Chapter 14

Great Expectations

by Charles Dickens

It is a most miserable thing to feel ashamed of home. There may
be black ingratitude in the thing, and the punishment may be
retributive and well deserved; but, that it is a miserable thing, I
can testify.

Home had never been a very pleasant place to me, because of my
sister's temper. But, Joe had sanctified it, and I had believed in
it. I had believed in the best parlour as a most elegant saloon; I
had believed in the front door, as a mysterious portal of the Temple
of State whose solemn opening was attended with a sacrifice of roast
fowls; I had believed in the kitchen as a chaste though not
magnificent apartment; I had believed in the forge as the glowing
road to manhood and independence. Within a single year, all this was
changed. Now, it was all coarse and common, and I would not have had
Miss Havisham and Estella see it on any account.

How much of my ungracious condition of mind may have been my own
fault, how much Miss Havisham's, how much my sister's, is now of no
moment to me or to any one. The change was made in me; the thing was
done. Well or ill done, excusably or inexcusably, it was done.

Once, it had seemed to me that when I should at last roll up my
shirt-sleeves and go into the forge, Joe's 'prentice, I should be
distinguished and happy. Now the reality was in my hold, I only felt
that I was dusty with the dust of small coal, and that I had a weight
upon my daily remembrance to which the anvil was a feather. There
have been occasions in my later life (I suppose as in most lives)
when I have felt for a time as if a thick curtain had fallen on all
its interest and romance, to shut me out from anything save dull
endurance any more. Never has that curtain dropped so heavy and
blank, as when my way in life lay stretched out straight before me
through the newly-entered road of apprenticeship to Joe.

I remember that at a later period of my "time," I used to stand
about the churchyard on Sunday evenings when night was falling,
comparing my own perspective with the windy marsh view, and making
out some likeness between them by thinking how flat and low both
were, and how on both there came an unknown way and a dark mist and
then the sea. I was quite as dejected on the first working-day of my
apprenticeship as in that after-time; but I am glad to know that I
never breathed a murmur to Joe while my indentures lasted. It is
about the only thing I am glad to know of myself in that
connection.

For, though it includes what I proceed to add, all the merit of
what I proceed to add was Joe's. It was not because I was faithful,
but because Joe was faithful, that I never ran away and went for a
soldier or a sailor. It was not because I had a strong sense of the
virtue of industry, but because Joe had a strong sense of the virtue
of industry, that I worked with tolerable zeal against the grain. It
is not possible to know how far the influence of any amiable
honest-hearted duty-doing man flies out into the world; but it is
very possible to know how it has touched one's self in going by, and
I know right well, that any good that intermixed itself with my
apprenticeship came of plain contented Joe, and not of restlessly
aspiring discontented me.

What I wanted, who can say? How can I say, when I never knew?
What I dreaded was, that in some unlucky hour I, being at my grimiest
and commonest, should lift up my eyes and see Estella looking in at
one of the wooden windows of the forge. I was haunted by the fear
that she would, sooner or later, find me out, with a black face and
hands, doing the coarsest part of my work, and would exult over me
and despise me. Often after dark, when I was pulling the bellows for
Joe, and we were singing Old Clem, and when the thought how we used
to sing it at Miss Havisham's would seem to show me Estella's face in
the fire, with her pretty hair fluttering in the wind and her eyes
scorning me, - often at such a time I would look towards those panels
of black night in the wall which the wooden windows then were, and
would fancy that I saw her just drawing her face away, and would
believe that she had come at last.

After that, when we went in to supper, the place and the meal
would have a more homely look than ever, and I would feel more
ashamed of home than ever, in my own ungracious breast.