase on it, when his eye fell on me, and
he saw that my bread and butter was gone.
The wonder and consternation with which Joe stopped on
the threshold of his bite and stared at me, were too evident
to escape my sister's observation.
"What's the matter now?" said she, smartly, as she put
down her cup.
"I say, you know!" muttered Joe, shaking his head at me
in very serious remonstrance. "Pip, old chap! You'll do
yourself a mischief. It'll stick somewhere. You can't have
chawed it, Pip."
"What's the matter now?" repeated my sister, more sharply
than before.
"If you can cough any trifle on it up, Pip, I'd recommend
you to do it," said Joe, all aghast. "Manners is manners,
but still your elth's your elth."
By this time, my sister was quite desperate, so she
pounced on Joe, and, taking him by the two whiskers, knocked
his head for a little while against the wall behind him,
while I sat in the corner, looking guiltily on.
"Now, perhaps you'll mention what's the matter," said my
sister, out of breath, "you staring great stuck pig."
Joe looked at her in a helpless way, then took a helpless
bite, and looked at me again.
"You know, Pip," said Joe, solemnly, with his last bite
in his cheek, and speaking in a confidential voice, as if we
two were quite alone, "you and me is always friends, and I'd
be the last to tell upon you, any time. But such a—" he
moved his chair and looked about the floor between us, and
then again at me—"such a most oncommon Bolt as that!"
"Been bolting his food, has he?" cried my sister.
"You know, old chap," said Joe, looking at me, and not at
Mrs. Joe, with his bite still in his cheek, "I Bolted,
myself, when I was your age—frequent—and as a boy I've been
among a many Bolters; but I never see your Bolting equal
yet, Pip, and it's a mercy you ain't Bolted dead."
My sister made a dive at me, and fished me up by the
hair, saying nothing more than the awful words, "You come
along and be dosed."
Some medical beast had revived Tar-water in those days as
a fine medicine, and Mrs. Joe always kept a supply of it in
the cupboard; having a belief in its virtues correspondent
to its nastiness. At the best of times, so much of this
elixir was administered to me as a choice restorative, that
I was conscious of going about, smelling like a new fence.
On this particular evening the urgency of my case demanded a
pint of this mixture, which was poured down my throat, for
my greater comfort, while Mrs. Joe held my head under her
arm, as a boot would be held in a bootjack. Joe got off with
half a pint; but was made to swallow that (much to his
disturbance, as he sat slowly munching and meditating before
the fire), "because he had had a turn." Judging from myself,
I should say he certainly had a turn afterwards, if he had
had none before.
Conscience is a dreadful thing when it accuses man or
boy; but when, in the case of a boy, that secret burden
co-operates with another secret burden down the leg of his
trousers, it is (as I can testify) a great punishment. The
guilty knowledge that I was going to rob Mrs. Joe—I never
thought I was going to rob Joe, for I never thought of any
of the housekeeping property as his—united to the necessity
of always keeping one hand on my bread and butter as I sat,
or when I was ordered about the kitchen on any small errand,
almost drove me out of my mind. Then, as the marsh winds
made the fire glow and flare, I thought I heard the voice
outside, of the man with the iron on his leg who had sworn
me to secrecy, declaring that he couldn't and wouldn't
starve until to-morrow, but must be fed now. At other times,
I thought, What if the young man who was with so much
difficulty restrained from imbruing his hands in me should
yield to a constitutional impatience, or should mistake the
time, and should think himself accredited to my heart and
liver to-night, instead of to-morrow! If ever anybody's hair
stood on end with terror, mine must have done so then. But,
perhaps, nobody's ever did?
It was Christmas Eve, and I had to stir the pudding for
next day, with a copper-stick, from seven to eight by the
Dutch clock. I tried it with the load upon my leg (and that
made me think afresh of the man with the load on his leg),
and found the tendency of exercise to bring the bread and
butter out at my ankle, quite unmanageable. Happily I
slipped away, and deposited that part of my conscience in my
garret bedroom.
"Hark!" said I, when I had done my stirring, and was
taking a final warm in the chimney corner before being sent
up to bed; "was that great guns, Joe?"
"Ah!" said Joe. "There's another conwict off."
"What does that mean, Joe?" said I.
Mrs. Joe, who always took explanations upon herself,
said, snappishly, "Escaped. Escaped." Administering the
definition like Tar-water.
While Mrs. Joe sat with her head bending over her
needlework, I put my mouth into the forms of saying to Joe,
"What's a convict?" Joe put his mouth into the forms of
returning such a highly elaborate answer, that I could make
out nothing of it but the single word "Pip."
"There was a conwict off last night," said Joe, aloud,
"after sunset-gun. And they fired warning of him. And now it
appears they're firing warning of another."
"Who's firing?" said I.
"Drat that boy," interposed my sister, frowning at me
over her work, "what a questioner he is. Ask no questions,
and you'll be told no lies."
It was not very polite to herself, I thought, to imply
that I should be told lies by her even if I did ask
questions. But she never was polite unless there was
company.
At this point Joe greatly augmented my curiosity by
taking the utmost pains to open his mouth very wide, and to
put it into the form of a word that looked to me like
"sulks." Therefore, I naturally pointed to Mrs. Joe, and put
my mouth into the form of saying, "her?" But Joe wouldn't
hear of that, at all, and again opened his mouth very wide,
and shook the form of a most emphatic word out of it. But I
could make nothing of the word.
"Mrs. Joe," said I, as a last resort, "I should like to
know—if you wouldn't much mind—where the firing comes from?"
"Lord bless the boy!" exclaimed my sister, as if she
didn't quite mean that but rather the contrary. "From the
Hulks!"
"Oh-h!" said I, looking at Joe. "Hulks!"
Joe gave a reproachful cough, as much as to say, "Well, I
told you so."
"And please, what's Hulks?" said I.
"That's the way with this boy!" exclaimed my sister,
pointing me out with her needle and thread, and shaking her
head at me. "Answer him one question, and he'll ask you a
dozen directly. Hulks are prison-ships, right 'cross th'
meshes." We always used that name for marshes, in our
country.
"I wonder who's put into prison-ships, and why they're
put there?" said I, in a general way, and with quiet
desperation.
It was too much for Mrs. Joe, who immediately rose. "I
tell you what, young fellow," said she, "I didn't bring you
up by hand to badger people's lives out. It would be blame
to me and not praise, if I had. People are put in the Hulks
because they murder, and because they rob, and forge, and do
all sorts of bad; and they always begin by asking questions.
Now, you get along to bed!"
I was never allowed a candle to light me to bed, and, as
I went up stairs in the dark, with my head tingling,—from
Mrs. Joe's thimble having played the tambourine upon it, to
accompany her last words,—I felt fearfully sensible of the
great convenience that the hulks were handy for me. I was
clearly on my way there. I had begun by asking questions,
and I was going to rob Mrs. Joe.
Since that time, which is far enough away now, I have
often thought that few people know what secrecy there is in
the young under terror. No matter how unreasonable the
terror, so that it be terror. I was in mortal terror of the
young man who wanted my heart and liver; I was in mortal
terror of my interlocutor with the iron leg; I was in mortal
terror of myself, from whom an awful promise had been
extracted; I had no hope of deliverance through my
all-powerful sister, who repulsed me at every turn; I am
afraid to think of what I might have done on requirement, in
the secrecy of my terror.
If I slept at all that night, it was only to imagine
myself drifting down the river on a strong spring-tide, to
the Hulks; a ghostly pirate calling out to me through a
speaking-trumpet, as I passed the gibbet-station, that I had
better come ashore and be hanged there at once, and not put
it off. I was afraid to sleep, even if I had been inclined,
for I knew that at the first faint dawn of morning I must
rob the pantry. There was no doing it in the night, for
there was no getting a light by easy friction then; to have
got one I must have struck it out of flint and steel, and
have made a noise like the very pirate himself rattling his
chains.
As soon as the great black velvet pall outside my little
window was shot with gray, I got up and went down stairs;
every board upon the way, and every crack in every board
calling after me, "Stop thief!" and "Get up, Mrs. Joe!" In
the pantry, which was far more abundantly supplied than
usual, owing to the season, I was very much alarmed by a
hare hanging up by the heels, whom I rather thought I caught
when my back was half turned, winking. I had no time for
verification, no time for selection, no time for anything,
for I had no time to spare. I stole some bread, some rind of
cheese, about half a jar of mincemeat (which I tied up in my
pocket-handkerchief with my last night's slice), some brandy
from a stone bottle (which I decanted into a glass bottle I
had secretly used for making that intoxicating fluid,
Spanish-liquorice-water, up in my room: diluting the stone
bottle from a jug in the kitchen cupboard), a meat bone with
very little on it, and a beautiful round compact pork pie. I
was nearly going away without the pie, but I was tempted to
mount upon a shelf, to look what it was that was put away so
carefully in a covered earthen ware dish in a corner, and I
found it was the pie, and I took it in the hope that it was
not intended for early use, and would not be missed for some
time.
There was a door in the kitchen, communicating with the
forge; I unlocked and unbolted that door, and got a file
from among Joe's tools. Then I put the fastenings as I had
found them, opened the door at which I had entered when I
ran home last night, shut it, and ran for the misty marshes.
Chapter III
It was a rimy morning, and very damp. I had seen the damp
lying on the outside of my little window, as if some goblin
had been crying there all night, and using the window for a
pocket-handkerchief. Now, I saw the damp lying on the bare
hedges and spare grass, like a coarser sort of spiders'
webs; hanging itself from twig to twig and blade to blade.
On every rail and gate, wet lay clammy, and the marsh mist
was so thick, that the wooden finger on the post directing
people to our village—a direction which they never accepted,
for they never came there—was invisible to me until I was
quite close under it. Then, as I looked up at it, while it
dripped, it seemed to my oppressed conscience like a phantom
devoting me to the Hulks.
The mist was heavier yet when I got out upon the marshes,
so that instead of my running at everything, everything
seemed to run at me. This was very disagreeable to a guilty
mind. The gates and dikes and banks came bursting at me
through the mist, as if they cried as plainly as could be,
"A boy with Somebody's else's pork pie! Stop him!" The
cattle came upon me with like suddenness, staring out of
their eyes, and steaming out of their nostrils, "Halloa,
young thief!" One black ox, with a white cravat on,—who even
had to my awakened conscience something of a clerical
air,—fixed me so obstinately with his eyes, and moved his
blunt head round in such an accusatory manner as I moved
round, that I blubbered out to him, "I couldn't help it,
sir! It wasn't for myself I took it!" Upon which he put down
his head, blew a cloud of smoke out of his nose, and
vanished with a kick-up of his hind-legs and a flourish of
his tail.
All this time, I was getting on towards the river; but
however fast I went, I couldn't warm my feet, to which the
damp cold seemed riveted, as the iron was riveted to the leg
of the man I was running to meet. I knew my way to the
Battery, pretty straight, for I had been down there on a
Sunday with Joe, and Joe, sitting on an old gun, had told me
that when I was 'prentice to him, regularly bound, we would
have such Larks there! However, in the confusion of the
mist, I found myself at last too far to the right, and
consequently had to try back along the river-side, on the
bank of loose stones above the mud and the stakes that
staked the tide out. Making my way along here with all
despatch, I had just crossed a ditch which I knew to be very
near the Battery, and had just scrambled up the mound beyond
the ditch, when I saw the man sitting before me. His back
was towards me, and he had his arms folded, and was nodding
forward, heavy with sleep.
I thought he would be more glad if I came upon him with
his breakfast, in that unexpected manner, so I went forward
softly and touched him on the shoulder. He instantly jumped
up, and it was not the same man, but another man!
And yet this man was dressed in coarse gray, too, and had
a great iron on his leg, and was lame, and hoarse, and cold,
and was everything that the other man was; except that he
had not the same face, and had a flat broad-brimmed
low-crowned felt hat on. All this I saw in a moment, for I
had only a moment to see it in: he swore an oath at me, made
a hit at me,—it was a round weak blow that missed me and
almost knocked himself down, for it made him stumble,—and
then he ran into the mist, stumbling twice as he went, and I
lost him.
"It's the young man!" I thought, feeling my heart shoot
as I identified him. I dare say I should have felt a pain in
my liver, too, if I had known where it was.
I was soon at the Battery after that, and there was the
right Man,—hugging himself and limping to and fro, as if he
had never all night left off hugging and limping,—waiting
for me. He was awfully cold, to be sure. I half expected to
see him drop down before my face and die of deadly cold. His
eyes looked so awfully hungry too, that when I handed him
the file and he laid it down on the grass, it occurred to me
he would have tried to eat it, if he had not seen my bundle.
He did not turn me upside down this time to get at what I
had, but left me right side upwards while I opened the
bundle and emptied my pockets.
"What's in the bottle, boy?" said he.
"Brandy," said I.
He was already handing mincemeat down his throat in the
most curious manner,—more like a man who was putting it away
somewhere in a violent hurry, than a man who was eating
it,—but he left off to take some of the liquor. He shivered
all the while so violently, that it was quite as much as he
could do to keep the neck of the bottle between his teeth,
without biting it off.
"I think you have got the ague," said I.
"I'm much of your opinion, boy," said he.
"It's bad about here," I told him. "You've been lying out
on the meshes, and they're dreadful aguish. Rheumatic too."
"I'll eat my breakfast afore they're the death of me,"
said he. "I'd do that, if I was going to be strung up to
that there gallows as there is over there, directly
afterwards. I'll beat the shivers so far, I'll bet you."
He was gobbling mincemeat, meatbone, bread, cheese, and
pork pie, all at once: staring distrustfully while he did so
at the mist all round us, and often stopping—even stopping
his jaws—to listen. Some real or fancied sound, some clink
upon the river or breathing of beast upon the marsh, now
gave him a start, and he said, suddenly,—
"You're not a deceiving imp? You brought no one with
you?"
"No, sir! No!"
"Nor giv' no one the office to follow you?"
"No!"
"Well," said he, "I believe you. You'd be but a fierce
young hound indeed, if at your time of life you could help
to hunt a wretched warmint hunted as near death and dunghill
as this poor wretched warmint is!"
