Chapter 40

Great Expectations

by Charles Dickens

It was fortunate for me that I had to take precautions to ensure
(so far as I could) the safety of my dreaded visitor; for, this
thought pressing on me when I awoke, held other thoughts in a
confused concourse at a distance.

The impossibility of keeping him concealed in the chambers was
self-evident. It could not be done, and the attempt to do it would
inevitably engender suspicion. True, I had no Avenger in my service
now, but I was looked after by an inflammatory old female, assisted
by an animated rag-bag whom she called her niece, and to keep a room
secret from them would be to invite curiosity and exaggeration. They
both had weak eyes, which I had long attributed to their chronically
looking in at keyholes, and they were always at hand when not wanted;
indeed that was their only reliable quality besides larceny. Not to
get up a mystery with these people, I resolved to announce in the
morning that my uncle had unexpectedly come from the country.

This course I decided on while I was yet groping about in the
darkness for the means of getting a light. Not stumbling on the
means after all, I was fain to go out to the adjacent Lodge and get
the watchman there to come with his lantern. Now, in groping my way
down the black staircase I fell over something, and that something
was a man crouching in a corner.

As the man made no answer when I asked him what he did there,
but eluded my touch in silence, I ran to the Lodge and urged the
watchman to come quickly: telling him of the incident on the way
back. The wind being as fierce as ever, we did not care to endanger
the light in the lantern by rekindling the extinguished lamps on the
staircase, but we examined the staircase from the bottom to the top
and found no one there. It then occurred to me as possible that the
man might have slipped into my rooms; so, lighting my candle at the
watchman's, and leaving him standing at the door, I examined them
carefully, including the room in which my dreaded guest lay asleep.
All was quiet, and assuredly no other man was in those chambers.

It troubled me that there should have been a lurker on the
stairs, on that night of all nights in the year, and I asked the
watchman, on the chance of eliciting some hopeful explanation as I
handed him a dram at the door, whether he had admitted at his gate
any gentleman who had perceptibly been dining out? Yes, he said; at
different times of the night, three. One lived in Fountain Court,
and the other two lived in the Lane, and he had seen them all go
home. Again, the only other man who dwelt in the house of which my
chambers formed a part, had been in the country for some weeks; and
he certainly had not returned in the night, because we had seen his
door with his seal on it as we came up-stairs.

"The night being so bad, sir," said the watchman, as he gave me
back my glass, "uncommon few have come in at my gate. Besides them
three gentlemen that I have named, I don't call to mind another since
about eleven o'clock, when a stranger asked for you."

"My uncle," I muttered. "Yes."

"You saw him, sir?"

"Yes. Oh yes."

"Likewise the person with him?"

"Person with him!" I repeated.

"I judged the person to be with him," returned the watchman.
"The person stopped, when he stopped to make inquiry of me, and the
person took this way when he took this way."

"What sort of person?"

The watchman had not particularly noticed; he should say a
working person; to the best of his belief, he had a dust-coloured
kind of clothes on, under a dark coat. The watchman made more light
of the matter than I did, and naturally; not having my reason for
attaching weight to it.

When I had got rid of him, which I thought it well to do without
prolonging explanations, my mind was much troubled by these two
circumstances taken together. Whereas they were easy of innocent
solution apart - as, for instance, some diner-out or diner-at-home,
who had not gone near this watchman's gate, might have strayed to my
staircase and dropped asleep there - and my nameless visitor might
have brought some one with him to show him the way - still, joined,
they had an ugly look to one as prone to distrust and fear as the
changes of a few hours had made me.

I lighted my fire, which burnt with a raw pale flare at that
time of the morning, and fell into a doze before it. I seemed to
have been dozing a whole night when the clocks struck six. As there
was full an hour and a half between me and daylight, I dozed again;
now, waking up uneasily, with prolix conversations about nothing, in
my ears; now, making thunder of the wind in the chimney; at length,
falling off into a profound sleep from which the daylight woke me
with a start.

