Great Expectations

he 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 patronise 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 humour 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 parlour. 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.