Something clicked in his throat as if he had works in him
like a clock, and was going to strike. And he smeared his
ragged rough sleeve over his eyes.
Pitying his desolation, and watching him as he gradually
settled down upon the pie, I made bold to say, "I am glad
you enjoy it."
"Did you speak?"
"I said I was glad you enjoyed it."
"Thankee, my boy. I do."
I had often watched a large dog of ours eating his food;
and I now noticed a decided similarity between the dog's way
of eating, and the man's. The man took strong sharp sudden
bites, just like the dog. He swallowed, or rather snapped
up, every mouthful, too soon and too fast; and he looked
sideways here and there while he ate, as if he thought there
was danger in every direction of somebody's coming to take
the pie away. He was altogether too unsettled in his mind
over it, to appreciate it comfortably I thought, or to have
anybody to dine with him, without making a chop with his
jaws at the visitor. In all of which particulars he was very
like the dog.
"I am afraid you won't leave any of it for him," said I,
timidly; after a silence during which I had hesitated as to
the politeness of making the remark. "There's no more to be
got where that came from." It was the certainty of this fact
that impelled me to offer the hint.
"Leave any for him? Who's him?" said my friend, stopping
in his crunching of pie-crust.
"The young man. That you spoke of. That was hid with
you."
"Oh ah!" he returned, with something like a gruff laugh.
"Him? Yes, yes! He don't want no wittles."
"I thought he looked as if he did," said I.
The man stopped eating, and regarded me with the keenest
scrutiny and the greatest surprise.
"Looked? When?"
"Just now."
"Where?"
"Yonder," said I, pointing; "over there, where I found
him nodding asleep, and thought it was you."
He held me by the collar and stared at me so, that I
began to think his first idea about cutting my throat had
revived.
"Dressed like you, you know, only with a hat," I
explained, trembling; "and—and"—I was very anxious to put
this delicately—"and with—the same reason for wanting to
borrow a file. Didn't you hear the cannon last night?"
"Then there was firing!" he said to himself.
"I wonder you shouldn't have been sure of that," I
returned, "for we heard it up at home, and that's farther
away, and we were shut in besides."
"Why, see now!" said he. "When a man's alone on these
flats, with a light head and a light stomach, perishing of
cold and want, he hears nothin' all night, but guns firing,
and voices calling. Hears? He sees the soldiers, with their
red coats lighted up by the torches carried afore, closing
in round him. Hears his number called, hears himself
challenged, hears the rattle of the muskets, hears the
orders 'Make ready! Present! Cover him steady, men!' and is
laid hands on—and there's nothin'! Why, if I see one
pursuing party last night—coming up in order, Damn 'em, with
their tramp, tramp—I see a hundred. And as to firing! Why, I
see the mist shake with the cannon, arter it was broad
day,—But this man"; he had said all the rest, as if he had
forgotten my being there; "did you notice anything in him?"
"He had a badly bruised face," said I, recalling what I
hardly knew I knew.
"Not here?" exclaimed the man, striking his left cheek
mercilessly, with the flat of his hand.
"Yes, there!"
"Where is he?" He crammed what little food was left, into
the breast of his gray jacket. "Show me the way he went.
I'll pull him down, like a bloodhound. Curse this iron on my
sore leg! Give us hold of the file, boy."
I indicated in what direction the mist had shrouded the
other man, and he looked up at it for an instant. But he was
down on the rank wet grass, filing at his iron like a
madman, and not minding me or minding his own leg, which had
an old chafe upon it and was bloody, but which he handled as
roughly as if it had no more feeling in it than the file. I
was very much afraid of him again, now that he had worked
himself into this fierce hurry, and I was likewise very much
afraid of keeping away from home any longer. I told him I
must go, but he took no notice, so I thought the best thing
I could do was to slip off. The last I saw of him, his head
was bent over his knee and he was working hard at his
fetter, muttering impatient imprecations at it and at his
leg. The last I heard of him, I stopped in the mist to
listen, and the file was still going.
Chapter IV
I fully expected to find a Constable in the kitchen,
waiting to take me up. But not only was there no Constable
there, but no discovery had yet been made of the robbery.
Mrs. Joe was prodigiously busy in getting the house ready
for the festivities of the day, and Joe had been put upon
the kitchen doorstep to keep him out of the dust-pan,—an
article into which his destiny always led him, sooner or
later, when my sister was vigorously reaping the floors of
her establishment.
"And where the deuce ha' you been?" was Mrs. Joe's
Christmas salutation, when I and my conscience showed
ourselves.
I said I had been down to hear the Carols. "Ah! well!"
observed Mrs. Joe. "You might ha' done worse." Not a doubt
of that I thought.
"Perhaps if I warn't a blacksmith's wife, and (what's the
same thing) a slave with her apron never off, I should have
been to hear the Carols," said Mrs. Joe. "I'm rather partial
to Carols, myself, and that's the best of reasons for my
never hearing any."
Joe, who had ventured into the kitchen after me as the
dustpan had retired before us, drew the back of his hand
across his nose with a conciliatory air, when Mrs. Joe
darted a look at him, and, when her eyes were withdrawn,
secretly crossed his two forefingers, and exhibited them to
me, as our token that Mrs. Joe was in a cross temper. This
was so much her normal state, that Joe and I would often,
for weeks together, be, as to our fingers, like monumental
Crusaders as to their legs.
We were to have a superb dinner, consisting of a leg of
pickled pork and greens, and a pair of roast stuffed fowls.
A handsome mince-pie had been made yesterday morning (which
accounted for the mincemeat not being missed), and the
pudding was already on the boil. These extensive
arrangements occasioned us to be cut off unceremoniously in
respect of breakfast; "for I ain't," said Mrs. Joe,—"I ain't
a going to have no formal cramming and busting and washing
up now, with what I've got before me, I promise you!"
So, we had our slices served out, as if we were two
thousand troops on a forced march instead of a man and boy
at home; and we took gulps of milk and water, with
apologetic countenances, from a jug on the dresser. In the
meantime, Mrs. Joe put clean white curtains up, and tacked a
new flowered flounce across the wide chimney to replace the
old one, and uncovered the little state parlor across the
passage, which was never uncovered at any other time, but
passed the rest of the year in a cool haze of silver paper,
which even extended to the four little white crockery
poodles on the mantel-shelf, each with a black nose and a
basket of flowers in his mouth, and each the counterpart of
the other. Mrs. Joe was a very clean housekeeper, but had an
exquisite art of making her cleanliness more uncomfortable
and unacceptable than dirt itself. Cleanliness is next to
Godliness, and some people do the same by their religion.
My sister, having so much to do, was going to church
vicariously, that is to say, Joe and I were going. In his
working—clothes, Joe was a well-knit characteristic-looking
blacksmith; in his holiday clothes, he was more like a
scarecrow in good circumstances, than anything else. Nothing
that he wore then fitted him or seemed to belong to him; and
everything that he wore then grazed him. On the present
festive occasion he emerged from his room, when the blithe
bells were going, the picture of misery, in a full suit of
Sunday penitentials. As to me, I think my sister must have
had some general idea that I was a young offender whom an
Accoucheur Policeman had taken up (on my birthday) and
delivered over to her, to be dealt with according to the
outraged majesty of the law. I was always treated as if I
had insisted on being born in opposition to the dictates of
reason, religion, and morality, and against the dissuading
arguments of my best friends. Even when I was taken to have
a new suit of clothes, the tailor had orders to make them
like a kind of Reformatory, and on no account to let me have
the free use of my limbs.
Joe and I going to church, therefore, must have been a
moving spectacle for compassionate minds. Yet, what I
suffered outside was nothing to what I underwent within. The
terrors that had assailed me whenever Mrs. Joe had gone near
the pantry, or out of the room, were only to be equalled by
the remorse with which my mind dwelt on what my hands had
done. Under the weight of my wicked secret, I pondered
whether the Church would be powerful enough to shield me
from the vengeance of the terrible young man, if I divulged
to that establishment. I conceived the idea that the time
when the banns were read and when the clergyman said, "Ye
are now to declare it!" would be the time for me to rise and
propose a private conference in the vestry. I am far from
being sure that I might not have astonished our small
congregation by resorting to this extreme measure, but for
its being Christmas Day and no Sunday.
Mr. Wopsle, the clerk at church, was to dine with us; and
Mr. Hubble the wheelwright and Mrs. Hubble; and Uncle
Pumblechook (Joe's uncle, but Mrs. Joe appropriated him),
who was a well-to-do cornchandler in the nearest town, and
drove his own chaise-cart. The dinner hour was half-past
one. When Joe and I got home, we found the table laid, and
Mrs. Joe dressed, and the dinner dressing, and the front
door unlocked (it never was at any other time) for the
company to enter by, and everything most splendid. And
still, not a word of the robbery.
The time came, without bringing with it any relief to my
feelings, and the company came. Mr. Wopsle, united to a
Roman nose and a large shining bald forehead, had a deep
voice which he was uncommonly proud of; indeed it was
understood among his acquaintance that if you could only
give him his head, he would read the clergyman into fits; he
himself confessed that if the Church was "thrown open,"
meaning to competition, he would not despair of making his
mark in it. The Church not being "thrown open," he was, as I
have said, our clerk. But he punished the Amens
tremendously; and when he gave out the psalm,—always giving
the whole verse,—he looked all round the congregation first,
as much as to say, "You have heard my friend overhead;
oblige me with your opinion of this style!"
I opened the door to the company,—making believe that it
was a habit of ours to open that door,—and I opened it first
to Mr. Wopsle, next to Mr. and Mrs. Hubble, and last of all
to Uncle Pumblechook. N.B. I was not allowed to call him
uncle, under the severest penalties.
"Mrs. Joe," said Uncle Pumblechook, a large
hard-breathing middle-aged slow man, with a mouth like a
fish, dull staring eyes, and sandy hair standing upright on
his head, so that he looked as if he had just been all but
choked, and had that moment come to, "I have brought you as
the compliments of the season—I have brought you, Mum, a
bottle of sherry wine—and I have brought you, Mum, a bottle
of port wine."
Every Christmas Day he presented himself, as a profound
novelty, with exactly the same words, and carrying the two
bottles like dumb-bells. Every Christmas Day, Mrs. Joe
replied, as she now replied, "O, Un—cle Pum-ble—chook! This
is kind!" Every Christmas Day, he retorted, as he now
retorted, "It's no more than your merits. And now are you
all bobbish, and how's Sixpennorth of halfpence?" meaning
me.
We dined on these occasions in the kitchen, and
adjourned, for the nuts and oranges and apples to the
parlor; which was a change very like Joe's change from his
working-clothes to his Sunday dress. My sister was
uncommonly lively on the present occasion, and indeed was
generally more gracious in the society of Mrs. Hubble than
in other company. I remember Mrs. Hubble as a little curly
sharp-edged person in sky-blue, who held a conventionally
juvenile position, because she had married Mr. Hubble,—I
don't know at what remote period,—when she was much younger
than he. I remember Mr Hubble as a tough, high-shouldered,
stooping old man, of a sawdusty fragrance, with his legs
extraordinarily wide apart: so that in my short days I
always saw some miles of open country between them when I
met him coming up the lane.
Among this good company I should have felt myself, even
if I hadn't robbed the pantry, in a false position. Not
because I was squeezed in at an acute angle of the
tablecloth, with the table in my chest, and the
Pumblechookian elbow in my eye, nor because I was not
allowed to speak (I didn't want to speak), nor because I was
regaled with the scaly tips of the drumsticks of the fowls,
and with those obscure corners of pork of which the pig,
when living, had had the least reason to be vain. No; I
should not have minded that, if they would only have left me
alone. But they wouldn't leave me alone. They seemed to
think the opportunity lost, if they failed to point the
conversation at me, every now and then, and stick the point
into me. I might have been an unfortunate little bull in a
Spanish arena, I got so smartingly touched up by these moral
goads.
It began the moment we sat down to dinner. Mr. Wopsle
said grace with theatrical declamation,—as it now appears to
me, something like a religious cross of the Ghost in Hamlet
with Richard the Third,—and ended with the very proper
aspiration that we might be truly grateful. Upon which my
sister fixed me with her eye, and said, in a low reproachful
voice, "Do you hear that? Be grateful."
"Especially," said Mr. Pumblechook, "be grateful, boy, to
them which brought you up by hand."
Mrs. Hubble shook her head, and contemplating me with a
mournful presentiment that I should come to no good, asked,
"Why is it that the young are never grateful?" This moral
mystery seemed too much for the company until Mr. Hubble
tersely solved it by saying, "Naterally wicious." Everybody
then murmured "True!" and looked at me in a particularly
unpleasant and personal manner.
Joe's station and influence were something feebler (if
possible) when there was company than when there was none.
But he always aided and comforted me when he could, in some
way of his own, and he always did so at dinner-time by
giving me gravy, if there were any. There being plenty of
gravy to-day, Joe spooned into my plate, at this point,
about half a pint.
A little later on in the dinner, Mr. Wopsle reviewed the
sermon with some severity, and intimated—in the usual
hypothetical case of the Church being "thrown open"—what
kind of sermon he would have given them. After favoring them
with some heads of that discourse, he remarked that he
considered the subject of the day's homily, ill chosen;
which was the less excusable, he added, when there were so
many subjects "going about."
"True again," said Uncle Pumblechook. "You've hit it,
sir! Plenty of subjects going about, for them that know how
to put salt upon their tails. That's what's wanted. A man
needn't go far to find a subject, if he's ready with his
salt-box." Mr. Pumblechook added, after a short interval of
reflection, "Look at Pork alone. There's a subject! If you
want a subject, look at Pork!"
"True, sir. Many a moral for the young," returned Mr.
Wopsle,—and I knew he was going to lug me in, before he said
it; "might be deduced from that text."
("You listen to this," said my sister to me, in a severe
parenthesis.)
Joe gave me some more gravy.
"Swine," pursued Mr. Wopsle, in his deepest voice, and
pointing his fork at my blushes, as if he were mentioning my
Christian name,—"swine were the companions of the prodigal.