All this time I had never been able to consider my own
situation, nor could I do so yet. I had not the power to attend to
it. I was greatly dejected and distressed, but in an incoherent
wholesale sort of way. As to forming any plan for the future, I
could as soon have formed an elephant. When I opened the shutters
and looked out at the wet wild morning, all of a leaden hue; when I
walked from room to room; when I sat down again shivering, before the
fire, waiting for my laundress to appear; I thought how miserable I
was, but hardly knew why, or how long I had been so, or on what day
of the week I made the reflection, or even who I was that made it.

At last, the old woman and the niece came in - the latter with a
head not easily distinguishable from her dusty broom - and testified
surprise at sight of me and the fire. To whom I imparted how my
uncle had come in the night and was then asleep, and how the
breakfast preparations were to be modified accordingly. Then, I
washed and dressed while they knocked the furniture about and made a
dust; and so, in a sort of dream or sleep-waking, I found myself
sitting by the fire again, waiting for - Him - to come to
breakfast.

By-and-by, his door opened and he came out. I could not bring
myself to bear the sight of him, and I thought he had a worse look by
daylight.

"I do not even know," said I, speaking low as he took his seat
at the table, "by what name to call you. I have given out that you
are my uncle."

"That's it, dear boy! Call me uncle."

"You assumed some name, I suppose, on board ship?"

"Yes, dear boy. I took the name of Provis."

"Do you mean to keep that name?"

"Why, yes, dear boy, it's as good as another - unless you'd like
another."

"What is your real name?" I asked him in a whisper.

"Magwitch," he answered, in the same tone; "chrisen'd Abel."

"What were you brought up to be?"

"A warmint, dear boy."

He answered quite seriously, and used the word as if it denoted
some profession.

"When you came into the Temple last night--" said I, pausing to
wonder whether that could really have been last night, which seemed
so long ago.

"Yes, dear boy?"

"When you came in at the gate and asked the watchman the way
here, had you any one with you?"

"With me? No, dear boy."

"But there was some one there?"

"I didn't take particular notice," he said, dubiously, "not
knowing the ways of the place. But I think there was a person, too,
come in alonger me."

"Are you known in London?"

"I hope not!" said he, giving his neck a jerk with his
forefinger that made me turn hot and sick.

"Were you known in London, once?"

"Not over and above, dear boy. I was in the provinces
mostly."

"Were you - tried - in London?"

"Which time?" said he, with a sharp look.

"The last time."

He nodded. "First knowed Mr. Jaggers that way. Jaggers was for
me."

It was on my lips to ask him what he was tried for, but he took
up a knife, gave it a flourish, and with the words, "And what I done
is worked out and paid for!" fell to at his breakfast.

He ate in a ravenous way that was very disagreeable, and all his
actions were uncouth, noisy, and greedy. Some of his teeth had
failed him since I saw him eat on the marshes, and as he turned his
food in his mouth, and turned his head sideways to bring his
strongest fangs to bear upon it, he looked terribly like a hungry old
dog. If I had begun with any appetite, he would have taken it away,
and I should have sat much as I did - repelled from him by an
insurmountable aversion, and gloomily looking at the cloth.

"I'm a heavy grubber, dear boy," he said, as a polite kind of
apology when he made an end of his meal, "but I always was. If it
had been in my constitution to be a lighter grubber, I might ha' got
into lighter trouble. Similarly, I must have my smoke. When I was
first hired out as shepherd t'other side the world, it's my belief I
should ha' turned into a molloncolly-mad sheep myself, if I hadn't a
had my smoke."

As he said so, he got up from the table, and putting his hand
into the breast of the pea-coat he wore, brought out a short black
pipe, and a handful of loose tobacco of the kind that is called
Negro-head. Having filled his pipe, he put the surplus tobacco back
again, as if his pocket were a drawer. Then, he took a live coal
from the fire with the tongs, and lighted his pipe at it, and then
turned round on the hearth-rug with his back to the fire, and went
through his favourite action of holding out both his hands for
mine.

