10. Great Expectations: Charles Dickens

The appropriate idea occurred to me a morning or two later when I awoke that the best step towards making myself uncommon was to get out of Biddy everything she knew.  In pursuance of this luminous conception I mentioned to Biddy 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 immediately said she would, and began to carry out her promise. 

The educational scheme of Mr Wopsle's great aunt was like this: The pupils ate apples and put straws up 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 buzzing passed a ragged book from hand to hand.  The book had an alphabet in it, some figures and some tables, and a little spelling- that is to say it had once.  As soon as  this volume began to circulate, Mr Wopsle's great aunt fell into coma, either from sleep or rheumatic paroxysm.  The pupils then entered among themselves upon a competitive examination on the subject of Boots with the view of entertaining who could tread the hardest upon whose toes.  This mental excercise lasted until Biddy made rush at them and distributed three defaced Bibles, more illegibly printed at the best than any curiosities of literature.  I have since met with, speckled all over with iron mould, and having various specimens of 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 is no prohibition against any pupil's entertaining himself with a slate or even with ink, 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 held, and which was also Mr Wopsle's great aunt's sitting room and bed chamber -- 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 buckle.

There was a public-house in the village, 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 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 "Hello, 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 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 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 other side of the 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- on 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-by." 

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 babit 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 a stiff company," said Joe, " Rum."

"Rum," repeated the stranger. "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," said Joe by way of introducing Mr Wopsle, "is a gentleman 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 the graves round it!"

"That's it." said Joe.

The stranger, with a comfortable kind of grunt over his pipe, put the legs upon 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 then, 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 is likely young parcel of bones that.  What's it you call him?" 

"Pip," said Joe.

"Christened Pip?"

"No, Not Christened Pip."

Surname, Pip?" 

"No," said Joe, it is a kind of family name what he gave himself when an infant, and is called by.*

"Son of yours?" 

"Well," said Joe meditatively.  It was the way at Jolly Bargemen to consider deeply about everything that was discussed over pipes; "well -no.  No, he ain't." 

"Nephew?" said the strange man.

"Well," said Joe, with the same appearance of profound cognition, " he is not -- no, not to deceive you, he is not my nephew.

"What the Blue Blazes is he?" asked the stranger.  It appeared to me an inquiry of unnecessary strength.

Mr Wopsle struck in upon that, and expounded the ties between me and Joe.  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 his Blue Blazes remark, until the glasses of rum-and-water were brought; and then he made his shot, and 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 hand.

"Stop half a moment, Mr Gargery," said the strange man.  "I think I have 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, and Mr Wopsle went out with us.

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 stupified by this turning up of my old misdeeds and old acquaintance, and could think of nothing else.

My sister was not in a bad mood when we presented ourselves in the kitchen, and Joe was encouraged by the unusual circumstance to tell her about the bright shilling.  "A bad one, I will be bound," said Mrs Joe triumphantly, "or he wouldn't have given it to the boy!  Let us look at it." 

I took it out of the paper, and it proved to be a good one.  "But what is this?" said Mrs Joe, throwing down the shilling and catching up the paper.  "Two one-pound notes?" 

Nothing less than the two fat sweltering one-pound notes that seemed to have been on terms of the warmest intimacy with all the cattle markets in the country.  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 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 tea-pot in the top of a press in the state parlour.  There they remained, a nightmare to me, many many night and day.

I had sadly broken sleep when I got to bed, thinking of the strange man taking aim at me with his invisible gun, and of the guilty coarse and common thing it was, to be on secret terms of conspiracy with the 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.

End of the Chapter