The gluttony of Swine is put before us, as an example to the
young." (I thought this pretty well in him who had been
praising up the pork for being so plump and juicy.) "What is
detestable in a pig is more detestable in a boy."
"Or girl," suggested Mr. Hubble.
"Of course, or girl, Mr. Hubble," assented Mr. Wopsle,
rather irritably, "but there is no girl present."
"Besides," said Mr. Pumblechook, turning sharp on me,
"think what you've got to be grateful for. If you'd been
born a Squeaker—"
"He was, if ever a child was," said my sister, most
emphatically.
Joe gave me some more gravy.
"Well, but I mean a four-footed Squeaker," said Mr.
Pumblechook. "If you had been born such, would you have been
here now? Not you—"
"Unless in that form," said Mr. Wopsle, nodding towards
the dish.
"But I don't mean in that form, sir," returned Mr.
Pumblechook, who had an objection to being interrupted; "I
mean, enjoying himself with his elders and betters, and
improving himself with their conversation, and rolling in
the lap of luxury. Would he have been doing that? No, he
wouldn't. And what would have been your destination?"
turning on me again. "You would have been disposed of for so
many shillings according to the market price of the article,
and Dunstable the butcher would have come up to you as you
lay in your straw, and he would have whipped you under his
left arm, and with his right he would have tucked up his
frock to get a penknife from out of his waistcoat-pocket,
and he would have shed your blood and had your life. No
bringing up by hand then. Not a bit of it!"
Joe offered me more gravy, which I was afraid to take.
"He was a world of trouble to you, ma'am," said Mrs.
Hubble, commiserating my sister.
"Trouble?" echoed my sister; "trouble?" and then entered
on a fearful catalogue of all the illnesses I had been
guilty of, and all the acts of sleeplessness I had
committed, and all the high places I had tumbled from, and
all the low places I had tumbled into, and all the injuries
I had done myself, and all the times she had wished me in my
grave, and I had contumaciously refused to go there.
I think the Romans must have aggravated one another very
much, with their noses. Perhaps, they became the restless
people they were, in consequence. Anyhow, Mr. Wopsle's Roman
nose so aggravated me, during the recital of my
misdemeanours, that I should have liked to pull it until he
howled. But, all I had endured up to this time was nothing
in comparison with the awful feelings that took possession
of me when the pause was broken which ensued upon my
sister's recital, and in which pause everybody had looked at
me (as I felt painfully conscious) with indignation and
abhorrence.
"Yet," said Mr. Pumblechook, leading the company gently
back to the theme from which they had strayed,
"Pork—regarded as biled—is rich, too; ain't it?"
"Have a little brandy, uncle," said my sister.
O Heavens, it had come at last! He would find it was
weak, he would say it was weak, and I was lost! I held tight
to the leg of the table under the cloth, with both hands,
and awaited my fate.
My sister went for the stone bottle, came back with the
stone bottle, and poured his brandy out: no one else taking
any. The wretched man trifled with his glass,—took it up,
looked at it through the light, put it down,—prolonged my
misery. All this time Mrs. Joe and Joe were briskly clearing
the table for the pie and pudding.
I couldn't keep my eyes off him. Always holding tight by
the leg of the table with my hands and feet, I saw the
miserable creature finger his glass playfully, take it up,
smile, throw his head back, and drink the brandy off.
Instantly afterwards, the company were seized with
unspeakable consternation, owing to his springing to his
feet, turning round several times in an appalling spasmodic
whooping-cough dance, and rushing out at the door; he then
became visible through the window, violently plunging and
expectorating, making the most hideous faces, and apparently
out of his mind.
I held on tight, while Mrs. Joe and Joe ran to him. I
didn't know how I had done it, but I had no doubt I had
murdered him somehow. In my dreadful situation, it was a
relief when he was brought back, and surveying the company
all round as if they had disagreed with him, sank down into
his chair with the one significant gasp, "Tar!"
I had filled up the bottle from the tar-water jug. I knew
he would be worse by and by. I moved the table, like a
Medium of the present day, by the vigor of my unseen hold
upon it.
"Tar!" cried my sister, in amazement. "Why, how ever
could Tar come there?"
But, Uncle Pumblechook, who was omnipotent in that
kitchen, wouldn't hear the word, wouldn't hear of the
subject, imperiously waved it all away with his hand, and
asked for hot gin and water. My sister, who had begun to be
alarmingly meditative, had to employ herself actively in
getting the gin the hot water, the sugar, and the
lemon-peel, and mixing them. For the time being at least, I
was saved. I still held on to the leg of the table, but
clutched it now with the fervor of gratitude.
By degrees, I became calm enough to release my grasp and
partake of pudding. Mr. Pumblechook partook of pudding. All
partook of pudding. The course terminated, and Mr.
Pumblechook had begun to beam under the genial influence of
gin and water. I began to think I should get over the day,
when my sister said to Joe, "Clean plates,—cold."
I clutched the leg of the table again immediately, and
pressed it to my bosom as if it had been the companion of my
youth and friend of my soul. I foresaw what was coming, and
I felt that this time I really was gone.
"You must taste," said my sister, addressing the guests
with her best grace—"you must taste, to finish with, such a
delightful and delicious present of Uncle Pumblechook's!"
Must they! Let them not hope to taste it!
"You must know," said my sister, rising, "it's a pie; a
savory pork pie."
The company murmured their compliments. Uncle
Pumblechook, sensible of having deserved well of his
fellow-creatures, said,—quite vivaciously, all things
considered,—"Well, Mrs. Joe, we'll do our best endeavors;
let us have a cut at this same pie."
My sister went out to get it. I heard her steps proceed
to the pantry. I saw Mr. Pumblechook balance his knife. I
saw reawakening appetite in the Roman nostrils of Mr.
Wopsle. I heard Mr. Hubble remark that "a bit of savory pork
pie would lay atop of anything you could mention, and do no
harm," and I heard Joe say, "You shall have some, Pip." I
have never been absolutely certain whether I uttered a
shrill yell of terror, merely in spirit, or in the bodily
hearing of the company. I felt that I could bear no more,
and that I must run away. I released the leg of the table,
and ran for my life.
But I ran no farther than the house door, for there I ran
head-foremost into a party of soldiers with their muskets,
one of whom held out a pair of handcuffs to me, saying,
"Here you are, look sharp, come on!"
Chapter V
The apparition of a file of soldiers ringing down the
but-ends of their loaded muskets on our door-step, caused
the dinner-party to rise from table in confusion, and caused
Mrs. Joe re-entering the kitchen empty-handed, to stop short
and stare, in her wondering lament of "Gracious goodness
gracious me, what's gone—with the—pie!"
The sergeant and I were in the kitchen when Mrs. Joe
stood staring; at which crisis I partially recovered the use
of my senses. It was the sergeant who had spoken to me, and
he was now looking round at the company, with his handcuffs
invitingly extended towards them in his right hand, and his
left on my shoulder.
"Excuse me, ladies and gentleman," said the sergeant,
"but as I have mentioned at the door to this smart young
shaver," (which he hadn't), "I am on a chase in the name of
the king, and I want the blacksmith."
"And pray what might you want with him?" retorted my
sister, quick to resent his being wanted at all.
"Missis," returned the gallant sergeant, "speaking for
myself, I should reply, the honor and pleasure of his fine
wife's acquaintance; speaking for the king, I answer, a
little job done."
This was received as rather neat in the sergeant;
insomuch that Mr. Pumblechook cried audibly, "Good again!"
"You see, blacksmith," said the sergeant, who had by this
time picked out Joe with his eye, "we have had an accident
with these, and I find the lock of one of 'em goes wrong,
and the coupling don't act pretty. As they are wanted for
immediate service, will you throw your eye over them?"
Joe threw his eye over them, and pronounced that the job
would necessitate the lighting of his forge fire, and would
take nearer two hours than one, "Will it? Then will you set
about it at once, blacksmith?" said the off-hand sergeant,
"as it's on his Majesty's service. And if my men can bear a
hand anywhere, they'll make themselves useful." With that,
he called to his men, who came trooping into the kitchen one
after another, and piled their arms in a corner. And then
they stood about, as soldiers do; now, with their hands
loosely clasped before them; now, resting a knee or a
shoulder; now, easing a belt or a pouch; now, opening the
door to spit stiffly over their high stocks, out into the
yard.
All these things I saw without then knowing that I saw
them, for I was in an agony of apprehension. But beginning
to perceive that the handcuffs were not for me, and that the
military had so far got the better of the pie as to put it
in the background, I collected a little more of my scattered
wits.
"Would you give me the time?" said the sergeant,
addressing himself to Mr. Pumblechook, as to a man whose
appreciative powers justified the inference that he was
equal to the time.
"It's just gone half past two."
"That's not so bad," said the sergeant, reflecting; "even
if I was forced to halt here nigh two hours, that'll do. How
far might you call yourselves from the marshes, hereabouts?
Not above a mile, I reckon?"
"Just a mile," said Mrs. Joe.
"That'll do. We begin to close in upon 'em about dusk. A
little before dusk, my orders are. That'll do."
"Convicts, sergeant?" asked Mr. Wopsle, in a
matter-of-course way.
"Ay!" returned the sergeant, "two. They're pretty well
known to be out on the marshes still, and they won't try to
get clear of 'em before dusk. Anybody here seen anything of
any such game?"
Everybody, myself excepted, said no, with confidence.
Nobody thought of me.
"Well!" said the sergeant, "they'll find themselves
trapped in a circle, I expect, sooner than they count on.
Now, blacksmith! If you're ready, his Majesty the King is."
Joe had got his coat and waistcoat and cravat off, and
his leather apron on, and passed into the forge. One of the
soldiers opened its wooden windows, another lighted the
fire, another turned to at the bellows, the rest stood round
the blaze, which was soon roaring. Then Joe began to hammer
and clink, hammer and clink, and we all looked on.
The interest of the impending pursuit not only absorbed
the general attention, but even made my sister liberal. She
drew a pitcher of beer from the cask for the soldiers, and
invited the sergeant to take a glass of brandy. But Mr.
Pumblechook said, sharply, "Give him wine, Mum. I'll engage
there's no Tar in that:" so, the sergeant thanked him and
said that as he preferred his drink without tar, he would
take wine, if it was equally convenient. When it was given
him, he drank his Majesty's health and compliments of the
season, and took it all at a mouthful and smacked his lips.
"Good stuff, eh, sergeant?" said Mr. Pumblechook.
"I'll tell you something," returned the sergeant; "I
suspect that stuff's of your providing."
Mr. Pumblechook, with a fat sort of laugh, said, "Ay, ay?
Why?"
"Because," returned the sergeant, clapping him on the
shoulder, "you're a man that knows what's what."
"D'ye think so?" said Mr. Pumblechook, with his former
laugh. "Have another glass!"
"With you. Hob and nob," returned the sergeant. "The top
of mine to the foot of yours,—the foot of yours to the top
of mine,—Ring once, ring twice,—the best tune on the Musical
Glasses! Your health. May you live a thousand years, and
never be a worse judge of the right sort than you are at the
present moment of your life!"
The sergeant tossed off his glass again and seemed quite
ready for another glass. I noticed that Mr. Pumblechook in
his hospitality appeared to forget that he had made a
present of the wine, but took the bottle from Mrs. Joe and
had all the credit of handing it about in a gush of
joviality. Even I got some. And he was so very free of the
wine that he even called for the other bottle, and handed
that about with the same liberality, when the first was
gone.
As I watched them while they all stood clustering about
the forge, enjoying themselves so much, I thought what
terrible good sauce for a dinner my fugitive friend on the
marshes was. They had not enjoyed themselves a quarter so
much, before the entertainment was brightened with the
excitement he furnished. And now, when they were all in
lively anticipation of "the two villains" being taken, and
when the bellows seemed to roar for the fugitives, the fire
to flare for them, the smoke to hurry away in pursuit of
them, Joe to hammer and clink for them, and all the murky
shadows on the wall to shake at them in menace as the blaze
rose and sank, and the red-hot sparks dropped and died, the
pale afternoon outside almost seemed in my pitying young
fancy to have turned pale on their account, poor wretches.
At last, Joe's job was done, and the ringing and roaring
stopped. As Joe got on his coat, he mustered courage to
propose that some of us should go down with the soldiers and
see what came of the hunt. Mr. Pumblechook and Mr. Hubble
declined, on the plea of a pipe and ladies' society; but Mr.
Wopsle said he would go, if Joe would. Joe said he was
agreeable, and would take me, if Mrs. Joe approved. We never
should have got leave to go, I am sure, but for Mrs. Joe's
curiosity to know all about it and how it ended. As it was,
she merely stipulated, "If you bring the boy back with his
head blown to bits by a musket, don't look to me to put it
together again."
The sergeant took a polite leave of the ladies, and
parted from Mr. Pumblechook as from a comrade; though I
doubt if he were quite as fully sensible of that gentleman's
merits under arid conditions, as when something moist was
going. His men resumed their muskets and fell in. Mr.
Wopsle, Joe, and I, received strict charge to keep in the
rear, and to speak no word after we reached the marshes.
When we were all out in the raw air and were steadily moving
towards our business, I treasonably whispered to Joe, "I
hope, Joe, we shan't find them." and Joe whispered to me,
"I'd give a shilling if they had cut and run, Pip."
We were joined by no stragglers from the village, for the
weather was cold and threatening, the way dreary, the
footing bad, darkness coming on, and the people had good
fires in-doors and were keeping the day. A few faces hurried
to glowing windows and looked after us, but none came out.
We passed the finger-post, and held straight on to the
churchyard. There we were stopped a few minutes by a signal
from the sergeant's hand, while two or three of his men
dispersed themselves among the graves, and also examined the
porch. They came in again without finding anything, and then
we struck out on the open marshes, through the gate at the
side of the churchyard. A bitter sleet came rattling against
us here on the east wind, and Joe took me on his back.
