Chapter 4

Great Expectations

by Charles Dickens

I fully expected to find a Constable in the kitchen, waiting to
take me up. But not only was there no Constable there, but no
discovery had yet been made of the robbery. Mrs. Joe was
prodigiously busy in getting the house ready for the festivities of
the day, and Joe had been put upon the kitchen door-step to keep him
out of the dust-pan - an article into which his destiny always led
him sooner or later, when my sister was vigorously reaping the floors
of her establishment.

"And where the deuce ha' you been?" was Mrs. Joe's Christmas
salutation, when I and my conscience showed ourselves.

I said I had been down to hear the Carols. "Ah! well!" observed
Mrs. Joe. "You might ha' done worse." Not a doubt of that, I
thought.

"Perhaps if I warn't a blacksmith's wife, and (what's the same
thing) a slave with her apron never off, I should have been to hear
the Carols," said Mrs. Joe. "I'm rather partial to Carols, myself,
and that's the best of reasons for my never hearing any."

Joe, who had ventured into the kitchen after me as the dust-pan
had retired before us, drew the back of his hand across his nose with
a conciliatory air when Mrs. Joe darted a look at him, and, when her
eyes were withdrawn, secretly crossed his two forefingers, and
exhibited them to me, as our token that Mrs. Joe was in a cross
temper. This was so much her normal state, that Joe and I would
often, for weeks together, be, as to our fingers, like monumental
Crusaders as to their legs.

We were to have a superb dinner, consisting of a leg of pickled
pork and greens, and a pair of roast stuffed fowls. A handsome
mince-pie had been made yesterday morning (which accounted for the
mincemeat not being missed), and the pudding was already on the boil.
These extensive arrangements occasioned us to be cut off
unceremoniously in respect of breakfast; "for I an't," said Mrs. Joe,
"I an't a-going to have no formal cramming and busting and washing up
now, with what I've got before me, I promise you!"

So, we had our slices served out, as if we were two thousand
troops on a forced march instead of a man and boy at home; and we
took gulps of milk and water, with apologetic countenances, from a
jug on the dresser. In the meantime, Mrs. Joe put clean white
curtains up, and tacked a new flowered-flounce across the wide
chimney to replace the old one, and uncovered the little state
parlour across the passage, which was never uncovered at any other
time, but passed the rest of the year in a cool haze of silver paper,
which even extended to the four little white crockery poodles on the
mantelshelf, each with a black nose and a basket of flowers in his
mouth, and each the counterpart of the other. Mrs. Joe was a very
clean housekeeper, but had an exquisite art of making her cleanliness
more uncomfortable and unacceptable than dirt itself. Cleanliness is
next to Godliness, and some people do the same by their religion.

My sister having so much to do, was going to church vicariously;
that is to say, Joe and I were going. In his working clothes, Joe
was a well-knit characteristic-looking blacksmith; in his holiday
clothes, he was more like a scarecrow in good circumstances, than
anything else. Nothing that he wore then, fitted him or seemed to
belong to him; and everything that he wore then, grazed him. On the
present festive occasion he emerged from his room, when the blithe
bells were going, the picture of misery, in a full suit of Sunday
penitentials. As to me, I think my sister must have had some general
idea that I was a young offender whom an Accoucheur Policemen had
taken up (on my birthday) and delivered over to her, to be dealt with
according to the outraged majesty of the law. I was always treated
as if I had insisted on being born, in opposition to the dictates of
reason, religion, and morality, and against the dissuading arguments
of my best friends. Even when I was taken to have a new suit of
clothes, the tailor had orders to make them like a kind of
Reformatory, and on no account to let me have the free use of my
limbs.

Joe and I going to church, therefore, must have been a moving
spectacle for compassionate minds. Yet, what I suffered outside, was
nothing to what I underwent within. The terrors that had assailed me
whenever Mrs. Joe had gone near the pantry, or out of the room, were
only to be equalled by the remorse with which my mind dwelt on what
my hands had done. Under the weight of my wicked secret, I pondered
whether the Church would be powerful enough to shield me from the
vengeance of the terrible young man, if I divulged to that
establishment. I conceived the idea that the time when the banns
were read and when the clergyman said, "Ye are now to declare it!"
would be the time for me to rise and propose a private conference in
the vestry. I am far from being sure that I might not have
astonished our small congregation by resorting to this extreme
measure, but for its being Christmas Day and no Sunday.

