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Read books online » Fiction » Great Expectations by Charles Dickens (best ereader under 100 TXT) 📖

Book online «Great Expectations by Charles Dickens (best ereader under 100 TXT) 📖». Author Charles Dickens



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I could see nothing else but black darkness.

Our lights warmed the air about us with their pitchy blaze, and the

two prisoners seemed rather to like that, as they limped along in

the midst of the muskets. We could not go fast, because of their

lameness; and they were so spent, that two or three times we had to

halt while they rested.

After an hour or so of this travelling, we came to a rough wooden

hut and a landing-place. There was a guard in the hut, and they

challenged, and the sergeant answered. Then, we went into the hut,

where there was a smell of tobacco and whitewash, and a bright

fire, and a lamp, and a stand of muskets, and a drum, and a low

wooden bedstead, like an overgrown mangle without the machinery,

capable of holding about a dozen soldiers all at once. Three or

four soldiers who lay upon it in their great-coats were not much

interested in us, but just lifted their heads and took a sleepy

stare, and then lay down again. The sergeant made some kind of

report, and some entry in a book, and then the convict whom I call

the other convict was drafted off with his guard, to go on board

first.

My convict never looked at me, except that once. While we stood in

the hut, he stood before the fire looking thoughtfully at it, or

putting up his feet by turns upon the hob, and looking thoughtfully

at them as if he pitied them for their recent adventures. Suddenly,

he turned to the sergeant, and remarked,—

“I wish to say something respecting this escape. It may prevent

some persons laying under suspicion alonger me.”

“You can say what you like,” returned the sergeant, standing coolly

looking at him with his arms folded, “but you have no call to say

it here. You’ll have opportunity enough to say about it, and hear

about it, before it’s done with, you know.”

“I know, but this is another pint, a separate matter. A man can’t

starve; at least I can’t. I took some wittles, up at the willage

over yonder,—where the church stands a’most out on the marshes.”

“You mean stole,” said the sergeant.

“And I’ll tell you where from. From the blacksmith’s.”

“Halloa!” said the sergeant, staring at Joe.

“Halloa, Pip!” said Joe, staring at me.

“It was some broken wittles—that’s what it was—and a dram of

liquor, and a pie.”

“Have you happened to miss such an article as a pie, blacksmith?”

asked the sergeant, confidentially.

“My wife did, at the very moment when you came in. Don’t you know,

Pip?”

“So,” said my convict, turning his eyes on Joe in a moody manner,

and without the least glance at me,—“so you’re the blacksmith, are

you? Than I’m sorry to say, I’ve eat your pie.”

“God knows you’re welcome to it,—so far as it was ever mine,”

returned Joe, with a saving remembrance of Mrs. Joe. “We don’t know

what you have done, but we wouldn’t have you starved to death for

it, poor miserable fellow-creatur.—Would us, Pip?”

The something that I had noticed before, clicked in the man’s

throat again, and he turned his back. The boat had returned, and

his guard were ready, so we followed him to the landing-place made

of rough stakes and stones, and saw him put into the boat, which

was rowed by a crew of convicts like himself. No one seemed

surprised to see him, or interested in seeing him, or glad to see

him, or sorry to see him, or spoke a word, except that somebody in

the boat growled as if to dogs, “Give way, you!” which was the

signal for the dip of the oars. By the light of the torches, we saw

the black Hulk lying out a little way from the mud of the shore, like

a wicked Noah’s ark. Cribbed and barred and moored by massive rusty

chains, the prison-ship seemed in my young eyes to be ironed like

the prisoners. We saw the boat go alongside, and we saw him taken

up the side and disappear. Then, the ends of the torches were flung

hissing into the water, and went out, as if it were all over with

him.

Chapter VI

My state of mind regarding the pilfering from which I had been so

unexpectedly exonerated did not impel me to frank disclosure; but

I hope it had some dregs of good at the bottom of it.

I do not recall that I felt any tenderness of conscience in

reference to Mrs. Joe, when the fear of being found out was lifted

off me. But I loved Joe,—perhaps for no better reason in those

early days than because the dear fellow let me love him,—and, as

to him, my inner self was not so easily composed. It was much upon

my mind (particularly when I first saw him looking about for his

file) that I ought to tell Joe the whole truth. Yet I did not, and

for the reason that I mistrusted that if I did, he would think me

worse than I was. The fear of losing Joe’s confidence, and of

thenceforth sitting in the chimney corner at night staring drearily

at my forever lost companion and friend, tied up my tongue. I

morbidly represented to myself that if Joe knew it, I never

afterwards could see him at the fireside feeling his fair whisker,

without thinking that he was meditating on it. That, if Joe knew

it, I never afterwards could see him glance, however casually, at

yesterday’s meat or pudding when it came on to-day’s table, without

thinking that he was debating whether I had been in the pantry.