Now that we were out upon the dismal wilderness where
they little thought I had been within eight or nine hours
and had seen both men hiding, I considered for the first
time, with great dread, if we should come upon them, would
my particular convict suppose that it was I who had brought
the soldiers there? He had asked me if I was a deceiving
imp, and he had said I should be a fierce young hound if I
joined the hunt against him. Would he believe that I was
both imp and hound in treacherous earnest, and had betrayed
him?
It was of no use asking myself this question now. There I
was, on Joe's back, and there was Joe beneath me, charging
at the ditches like a hunter, and stimulating Mr. Wopsle not
to tumble on his Roman nose, and to keep up with us. The
soldiers were in front of us, extending into a pretty wide
line with an interval between man and man. We were taking
the course I had begun with, and from which I had diverged
in the mist. Either the mist was not out again yet, or the
wind had dispelled it. Under the low red glare of sunset,
the beacon, and the gibbet, and the mound of the Battery,
and the opposite shore of the river, were plain, though all
of a watery lead color.
With my heart thumping like a blacksmith at Joe's broad
shoulder, I looked all about for any sign of the convicts. I
could see none, I could hear none. Mr. Wopsle had greatly
alarmed me more than once, by his blowing and hard
breathing; but I knew the sounds by this time, and could
dissociate them from the object of pursuit. I got a dreadful
start, when I thought I heard the file still going; but it
was only a sheep-bell. The sheep stopped in their eating and
looked timidly at us; and the cattle, their heads turned
from the wind and sleet, stared angrily as if they held us
responsible for both annoyances; but, except these things,
and the shudder of the dying day in every blade of grass,
there was no break in the bleak stillness of the marshes.
The soldiers were moving on in the direction of the old
Battery, and we were moving on a little way behind them,
when, all of a sudden, we all stopped. For there had reached
us on the wings of the wind and rain, a long shout. It was
repeated. It was at a distance towards the east, but it was
long and loud. Nay, there seemed to be two or more shouts
raised together,—if one might judge from a confusion in the
sound.
To this effect the sergeant and the nearest men were
speaking under their breath, when Joe and I came up. After
another moment's listening, Joe (who was a good judge)
agreed, and Mr. Wopsle (who was a bad judge) agreed. The
sergeant, a decisive man, ordered that the sound should not
be answered, but that the course should be changed, and that
his men should make towards it "at the double." So we
slanted to the right (where the East was), and Joe pounded
away so wonderfully, that I had to hold on tight to keep my
seat.
It was a run indeed now, and what Joe called, in the only
two words he spoke all the time, "a Winder." Down banks and
up banks, and over gates, and splashing into dikes, and
breaking among coarse rushes: no man cared where he went. As
we came nearer to the shouting, it became more and more
apparent that it was made by more than one voice. Sometimes,
it seemed to stop altogether, and then the soldiers stopped.
When it broke out again, the soldiers made for it at a
greater rate than ever, and we after them. After a while, we
had so run it down, that we could hear one voice calling
"Murder!" and another voice, "Convicts! Runaways! Guard!
This way for the runaway convicts!" Then both voices would
seem to be stifled in a struggle, and then would break out
again. And when it had come to this, the soldiers ran like
deer, and Joe too.
The sergeant ran in first, when we had run the noise
quite down, and two of his men ran in close upon him. Their
pieces were cocked and levelled when we all ran in.
"Here are both men!" panted the sergeant, struggling at
the bottom of a ditch. "Surrender, you two! and confound you
for two wild beasts! Come asunder!"
Water was splashing, and mud was flying, and oaths were
being sworn, and blows were being struck, when some more men
went down into the ditch to help the sergeant, and dragged
out, separately, my convict and the other one. Both were
bleeding and panting and execrating and struggling; but of
course I knew them both directly.
"Mind!" said my convict, wiping blood from his face with
his ragged sleeves, and shaking torn hair from his fingers:
"I took him! I give him up to you! Mind that!"
"It's not much to be particular about," said the
sergeant; "it'll do you small good, my man, being in the
same plight yourself. Handcuffs there!"
"I don't expect it to do me any good. I don't want it to
do me more good than it does now," said my convict, with a
greedy laugh. "I took him. He knows it. That's enough for
me."
The other convict was livid to look at, and, in addition
to the old bruised left side of his face, seemed to be
bruised and torn all over. He could not so much as get his
breath to speak, until they were both separately handcuffed,
but leaned upon a soldier to keep himself from falling.
"Take notice, guard,—he tried to murder me," were his
first words.
"Tried to murder him?" said my convict, disdainfully.
"Try, and not do it? I took him, and giv' him up; that's
what I done. I not only prevented him getting off the
marshes, but I dragged him here,—dragged him this far on his
way back. He's a gentleman, if you please, this villain.
Now, the Hulks has got its gentleman again, through me.
Murder him? Worth my while, too, to murder him, when I could
do worse and drag him back!"
The other one still gasped, "He tried—he tried-to—murder
me. Bear—bear witness."
"Lookee here!" said my convict to the sergeant.
"Single-handed I got clear of the prison-ship; I made a dash
and I done it. I could ha' got clear of these death-cold
flats likewise—look at my leg: you won't find much iron on
it—if I hadn't made the discovery that he was here. Let him
go free? Let him profit by the means as I found out? Let him
make a tool of me afresh and again? Once more? No, no, no.
If I had died at the bottom there," and he made an emphatic
swing at the ditch with his manacled hands, "I'd have held
to him with that grip, that you should have been safe to
find him in my hold."
The other fugitive, who was evidently in extreme horror
of his companion, repeated, "He tried to murder me. I should
have been a dead man if you had not come up."
"He lies!" said my convict, with fierce energy. "He's a
liar born, and he'll die a liar. Look at his face; ain't it
written there? Let him turn those eyes of his on me. I defy
him to do it."
The other, with an effort at a scornful smile, which
could not, however, collect the nervous working of his mouth
into any set expression, looked at the soldiers, and looked
about at the marshes and at the sky, but certainly did not
look at the speaker.
"Do you see him?" pursued my convict. "Do you see what a
villain he is? Do you see those grovelling and wandering
eyes? That's how he looked when we were tried together. He
never looked at me."
The other, always working and working his dry lips and
turning his eyes restlessly about him far and near, did at
last turn them for a moment on the speaker, with the words,
"You are not much to look at," and with a half-taunting
glance at the bound hands. At that point, my convict became
so frantically exasperated, that he would have rushed upon
him but for the interposition of the soldiers. "Didn't I
tell you," said the other convict then, "that he would
murder me, if he could?" And any one could see that he shook
with fear, and that there broke out upon his lips curious
white flakes, like thin snow.
"Enough of this parley," said the sergeant. "Light those
torches."
As one of the soldiers, who carried a basket in lieu of a
gun, went down on his knee to open it, my convict looked
round him for the first time, and saw me. I had alighted
from Joe's back on the brink of the ditch when we came up,
and had not moved since. I looked at him eagerly when he
looked at me, and slightly moved my hands and shook my head.
I had been waiting for him to see me that I might try to
assure him of my innocence. It was not at all expressed to
me that he even comprehended my intention, for he gave me a
look that I did not understand, and it all passed in a
moment. But if he had looked at me for an hour or for a day,
I could not have remembered his face ever afterwards, as
having been more attentive.
The soldier with the basket soon got a light, and lighted
three or four torches, and took one himself and distributed
the others. It had been almost dark before, but now it
seemed quite dark, and soon afterwards very dark. Before we
departed from that spot, four soldiers standing in a ring,
fired twice into the air. Presently we saw other torches
kindled at some distance behind us, and others on the
marshes on the opposite bank of the river. "All right," said
the sergeant. "March."
We had not gone far when three cannon were fired ahead of
us with a sound that seemed to burst something inside my
ear. "You are expected on board," said the sergeant to my
convict; "they know you are coming. Don't straggle, my man.
Close up here."
The two were kept apart, and each walked surrounded by a
separate guard. I had hold of Joe's hand now, and Joe
carried one of the torches. Mr. Wopsle had been for going
back, but Joe was resolved to see it out, so we went on with
the party. There was a reasonably good path now, mostly on
the edge of the river, with a divergence here and there
where a dike came, with a miniature windmill on it and a
muddy sluice-gate. When I looked round, I could see the
other lights coming in after us. The torches we carried
dropped great blotches of fire upon the track, and I could
see those, too, lying smoking and flaring. I could see
nothing else but black darkness. Our lights warmed the air
about us with their pitchy blaze, and the two prisoners
seemed rather to like that, as they limped along in the
midst of the muskets. We could not go fast, because of their
lameness; and they were so spent, that two or three times we
had to halt while they rested.
After an hour or so of this travelling, we came to a
rough wooden hut and a landing-place. There was a guard in
the hut, and they challenged, and the sergeant answered.
Then, we went into the hut, where there was a smell of
tobacco and whitewash, and a bright fire, and a lamp, and a
stand of muskets, and a drum, and a low wooden bedstead,
like an overgrown mangle without the machinery, capable of
holding about a dozen soldiers all at once. Three or four
soldiers who lay upon it in their great-coats were not much
interested in us, but just lifted their heads and took a
sleepy stare, and then lay down again. The sergeant made
some kind of report, and some entry in a book, and then the
convict whom I call the other convict was drafted off with
his guard, to go on board first.
My convict never looked at me, except that once. While we
stood in the hut, he stood before the fire looking
thoughtfully at it, or putting up his feet by turns upon the
hob, and looking thoughtfully at them as if he pitied them
for their recent adventures. Suddenly, he turned to the
sergeant, and remarked,—
"I wish to say something respecting this escape. It may
prevent some persons laying under suspicion alonger me."
"You can say what you like," returned the sergeant,
standing coolly looking at him with his arms folded, "but
you have no call to say it here. You'll have opportunity
enough to say about it, and hear about it, before it's done
with, you know."
"I know, but this is another pint, a separate matter. A
man can't starve; at least I can't. I took some wittles, up
at the willage over yonder,—where the church stands a'most
out on the marshes."
"You mean stole," said the sergeant.
"And I'll tell you where from. From the blacksmith's."
"Halloa!" said the sergeant, staring at Joe.
"Halloa, Pip!" said Joe, staring at me.
"It was some broken wittles—that's what it was—and a dram
of liquor, and a pie."
"Have you happened to miss such an article as a pie,
blacksmith?" asked the sergeant, confidentially.
"My wife did, at the very moment when you came in. Don't
you know, Pip?"
"So," said my convict, turning his eyes on Joe in a moody
manner, and without the least glance at me,—"so you're the
blacksmith, are you? Than I'm sorry to say, I've eat your
pie."
"God knows you're welcome to it,—so far as it was ever
mine," returned Joe, with a saving remembrance of Mrs. Joe.
"We don't know what you have done, but we wouldn't have you
starved to death for it, poor miserable
fellow-creatur.—Would us, Pip?"
The something that I had noticed before, clicked in the
man's throat again, and he turned his back. The boat had
returned, and his guard were ready, so we followed him to
the landing-place made of rough stakes and stones, and saw
him put into the boat, which was rowed by a crew of convicts
like himself. No one seemed surprised to see him, or
interested in seeing him, or glad to see him, or sorry to
see him, or spoke a word, except that somebody in the boat
growled as if to dogs, "Give way, you!" which was the signal
for the dip of the oars. By the light of the torches, we saw
the black Hulk lying out a little way from the mud of the
shore, like a wicked Noah's ark. Cribbed and barred and
moored by massive rusty chains, the prison-ship seemed in my
young eyes to be ironed like the prisoners. We saw the boat
go alongside, and we saw him taken up the side and
disappear. Then, the ends of the torches were flung hissing
into the water, and went out, as if it were all over with
him.
Chapter VI
My state of mind regarding the pilfering from which I had
been so unexpectedly exonerated did not impel me to frank
disclosure; but I hope it had some dregs of good at the
bottom of it.
I do not recall that I felt any tenderness of conscience
in reference to Mrs. Joe, when the fear of being found out
was lifted off me. But I loved Joe,—perhaps for no better
reason in those early days than because the dear fellow let
me love him,—and, as to him, my inner self was not so easily
composed. It was much upon my mind (particularly when I
first saw him looking about for his file) that I ought to
tell Joe the whole truth. Yet I did not, and for the reason
that I mistrusted that if I did, he would think me worse
than I was. The fear of losing Joe's confidence, and of
thenceforth sitting in the chimney corner at night staring
drearily at my forever lost companion and friend, tied up my
tongue. I morbidly represented to myself that if Joe knew
it, I never afterwards could see him at the fireside feeling
his fair whisker, without thinking that he was meditating on
it. That, if Joe knew it, I never afterwards could see him
glance, however casually, at yesterday's meat or pudding
when it came on to-day's table, without thinking that he was
debating whether I had been in the pantry. That, if Joe knew
it, and at any subsequent period of our joint domestic life
remarked that his beer was flat or thick, the conviction
that he suspected Tar in it, would bring a rush of blood to
my face. In a word, I was too cowardly to do what I knew to
be right, as I had been too cowardly to avoid doing what I
knew to be wrong. I had had no intercourse with the world at
that time, and I imitated none of its many inhabitants who
act in this manner. Quite an untaught genius, I made the
discovery of the line of action for myself.
As I was sleepy before we were far away from the
prison-ship, Joe took me on his back again and carried me
home. He must have had a tiresome journey of it, for Mr.
Wopsle, being knocked up, was in such a very bad 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 neighbor happened to want an extra boy to frighten
birds, or pick up stones, or do any such job, I was favored
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, in to 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 up stairs, 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 transaction. Biddy was Mr. Wopsle's great-aunt's
granddaughter; I confess myself quiet 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 KR WITE 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 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."
Joe's blue eyes turned a little watery; he rubbed first
one of them, and then the other, in a most uncongenial and
uncomfortable manner, with the round knob on the top of the
poker.
"It were but lonesome then," said Joe, "living here
alone, and I got acquainted with your sister. Now, Pip,"—Joe
looked firmly at me as if he knew I was not going to agree
with him;—"your sister is a fine figure of a woman."
I could not help looking at the fire, in an obvious state
of doubt.
"Whatever family opinions, or whatever the world's
opinions, on that subject may be, Pip, your sister is," Joe
tapped the top bar with the poker after every word
following, "a-fine-figure—of—a—woman!"