Mr. Wopsle, the clerk at church, was to dine with us; and Mr.
Hubble the wheelwright and Mrs. Hubble; and Uncle Pumblechook (Joe's
uncle, but Mrs. Joe appropriated him), who was a well-to-do
corn-chandler in the nearest town, and drove his own chaise-cart.
The dinner hour was half-past one. When Joe and I got home, we found
the table laid, and Mrs. Joe dressed, and the dinner dressing, and
the front door unlocked (it never was at any other time) for the
company to enter by, and everything most splendid. And still, not a
word of the robbery.

The time came, without bringing with it any relief to my
feelings, and the company came. Mr. Wopsle, united to a Roman nose
and a large shining bald forehead, had a deep voice which he was
uncommonly proud of; indeed it was understood among his acquaintance
that if you could only give him his head, he would read the clergyman
into fits; he himself confessed that if the Church was "thrown open,"
meaning to competition, he would not despair of making his mark in
it. The Church not being "thrown open," he was, as I have said, our
clerk. But he punished the Amens tremendously; and when he gave out
the psalm - always giving the whole verse - he looked all round the
congregation first, as much as to say, "You have heard my friend
overhead; oblige me with your opinion of this style!"

I opened the door to the company - making believe that it was a
habit of ours to open that door - and I opened it first to Mr.
Wopsle, next to Mr. and Mrs. Hubble, and last of all to Uncle
Pumblechook. N.B., I was not allowed to call him uncle, under the
severest penalties.

"Mrs. Joe," said Uncle Pumblechook: a large hard-breathing
middle-aged slow man, with a mouth like a fish, dull staring eyes,
and sandy hair standing upright on his head, so that he looked as if
he had just been all but choked, and had that moment come to; "I have
brought you, as the compliments of the season - I have brought you,
Mum, a bottle of sherry wine - and I have brought you, Mum, a bottle
of port wine."

Every Christmas Day he presented himself, as a profound novelty,
with exactly the same words, and carrying the two bottles like
dumb-bells. Every Christmas Day, Mrs. Joe replied, as she now
replied, "Oh, Un - cle Pum - ble - chook! This is kind!" Every
Christmas Day, he retorted, as he now retorted, "It's no more than
your merits. And now are you all bobbish, and how's Sixpennorth of
halfpence?" meaning me.

We dined on these occasions in the kitchen, and adjourned, for
the nuts and oranges and apples, to the parlour; which was a change
very like Joe's change from his working clothes to his Sunday dress.
My sister was uncommonly lively on the present occasion, and indeed
was generally more gracious in the society of Mrs. Hubble than in
other company. I remember Mrs. Hubble as a little curly sharp-edged
person in sky-blue, who held a conventionally juvenile position,
because she had married Mr. Hubble - I don't know at what remote
period - when she was much younger than he. I remember Mr Hubble as
a tough high-shouldered stooping old man, of a sawdusty fragrance,
with his legs extraordinarily wide apart: so that in my short days I
always saw some miles of open country between them when I met him
coming up the lane.

Among this good company I should have felt myself, even if I
hadn't robbed the pantry, in a false position. Not because I was
squeezed in at an acute angle of the table-cloth, with the table in
my chest, and the Pumblechookian elbow in my eye, nor because I was
not allowed to speak (I didn't want to speak), nor because I was
regaled with the scaly tips of the drumsticks of the fowls, and with
those obscure corners of pork of which the pig, when living, had had
the least reason to be vain. No; I should not have minded that, if
they would only have left me alone. But they wouldn't leave me
alone. They seemed to think the opportunity lost, if they failed to
point the conversation at me, every now and then, and stick the point
into me. I might have been an unfortunate little bull in a Spanish
arena, I got so smartingly touched up by these moral goads.

It began the moment we sat down to dinner. Mr. Wopsle said
grace with theatrical declamation - as it now appears to me,
something like a religious cross of the Ghost in Hamlet with Richard
the Third - and ended with the very proper aspiration that we might
be truly grateful. Upon which my sister fixed me with her eye, and
said, in a low reproachful voice, "Do you hear that? Be
grateful."

