Chapter 28

Great Expectations

by Charles Dickens

It was clear that I must repair to our town next day, and in the
first flow of my repentance it was equally clear that I must stay at
Joe's. But, when I had secured my box-place by to-morrow's coach and
had been down to Mr. Pocket's and back, I was not by any means
convinced on the last point, and began to invent reasons and make
excuses for putting up at the Blue Boar. I should be an
inconvenience at Joe's; I was not expected, and my bed would not be
ready; I should be too far from Miss Havisham's, and she was exacting
and mightn't like it. All other swindlers upon earth are nothing to
the self-swindlers, and with such pretences did I cheat myself.
Surely a curious thing. That I should innocently take a bad
half-crown of somebody else's manufacture, is reasonable enough; but
that I should knowingly reckon the spurious coin of my own make, as
good money! An obliging stranger, under pretence of compactly
folding up my bank-notes for security's sake, abstracts the notes and
gives me nutshells; but what is his sleight of hand to mine, when I
fold up my own nutshells and pass them on myself as notes!

Having settled that I must go to the Blue Boar, my mind was much
disturbed by indecision whether or not to take the Avenger. It was
tempting to think of that expensive Mercenary publicly airing his
boots in the archway of the Blue Boar's posting-yard; it was almost
solemn to imagine him casually produced in the tailor's shop and
confounding the disrespectful senses of Trabb's boy. On the other
hand, Trabb's boy might worm himself into his intimacy and tell him
things; or, reckless and desperate wretch as I knew he could be,
might hoot him in the High-street, My patroness, too, might hear of
him, and not approve. On the whole, I resolved to leave the Avenger
behind.

It was the afternoon coach by which I had taken my place, and,
as winter had now come round, I should not arrive at my destination
until two or three hours after dark. Our time of starting from the
Cross Keys was two o'clock. I arrived on the ground with a quarter
of an hour to spare, attended by the Avenger - if I may connect that
expression with one who never attended on me if he could possibly
help it.

At that time it was customary to carry Convicts down to the
dockyards by stage-coach. As I had often heard of them in the
capacity of outside passengers, and had more than once seen them on
the high road dangling their ironed legs over the coach roof, I had
no cause to be surprised when Herbert, meeting me in the yard, came
up and told me there were two convicts going down with me. But I had
a reason that was an old reason now, for constitutionally faltering
whenever I heard the word convict.

"You don't mind them, Handel?" said Herbert.

"Oh no!"

"I thought you seemed as if you didn't like them?"

"I can't pretend that I do like them, and I suppose you don't
particularly. But I don't mind them."

"See! There they are," said Herbert, "coming out of the Tap.
What a degraded and vile sight it is!"

They had been treating their guard, I suppose, for they had a
gaoler with them, and all three came out wiping their mouths on their
hands. The two convicts were handcuffed together, and had irons on
their legs - irons of a pattern that I knew well. They wore the
dress that I likewise knew well. Their keeper had a brace of
pistols, and carried a thick-knobbed bludgeon under his arm; but he
was on terms of good understanding with them, and stood, with them
beside him, looking on at the putting-to of the horses, rather with
an air as if the convicts were an interesting Exhibition not formally
open at the moment, and he the Curator. One was a taller and stouter
man than the other, and appeared as a matter of course, according to
the mysterious ways of the world both convict and free, to have had
allotted to him the smaller suit of clothes. His arms and legs were
like great pincushions of those shapes, and his attire disguised him
absurdly; but I knew his half-closed eye at one glance. There stood
the man whom I had seen on the settle at the Three Jolly Bargemen on
a Saturday night, and who had brought me down with his invisible
gun!

It was easy to make sure that as yet he knew me no more than if
he had never seen me in his life. He looked across at me, and his
eye appraised my watch-chain, and then he incidentally spat and said
something to the other convict, and they laughed and slued themselves
round with a clink of their coupling manacle, and looked at something
else. The great numbers on their backs, as if they were street
doors; their coarse mangy ungainly outer surface, as if they were
lower animals; their ironed legs, apologetically garlanded with
pocket-handkerchiefs; and the way in which all present looked at them
and kept from them; made them (as Herbert had said) a most
disagreeable and degraded spectacle.

But this was not the worst of it. It came out that the whole of
the back of the coach had been taken by a family removing from
London, and that there were no places for the two prisoners but on
the seat in front, behind the coachman. Hereupon, a choleric
gentleman, who had taken the fourth place on that seat, flew into a
most violent passion, and said that it was a breach of contract to
mix him up with such villainous company, and that it was poisonous
and pernicious and infamous and shameful, and I don't know what else.
At this time the coach was ready and the coachman impatient, and we
were all preparing to get up, and the prisoners had come over with
their keeper - bringing with them that curious flavour of
bread-poultice, baize, rope-yarn, and hearthstone, which attends the
convict presence.

"Don't take it so much amiss. sir," pleaded the keeper to the
angry passenger; "I'll sit next you myself. I'll put 'em on the
outside of the row. They won't interfere with you, sir. You needn't
know they're there."

"And don't blame me," growled the convict I had recognized. "I
don't want to go. I am quite ready to stay behind. As fur as I am
concerned any one's welcome to my place."

"Or mine," said the other, gruffly. "I wouldn't have incommoded
none of you, if I'd had my way." Then, they both laughed, and began
cracking nuts, and spitting the shells about. - As I really think I
should have liked to do myself, if I had been in their place and so
despised.

At length, it was voted that there was no help for the angry
gentleman, and that he must either go in his chance company or remain
behind. So, he got into his place, still making complaints, and the
keeper got into the place next him, and the convicts hauled
themselves up as well as they could, and the convict I had recognized
sat behind me with his breath on the hair of my head.