"And this," said he, dandling my hands up and down in his, as he
puffed at his pipe; "and this is the gentleman what I made! The real
genuine One! It does me good fur to look at you, Pip. All I
stip'late, is, to stand by and look at you, dear boy!"

I released my hands as soon as I could, and found that I was
beginning slowly to settle down to the contemplation of my condition.
What I was chained to, and how heavily, became intelligible to me,
as I heard his hoarse voice, and sat looking up at his furrowed bald
head with its iron grey hair at the sides.

"I mustn't see my gentleman a footing it in the mire of the
streets; there mustn't be no mud on his boots. My gentleman must
have horses, Pip! Horses to ride, and horses to drive, and horses
for his servant to ride and drive as well. Shall colonists have
their horses (and blood 'uns, if you please, good Lord!) and not my
London gentleman? No, no. We'll show 'em another pair of shoes than
that, Pip; won't us?"

He took out of his pocket a great thick pocket-book, bursting
with papers, and tossed it on the table.

"There's something worth spending in that there book, dear boy.
It's yourn. All I've got ain't mine; it's yourn. Don't you be
afeerd on it. There's more where that come from. I've come to the
old country fur to see my gentleman spend his money like a gentleman.
That'll be my pleasure. My pleasure 'ull be fur to see him do it.
And blast you all!" he wound up, looking round the room and snapping
his fingers once with a loud snap, "blast you every one, from the
judge in his wig, to the colonist a stirring up the dust, I'll show a
better gentleman than the whole kit on you put together!"

"Stop!" said I, almost in a frenzy of fear and dislike, "I want
to speak to you. I want to know what is to be done. I want to know
how you are to be kept out of danger, how long you are going to stay,
what projects you have."

"Look'ee here, Pip," said he, laying his hand on my arm in a
suddenly altered and subdued manner; "first of all, look'ee here. I
forgot myself half a minute ago. What I said was low; that's what it
was; low. Look'ee here, Pip. Look over it. I ain't a-going to be
low."

"First," I resumed, half-groaning, "what precautions can be
taken against your being recognized and seized?"

"No, dear boy," he said, in the same tone as before, "that don't
go first. Lowness goes first. I ain't took so many years to make a
gentleman, not without knowing what's due to him. Look'ee here, Pip.
I was low; that's what I was; low. Look over it, dear boy."

Some sense of the grimly-ludicrous moved me to a fretful laugh,
as I replied, "I have looked over it. In Heaven's name, don't harp
upon it!"

"Yes, but look'ee here," he persisted. "Dear boy, I ain't come
so fur, not fur to be low. Now, go on, dear boy. You was
a-saying--"

"How are you to be guarded from the danger you have
incurred?"

"Well, dear boy, the danger ain't so great. Without I was
informed agen, the danger ain't so much to signify. There's Jaggers,
and there's Wemmick, and there's you. Who else is there to
inform?"

"Is there no chance person who might identify you in the
street?" said I.

"Well," he returned, "there ain't many. Nor yet I don't intend
to advertise myself in the newspapers by the name of A. M. come back
from Botany Bay; and years have rolled away, and who's to gain by it?
Still, look'ee here, Pip. If the danger had been fifty times as
great, I should ha' come to see you, mind you, just the same."

"And how long do you remain?"

"How long?" said he, taking his black pipe from his mouth, and
dropping his jaw as he stared at me. "I'm not a-going back. I've
come for good."

"Where are you to live?" said I. "What is to be done with you?
Where will you be safe?"

"Dear boy," he returned, "there's disguising wigs can be bought
for money, and there's hair powder, and spectacles, and black clothes
- shorts and what not. Others has done it safe afore, and what
others has done afore, others can do agen. As to the where and how
of living, dear boy, give me your own opinions on it."

"You take it smoothly now," said I, "but you were very serious
last night, when you swore it was Death."

