Chapter 32

Great Expectations

by Charles Dickens

One day when I was busy with my books and Mr. Pocket, I received
a note by the post, the mere outside of which threw me into a great
flutter; for, though I had never seen the handwriting in which it was
addressed, I divined whose hand it was. It had no set beginning, as
Dear Mr. Pip, or Dear Pip, or Dear Sir, or Dear Anything, but ran
thus:

"I am to come to London the day after to-morrow by the mid-day
coach. I believe it was settled you should meet me? At all events
Miss Havisham has that impression, and I write in obedience to it.
She sends you her regard.

Yours, Estella."

If there had been time, I should probably have ordered several
suits of clothes for this occasion; but as there was not, I was fain
to be content with those I had. My appetite vanished instantly, and
I knew no peace or rest until the day arrived. Not that its arrival
brought me either; for, then I was worse than ever, and began
haunting the coach-office in wood-street, Cheapside, before the coach
had left the Blue Boar in our town. For all that I knew this
perfectly well, I still felt as if it were not safe to let the
coach-office be out of my sight longer than five minutes at a time;
and in this condition of unreason I had performed the first half-hour
of a watch of four or five hours, when Wemmick ran against me.

"Halloa, Mr. Pip," said he; "how do you do? I should hardly
have thought this was your beat."

I explained that I was waiting to meet somebody who was coming
up by coach, and I inquired after the Castle and the Aged.

"Both flourishing thankye," said Wemmick, "and particularly the
Aged. He's in wonderful feather. He'll be eighty-two next birthday.
I have a notion of firing eighty-two times, if the neighbourhood
shouldn't complain, and that cannon of mine should prove equal to the
pressure. However, this is not London talk. where do you think I am
going to?"

"To the office?" said I, for he was tending in that
direction.

"Next thing to it," returned Wemmick, "I am going to Newgate.
We are in a banker's-parcel case just at present, and I have been
down the road taking as squint at the scene of action, and thereupon
must have a word or two with our client."

"Did your client commit the robbery?" I asked.

"Bless your soul and body, no," answered Wemmick, very drily.
"But he is accused of it. So might you or I be. Either of us might
be accused of it, you know."

"Only neither of us is," I remarked.

"Yah!" said Wemmick, touching me on the breast with his
forefinger; "you're a deep one, Mr. Pip! Would you like to have a
look at Newgate? Have you time to spare?"

I had so much time to spare, that the proposal came as a relief,
notwithstanding its irreconcilability with my latent desire to keep
my eye on the coach-office. Muttering that I would make the inquiry
whether I had time to walk with him, I went into the office, and
ascertained from the clerk with the nicest precision and much to the
trying of his temper, the earliest moment at which the coach could be
expected - which I knew beforehand, quite as well as he. I then
rejoined Mr. Wemmick, and affecting to consult my watch and to be
surprised by the information I had received, accepted his offer.

We were at Newgate in a few minutes, and we passed through the
lodge where some fetters were hanging up on the bare walls among the
prison rules, into the interior of the jail. At that time, jails
were much neglected, and the period of exaggerated reaction
consequent on all public wrong-doing - and which is always its
heaviest and longest punishment - was still far off. So, felons were
not lodged and fed better than soldiers (to say nothing of paupers),
and seldom set fire to their prisons with the excusable object of
improving the flavour of their soup. It was visiting time when
Wemmick took me in; and a potman was going his rounds with beer; and
the prisoners, behind bars in yards, were buying beer, and talking to
friends; and a frouzy, ugly, disorderly, depressing scene it was.

It struck me that Wemmick walked among the prisoners, much as a
gardener might walk among his plants. This was first put into my
head by his seeing a shoot that had come up in the night, and saying,
"What, Captain Tom? Are you there? Ah, indeed!" and also, "Is that
Black Bill behind the cistern? Why I didn't look for you these two
months; how do you find yourself?" Equally in his stopping at the
bars and attending to anxious whisperers - always singly - Wemmick
with his post-office in an immovable state, looked at them while in
conference, as if he were taking particular notice of the advance
they had made, since last observed, towards coming out in full blow
at their trial.

He was highly popular, and I found that he took the familiar
department of Mr. Jaggers's business: though something of the state
of Mr. Jaggers hung about him too, forbidding approach beyond certain
limits. His personal recognition of each successive client was
comprised in a nod, and in his settling his hat a little easier on
his head with both hands, and then tightening the postoffice, and
putting his hands in his pockets. In one or two instances, there was
a difficulty respecting the raising of fees, and then Mr. Wemmick,
backing as far as possible from the insufficient money produced,
said, "it's no use, my boy. I'm only a subordinate. I can't take
it. Don't go on in that way with a subordinate. If you are unable
to make up your quantum, my boy, you had better address yourself to a
principal; there are plenty of principals in the profession, you
know, and what is not worth the while of one, may be worth the while
of another; that's my recommendation to you, speaking as a
subordinate. Don't try on useless measures. Why should you? Now,
who's next?"

Thus, we walked through Wemmick's greenhouse, until he turned to
me and said, "Notice the man I shall shake hands with." I should
have done so, without the preparation, as he had shaken hands with no
one yet.

Almost as soon as he had spoken, a portly upright man (whom I
can see now, as I write) in a well-worn olive-coloured frock-coat,
with a peculiar pallor over-spreading the red in his complexion, and
eyes that went wandering about when he tried to fix them, came up to
a corner of the bars, and put his hand to his hat - which had a
greasy and fatty surface like cold broth - with a half-serious and
half-jocose military salute.