"Especially," said Mr. Pumblechook, "be grateful, boy, to them
which brought you up by hand."

Mrs. Hubble shook her head, and contemplating me with a mournful
presentiment that I should come to no good, asked, "Why is it that
the young are never grateful?" This moral mystery seemed too much
for the company until Mr. Hubble tersely solved it by saying,
"Naterally wicious." Everybody then murmured "True!" and looked at
me in a particularly unpleasant and personal manner.

Joe's station and influence were something feebler (if possible)
when there was company, than when there was none. But he always
aided and comforted me when he could, in some way of his own, and he
always did so at dinner-time by giving me gravy, if there were any.
There being plenty of gravy to-day, Joe spooned into my plate, at
this point, about half a pint.

A little later on in the dinner, Mr. Wopsle reviewed the sermon
with some severity, and intimated - in the usual hypothetical case of
the Church being "thrown open" - what kind of sermon he would have
given them. After favouring them with some heads of that discourse,
he remarked that he considered the subject of the day's homily,
ill-chosen; which was the less excusable, he added, when there were
so many subjects "going about."

"True again," said Uncle Pumblechook. "You've hit it, sir!
Plenty of subjects going about, for them that know how to put salt
upon their tails. That's what's wanted. A man needn't go far to
find a subject, if he's ready with his salt-box." Mr. Pumblechook
added, after a short interval of reflection, "Look at Pork alone.
There's a subject! If you want a subject, look at Pork!"

"True, sir. Many a moral for the young," returned Mr. Wopsle;
and I knew he was going to lug me in, before he said it; "might be
deduced from that text."

("You listen to this," said my sister to me, in a severe
parenthesis.)

Joe gave me some more gravy.

"Swine," pursued Mr. Wopsle, in his deepest voice, and pointing
his fork at my blushes, as if he were mentioning my Christian name;
"Swine were the companions of the prodigal. The gluttony of Swine is
put before us, as an example to the young." (I thought this pretty
well in him who had been praising up the pork for being so plump and
juicy.) "What is detestable in a pig, is more detestable in a
boy."

"Or girl," suggested Mr. Hubble.

"Of course, or girl, Mr. Hubble," assented Mr. Wopsle, rather
irritably, "but there is no girl present."

"Besides," said Mr. Pumblechook, turning sharp on me, "think
what you've got to be grateful for. If you'd been born a
Squeaker--"

"He was, if ever a child was," said my sister, most
emphatically.

Joe gave me some more gravy.

"Well, but I mean a four-footed Squeaker," said Mr. Pumblechook.
"If you had been born such, would you have been here now? Not
you--"

"Unless in that form," said Mr. Wopsle, nodding towards the
dish.

"But I don't mean in that form, sir," returned Mr. Pumblechook,
who had an objection to being interrupted; "I mean, enjoying himself
with his elders and betters, and improving himself with their
conversation, and rolling in the lap of luxury. Would he have been
doing that? No, he wouldn't. And what would have been your
destination?" turning on me again. "You would have been disposed of
for so many shillings according to the market price of the article,
and Dunstable the butcher would have come up to you as you lay in
your straw, and he would have whipped you under his left arm, and
with his right he would have tucked up his frock to get a penknife
from out of his waistcoat-pocket, and he would have shed your blood
and had your life. No bringing up by hand then. Not a bit of
it!"

Joe offered me more gravy, which I was afraid to take.

"He was a world of trouble to you, ma'am," said Mrs. Hubble,
commiserating my sister.

"Trouble?" echoed my sister; "trouble?" and then entered on a
fearful catalogue of all the illnesses I had been guilty of, and all
the acts of sleeplessness I had committed, and all the high places I
had tumbled from, and all the low places I had tumbled into, and all
the injuries I had done myself, and all the times she had wished me
in my grave, and I had contumaciously refused to go there.