"And so I swear it is Death," said he, putting his pipe back in
his mouth, "and Death by the rope, in the open street not fur from
this, and it's serious that you should fully understand it to be so.
What then, when that's once done? Here I am. To go back now, 'ud be
as bad as to stand ground - worse. Besides, Pip, I'm here, because
I've meant it by you, years and years. As to what I dare, I'm a old
bird now, as has dared all manner of traps since first he was
fledged, and I'm not afeerd to perch upon a scarecrow. If there's
Death hid inside of it, there is, and let him come out, and I'll face
him, and then I'll believe in him and not afore. And now let me have
a look at my gentleman agen."

Once more, he took me by both hands and surveyed me with an air
of admiring proprietorship: smoking with great complacency all the
while.

It appeared to me that I could do no better than secure him some
quiet lodging hard by, of which he might take possession when Herbert
returned: whom I expected in two or three days. That the secret
must be confided to Herbert as a matter of unavoidable necessity,
even if I could have put the immense relief I should derive from
sharing it with him out of the question, was plain to me. But it was
by no means so plain to Mr. Provis (I resolved to call him by that
name), who reserved his consent to Herbert's participation until he
should have seen him and formed a favourable judgment of his
physiognomy. "And even then, dear boy," said he, pulling a greasy
little clasped black Testament out of his pocket, "we'll have him on
his oath."

To state that my terrible patron carried this little black book
about the world solely to swear people on in cases of emergency,
would be to state what I never quite established - but this I can
say, that I never knew him put it to any other use. The book itself
had the appearance of having been stolen from some court of justice,
and perhaps his knowledge of its antecedents, combined with his own
experience in that wise, gave him a reliance on its powers as a sort
of legal spell or charm. On this first occasion of his producing it,
I recalled how he had made me swear fidelity in the churchyard long
ago, and how he had described himself last night as always swearing
to his resolutions in his solitude.

As he was at present dressed in a seafaring slop suit, in which
he looked as if he had some parrots and cigars to dispose of, I next
discussed with him what dress he should wear. He cherished an
extraordinary belief in the virtues of "shorts" as a disguise, and
had in his own mind sketched a dress for himself that would have made
him something between a dean and a dentist. It was with considerable
difficulty that I won him over to the assumption of a dress more like
a prosperous farmer's; and we arranged that he should cut his hair
close, and wear a little powder. Lastly, as he had not yet been seen
by the laundress or her niece, he was to keep himself out of their
view until his change of dress was made.

It would seem a simple matter to decide on these precautions;
but in my dazed, not to say distracted, state, it took so long, that
I did not get out to further them, until two or three in the
afternoon. He was to remain shut up in the chambers while I was
gone, and was on no account to open the door.

There being to my knowledge a respectable lodging-house in
Essex-street, the back of which looked into the Temple, and was
almost within hail of my windows, I first of all repaired to that
house, and was so fortunate as to secure the second floor for my
uncle, Mr. Provis. I then went from shop to shop, making such
purchases as were necessary to the change in his appearance. This
business transacted, I turned my face, on my own account, to Little
Britain. Mr. Jaggers was at his desk, but, seeing me enter, got up
immediately and stood before his fire.

"Now, Pip," said he, "be careful."

"I will, sir," I returned. For, coming along I had thought well
of what I was going to say.

"Don't commit yourself," said Mr. Jaggers, "and don't commit any
one. You understand - any one. Don't tell me anything: I don't
want to know anything; I am not curious."

Of course I saw that he knew the man was come.

"I merely want, Mr. Jaggers," said I, "to assure myself that
what I have been told, is true. I have no hope of its being untrue,
but at least I may verify it."

Mr. Jaggers nodded. "But did you say 'told' or 'informed'?" he
asked me, with his head on one side, and not looking at me, but
looking in a listening way at the floor. "Told would seem to imply
verbal communication. You can't have verbal communication with a man
in New South Wales, you know."

"I will say, informed, Mr. Jaggers."

"Good."

"I have been informed by a person named Abel Magwitch, that he
is the benefactor so long unknown to me."

"That is the man," said Mr. Jaggers," - in New South Wales."

"And only he?" said I.

"And only he," said Mr. Jaggers.

