Great Expectations

ne day when I was busy with my books and Mr. Pocket, I received a note
by the post, the mere outside of which threw me into a great flutter;
for, though I had never seen the handwriting in which it was addressed,
I divined whose hand it was. It had no set beginning, as Dear Mr. Pip,
or Dear Pip, or Dear Sir, or Dear Anything, but ran thus:—

“I am to come to London the day after to-morrow by the midday coach. I
believe it was settled you should meet me? At all events Miss Havisham
has that impression, and I write in obedience to it. She sends you her
regard.

“Yours, ESTELLA.”

If there had been time, I should probably have ordered several suits of
clothes for this occasion; but as there was not, I was fain to be
content with those I had. My appetite vanished instantly, and I knew no
peace or rest until the day arrived. Not that its arrival brought me
either; for, then I was worse than ever, and began haunting the
coach-office in Wood Street, Cheapside, before the coach had left the
Blue Boar in our town. For all that I knew this perfectly well, I still
felt as if it were not safe to let the coach-office be out of my sight
longer than five minutes at a time; and in this condition of unreason I
had performed the first half-hour of a watch of four or five hours,
when Wemmick ran against me.

“Halloa, Mr. Pip,” said he; “how do you do? I should hardly have
thought this was your beat.”

I explained that I was waiting to meet somebody who was coming up by
coach, and I inquired after the Castle and the Aged.

“Both flourishing thankye,” said Wemmick, “and particularly the Aged.
He’s in wonderful feather. He’ll be eighty-two next birthday. I have a
notion of firing eighty-two times, if the neighbourhood shouldn’t
complain, and that cannon of mine should prove equal to the pressure.
However, this is not London talk. Where do you think I am going to?”

“To the office?” said I, for he was tending in that direction.

“Next thing to it,” returned Wemmick, “I am going to Newgate. We are in
a banker’s-parcel case just at present, and I have been down the road
taking a squint at the scene of action, and thereupon must have a word
or two with our client.”

“Did your client commit the robbery?” I asked.

“Bless your soul and body, no,” answered Wemmick, very drily. “But he
is accused of it. So might you or I be. Either of us might be accused
of it, you know.”

“Only neither of us is,” I remarked.

“Yah!” said Wemmick, touching me on the breast with his forefinger;
“you’re a deep one, Mr. Pip! Would you like to have a look at Newgate?
Have you time to spare?”

I had so much time to spare, that the proposal came as a relief,
notwithstanding its irreconcilability with my latent desire to keep my
eye on the coach-office. Muttering that I would make the inquiry
whether I had time to walk with him, I went into the office, and
ascertained from the clerk with the nicest precision and much to the
trying of his temper, the earliest moment at which the coach could be
expected,—which I knew beforehand, quite as well as he. I then rejoined
Mr. Wemmick, and affecting to consult my watch, and to be surprised by
the information I had received, accepted his offer.

We were at Newgate in a few minutes, and we passed through the lodge
where some fetters were hanging up on the bare walls among the prison
rules, into the interior of the jail. At that time jails were much
neglected, and the period of exaggerated reaction consequent on all
public wrongdoing—and which is always its heaviest and longest
punishment—was still far off. So, felons were not lodged and fed better
than soldiers (to say nothing of paupers), and seldom set fire to their
prisons with the excusable object of improving the flavour of their
soup. It was visiting time when Wemmick took me in, and a potman was
going his rounds with beer; and the prisoners, behind bars in yards,
were buying beer, and talking to friends; and a frowzy, ugly,
disorderly, depressing scene it was.

It struck me that Wemmick walked among the prisoners much as a gardener
might walk among his plants. This was first put into my head by his
seeing a shoot that had come up in the night, and saying, “What,
Captain Tom? Are you there? Ah, indeed!” and also, “Is that Black
Bill behind the cistern? Why I didn’t look for you these two months;
how do you find yourself?” Equally in his stopping at the bars and
attending to anxious whisperers,—always singly,—Wemmick with his
post-office in an immovable state, looked at them while in conference,
as if he were taking particular notice of the advance they had made,
since last observed, towards coming out in full blow at their trial.

He was highly popular, and I found that he took the familiar department
of Mr. Jaggers’s business; though something of the state of Mr. Jaggers
hung about him too, forbidding approach beyond certain limits. His
personal recognition of each successive client was comprised in a nod,
and in his settling his hat a little easier on his head with both
hands, and then tightening the post-office, and putting his hands in
his pockets. In one or two instances there was a difficulty respecting
the raising of fees, and then Mr. Wemmick, backing as far as possible
from the insufficient money produced, said, “it’s no use, my boy. I’m
only a subordinate. I can’t take it. Don’t go on in that way with a
subordinate. If you are unable to make up your quantum, my boy, you had
better address yourself to a principal; there are plenty of principals
in the profession, you know, and what is not worth the while of one,
may be worth the while of another; that’s my recommendation to you,
speaking as a subordinate. Don’t try on useless measures. Why should
you? Now, who’s next?”

Thus, we walked through Wemmick’s greenhouse, until he turned to me and
said, “Notice the man I shall shake hands with.” I should have done so,
without the preparation, as he had shaken hands with no one yet.

Almost as soon as he had spoken, a portly upright man (whom I can see
now, as I write) in a well-worn olive-coloured frock-coat, with a
peculiar pallor overspreading the red in his complexion, and eyes that
went wandering about when he tried to fix them, came up to a corner of
the bars, and put his hand to his hat—which had a greasy and fatty
surface like cold broth—with a half-serious and half-jocose military
salute.