I think the Romans must have aggravated one another very much,
with their noses. Perhaps, they became the restless people they
were, in consequence. Anyhow, Mr. Wopsle's Roman nose so aggravated
me, during the recital of my misdemeanours, that I should have liked
to pull it until he howled. But, all I had endured up to this time,
was nothing in comparison with the awful feelings that took
possession of me when the pause was broken which ensued upon my
sister's recital, and in which pause everybody had looked at me (as I
felt painfully conscious) with indignation and abhorrence.

"Yet," said Mr. Pumblechook, leading the company gently back to
the theme from which they had strayed, "Pork - regarded as biled - is
rich, too; ain't it?"

"Have a little brandy, uncle," said my sister.

O Heavens, it had come at last! He would find it was weak, he
would say it was weak, and I was lost! I held tight to the leg of
the table under the cloth, with both hands, and awaited my fate.

My sister went for the stone bottle, came back with the stone
bottle, and poured his brandy out: no one else taking any. The
wretched man trifled with his glass - took it up, looked at it
through the light, put it down - prolonged my misery. All this time,
Mrs. Joe and Joe were briskly clearing the table for the pie and
pudding.

I couldn't keep my eyes off him. Always holding tight by the
leg of the table with my hands and feet, I saw the miserable creature
finger his glass playfully, take it up, smile, throw his head back,
and drink the brandy off. Instantly afterwards, the company were
seized with unspeakable consternation, owing to his springing to his
feet, turning round several times in an appalling spasmodic
whooping-cough dance, and rushing out at the door; he then became
visible through the window, violently plunging and expectorating,
making the most hideous faces, and apparently out of his mind.

I held on tight, while Mrs. Joe and Joe ran to him. I didn't
know how I had done it, but I had no doubt I had murdered him
somehow. In my dreadful situation, it was a relief when he was
brought back, and, surveying the company all round as if they had
disagreed with him, sank down into his chair with the one significant
gasp, "Tar!"

I had filled up the bottle from the tar-water jug. I knew he
would be worse by-and-by. I moved the table, like a Medium of the
present day, by the vigour of my unseen hold upon it.

"Tar!" cried my sister, in amazement. "Why, how ever could Tar
come there?"

But, Uncle Pumblechook, who was omnipotent in that kitchen,
wouldn't hear the word, wouldn't hear of the subject, imperiously
waved it all away with his hand, and asked for hot gin-and-water. My
sister, who had begun to be alarmingly meditative, had to employ
herself actively in getting the gin, the hot water, the sugar, and
the lemon-peel, and mixing them. For the time being at least, I was
saved. I still held on to the leg of the table, but clutched it now
with the fervour of gratitude.

By degrees, I became calm enough to release my grasp and partake
of pudding. Mr. Pumblechook partook of pudding. All partook of
pudding. The course terminated, and Mr. Pumblechook had begun to beam
under the genial influence of gin-and-water. I began to think I
should get over the day, when my sister said to Joe, "Clean plates -
cold."

I clutched the leg of the table again immediately, and pressed
it to my bosom as if it had been the companion of my youth and friend
of my soul. I foresaw what was coming, and I felt that this time I
really was gone.

"You must taste," said my sister, addressing the guests with her
best grace, "You must taste, to finish with, such a delightful and
delicious present of Uncle Pumblechook's!"

Must they! Let them not hope to taste it!

"You must know," said my sister, rising, "it's a pie; a savoury
pork pie."

The company murmured their compliments. Uncle Pumblechook,
sensible of having deserved well of his fellow-creatures, said -
quite vivaciously, all things considered - "Well, Mrs. Joe, we'll do
our best endeavours; let us have a cut at this same pie."

My sister went out to get it. I heard her steps proceed to the
pantry. I saw Mr. Pumblechook balance his knife. I saw re-awakening
appetite in the Roman nostrils of Mr. Wopsle. I heard Mr. Hubble
remark that "a bit of savoury pork pie would lay atop of anything you
could mention, and do no harm," and I heard Joe say, "You shall have
some, Pip." I have never been absolutely certain whether I uttered a
shrill yell of terror, merely in spirit, or in the bodily hearing of
the company. I felt that I could bear no more, and that I must run
away. I released the leg of the table, and ran for my life.

But, I ran no further than the house door, for there I ran head
foremost into a party of soldiers with their muskets: one of whom
held out a pair of handcuffs to me, saying, "Here you are, look
sharp, come on!"