I could think of nothing better to say than "I am glad
you think so, Joe."
"So am I," returned Joe, catching me up. "I am glad I
think so, Pip. A little redness or a little matter of Bone,
here or there, what does it signify to Me?"
I sagaciously observed, if it didn't signify to him, to
whom did it signify?
"Certainly!" assented Joe. "That's it. You're right, old
chap! When I got acquainted with your sister, it were the
talk how she was bringing you up by hand. Very kind of her
too, all the folks said, and I said, along with all the
folks. As to you," Joe pursued with a countenance expressive
of seeing something very nasty indeed, "if you could have
been aware how small and flabby and mean you was, dear me,
you'd have formed the most contemptible opinion of
yourself!"
Not exactly relishing this, I said, "Never mind me, Joe."
"But I did mind you, Pip," he returned with tender
simplicity. "When I offered to your sister to keep company,
and to be asked in church at such times as she was willing
and ready to come to the forge, I said to her, 'And bring
the poor little child. God bless the poor little child,' I
said to your sister, 'there's room for him at the forge!'"
I broke out crying and begging pardon, and hugged Joe
round the neck: who dropped the poker to hug me, and to say,
"Ever the best of friends; an't us, Pip? Don't cry, old
chap!"
When this little interruption was over, Joe resumed:—
"Well, you see, Pip, and here we are! That's about where
it lights; here we are! Now, when you take me in hand in my
learning, Pip (and I tell you beforehand I am awful dull,
most awful dull), Mrs. Joe mustn't see too much of what
we're up to. It must be done, as I may say, on the sly. And
why on the sly? I'll tell you why, Pip."
He had taken up the poker again; without which, I doubt
if he could have proceeded in his demonstration.
"Your sister is given to government."
"Given to government, Joe?" I was startled, for I had
some shadowy idea (and I am afraid I must add, hope) that
Joe had divorced her in a favor of the Lords of the
Admiralty, or Treasury.
"Given to government," said Joe. "Which I meantersay the
government of you and myself."
"Oh!"
"And she an't over partial to having scholars on the
premises," Joe continued, "and in partickler would not be
over partial to my being a scholar, for fear as I might
rise. Like a sort or rebel, don't you see?"
I was going to retort with an inquiry, and had got as far
as "Why—" when Joe stopped me.
"Stay a bit. I know what you're a going to say, Pip; stay
a bit! I don't deny that your sister comes the Mo-gul over
us, now and again. I don't deny that she do throw us
back-falls, and that she do drop down upon us heavy. At such
times as when your sister is on the Ram-page, Pip," Joe sank
his voice to a whisper and glanced at the door, "candor
compels fur to admit that she is a Buster."
Joe pronounced this word, as if it began with at least
twelve capital Bs.
"Why don't I rise? That were your observation when I
broke it off, Pip?"
"Yes, Joe."
"Well," said Joe, passing the poker into his left hand,
that he might feel his whisker; and I had no hope of him
whenever he took to that placid occupation; "your sister's a
master-mind. A master-mind."
"What's that?" I asked, in some hope of bringing him to a
stand. But Joe was readier with his definition than I had
expected, and completely stopped me by arguing circularly,
and answering with a fixed look, "Her."
"And I ain't a master-mind," Joe resumed, when he had
unfixed his look, and got back to his whisker. "And last of
all, Pip,—and this I want to say very serious to you, old
chap,—I see so much in my poor mother, of a woman drudging
and slaving and breaking her honest hart and never getting
no peace in her mortal days, that I'm dead afeerd of going
wrong in the way of not doing what's right by a woman, and
I'd fur rather of the two go wrong the t'other way, and be a
little ill-conwenienced myself. I wish it was only me that
got put out, Pip; I wish there warn't no Tickler for you,
old chap; I wish I could take it all on myself; but this is
the up-and-down-and-straight on it, Pip, and I hope you'll
overlook shortcomings."
Young as I was, I believe that I dated a new admiration
of Joe from that night. We were equals afterwards, as we had
been before; but, afterwards at quiet times when I sat
looking at Joe and thinking about him, I had a new sensation
of feeling conscious that I was looking up to Joe in my
heart.
"However," said Joe, rising to replenish the fire;
"here's the Dutch-clock a working himself up to being equal
to strike Eight of 'em, and she's not come home yet! I hope
Uncle Pumblechook's mare mayn't have set a forefoot on a
piece o' ice, and gone down."
Mrs. Joe made occasional trips with Uncle Pumblechook on
market-days, to assist him in buying such household stuffs
and goods as required a woman's judgment; Uncle Pumblechook
being a bachelor and reposing no confidences in his domestic
servant. This was market-day, and Mrs. Joe was out on one of
these expeditions.
Joe made the fire and swept the hearth, and then we went
to the door to listen for the chaise-cart. It was a dry cold
night, and the wind blew keenly, and the frost was white and
hard. A man would die to-night of lying out on the marshes,
I thought. And then I looked at the stars, and considered
how awful if would be for a man to turn his face up to them
as he froze to death, and see no help or pity in all the
glittering multitude.
"Here comes the mare," said Joe, "ringing like a peal of
bells!"
The sound of her iron shoes upon the hard road was quite
musical, as she came along at a much brisker trot than
usual. We got a chair out, ready for Mrs. Joe's alighting,
and stirred up the fire that they might see a bright window,
and took a final survey of the kitchen that nothing might be
out of its place. When we had completed these preparations,
they drove up, wrapped to the eyes. Mrs. Joe was soon
landed, and Uncle Pumblechook was soon down too, covering
the mare with a cloth, and we were soon all in the kitchen,
carrying so much cold air in with us that it seemed to drive
all the heat out of the fire.
"Now," said Mrs. Joe, unwrapping herself with haste and
excitement, and throwing her bonnet back on her shoulders
where it hung by the strings, "if this boy ain't grateful
this night, he never will be!"
I looked as grateful as any boy possibly could, who was
wholly uninformed why he ought to assume that expression.
"It's only to be hoped," said my sister, "that he won't
be Pompeyed. But I have my fears."
"She ain't in that line, Mum," said Mr. Pumblechook. "She
knows better."
She? I looked at Joe, making the motion with my lips and
eyebrows, "She?" Joe looked at me, making the motion with
his lips and eyebrows, "She?" My sister catching him in the
act, he drew the back of his hand across his nose with his
usual conciliatory air on such occasions, and looked at her.
"Well?" said my sister, in her snappish way. "What are
you staring at? Is the house afire?"
"—Which some individual," Joe politely hinted,
"mentioned—she."
"And she is a she, I suppose?" said my sister. "Unless
you call Miss Havisham a he. And I doubt if even you'll go
so far as that."
"Miss Havisham, up town?" said Joe.
"Is there any Miss Havisham down town?" returned my
sister.
"She wants this boy to go and play there. And of course
he's going. And he had better play there," said my sister,
shaking her head at me as an encouragement to be extremely
light and sportive, "or I'll work him."
I had heard of Miss Havisham up town,—everybody for miles
round had heard of Miss Havisham up town,—as an immensely
rich and grim lady who lived in a large and dismal house
barricaded against robbers, and who led a life of seclusion.
"Well to be sure!" said Joe, astounded. "I wonder how she
come to know Pip!"
"Noodle!" cried my sister. "Who said she knew him?"
"—Which some individual," Joe again politely hinted,
"mentioned that she wanted him to go and play there."
"And couldn't she ask Uncle Pumblechook if he knew of a
boy to go and play there? Isn't it just barely possible that
Uncle Pumblechook may be a tenant of hers, and that he may
sometimes—we won't say quarterly or half-yearly, for that
would be requiring too much of you—but sometimes—go there to
pay his rent? And couldn't she then ask Uncle Pumblechook if
he knew of a boy to go and play there? And couldn't Uncle
Pumblechook, being always considerate and thoughtful for
us—though you may not think it, Joseph," in a tone of the
deepest reproach, as if he were the most callous of nephews,
"then mention this boy, standing Prancing here"—which I
solemnly declare I was not doing—"that I have for ever been
a willing slave to?"
"Good again!" cried Uncle Pumblechook. "Well put!
Prettily pointed! Good indeed! Now Joseph, you know the
case."
"No, Joseph," said my sister, still in a reproachful
manner, while Joe apologetically drew the back of his hand
across and across his nose, "you do not yet—though you may
not think it—know the case. You may consider that you do,
but you do not, Joseph. For you do not know that Uncle
Pumblechook, being sensible that for anything we can tell,
this boy's fortune may be made by his going to Miss
Havisham's, has offered to take him into town to-night in
his own chaise-cart, and to keep him to-night, and to take
him with his own hands to Miss Havisham's to-morrow morning.
And Lor-a-mussy me!" cried my sister, casting off her bonnet
in sudden desperation, "here I stand talking to mere
Mooncalfs, with Uncle Pumblechook waiting, and the mare
catching cold at the door, and the boy grimed with crock and
dirt from the hair of his head to the sole of his foot!"
With that, she pounced upon me, like an eagle on a lamb,
and my face was squeezed into wooden bowls in sinks, and my
head was put under taps of water-butts, and I was soaped,
and kneaded, and towelled, and thumped, and harrowed, and
rasped, until I really was quite beside myself. (I may here
remark that I suppose myself to be better acquainted than
any living authority, with the ridgy effect of a
wedding-ring, passing unsympathetically over the human
countenance.)
When my ablutions were completed, I was put into clean
linen of the stiffest character, like a young penitent into
sackcloth, and was trussed up in my tightest and fearfullest
suit. I was then delivered over to Mr. Pumblechook, who
formally received me as if he were the Sheriff, and who let
off upon me the speech that I knew he had been dying to make
all along: "Boy, be forever grateful to all friends, but
especially unto them which brought you up by hand!"
"Good-bye, Joe!"
"God bless you, Pip, old chap!"
I had never parted from him before, and what with my
feelings and what with soapsuds, I could at first see no
stars from the chaise-cart. But they twinkled out one by
one, without throwing any light on the questions why on
earth I was going to play at Miss Havisham's, and what on
earth I was expected to play at.
Chapter VIII
Mr. Pumblechook's premises in the High Street of the
market town, were of a peppercorny and farinaceous
character, as the premises of a cornchandler and seedsman
should be. It appeared to me that he must be a very happy
man indeed, to have so many little drawers in his shop; and
I wondered when I peeped into one or two on the lower tiers,
and saw the tied-up brown paper packets inside, whether the
flower-seeds and bulbs ever wanted of a fine day to break
out of those jails, and bloom.
It was in the early morning after my arrival that I
entertained this speculation. On the previous night, I had
been sent straight to bed in an attic with a sloping roof,
which was so low in the corner where the bedstead was, that
I calculated the tiles as being within a foot of my
eyebrows. In the same early morning, I discovered a singular
affinity between seeds and corduroys. Mr. Pumblechook wore
corduroys, and so did his shopman; and somehow, there was a
general air and flavor about the corduroys, so much in the
nature of seeds, and a general air and flavor about the
seeds, so much in the nature of corduroys, that I hardly
knew which was which. The same opportunity served me for
noticing that Mr. Pumblechook appeared to conduct his
business by looking across the street at the saddler, who
appeared to transact his business by keeping his eye on the
coachmaker, who appeared to get on in life by putting his
hands in his pockets and contemplating the baker, who in his
turn folded his arms and stared at the grocer, who stood at
his door and yawned at the chemist. The watchmaker, always
poring over a little desk with a magnifying-glass at his
eye, and always inspected by a group of smock-frocks poring
over him through the glass of his shop-window, seemed to be
about the only person in the High Street whose trade engaged
his attention.
Mr. Pumblechook and I breakfasted at eight o'clock in the
parlor behind the shop, while the shopman took his mug of
tea and hunch of bread and butter on a sack of peas in the
front premises. I considered Mr. Pumblechook wretched
company. Besides being possessed by my sister's idea that a
mortifying and penitential character ought to be imparted to
my diet,—besides giving me as much crumb as possible in
combination with as little butter, and putting such a
quantity of warm water into my milk that it would have been
more candid to have left the milk out altogether,—his
conversation consisted of nothing but arithmetic. On my
politely bidding him Good morning, he said, pompously,
"Seven times nine, boy?" And how should I be able to answer,
dodged in that way, in a strange place, on an empty stomach!
I was hungry, but before I had swallowed a morsel, he began
a running sum that lasted all through the breakfast.
"Seven?" "And four?" "And eight?" "And six?" "And two?" "And
ten?" And so on. And after each figure was disposed of, it
was as much as I could do to get a bite or a sup, before the
next came; while he sat at his ease guessing nothing, and
eating bacon and hot roll, in (if I may be allowed the
expression) a gorging and gormandizing manner.
For such reasons, I was very glad when ten o'clock came
and we started for Miss Havisham's; though I was not at all
at my ease regarding the manner in which I should acquit
myself under that lady's roof. Within a quarter of an hour
we came to Miss Havisham's house, which was of old brick,
and dismal, and had a great many iron bars to it. Some of
the windows had been walled up; of those that remained, all
the lower were rustily barred. There was a courtyard in
front, and that was barred; so we had to wait, after ringing
the bell, until some one should come to open it. While we
waited at the gate, I peeped in (even then Mr. Pumblechook
said, "And fourteen?" but I pretended not to hear him), and
saw that at the side of the house there was a large brewery.
No brewing was going on in it, and none seemed to have gone
on for a long long time.
A window was raised, and a clear voice demanded "What
name?" To which my conductor replied, "Pumblechook." The
voice returned, "Quite right," and the window was shut
again, and a young lady came across the court-yard, with
keys in her hand.
"This," said Mr. Pumblechook, "is Pip."
"This is Pip, is it?" returned the young lady, who was
very pretty and seemed very proud; "come in, Pip."
Mr. Pumblechook was coming in also, when she stopped him
with the gate.
"Oh!" she said. "Did you wish to see Miss Havisham?"
"If Miss Havisham wished to see me," returned Mr.
Pumblechook, discomfited.
"Ah!" said the girl; "but you see she don't."