"I am not so unreasonable, sir, as to think you at all
responsible for my mistakes and wrong conclusions; but I always
supposed it was Miss Havisham."

"As you say, Pip," returned Mr. Jaggers, turning his eyes upon
me coolly, and taking a bite at his forefinger, "I am not at all
responsible for that."

"And yet it looked so like it, sir," I pleaded with a downcast
heart.

"Not a particle of evidence, Pip," said Mr. Jaggers, shaking his
head and gathering up his skirts. "Take nothing on its looks; take
everything on evidence. There's no better rule."

"I have no more to say," said I, with a sigh, after standing
silent for a little while. "I have verified my information, and
there's an end."

"And Magwitch - in New South Wales - having at last disclosed
himself," said Mr. Jaggers, "you will comprehend, Pip, how rigidly
throughout my communication with you, I have always adhered to the
strict line of fact. There has never been the least departure from
the strict line of fact. You are quite aware of that?"

"Quite, sir."

"I communicated to Magwitch - in New South Wales - when he first
wrote to me - from New South Wales - the caution that he must not
expect me ever to deviate from the strict line of fact. I also
communicated to him another caution. He appeared to me to have
obscurely hinted in his letter at some distant idea he had of seeing
you in England here. I cautioned him that I must hear no more of
that; that he was not at all likely to obtain a pardon; that he was
expatriated for the term of his natural life; and that his presenting
himself in this country would be an act of felony, rendering him
liable to the extreme penalty of the law. I gave Magwitch that
caution," said Mr. Jaggers, looking hard at me; "I wrote it to New
South Wales. He guided himself by it, no doubt."

"No doubt," said I.

"I have been informed by Wemmick," pursued Mr. Jaggers, still
looking hard at me, "that he has received a letter, under date
Portsmouth, from a colonist of the name of Purvis, or--"

"Or Provis," I suggested.

"Or Provis - thank you, Pip. Perhaps it is Provis? Perhaps you
know it's Provis?"

"Yes," said I.

"You know it's Provis. A letter, under date Portsmouth, from a
colonist of the name of Provis, asking for the particulars of your
address, on behalf of Magwitch. Wemmick sent him the particulars, I
understand, by return of post. Probably it is through Provis that
you have received the explanation of Magwitch - in New South
Wales?"

"It came through Provis," I replied.

"Good day, Pip," said Mr. Jaggers, offering his hand; "glad to
have seen you. In writing by post to Magwitch - in New South Wales -
or in communicating with him through Provis, have the goodness to
mention that the particulars and vouchers of our long account shall
be sent to you, together with the balance; for there is still a
balance remaining. Good day, Pip!"

We shook hands, and he looked hard at me as long as he could see
me. I turned at the door, and he was still looking hard at me, while
the two vile casts on the shelf seemed to be trying to get their
eyelids open, and to force out of their swollen throats, "O, what a
man he is!"

Wemmick was out, and though he had been at his desk he could
have done nothing for me. I went straight back to the Temple, where
I found the terrible Provis drinking rum-and-water and smoking
negro-head, in safety.

Next day the clothes I had ordered, all came home, and he put
them on. Whatever he put on, became him less (it dismally seemed to
me) than what he had worn before. To my thinking, there was
something in him that made it hopeless to attempt to disguise him.
The more I dressed him and the better I dressed him, the more he
looked like the slouching fugitive on the marshes. This effect on my
anxious fancy was partly referable, no doubt, to his old face and
manner growing more familiar to me; but I believe too that he dragged
one of his legs as if there were still a weight of iron on it, and
that from head to foot there was Convict in the very grain of the
man.

The influences of his solitary hut-life were upon him besides,
and gave him a savage air that no dress could tame; added to these,
were the influences of his subsequent branded life among men, and,
crowning all, his consciousness that he was dodging and hiding now.
In all his ways of sitting and standing, and eating and drinking - of
brooding about, in a high-shouldered reluctant style - of taking out
his great horn-handled jack-knife and wiping it on his legs and
cutting his food - of lifting light glasses and cups to his lips, as
if they were clumsy pannikins - of chopping a wedge off his bread,
and soaking up with it the last fragments of gravy round and round
his plate, as if to make the most of an allowance, and then drying
his finger-ends on it, and then swallowing it - in these ways and a
thousand other small nameless instances arising every minute in the
day, there was Prisoner, Felon, Bondsman, plain as plain could be.