"Colonel, to you!" said Wemmick; "how are you, Colonel?"

"All right, Mr. Wemmick."

"Everything was done that could be done, but the evidence was
too strong for us, Colonel."

"Yes, it was too strong, sir - but I don't care."

"No, no," said Wemmick, coolly, "you don't care." Then, turning
to me, "Served His Majesty this man. Was a soldier in the line and
bought his discharge."

I said, "Indeed?" and the man's eyes looked at me, and then
looked over my head, and then looked all round me, and then he drew
his hand across his lips and laughed.

"I think I shall be out of this on Monday, sir," he said to
Wemmick.

"Perhaps," returned my friend, "but there's no knowing."

"I am glad to have the chance of bidding you good-bye, Mr.
Wemmick," said the man, stretching out his hand between two bars.

"Thankye," said Wemmick, shaking hands with him. "Same to you,
Colonel."

"If what I had upon me when taken, had been real, Mr. Wemmick,"
said the man, unwilling to let his hand go, "I should have asked the
favour of your wearing another ring - in acknowledgment of your
attentions."

"I'll accept the will for the deed," said Wemmick. "By-the-bye;
you were quite a pigeon-fancier." The man looked up at the sky. "I
am told you had a remarkable breed of tumblers. could you commission
any friend of yours to bring me a pair, of you've no further use for
'em?"

"It shall be done, sir?"

"All right," said Wemmick, "they shall be taken care of. Good
afternoon, Colonel. Good-bye!" They shook hands again, and as we
walked away Wemmick said to me, "A Coiner, a very good workman. The
Recorder's report is made to-day, and he is sure to be executed on
Monday. Still you see, as far as it goes, a pair of pigeons are
portable property, all the same." With that, he looked back, and
nodded at this dead plant, and then cast his eyes about him in
walking out of the yard, as if he were considering what other pot
would go best in its place.

As we came out of the prison through the lodge, I found that the
great importance of my guardian was appreciated by the turnkeys, no
less than by those whom they held in charge. "Well, Mr. Wemmick,"
said the turnkey, who kept us between the two studded and spiked
lodge gates, and who carefully locked one before he unlocked the
other, "what's Mr. Jaggers going to do with that waterside murder? Is
he going to make it manslaughter, or what's he going to make of
it?"

"Why don't you ask him?" returned Wemmick.

"Oh yes, I dare say!" said the turnkey.

"Now, that's the way with them here. Mr. Pip," remarked
Wemmick, turning to me with his post-office elongated. "They don't
mind what they ask of me, the subordinate; but you'll never catch 'em
asking any questions of my principal."

"Is this young gentleman one of the 'prentices or articled ones
of your office?" asked the turnkey, with a grin at Mr. Wemmick's
humour.

"There he goes again, you see!" cried Wemmick, "I told you so!
Asks another question of the subordinate before his first is dry!
Well, supposing Mr. Pip is one of them?"

"Why then," said the turnkey, grinning again, "he knows what Mr.
Jaggers is."

"Yah!" cried Wemmick, suddenly hitting out at the turnkey in a
facetious way, "you're dumb as one of your own keys when you have to
do with my principal, you know you are. Let us out, you old fox, or
I'll get him to bring an action against you for false
imprisonment."

The turnkey laughed, and gave us good day, and stood laughing at
us over the spikes of the wicket when we descended the steps into the
street.

"Mind you, Mr. Pip," said Wemmick, gravely in my ear, as he took
my arm to be more confidential; "I don't know that Mr. Jaggers does a
better thing than the way in which he keeps himself so high. He's
always so high. His constant height is of a piece with his immense
abilities. That Colonel durst no more take leave of him, than that
turnkey durst ask him his intentions respecting a case. Then,
between his height and them, he slips in his subordinate - don't you
see? - and so he has 'em, soul and body."

I was very much impressed, and not for the first time, by my
guardian's subtlety. To confess the truth, I very heartily wished,
and not for the first time, that I had had some other guardian of
minor abilities.

Mr. Wemmick and I parted at the office in Little Britain, where
suppliants for Mr. Jaggers's notice were lingering about as usual,
and I returned to my watch in the street of the coach-office, with
some three hours on hand. I consumed the whole time in thinking how
strange it was that I should be encompassed by all this taint of
prison and crime; that, in my childhood out on our lonely marshes on
a winter evening I should have first encountered it; that, it should
have reappeared on two occasions, starting out like a stain that was
faded but not gone; that, it should in this new way pervade my
fortune and advancement. While my mind was thus engaged, I thought
of the beautiful young Estella, proud and refined, coming towards me,
and I thought with absolute abhorrence of the contrast between the
jail and her. I wished that Wemmick had not met me, or that I had
not yielded to him and gone with him, so that, of all days in the
year on this day, I might not have had Newgate in my breath and on my
clothes. I beat the prison dust off my feet as I sauntered to and
fro, and I shook it out of my dress, and I exhaled its air from my
lungs. So contaminated did I feel, remembering who was coming, that
the coach came quickly after all, and I was not yet free from the
soiling consciousness of Mr. Wemmick's conservatory, when I saw her
face at the coach window and her hand waving to me.

What was the nameless shadow which again in that one instant had
passed?