She said it so finally, and in such an undiscussible way,
that Mr. Pumblechook, though in a condition of ruffled
dignity, could not protest. But he eyed me severely,—as if I
had done anything to him!—and departed with the words
reproachfully delivered: "Boy! Let your behavior here be a
credit unto them which brought you up by hand!" I was not
free from apprehension that he would come back to propound
through the gate, "And sixteen?" But he didn't.
My young conductress locked the gate, and we went across
the courtyard. It was paved and clean, but grass was growing
in every crevice. The brewery buildings had a little lane of
communication with it, and the wooden gates of that lane
stood open, and all the brewery beyond stood open, away to
the high enclosing wall; and all was empty and disused. The
cold wind seemed to blow colder there than outside the gate;
and it made a shrill noise in howling in and out at the open
sides of the brewery, like the noise of wind in the rigging
of a ship at sea.
She saw me looking at it, and she said, "You could drink
without hurt all the strong beer that's brewed there now,
boy."
"I should think I could, miss," said I, in a shy way.
"Better not try to brew beer there now, or it would turn
out sour, boy; don't you think so?"
"It looks like it, miss."
"Not that anybody means to try," she added, "for that's
all done with, and the place will stand as idle as it is
till it falls. As to strong beer, there's enough of it in
the cellars already, to drown the Manor House."
"Is that the name of this house, miss?"
"One of its names, boy."
"It has more than one, then, miss?"
"One more. Its other name was Satis; which is Greek, or
Latin, or Hebrew, or all three—or all one to me—for enough."
"Enough House," said I; "that's a curious name, miss."
"Yes," she replied; "but it meant more than it said. It
meant, when it was given, that whoever had this house could
want nothing else. They must have been easily satisfied in
those days, I should think. But don't loiter, boy."
Though she called me "boy" so often, and with a
carelessness that was far from complimentary, she was of
about my own age. She seemed much older than I, of course,
being a girl, and beautiful and self-possessed; and she was
as scornful of me as if she had been one-and-twenty, and a
queen.
We went into the house by a side door, the great front
entrance had two chains across it outside,—and the first
thing I noticed was, that the passages were all dark, and
that she had left a candle burning there. She took it up,
and we went through more passages and up a staircase, and
still it was all dark, and only the candle lighted us.
At last we came to the door of a room, and she said, "Go
in."
I answered, more in shyness than politeness, "After you,
miss."
To this she returned: "Don't be ridiculous, boy; I am not
going in." And scornfully walked away, and—what was
worse—took the candle with her.
This was very uncomfortable, and I was half afraid.
However, the only thing to be done being to knock at the
door, I knocked, and was told from within to enter. I
entered, therefore, and found myself in a pretty large room,
well lighted with wax candles. No glimpse of daylight was to
be seen in it. It was a dressing-room, as I supposed from
the furniture, though much of it was of forms and uses then
quite unknown to me. But prominent in it was a draped table
with a gilded looking-glass, and that I made out at first
sight to be a fine lady's dressing-table.
Whether I should have made out this object so soon if
there had been no fine lady sitting at it, I cannot say. In
an arm-chair, with an elbow resting on the table and her
head leaning on that hand, sat the strangest lady I have
ever seen, or shall ever see.
She was dressed in rich materials,—satins, and lace, and
silks,—all of white. Her shoes were white. And she had a
long white veil dependent from her hair, and she had bridal
flowers in her hair, but her hair was white. Some bright
jewels sparkled on her neck and on her hands, and some other
jewels lay sparkling on the table. Dresses, less splendid
than the dress she wore, and half-packed trunks, were
scattered about. She had not quite finished dressing, for
she had but one shoe on,—the other was on the table near her
hand,—her veil was but half arranged, her watch and chain
were not put on, and some lace for her bosom lay with those
trinkets, and with her handkerchief, and gloves, and some
flowers, and a Prayer-Book all confusedly heaped about the
looking-glass.
It was not in the first few moments that I saw all these
things, though I saw more of them in the first moments than
might be supposed. But I saw that everything within my view
which ought to be white, had been white long ago, and had
lost its lustre and was faded and yellow. I saw that the
bride within the bridal dress had withered like the dress,
and like the flowers, and had no brightness left but the
brightness of her sunken eyes. I saw that the dress had been
put upon the rounded figure of a young woman, and that the
figure upon which it now hung loose had shrunk to skin and
bone. Once, I had been taken to see some ghastly waxwork at
the Fair, representing I know not what impossible personage
lying in state. Once, I had been taken to one of our old
marsh churches to see a skeleton in the ashes of a rich
dress that had been dug out of a vault under the church
pavement. Now, waxwork and skeleton seemed to have dark eyes
that moved and looked at me. I should have cried out, if I
could.
"Who is it?" said the lady at the table.
"Pip, ma'am."
"Pip?"
"Mr. Pumblechook's boy, ma'am. Come—to play."
"Come nearer; let me look at you. Come close."
It was when I stood before her, avoiding her eyes, that I
took note of the surrounding objects in detail, and saw that
her watch had stopped at twenty minutes to nine, and that a
clock in the room had stopped at twenty minutes to nine.
"Look at me," said Miss Havisham. "You are not afraid of
a woman who has never seen the sun since you were born?"
I regret to state that I was not afraid of telling the
enormous lie comprehended in the answer "No."
"Do you know what I touch here?" she said, laying her
hands, one upon the other, on her left side.
"Yes, ma'am." (It made me think of the young man.)
"What do I touch?"
"Your heart."
"Broken!"
She uttered the word with an eager look, and with strong
emphasis, and with a weird smile that had a kind of boast in
it. Afterwards she kept her hands there for a little while,
and slowly took them away as if they were heavy.
"I am tired," said Miss Havisham. "I want diversion, and
I have done with men and women. Play."
I think it will be conceded by my most disputatious
reader, that she could hardly have directed an unfortunate
boy to do anything in the wide world more difficult to be
done under the circumstances.
"I sometimes have sick fancies," she went on, "and I have
a sick fancy that I want to see some play. There, there!"
with an impatient movement of the fingers of her right hand;
"play, play, play!"
For a moment, with the fear of my sister's working me
before my eyes, I had a desperate idea of starting round the
room in the assumed character of Mr. Pumblechook's
chaise-cart. But I felt myself so unequal to the performance
that I gave it up, and stood looking at Miss Havisham in
what I suppose she took for a dogged manner, inasmuch as she
said, when we had taken a good look at each other,—
"Are you sullen and obstinate?"
"No, ma'am, I am very sorry for you, and very sorry I
can't play just now. If you complain of me I shall get into
trouble with my sister, so I would do it if I could; but
it's so new here, and so strange, and so fine,—and
melancholy—." I stopped, fearing I might say too much, or
had already said it, and we took another look at each other.
Before she spoke again, she turned her eyes from me, and
looked at the dress she wore, and at the dressing-table, and
finally at herself in the looking-glass.
"So new to him," she muttered, "so old to me; so strange
to him, so familiar to me; so melancholy to both of us! Call
Estella."
As she was still looking at the reflection of herself, I
thought she was still talking to herself, and kept quiet.
"Call Estella," she repeated, flashing a look at me. "You
can do that. Call Estella. At the door."
To stand in the dark in a mysterious passage of an
unknown house, bawling Estella to a scornful young lady
neither visible nor responsive, and feeling it a dreadful
liberty so to roar out her name, was almost as bad as
playing to order. But she answered at last, and her light
came along the dark passage like a star.
Miss Havisham beckoned her to come close, and took up a
jewel from the table, and tried its effect upon her fair
young bosom and against her pretty brown hair. "Your own,
one day, my dear, and you will use it well. Let me see you
play cards with this boy."
"With this boy? Why, he is a common laboring boy!"
I thought I overheard Miss Havisham answer,—only it
seemed so Unlikely,—"Well? You can break his heart."
"What do you play, boy?" asked Estella of myself, with
the greatest disdain.
"Nothing but beggar my neighbor, miss."
"Beggar him," said Miss Havisham to Estella. So we sat
down to cards.
It was then I began to understand that everything in the
room had stopped, like the watch and the clock, a long time
ago. I noticed that Miss Havisham put down the jewel exactly
on the spot from which she had taken it up. As Estella dealt
the cards, I glanced at the dressing-table again, and saw
that the shoe upon it, once white, now yellow, had never
been worn. I glanced down at the foot from which the shoe
was absent, and saw that the silk stocking on it, once
white, now yellow, had been trodden ragged. Without this
arrest of everything, this standing still of all the pale
decayed objects, not even the withered bridal dress on the
collapsed form could have looked so like grave-clothes, or
the long veil so like a shroud.
So she sat, corpse-like, as we played at cards; the
frillings and trimmings on her bridal dress, looking like
earthy paper. I knew nothing then of the discoveries that
are occasionally made of bodies buried in ancient times,
which fall to powder in the moment of being distinctly seen;
but, I have often thought since, that she must have looked
as if the admission of the natural light of day would have
struck her to dust.
"He calls the knaves Jacks, this boy!" said Estella with
disdain, before our first game was out. "And what coarse
hands he has! And what thick boots!"
I had never thought of being ashamed of my hands before;
but I began to consider them a very indifferent pair. Her
contempt for me was so strong, that it became infectious,
and I caught it.
She won the game, and I dealt. I misdealt, as was only
natural, when I knew she was lying in wait for me to do
wrong; and she denounced me for a stupid, clumsy
laboring-boy.
"You say nothing of her," remarked Miss Havisham to me,
as she looked on. "She says many hard things of you, but you
say nothing of her. What do you think of her?"
"I don't like to say," I stammered.
"Tell me in my ear," said Miss Havisham, bending down.
"I think she is very proud," I replied, in a whisper.
"Anything else?"
"I think she is very pretty."
"Anything else?"
"I think she is very insulting." (She was looking at me
then with a look of supreme aversion.)
"Anything else?"
"I think I should like to go home."
"And never see her again, though she is so pretty?"
"I am not sure that I shouldn't like to see her again,
but I should like to go home now."
"You shall go soon," said Miss Havisham, aloud. "Play the
game out."
Saving for the one weird smile at first, I should have
felt almost sure that Miss Havisham's face could not smile.
It had dropped into a watchful and brooding expression,—most
likely when all the things about her had become
transfixed,—and it looked as if nothing could ever lift it
up again. Her chest had dropped, so that she stooped; and
her voice had dropped, so that she spoke low, and with a
dead lull upon her; altogether, she had the appearance of
having dropped body and soul, within and without, under the
weight of a crushing blow.
I played the game to an end with Estella, and she
beggared me. She threw the cards down on the table when she
had won them all, as if she despised them for having been
won of me.
"When shall I have you here again?" said Miss Havisham.
"Let me think."
I was beginning to remind her that to-day was Wednesday,
when she checked me with her former impatient movement of
the fingers of her right hand.
"There, there! I know nothing of days of the week; I know
nothing of weeks of the year. Come again after six days. You
hear?"
"Yes, ma'am."
"Estella, take him down. Let him have something to eat,
and let him roam and look about him while he eats. Go, Pip."
I followed the candle down, as I had followed the candle
up, and she stood it in the place where we had found it.
Until she opened the side entrance, I had fancied, without
thinking about it, that it must necessarily be night-time.
The rush of the daylight quite confounded me, and made me
feel as if I had been in the candlelight of the strange room
many hours.
"You are to wait here, you boy," said Estella; and
disappeared and closed the door.
I took the opportunity of being alone in the courtyard to
look at my coarse hands and my common boots. My opinion of
those accessories was not favorable. They had never troubled
me before, but they troubled me now, as vulgar appendages. I
determined to ask Joe why he had ever taught me to call
those picture-cards Jacks, which ought to be called knaves.
I wished Joe had been rather more genteelly brought up, and
then I should have been so too.
She came back, with some bread and meat and a little mug
of beer. She put the mug down on the stones of the yard, and
gave me the bread and meat without looking at me, as
insolently as if I were a dog in disgrace. I was so
humiliated, hurt, spurned, offended, angry, sorry,—I cannot
hit upon the right name for the smart—God knows what its
name was,—that tears started to my eyes. The moment they
sprang there, the girl looked at me with a quick delight in
having been the cause of them. This gave me power to keep
them back and to look at her: so, she gave a contemptuous
toss—but with a sense, I thought, of having made too sure
that I was so wounded—and left me.
But when she was gone, I looked about me for a place to
hide my face in, and got behind one of the gates in the
brewery-lane, and leaned my sleeve against the wall there,
and leaned my forehead on it and cried. As I cried, I kicked
the wall, and took a hard twist at my hair; so bitter were
my feelings, and so sharp was the smart without a name, that
needed counteraction.
My sister's bringing up had made me sensitive. In the
little world in which children have their existence
whosoever brings them up, there is nothing so finely
perceived and so finely felt as injustice. It may be only
small injustice that the child can be exposed to; but the
child is small, and its world is small, and its
rocking-horse stands as many hands high, according to scale,
as a big-boned Irish hunter. Within myself, I had sustained,
from my babyhood, a perpetual conflict with injustice. I had
known, from the time when I could speak, that my sister, in
her capricious and violent coercion, was unjust to me. I had
cherished a profound conviction that her bringing me up by
hand gave her no right to bring me up by jerks. Through all
my punishments, disgraces, fasts, and vigils, and other
penitential performances, I had nursed this assurance; and
to my communing so much with it, in a solitary and
unprotected way, I in great part refer the fact that I was
morally timid and very sensitive.
I got rid of my injured feelings for the time by kicking
them into the brewery wall, and twisting them out of my
hair, and then I smoothed my face with my sleeve, and came
from behind the gate. The bread and meat were acceptable,
and the beer was warming and tingling, and I was soon in
spirits to look about me.
To be sure, it was a deserted place, down to the
pigeon-house in the brewery-yard, which had been blown
crooked on its pole by some high wind, and would have made
the pigeons think themselves at sea, if there had been any
pigeons there to be rocked by it. But there were no pigeons
in the dove-cot, no horses in the stable, no pigs in the
sty, no malt in the storehouse, no smells of grains and beer
in the copper or the vat. All the uses and scents of the
brewery might have evaporated with its last reek of smoke.