That, if Joe knew it, and at any subsequent period of our joint

domestic life remarked that his beer was flat or thick, the

conviction that he suspected Tar in it, would bring a rush of blood

to my face. In a word, I was too cowardly to do what I knew to be

right, as I had been too cowardly to avoid doing what I knew to be

wrong. I had had no intercourse with the world at that time, and I

imitated none of its many inhabitants who act in this manner. Quite

an untaught genius, I made the discovery of the line of action for

myself.

As I was sleepy before we were far away from the prison-ship, Joe

took me on his back again and carried me home. He must have had a

tiresome journey of it, for Mr. Wopsle, being knocked up, was in

such a very bad temper that if the Church had been thrown open, he

would probably have excommunicated the whole expedition, beginning

with Joe and myself. In his lay capacity, he persisted in sitting

down in the damp to such an insane extent, that when his coat was

taken off to be dried at the kitchen fire, the circumstantial

evidence on his trousers would have hanged him, if it had been a

capital offence.

By that time, I was staggering on the kitchen floor like a little

drunkard, through having been newly set upon my feet, and through

having been fast asleep, and through waking in the heat and lights

and noise of tongues. As I came to myself (with the aid of a heavy

thump between the shoulders, and the restorative exclamation “Yah!

Was there ever such a boy as this!” from my sister,) I found Joe

telling them about the convict’s confession, and all the visitors

suggesting different ways by which he had got into the pantry. Mr.

Pumblechook made out, after carefully surveying the premises, that

he had first got upon the roof of the forge, and had then got upon

the roof of the house, and had then let himself down the kitchen

chimney by a rope made of his bedding cut into strips; and as Mr.

Pumblechook was very positive and drove his own chaise-cart—over

Everybody—it was agreed that it must be so. Mr. Wopsle, indeed,

wildly cried out, “No!” with the feeble malice of a tired man; but,

as he had no theory, and no coat on, he was unanimously set at

naught,—not to mention his smoking hard behind, as he stood with

his back to the kitchen fire to draw the damp out: which was not

calculated to inspire confidence.

This was all I heard that night before my sister clutched me, as a

slumberous offence to the company’s eyesight, and assisted me up to

bed with such a strong hand that I seemed to have fifty boots on,

and to be dangling them all against the edges of the stairs. My

state of mind, as I have described it, began before I was up in the

morning, and lasted long after the subject had died out, and had

ceased to be mentioned saving on exceptional occasions.

Chapter VII

At the time when I stood in the churchyard reading the family

tombstones, I had just enough learning to be able to spell them

out. My construction even of their simple meaning was not very

correct, for I read “wife of the Above” as a complimentary

reference to my father’s exaltation to a better world; and if any

one of my deceased relations had been referred to as “Below,” I

have no doubt I should have formed the worst opinions of that

member of the family. Neither were my notions of the theological

positions to which my Catechism bound me, at all accurate; for, I

have a lively remembrance that I supposed my declaration that I was

to “walk in the same all the days of my life,” laid me under an

obligation always to go through the village from our house in one

particular direction, and never to vary it by turning down by the

wheelwright’s or up by the mill.

When I was old enough, I was to be apprenticed to Joe, and until I

could assume that dignity I was not to be what Mrs. Joe called

“Pompeyed,” or (as I render it) pampered. Therefore, I was not only

odd-boy about the forge, but if any neighbor happened to want an

extra boy to frighten birds, or pick up stones, or do any such job,

I was favored with the employment. In order, however, that our

superior position might not be compromised thereby, a money-box was

kept on the kitchen mantel-shelf, in to which it was publicly made

known that all my earnings were dropped. I have an impression that

they were to be contributed eventually towards the liquidation of

the National Debt, but I know I had no hope of any personal

participation in the treasure.

Mr. Wopsle’s great-aunt kept an evening school in the village; that

is to say, she was a ridiculous old woman of limited means and

unlimited infirmity, who used to go to sleep from six to seven

every evening, in the society of youth who paid two pence per week

each, for the improving opportunity of seeing her do it. She rented

a small cottage, and Mr. Wopsle had the room up stairs, where we

students used to overhear him reading aloud in a most dignified and

terrific manner, and occasionally bumping on the ceiling. There was

a fiction that Mr. Wopsle “examined” the scholars once a quarter.

What he did on those occasions was to turn up his cuffs, stick up

his hair, and give us Mark Antony’s oration over the body of

Caesar. This was always followed by Collins’s Ode on the Passions,

wherein I particularly venerated Mr. Wopsle as Revenge throwing his

bloodstained sword in thunder down, and taking the War-denouncing

trumpet with a withering look. It was not with me then, as it was

in later life, when I fell into the society of the Passions, and

compared them with Collins and Wopsle, rather to the

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