08: Great Expectations: Charles Dickens

Mr Pumblechook's premises in the high streets of market town, were of a peppercorny and farinacious character, as the premises of a corn-chandler and seedsman should be. It appeared to me that he must be a very happy man, to have many little drawers in his shop. I peeped into one or two of these drawers in the lower tiers.  The brown packets inside, I wondered whether the bulbs or seeds in them ever wanted of a fine day to break out of those jails, and bloom. 

It was in the early morning after my arrival those thoughts came to me.  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, and the tiles being within a foot of my eyebrows.  Mr Pumblechook wore corduroys. And so did his shopman. There was a general air and flavour about the corduroys, so much in the nature of seeds.  A singular affinity between corduroys and seeds.  Uncle Pumblechook appeared to transact his business by looking across the street at saddler, who appeared to transact a business by keeping his eye on the coachmaker, who appeared to get on in life by putting his hands in his pocket and contemplating the baker, who in 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 in smock-frocks poring over him through the glass of shopwindow, 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 parlour 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.  Mr Pumblechook is a wretched company.  Besides being possessed of 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 sallowed 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 a gorging and gormandising manner.

For such reasons, I was very glad when ten o'clock came and we started for Havisham's.  I was not at all at my ease regarding the manner in which I should acquit myself under the lady's roof.  Within a quarter of an hour we came to Miss Havisham's house.  An 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. The doors were closed.  We had to wait, after ringing the bell, until someone should come to open it.  While we had waited at the gate, Mr Pumblechook muttered "And fourteen" and I pretended not to hear him; I peeped in and saw that at the side of the house there was a large brewery.  It was dilapidated and vacant. 

A  window was raised and a clear voice demanded, "What name?"

"Pumblechook," said my conductor.

"Quite right," returned the voice. The window was shut again.  A young lady came across the courtyard, 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 doesn't." 

She said it so finally, and in such an undiscussible way, that Mr Pumblechook, though in a condition of ruffled diginity, could not protest. But he eyed me severely -- as if I had done anything to him -- and departed.

"Boy!  Let your behaviour here be a credit unto them who 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 the grass was growing in every crevice.  The brewery buildings had a little lane of communication with it.  The wooden gate of the 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, and it made a shrill noise in howling while passing through the open sides of the brewery, like this 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 to 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 it, and the place will stand idle as it is, till it falls.  As to strong beer, there's enough of it in the cellars already, in 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 about my own age.  She seemed much older than I, of course, being a girl, and beautiful and self possessed, she was 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 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 she 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.  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 armchair, with an elbow resting on the table and her head leaning on that hand, sat the 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 white jewels sparkled on her neck and on her hands, and some other jewels lay sparkling on the table.  Dresses, less splendid than the dresses 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 moments that I saw all these things, though I saw more of them in the first moments.  I saw 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 in 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 wax-work 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, wax work and skeleton seemed to have dark eyes that moved and looked at me. I should have cried out, if I could. 

"Who's 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 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 returned the word with an eager look, and with strong emphasis, and with 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 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 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 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, in as much 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 is 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 her 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."

And 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 long 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 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 labouring boy!" 

I thought I overheard Miss Havisham answer -- only it seemed unlikely -- Well? You can break his heart."

"What do you play, boy?" asked Estella of myself, with the greatest disdain.

"Nothing, but beggar my neighbour, 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 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 looked like earthy paper.  I knew nothing then, of the discoveries that are occasionally made of bodies buried in ancient times, which fail 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 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 my hands before; but I began to consider them a very indifferent pair.  Her contempt 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 labouring boy.

"You say nothing of her," remarked Miss Havisham to me, as she looked on.  "She says many 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 pretty." 

"Anything else?" 

"I think she is very insulting."  Estella was looking at me, 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 should not like to see her again, but I should like to go home." 

"You shall go soon.  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 stopped; and her voice had 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 beggard 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 today 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 weeks of the year.

"Come again after six days, you hear?" 

"Yes, Ma'am" 

"Estella, take him down.  Let him have something to eat, let him roam and look about him while he eats.  Go, Pip." 

I followed the candle down.  As I had followed the candle up, 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.

The rush of daylight quite confounded me, and made me feel as if I had been in the candle light of the strange room many hours.

"You are to wait here, you boy," said Estella, and disappeared behind 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 favourable.  They have never troubled me before, but they trouble me now as vulgar appendages.  I determined to ask Joe why he had ever taught me to call those picture cards, Jacks, which aught 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 the power to keep them back and to look at her: so, she gave me a contemptuous toss -- but with a sense, I thought, of having made too sure that I was so wounded -- and left me.

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 line, 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 hard twist at my hair; so bitter were my feelings, and so sharp was the smart without a name, that needed counter action.

My sister's bringing up had made me sensitive.  In her capricious and violent coercion, she was unjust to me.  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, the beer was warming and tingling and I was soon in spirits to look about me.

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 dovecot, no horses in the stsble, no pigs in the sty, no malt in the store house, no smell of grains and beer in the copper or the vat.  All the scents of the brewery might have evaporated with its last reek of smoke.  In a by-yard there was a wilderness of empty casks.

Behind the furthest end of brewery was a rank garden with an old wall, not so high.  It was the garden of the house.  It was overgrown with tangled weeds; there was a track upon the green and yellow paths, as if someone sometimes walked over it.  Estella was walking away from me.  But she seemed to be everywhere.  I was tempted to walk over the casks.  She had her back towards me, and held her pretty brown hair spread out in her two hands.  I saw her pass among the extinguished fires, and ascend some light iron stairs, and go out by the gallery high overhead, as if she were going out into the sky.

Here, at this moment a strange thing happened to my fancy.  It lingered in my memory long afterwards; in the frosty light, towards the great wooden beam in the low nook of the 

building near me, on my right hand, I saw a figure hanging by 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 an earthy paper, and that the face of Miss Havisham's, with a movement going over the whole countenance as if she were going to call 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 towards it.  And my terror was 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 courtyard gate, and the reviving influence of the rest of the bread and meat and beer, would have brought me round. Even with those I might not have come to myself, but that Estella approaching with the keys to let me out.  She would have some fair reason for looking down upon me, if she saw me frightened. She should have no fair reason.

She gave me a triumphant glance while passing me, as if she rejoiced that my hands were coarse and my boots were so thick.  She opened the gate and stood holding it. I passed out without looking at her. 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 cotemptuously, pushed me out, and locked the gate upon me.  I went straight to Pumblechook, and was immediately 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.resolving that I was a common labour 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 a low lived bad boy.