In a by-yard, there was a wilderness of empty casks, which
had a certain sour remembrance of better days lingering
about them; but it was too sour to be accepted as a sample
of the beer that was gone,—and in this respect I remember
those recluses as being like most others.
Behind the furthest end of the brewery, was a rank garden
with an old wall; not so high but that I could struggle up
and hold on long enough to look over it, and see that the
rank garden was the garden of the house, and that it was
overgrown with tangled weeds, but that there was a track
upon the green and yellow paths, as if some one sometimes
walked there, and that Estella was walking away from me even
then. But she seemed to be everywhere. For when I yielded to
the temptation presented by the casks, and began to walk on
them, I saw her walking on them at the end of the yard of
casks. She had her back towards me, and held her pretty
brown hair spread out in her two hands, and never looked
round, and passed out of my view directly. So, in the
brewery itself,—by which I mean the large paved lofty place
in which they used to make the beer, and where the brewing
utensils still were. When I first went into it, and, rather
oppressed by its gloom, stood near the door looking about
me, I saw her pass among the extinguished fires, and ascend
some light iron stairs, and go out by a gallery high
overhead, as if she were going out into the sky.
It was in this place, and at this moment, that a strange
thing happened to my fancy. I thought it a strange thing
then, and I thought it a stranger thing long afterwards. I
turned my eyes—a little dimmed by looking up at the frosty
light—towards a great wooden beam in a low nook of the
building near me on my right hand, and I saw a figure
hanging there by the neck. A figure all in yellow white,
with but one shoe to the feet; and it hung so, that I could
see that the faded trimmings of the dress were like earthy
paper, and that the face was Miss Havisham's, with a
movement going over the whole countenance as if she were
trying to call to me. In the terror of seeing the figure,
and in the terror of being certain that it had not been
there a moment before, I at first ran from it, and then ran
towards it. And my terror was greatest of all when I found
no figure there.
Nothing less than the frosty light of the cheerful sky,
the sight of people passing beyond the bars of the
court-yard gate, and the reviving influence of the rest of
the bread and meat and beer, would have brought me round.
Even with those aids, I might not have come to myself as
soon as I did, but that I saw Estella approaching with the
keys, to let me out. She would have some fair reason for
looking down upon me, I thought, if she saw me frightened;
and she would have no fair reason.
She gave me a triumphant glance in passing me, as if she
rejoiced that my hands were so coarse and my boots were so
thick, and she opened the gate, and stood holding it. I was
passing out without looking at her, when she touched me with
a taunting hand.
"Why don't you cry?"
"Because I don't want to."
"You do," said she. "You have been crying till you are
half blind, and you are near crying again now."
She laughed contemptuously, pushed me out, and locked the
gate upon me. I went straight to Mr. Pumblechook's, and was
immensely relieved to find him not at home. So, leaving word
with the shopman on what day I was wanted at Miss Havisham's
again, I set off on the four-mile walk to our forge;
pondering, as I went along, on all I had seen, and deeply
revolving that I was a common laboring-boy; that my hands
were coarse; that my boots were thick; that I had fallen
into a despicable habit of calling knaves Jacks; that I was
much more ignorant than I had considered myself last night,
and generally that I was in a low-lived bad way.
Chapter IX
When I reached home, my sister was very curious to know
all about Miss Havisham's, and asked a number of questions.
And I soon found myself getting heavily bumped from behind
in the nape of the neck and the small of the back, and
having my face ignominiously shoved against the kitchen
wall, because I did not answer those questions at sufficient
length.
If a dread of not being understood be hidden in the
breasts of other young people to anything like the extent to
which it used to be hidden in mine,—which I consider
probable, as I have no particular reason to suspect myself
of having been a monstrosity,—it is the key to many
reservations. I felt convinced that if I described Miss
Havisham's as my eyes had seen it, I should not be
understood. Not only that, but I felt convinced that Miss
Havisham too would not be understood; and although she was
perfectly incomprehensible to me, I entertained an
impression that there would be something coarse and
treacherous in my dragging her as she really was (to say
nothing of Miss Estella) before the contemplation of Mrs.
Joe. Consequently, I said as little as I could, and had my
face shoved against the kitchen wall.
The worst of it was that that bullying old Pumblechook,
preyed upon by a devouring curiosity to be informed of all I
had seen and heard, came gaping over in his chaise-cart at
tea-time, to have the details divulged to him. And the mere
sight of the torment, with his fishy eyes and mouth open,
his sandy hair inquisitively on end, and his waistcoat
heaving with windy arithmetic, made me vicious in my
reticence.
"Well, boy," Uncle Pumblechook began, as soon as he was
seated in the chair of honor by the fire. "How did you get
on up town?"
I answered, "Pretty well, sir," and my sister shook her
fist at me.
"Pretty well?" Mr. Pumblechook repeated. "Pretty well is
no answer. Tell us what you mean by pretty well, boy?"
Whitewash on the forehead hardens the brain into a state
of obstinacy perhaps. Anyhow, with whitewash from the wall
on my forehead, my obstinacy was adamantine. I reflected for
some time, and then answered as if I had discovered a new
idea, "I mean pretty well."
My sister with an exclamation of impatience was going to
fly at me,—I had no shadow of defence, for Joe was busy in
the forge,—when Mr. Pumblechook interposed with "No! Don't
lose your temper. Leave this lad to me, ma'am; leave this
lad to me." Mr. Pumblechook then turned me towards him, as
if he were going to cut my hair, and said,—
"First (to get our thoughts in order): Forty-three
pence?"
I calculated the consequences of replying "Four Hundred
Pound," and finding them against me, went as near the answer
as I could—which was somewhere about eightpence off. Mr.
Pumblechook then put me through my pence-table from "twelve
pence make one shilling," up to "forty pence make three and
fourpence," and then triumphantly demanded, as if he had
done for me, "Now! How much is forty-three pence?" To which
I replied, after a long interval of reflection, "I don't
know." And I was so aggravated that I almost doubt if I did
know.
Mr. Pumblechook worked his head like a screw to screw it
out of me, and said, "Is forty-three pence seven and
sixpence three fardens, for instance?"
"Yes!" said I. And although my sister instantly boxed my
ears, it was highly gratifying to me to see that the answer
spoilt his joke, and brought him to a dead stop.
"Boy! What like is Miss Havisham?" Mr. Pumblechook began
again when he had recovered; folding his arms tight on his
chest and applying the screw.
"Very tall and dark," I told him.
"Is she, uncle?" asked my sister.
Mr. Pumblechook winked assent; from which I at once
inferred that he had never seen Miss Havisham, for she was
nothing of the kind.
"Good!" said Mr. Pumblechook conceitedly. ("This is the
way to have him! We are beginning to hold our own, I think,
Mum?")
"I am sure, uncle," returned Mrs. Joe, "I wish you had
him always; you know so well how to deal with him."
"Now, boy! What was she a doing of, when you went in
today?" asked Mr. Pumblechook.
"She was sitting," I answered, "in a black velvet coach."
Mr. Pumblechook and Mrs. Joe stared at one another—as
they well Might—and both repeated, "In a black velvet
coach?"
"Yes," said I. "And Miss Estella—that's her niece, I
think—handed her in cake and wine at the coach-window, on a
gold plate. And we all had cake and wine on gold plates. And
I got up behind the coach to eat mine, because she told me
to."
"Was anybody else there?" asked Mr. Pumblechook.
"Four dogs," said I.
"Large or small?"
"Immense," said I. "And they fought for veal-cutlets out
of a silver basket."
Mr. Pumblechook and Mrs. Joe stared at one another again,
in utter amazement. I was perfectly frantic,—a reckless
witness under the torture,—and would have told them
anything.
"Where was this coach, in the name of gracious?" asked my
sister.
"In Miss Havisham's room." They stared again. "But there
weren't any horses to it." I added this saving clause, in
the moment of rejecting four richly caparisoned coursers
which I had had wild thoughts of harnessing.
"Can this be possible, uncle?" asked Mrs. Joe. "What can
the boy mean?"
"I'll tell you, Mum," said Mr. Pumblechook. "My opinion
is, it's a sedan-chair. She's flighty, you know,—very
flighty,—quite flighty enough to pass her days in a
sedan-chair."
"Did you ever see her in it, uncle?" asked Mrs. Joe.
"How could I," he returned, forced to the admission,
"when I never see her in my life? Never clapped eyes upon
her!"
"Goodness, uncle! And yet you have spoken to her?"
"Why, don't you know," said Mr. Pumblechook, testily,
"that when I have been there, I have been took up to the
outside of her door, and the door has stood ajar, and she
has spoke to me that way. Don't say you don't know that,
Mum. Howsever, the boy went there to play. What did you play
at, boy?"
"We played with flags," I said. (I beg to observe that I
think of myself with amazement, when I recall the lies I
told on this occasion.)
"Flags!" echoed my sister.
"Yes," said I. "Estella waved a blue flag, and I waved a
red one, and Miss Havisham waved one sprinkled all over with
little gold stars, out at the coach-window. And then we all
waved our swords and hurrahed."
"Swords!" repeated my sister. "Where did you get swords
from?"
"Out of a cupboard," said I. "And I saw pistols in
it,—and jam,—and pills. And there was no daylight in the
room, but it was all lighted up with candles."
"That's true, Mum," said Mr. Pumblechook, with a grave
nod. "That's the state of the case, for that much I've seen
myself." And then they both stared at me, and I, with an
obtrusive show of artlessness on my countenance, stared at
them, and plaited the right leg of my trousers with my right
hand.
If they had asked me any more questions, I should
undoubtedly have betrayed myself, for I was even then on the
point of mentioning that there was a balloon in the yard,
and should have hazarded the statement but for my invention
being divided between that phenomenon and a bear in the
brewery. They were so much occupied, however, in discussing
the marvels I had already presented for their consideration,
that I escaped. The subject still held them when Joe came in
from his work to have a cup of tea. To whom my sister, more
for the relief of her own mind than for the gratification of
his, related my pretended experiences.
Now, when I saw Joe open his blue eyes and roll them all
round the kitchen in helpless amazement, I was overtaken by
penitence; but only as regarded him,—not in the least as
regarded the other two. Towards Joe, and Joe only, I
considered myself a young monster, while they sat debating
what results would come to me from Miss Havisham's
acquaintance and favor. They had no doubt that Miss Havisham
would "do something" for me; their doubts related to the
form that something would take. My sister stood out for
"property." Mr. Pumblechook was in favor of a handsome
premium for binding me apprentice to some genteel
trade,—say, the corn and seed trade, for instance. Joe fell
into the deepest disgrace with both, for offering the bright
suggestion that I might only be presented with one of the
dogs who had fought for the veal-cutlets. "If a fool's head
can't express better opinions than that," said my sister,
"and you have got any work to do, you had better go and do
it." So he went.
After Mr. Pumblechook had driven off, and when my sister
was washing up, I stole into the forge to Joe, and remained
by him until he had done for the night. Then I said, "Before
the fire goes out, Joe, I should like to tell you
something."
"Should you, Pip?" said Joe, drawing his shoeing-stool
near the forge. "Then tell us. What is it, Pip?"
"Joe," said I, taking hold of his rolled-up shirt sleeve,
and twisting it between my finger and thumb, "you remember
all that about Miss Havisham's?"
"Remember?" said Joe. "I believe you! Wonderful!"
"It's a terrible thing, Joe; it ain't true."
"What are you telling of, Pip?" cried Joe, falling back
in the greatest amazement. "You don't mean to say it's—"
"Yes I do; it's lies, Joe."
"But not all of it? Why sure you don't mean to say, Pip,
that there was no black welwet co—ch?" For, I stood shaking
my head. "But at least there was dogs, Pip? Come, Pip," said
Joe, persuasively, "if there warn't no weal-cutlets, at
least there was dogs?"
"No, Joe."
"A dog?" said Joe. "A puppy? Come?"
"No, Joe, there was nothing at all of the kind."
As I fixed my eyes hopelessly on Joe, Joe contemplated me
in dismay. "Pip, old chap! This won't do, old fellow! I say!
Where do you expect to go to?"
"It's terrible, Joe; ain't it?"
"Terrible?" cried Joe. "Awful! What possessed you?"
"I don't know what possessed me, Joe," I replied, letting
his shirt sleeve go, and sitting down in the ashes at his
feet, hanging my head; "but I wish you hadn't taught me to
call Knaves at cards Jacks; and I wish my boots weren't so
thick nor my hands so coarse."
And then I told Joe that I felt very miserable, and that
I hadn't been able to explain myself to Mrs. Joe and
Pumblechook, who were so rude to me, and that there had been
a beautiful young lady at Miss Havisham's who was dreadfully
proud, and that she had said I was common, and that I knew I
was common, and that I wished I was not common, and that the
lies had come of it somehow, though I didn't know how.
This was a case of metaphysics, at least as difficult for
Joe to deal with as for me. But Joe took the case altogether
out of the region of metaphysics, and by that means
vanquished it.
"There's one thing you may be sure of, Pip," said Joe,
after some rumination, "namely, that lies is lies. Howsever
they come, they didn't ought to come, and they come from the
father of lies, and work round to the same. Don't you tell
no more of 'em, Pip. That ain't the way to get out of being
common, old chap. And as to being common, I don't make it
out at all clear. You are oncommon in some things. You're
oncommon small. Likewise you're a oncommon scholar."
"No, I am ignorant and backward, Joe."
"Why, see what a letter you wrote last night! Wrote in
print even! I've seen letters—Ah! and from gentlefolks!—that
I'll swear weren't wrote in print," said Joe.
"I have learnt next to nothing, Joe. You think much of
me. It's only that."
"Well, Pip," said Joe, "be it so or be it son't, you must
be a common scholar afore you can be a oncommon one, I
should hope! The king upon his throne, with his crown upon
his ed, can't sit and write his acts of Parliament in print,
without having begun, when he were a unpromoted Prince, with
the alphabet.—Ah!" added Joe, with a shake of the head that
was full of meaning, "and begun at A. too, and worked his
way to Z. And I know what that is to do, though I can't say
I've exactly done it."