"Good-bye, Handel!" Herbert called out as we started. I thought
what a blessed fortune it was, that he had found another name for me
than Pip.

It is impossible to express with what acuteness I felt the
convict's breathing, not only on the back of my head, but all along
my spine. The sensation was like being touched in the marrow with
some pungent and searching acid, it set my very teeth on edge. He
seemed to have more breathing business to do than another man, and to
make more noise in doing it; and I was conscious of growing
high-shoulderd on one side, in my shrinking endeavours to fend him
off.

The weather was miserably raw, and the two cursed the cold. It
made us all lethargic before we had gone far, and when we had left
the Half-way House behind, we habitually dozed and shivered and were
silent. I dozed off, myself, in considering the question whether I
ought to restore a couple of pounds sterling to this creature before
losing sight of him, and how it could best be done. In the act of
dipping forward as if I were going to bathe among the horses, I woke
in a fright and took the question up again.

But I must have lost it longer than I had thought, since,
although I could recognize nothing in the darkness and the fitful
lights and shadows of our lamps, I traced marsh country in the cold
damp wind that blew at us. Cowering forward for warmth and to make
me a screen against the wind, the convicts were closer to me than
before. They very first words I heard them interchange as I became
conscious were the words of my own thought, "Two One Pound notes."

"How did he get 'em?" said the convict I had never seen.

"How should I know?" returned the other. "He had 'em stowed
away somehows. Giv him by friends, I expect."

"I wish," said the other, with a bitter curse upon the cold,
"that I had 'em here."

"Two one pound notes, or friends?"

"Two one pound notes. I'd sell all the friends I ever had, for
one, and think it a blessed good bargain. Well? So he says - ?"

"So he says," resumed the convict I had recognized - "it was all
said and done in half a minute, behind a pile of timber in the
Dockyard - 'You're a-going to be discharged?' Yes, I was. Would I
find out that boy that had fed him and kep his secret, and give him
them two one pound notes? Yes, I would. And I did."

"More fool you," growled the other. "I'd have spent 'em on a
Man, in wittles and drink. He must have been a green one. Mean to
say he knowed nothing of you?"

"Not a ha'porth. Different gangs and different ships. He was
tried again for prison breaking, and got made a Lifer."

"And was that - Honour! - the only time you worked out, in this
part of the country?"

"The only time."

"What might have been your opinion of the place?"

"A most beastly place. Mudbank, mist, swamp, and work; work,
swamp, mist, and mudbank."

They both execrated the place in very strong language, and
gradually growled themselves out, and had nothing left to say.

After overhearing this dialogue, I should assuredly have got
down and been left in the solitude and darkness of the highway, but
for feeling certain that the man had no suspicion of my identity.
Indeed, I was not only so changed in the course of nature, but so
differently dressed and so differently circumstanced, that it was not
at all likely he could have known me without accidental help. Still,
the coincidence of our being together on the coach, was sufficiently
strange to fill me with a dread that some other coincidence might at
any moment connect me, in his hearing, with my name. For this
reason, I resolved to alight as soon as we touched the town, and put
myself out of his hearing. This device I executed successfully. My
little portmanteau was in the boot under my feet; I had but to turn a
hinge to get it out: I threw it down before me, got down after it,
and was left at the first lamp on the first stones of the town
pavement. As to the convicts, they went their way with the coach,
and I knew at what point they would be spirited off to the river. In
my fancy, I saw the boat with its convict crew waiting for them at
the slime-washed stairs, - again heard the gruff "Give way, you!"
like and order to dogs - again saw the wicked Noah's Ark lying out on
the black water.

I could not have said what I was afraid of, for my fear was
altogether undefined and vague, but there was great fear upon me. As
I walked on to the hotel, I felt that a dread, much exceeding the
mere apprehension of a painful or disagreeable recognition, made me
tremble. I am confident that it took no distinctness of shape, and
that it was the revival for a few minutes of the terror of
childhood.

The coffee-room at the Blue Boar was empty, and I had not only
ordered my dinner there, but had sat down to it, before the waiter
knew me. As soon as he had apologized for the remissness of his
memory, he asked me if he should send Boots for Mr. Pumblechook?

"No," said I, "certainly not."

The waiter (it was he who had brought up the Great Remonstrance
from the Commercials, on the day when I was bound) appeared
surprised, and took the earliest opportunity of putting a dirty old
copy of a local newspaper so directly in my way, that I took it up
and read this paragraph:

Our readers will learn, not altogether without interest, in
reference to the recent romantic rise in fortune of a young artificer
in iron of this neighbourhood (what a theme, by the way, for the
magic pen of our as yet not universally acknowledged townsman Tooby,
the poet of our columns!) that the youth's earliest patron,
companion, and friend, was a highly-respected individual not entirely
unconnected with the corn and seed trade, and whose eminently
convenient and commodious business premises are situate within a
hundred miles of the High-street. It is not wholly irrespective of
our personal feelings that we record him as the Mentor of our young
Telemachus, for it is good to know that our town produced the founder
of the latter's fortunes. Does the thoughtcontracted brow of the
local Sage or the lustrous eye of local Beauty inquire whose
fortunes? We believe that Quintin Matsys was the blacksmith of
Antwerp. Verb. Sap.

I entertain a conviction, based upon large experience, that if
in the days of my prosperity I had gone to the North Pole, I should
have met somebody there, wandering Esquimaux or civilized man, who
would have told me that Pumblechook was my earliest patron and the
founder of my fortunes.