Great Expectations

is a most miserable thing to feel ashamed of home. There may be
black ingratitude in the thing, and the punishment may be retributive
and well deserved; but that it is a miserable thing, I can testify.

Home had never been a very pleasant place to me, because of my sister’s
temper. But, Joe had sanctified it, and I had believed in it. I had
believed in the best parlour as a most elegant saloon; I had believed
in the front door, as a mysterious portal of the Temple of State whose
solemn opening was attended with a sacrifice of roast fowls; I had
believed in the kitchen as a chaste though not magnificent apartment; I
had believed in the forge as the glowing road to manhood and
independence. Within a single year all this was changed. Now it was all
coarse and common, and I would not have had Miss Havisham and Estella
see it on any account.

How much of my ungracious condition of mind may have been my own fault,
how much Miss Havisham’s, how much my sister’s, is now of no moment to
me or to any one. The change was made in me; the thing was done. Well
or ill done, excusably or inexcusably, it was done.

Once, it had seemed to me that when I should at last roll up my
shirt-sleeves and go into the forge, Joe’s ’prentice, I should be
distinguished and happy. Now the reality was in my hold, I only felt
that I was dusty with the dust of small-coal, and that I had a weight
upon my daily remembrance to which the anvil was a feather. There have
been occasions in my later life (I suppose as in most lives) when I
have felt for a time as if a thick curtain had fallen on all its
interest and romance, to shut me out from anything save dull endurance
any more. Never has that curtain dropped so heavy and blank, as when my
way in life lay stretched out straight before me through the newly
entered road of apprenticeship to Joe.

I remember that at a later period of my “time,” I used to stand about
the churchyard on Sunday evenings when night was falling, comparing my
own perspective with the windy marsh view, and making out some likeness
between them by thinking how flat and low both were, and how on both
there came an unknown way and a dark mist and then the sea. I was quite
as dejected on the first working-day of my apprenticeship as in that
after-time; but I am glad to know that I never breathed a murmur to Joe
while my indentures lasted. It is about the only thing I am glad to
know of myself in that connection.

For, though it includes what I proceed to add, all the merit of what I
proceed to add was Joe’s. It was not because I was faithful, but
because Joe was faithful, that I never ran away and went for a soldier
or a sailor. It was not because I had a strong sense of the virtue of
industry, but because Joe had a strong sense of the virtue of industry,
that I worked with tolerable zeal against the grain. It is not possible
to know how far the influence of any amiable honest-hearted duty-doing
man flies out into the world; but it is very possible to know how it
has touched one’s self in going by, and I know right well that any good
that intermixed itself with my apprenticeship came of plain contented
Joe, and not of restlessly aspiring discontented me.

What I wanted, who can say? How can I say, when I never knew? What I
dreaded was, that in some unlucky hour I, being at my grimiest and
commonest, should lift up my eyes and see Estella looking in at one of
the wooden windows of the forge. I was haunted by the fear that she
would, sooner or later, find me out, with a black face and hands, doing
the coarsest part of my work, and would exult over me and despise me.
Often after dark, when I was pulling the bellows for Joe, and we were
singing Old Clem, and when the thought how we used to sing it at Miss
Havisham’s would seem to show me Estella’s face in the fire, with her
pretty hair fluttering in the wind and her eyes scorning me,—often at
such a time I would look towards those panels of black night in the
wall which the wooden windows then were, and would fancy that I saw her
just drawing her face away, and would believe that she had come at
last.

After that, when we went in to supper, the place and the meal would
have a more homely look than ever, and I would feel more ashamed of
home than ever, in my own ungracious breast.