There was some hope in this piece of wisdom, and it
rather encouraged me.
"Whether common ones as to callings and earnings,"
pursued Joe, reflectively, "mightn't be the better of
continuing for to keep company with common ones, instead of
going out to play with oncommon ones,—which reminds me to
hope that there were a flag, perhaps?"
"No, Joe."
"(I'm sorry there weren't a flag, Pip). Whether that
might be or mightn't be, is a thing as can't be looked into
now, without putting your sister on the Rampage; and that's
a thing not to be thought of as being done intentional.
Lookee here, Pip, at what is said to you by a true friend.
Which this to you the true friend say. If you can't get to
be oncommon through going straight, you'll never get to do
it through going crooked. So don't tell no more on 'em, Pip,
and live well and die happy."
"You are not angry with me, Joe?"
"No, old chap. But bearing in mind that them were which I
meantersay of a stunning and outdacious sort,—alluding to
them which bordered on weal-cutlets and dog-fighting,—a
sincere well-wisher would adwise, Pip, their being dropped
into your meditations, when you go up stairs to bed. That's
all, old chap, and don't never do it no more."
When I got up to my little room and said my prayers, I
did not forget Joe's recommendation, and yet my young mind
was in that disturbed and unthankful state, that I thought
long after I laid me down, how common Estella would consider
Joe, a mere blacksmith; how thick his boots, and how coarse
his hands. I thought how Joe and my sister were then sitting
in the kitchen, and how I had come up to bed from the
kitchen, and how Miss Havisham and Estella never sat in a
kitchen, but were far above the level of such common doings.
I fell asleep recalling what I "used to do" when I was at
Miss Havisham's; as though I had been there weeks or months,
instead of hours; and as though it were quite an old subject
of remembrance, instead of one that had arisen only that
day.
That was a memorable day to me, for it made great changes
in me. But it is the same with any life. Imagine one
selected day struck out of it, and think how different its
course would have been. Pause you who read this, and think
for a moment of the long chain of iron or gold, of thorns or
flowers, that would never have bound you, but for the
formation of the first link on one memorable day.
Chapter X
The felicitous idea occurred to me a morning or two later
when I woke, that the best step I could take towards making
myself uncommon was to get out of Biddy everything she knew.
In pursuance of this luminous conception I mentioned to
Biddy when I went to Mr. Wopsle's great-aunt's at night,
that I had a particular reason for wishing to get on in
life, and that I should feel very much obliged to her if she
would impart all her learning to me. Biddy, who was the most
obliging of girls, immediately said she would, and indeed
began to carry out her promise within five minutes.
The Educational scheme or Course established by Mr.
Wopsle's great-aunt may be resolved into the following
synopsis. The pupils ate apples and put straws down one
another's backs, until Mr. Wopsle's great-aunt collected her
energies, and made an indiscriminate totter at them with a
birch-rod. After receiving the charge with every mark of
derision, the pupils formed in line and buzzingly passed a
ragged book from hand to hand. The book had an alphabet in
it, some figures and tables, and a little spelling,—that is
to say, it had had once. As soon as this volume began to
circulate, Mr. Wopsle's great-aunt fell into a state of
coma, arising either from sleep or a rheumatic paroxysm. The
pupils then entered among themselves upon a competitive
examination on the subject of Boots, with the view of
ascertaining who could tread the hardest upon whose toes.
This mental exercise lasted until Biddy made a rush at them
and distributed three defaced Bibles (shaped as if they had
been unskilfully cut off the chump end of something), more
illegibly printed at the best than any curiosities of
literature I have since met with, speckled all over with
ironmould, and having various specimens of the insect world
smashed between their leaves. This part of the Course was
usually lightened by several single combats between Biddy
and refractory students. When the fights were over, Biddy
gave out the number of a page, and then we all read aloud
what we could,—or what we couldn't—in a frightful chorus;
Biddy leading with a high, shrill, monotonous voice, and
none of us having the least notion of, or reverence for,
what we were reading about. When this horrible din had
lasted a certain time, it mechanically awoke Mr. Wopsle's
great-aunt, who staggered at a boy fortuitously, and pulled
his ears. This was understood to terminate the Course for
the evening, and we emerged into the air with shrieks of
intellectual victory. It is fair to remark that there was no
prohibition against any pupil's entertaining himself with a
slate or even with the ink (when there was any), but that it
was not easy to pursue that branch of study in the winter
season, on account of the little general shop in which the
classes were holden—and which was also Mr. Wopsle's
great-aunt's sitting-room and bedchamber—being but faintly
illuminated through the agency of one low-spirited
dip-candle and no snuffers.
It appeared to me that it would take time to become
uncommon, under these circumstances: nevertheless, I
resolved to try it, and that very evening Biddy entered on
our special agreement, by imparting some information from
her little catalogue of Prices, under the head of moist
sugar, and lending me, to copy at home, a large old English
D which she had imitated from the heading of some newspaper,
and which I supposed, until she told me what it was, to be a
design for a buckle.
Of course there was a public-house in the village, and of
course Joe liked sometimes to smoke his pipe there. I had
received strict orders from my sister to call for him at the
Three Jolly Bargemen, that evening, on my way from school,
and bring him home at my peril. To the Three Jolly Bargemen,
therefore, I directed my steps.
There was a bar at the Jolly Bargemen, with some
alarmingly long chalk scores in it on the wall at the side
of the door, which seemed to me to be never paid off. They
had been there ever since I could remember, and had grown
more than I had. But there was a quantity of chalk about our
country, and perhaps the people neglected no opportunity of
turning it to account.
It being Saturday night, I found the landlord looking
rather grimly at these records; but as my business was with
Joe and not with him, I merely wished him good evening, and
passed into the common room at the end of the passage, where
there was a bright large kitchen fire, and where Joe was
smoking his pipe in company with Mr. Wopsle and a stranger.
Joe greeted me as usual with "Halloa, Pip, old chap!" and
the moment he said that, the stranger turned his head and
looked at me.
He was a secret-looking man whom I had never seen before.
His head was all on one side, and one of his eyes was half
shut up, as if he were taking aim at something with an
invisible gun. He had a pipe in his mouth, and he took it
out, and, after slowly blowing all his smoke away and
looking hard at me all the time, nodded. So, I nodded, and
then he nodded again, and made room on the settle beside him
that I might sit down there.
But as I was used to sit beside Joe whenever I entered
that place of resort, I said "No, thank you, sir," and fell
into the space Joe made for me on the opposite settle. The
strange man, after glancing at Joe, and seeing that his
attention was otherwise engaged, nodded to me again when I
had taken my seat, and then rubbed his leg—in a very odd
way, as it struck me.
"You was saying," said the strange man, turning to Joe,
"that you was a blacksmith."
"Yes. I said it, you know," said Joe.
"What'll you drink, Mr.—? You didn't mention your name,
by the bye."
Joe mentioned it now, and the strange man called him by
it. "What'll you drink, Mr. Gargery? At my expense? To top
up with?"
"Well," said Joe, "to tell you the truth, I ain't much in
the habit of drinking at anybody's expense but my own."
"Habit? No," returned the stranger, "but once and away,
and on a Saturday night too. Come! Put a name to it, Mr.
Gargery."
"I wouldn't wish to be stiff company," said Joe. "Rum."
"Rum," repeated the stranger. "And will the other
gentleman originate a sentiment."
"Rum," said Mr. Wopsle.
"Three Rums!" cried the stranger, calling to the
landlord. "Glasses round!"
"This other gentleman," observed Joe, by way of
introducing Mr. Wopsle, "is a gentleman that you would like
to hear give it out. Our clerk at church."
"Aha!" said the stranger, quickly, and cocking his eye at
me. "The lonely church, right out on the marshes, with
graves round it!"
"That's it," said Joe.
The stranger, with a comfortable kind of grunt over his
pipe, put his legs up on the settle that he had to himself.
He wore a flapping broad-brimmed traveller's hat, and under
it a handkerchief tied over his head in the manner of a cap:
so that he showed no hair. As he looked at the fire, I
thought I saw a cunning expression, followed by a
half-laugh, come into his face.
"I am not acquainted with this country, gentlemen, but it
seems a solitary country towards the river."
"Most marshes is solitary," said Joe.
"No doubt, no doubt. Do you find any gypsies, now, or
tramps, or vagrants of any sort, out there?"
"No," said Joe; "none but a runaway convict now and then.
And we don't find them, easy. Eh, Mr. Wopsle?"
Mr. Wopsle, with a majestic remembrance of old
discomfiture, assented; but not warmly.
"Seems you have been out after such?" asked the stranger.
"Once," returned Joe. "Not that we wanted to take them,
you understand; we went out as lookers on; me, and Mr.
Wopsle, and Pip. Didn't us, Pip?"
"Yes, Joe."
The stranger looked at me again,—still cocking his eye,
as if he were expressly taking aim at me with his invisible
gun,—and said, "He's a likely young parcel of bones that.
What is it you call him?"
"Pip," said Joe.
"Christened Pip?"
"No, not christened Pip."
"Surname Pip?"
"No," said Joe, "it's a kind of family name what he gave
himself when a infant, and is called by."
"Son of yours?"
"Well," said Joe, meditatively, not, of course, that it
could be in anywise necessary to consider about it, but
because it was the way at the Jolly Bargemen to seem to
consider deeply about everything that was discussed over
pipes,—"well—no. No, he ain't."
"Nevvy?" said the strange man.
"Well," said Joe, with the same appearance of profound
cogitation, "he is not—no, not to deceive you, he is not—my
nevvy."
"What the Blue Blazes is he?" asked the stranger. Which
appeared to me to be an inquiry of unnecessary strength.
Mr. Wopsle struck in upon that; as one who knew all about
relationships, having professional occasion to bear in mind
what female relations a man might not marry; and expounded
the ties between me and Joe. Having his hand in, Mr. Wopsle
finished off with a most terrifically snarling passage from
Richard the Third, and seemed to think he had done quite
enough to account for it when he added, "—as the poet says."
And here I may remark that when Mr. Wopsle referred to
me, he considered it a necessary part of such reference to
rumple my hair and poke it into my eyes. I cannot conceive
why everybody of his standing who visited at our house
should always have put me through the same inflammatory
process under similar circumstances. Yet I do not call to
mind that I was ever in my earlier youth the subject of
remark in our social family circle, but some large-handed
person took some such ophthalmic steps to patronize me.
All this while, the strange man looked at nobody but me,
and looked at me as if he were determined to have a shot at
me at last, and bring me down. But he said nothing after
offering his Blue Blazes observation, until the glasses of
rum and water were brought; and then he made his shot, and a
most extraordinary shot it was.
It was not a verbal remark, but a proceeding in
dumb-show, and was pointedly addressed to me. He stirred his
rum and water pointedly at me, and he tasted his rum and
water pointedly at me. And he stirred it and he tasted it;
not with a spoon that was brought to him, but with a file.
He did this so that nobody but I saw the file; and when
he had done it he wiped the file and put it in a
breast-pocket. I knew it to be Joe's file, and I knew that
he knew my convict, the moment I saw the instrument. I sat
gazing at him, spell-bound. But he now reclined on his
settle, taking very little notice of me, and talking
principally about turnips.
There was a delicious sense of cleaning-up and making a
quiet pause before going on in life afresh, in our village
on Saturday nights, which stimulated Joe to dare to stay out
half an hour longer on Saturdays than at other times. The
half-hour and the rum and water running out together, Joe
got up to go, and took me by the hand.
"Stop half a moment, Mr. Gargery," said the strange man.
"I think I've got a bright new shilling somewhere in my
pocket, and if I have, the boy shall have it."
He looked it out from a handful of small change, folded
it in some crumpled paper, and gave it to me. "Yours!" said
he. "Mind! Your own."
I thanked him, staring at him far beyond the bounds of
good manners, and holding tight to Joe. He gave Joe
good-night, and he gave Mr. Wopsle good-night (who went out
with us), and he gave me only a look with his aiming
eye,—no, not a look, for he shut it up, but wonders may be
done with an eye by hiding it.
On the way home, if I had been in a humor for talking,
the talk must have been all on my side, for Mr. Wopsle
parted from us at the door of the Jolly Bargemen, and Joe
went all the way home with his mouth wide open, to rinse the
rum out with as much air as possible. But I was in a manner
stupefied by this turning up of my old misdeed and old
acquaintance, and could think of nothing else.
My sister was not in a very bad temper when we presented
ourselves in the kitchen, and Joe was encouraged by that
unusual circumstance to tell her about the bright shilling.
"A bad un, I'll be bound," said Mrs. Joe triumphantly, "or
he wouldn't have given it to the boy! Let's look at it."
I took it out of the paper, and it proved to be a good
one. "But what's this?" said Mrs. Joe, throwing down the
shilling and catching up the paper. "Two One-Pound notes?"
Nothing less than two fat sweltering one-pound notes that
seemed to have been on terms of the warmest intimacy with
all the cattle-markets in the county. Joe caught up his hat
again, and ran with them to the Jolly Bargemen to restore
them to their owner. While he was gone, I sat down on my
usual stool and looked vacantly at my sister, feeling pretty
sure that the man would not be there.
Presently, Joe came back, saying that the man was gone,
but that he, Joe, had left word at the Three Jolly Bargemen
concerning the notes. Then my sister sealed them up in a
piece of paper, and put them under some dried rose-leaves in
an ornamental teapot on the top of a press in the state
parlor. There they remained, a nightmare to me, many and
many a night and day.
I had sadly broken sleep when I got to bed, through
thinking of the strange man taking aim at me with his
invisible gun, and of the guiltily coarse and common thing
it was, to be on secret terms of conspiracy with convicts,—a
feature in my low career that I had previously forgotten. I
was haunted by the file too. A dread possessed me that when
I least expected it, the file would reappear. I coaxed
myself to sleep by thinking of Miss Havisham's, next
Wednesday; and in my sleep I saw the file coming at me out
of a door, without seeing who held it, and I screamed myself
awake.