“Colonel, to you!” said Wemmick; “how are you, Colonel?”

“All right, Mr. Wemmick.”

“Everything was done that could be done, but the evidence was too
strong for us, Colonel.”

“Yes, it was too strong, sir,—but I don’t care.”

“No, no,” said Wemmick, coolly, “you don’t care.” Then, turning to
me, “Served His Majesty this man. Was a soldier in the line and bought
his discharge.”

I said, “Indeed?” and the man’s eyes looked at me, and then looked over
my head, and then looked all round me, and then he drew his hand across
his lips and laughed.

“I think I shall be out of this on Monday, sir,” he said to Wemmick.

“Perhaps,” returned my friend, “but there’s no knowing.”

“I am glad to have the chance of bidding you good-bye, Mr. Wemmick,”
said the man, stretching out his hand between two bars.

“Thankye,” said Wemmick, shaking hands with him. “Same to you,
Colonel.”

“If what I had upon me when taken had been real, Mr. Wemmick,” said the
man, unwilling to let his hand go, “I should have asked the favour of
your wearing another ring—in acknowledgment of your attentions.”

“I’ll accept the will for the deed,” said Wemmick. “By the by; you were
quite a pigeon-fancier.” The man looked up at the sky. “I am told you
had a remarkable breed of tumblers. Could you commission any friend
of yours to bring me a pair, if you’ve no further use for ’em?”

“It shall be done, sir.”

“All right,” said Wemmick, “they shall be taken care of.
Good-afternoon, Colonel. Good-bye!” They shook hands again, and as we
walked away Wemmick said to me, “A Coiner, a very good workman. The
Recorder’s report is made to-day, and he is sure to be executed on
Monday. Still you see, as far as it goes, a pair of pigeons are
portable property all the same.” With that, he looked back, and nodded
at this dead plant, and then cast his eyes about him in walking out of
the yard, as if he were considering what other pot would go best in its
place.

As we came out of the prison through the lodge, I found that the great
importance of my guardian was appreciated by the turnkeys, no less than
by those whom they held in charge. “Well, Mr. Wemmick,” said the
turnkey, who kept us between the two studded and spiked lodge gates,
and who carefully locked one before he unlocked the other, “what’s Mr.
Jaggers going to do with that water-side murder? Is he going to make it
manslaughter, or what’s he going to make of it?”

“Why don’t you ask him?” returned Wemmick.

“O yes, I dare say!” said the turnkey.

“Now, that’s the way with them here, Mr. Pip,” remarked Wemmick,
turning to me with his post-office elongated. “They don’t mind what
they ask of me, the subordinate; but you’ll never catch ’em asking any
questions of my principal.”

“Is this young gentleman one of the ’prentices or articled ones of your
office?” asked the turnkey, with a grin at Mr. Wemmick’s humour.

“There he goes again, you see!” cried Wemmick, “I told you so! Asks
another question of the subordinate before his first is dry! Well,
supposing Mr. Pip is one of them?”

“Why then,” said the turnkey, grinning again, “he knows what Mr.
Jaggers is.”

“Yah!” cried Wemmick, suddenly hitting out at the turnkey in a
facetious way, “you’re dumb as one of your own keys when you have to do
with my principal, you know you are. Let us out, you old fox, or I’ll
get him to bring an action against you for false imprisonment.”

The turnkey laughed, and gave us good day, and stood laughing at us
over the spikes of the wicket when we descended the steps into the
street.

“Mind you, Mr. Pip,” said Wemmick, gravely in my ear, as he took my arm
to be more confidential; “I don’t know that Mr. Jaggers does a better
thing than the way in which he keeps himself so high. He’s always so
high. His constant height is of a piece with his immense abilities.
That Colonel durst no more take leave of him, than that turnkey durst
ask him his intentions respecting a case. Then, between his height and
them, he slips in his subordinate,—don’t you see?—and so he has ’em,
soul and body.”

I was very much impressed, and not for the first time, by my guardian’s
subtlety. To confess the truth, I very heartily wished, and not for the
first time, that I had had some other guardian of minor abilities.

Mr. Wemmick and I parted at the office in Little Britain, where
suppliants for Mr. Jaggers’s notice were lingering about as usual, and
I returned to my watch in the street of the coach-office, with some
three hours on hand. I consumed the whole time in thinking how strange
it was that I should be encompassed by all this taint of prison and
crime; that, in my childhood out on our lonely marshes on a winter
evening, I should have first encountered it; that, it should have
reappeared on two occasions, starting out like a stain that was faded
but not gone; that, it should in this new way pervade my fortune and
advancement. While my mind was thus engaged, I thought of the beautiful
young Estella, proud and refined, coming towards me, and I thought with
absolute abhorrence of the contrast between the jail and her. I wished
that Wemmick had not met me, or that I had not yielded to him and gone
with him, so that, of all days in the year on this day, I might not
have had Newgate in my breath and on my clothes. I beat the prison dust
off my feet as I sauntered to and fro, and I shook it out of my dress,
and I exhaled its air from my lungs. So contaminated did I feel,
remembering who was coming, that the coach came quickly after all, and
I was not yet free from the soiling consciousness of Mr. Wemmick’s
conservatory, when I saw her face at the coach window and her hand
waving to me.

What was the nameless shadow which again in that one instant had
passed?