It had been his own idea to wear that touch of powder, and I had
conceded the powder after overcoming the shorts. But I can compare
the effect of it, when on, to nothing but the probable effect of
rouge upon the dead; so awful was the manner in which everything in
him that it was most desirable to repress, started through that thin
layer of pretence, and seemed to come blazing out at the crown of his
head. It was abandoned as soon as tried, and he wore his grizzled
hair cut short.

Words cannot tell what a sense I had, at the same time, of the
dreadful mystery that he was to me. When he fell asleep of an
evening, with his knotted hands clenching the sides of the
easy-chair, and his bald head tattooed with deep wrinkles falling
forward on his breast, I would sit and look at him, wondering what he
had done, and loading him with all the crimes in the Calendar, until
the impulse was powerful on me to start up and fly from him. Every
hour so increased my abhorrence of him, that I even think I might
have yielded to this impulse in the first agonies of being so
haunted, notwithstanding all he had done for me, and the risk he ran,
but for the knowledge that Herbert must soon come back. Once, I
actually did start out of bed in the night, and begin to dress myself
in my worst clothes, hurriedly intending to leave him there with
everything else I possessed, and enlist for India as a private
soldier.

I doubt if a ghost could have been more terrible to me, up in
those lonely rooms in the long evenings and long nights, with the
wind and the rain always rushing by. A ghost could not have been
taken and hanged on my account, and the consideration that he could
be, and the dread that he would be, were no small addition to my
horrors. When he was not asleep, or playing a complicated kind of
patience with a ragged pack of cards of his own - a game that I never
saw before or since, and in which he recorded his winnings by
sticking his jack-knife into the table - when he was not engaged in
either of these pursuits, he would ask me to read to him - "Foreign
language, dear boy!" While I complied, he, not comprehending a
single word, would stand before the fire surveying me with the air of
an Exhibitor, and I would see him, between the fingers of the hand
with which I shaded my face, appealing in dumb show to the furniture
to take notice of my proficiency. The imaginary student pursued by
the misshapen creature he had impiously made, was not more wretched
than I, pursued by the creature who had made me, and recoiling from
him with a stronger repulsion, the more he admired me and the fonder
he was of me.

This is written of, I am sensible, as if it had lasted a year.
It lasted about five days. Expecting Herbert all the time, I dared
not go out, except when I took Provis for an airing after dark. At
length, one evening when dinner was over and I had dropped into a
slumber quite worn out - for my nights had been agitated and my rest
broken by fearful dreams - I was roused by the welcome footstep on
the staircase. Provis, who had been asleep too, staggered up at the
noise I made, and in an instant I saw his jack-knife shining in his
hand.

"Quiet! It's Herbert!" I said; and Herbert came bursting in,
with the airy freshness of six hundred miles of France upon him.

"Handel, my dear fellow, how are you, and again how are you, and
again how are you? I seem to have been gone a twelvemonth! Why, so
I must have been, for you have grown quite thin and pale! Handel, my
- Halloa! I beg your pardon."

He was stopped in his running on and in his shaking hands with
me, by seeing Provis. Provis, regarding him with a fixed attention,
was slowly putting up his jack-knife, and groping in another pocket
for something else.

"Herbert, my dear friend," said I, shutting the double doors,
while Herbert stood staring and wondering, "something very strange
has happened. This is - a visitor of mine."

"It's all right, dear boy!" said Provis coming forward, with his
little clasped black book, and then addressing himself to Herbert.
"Take it in your right hand. Lord strike you dead on the spot, if
ever you split in any way sumever! Kiss it!"

"Do so, as he wishes it," I said to Herbert. So, Herbert,
looking at me with a friendly uneasiness and amazement, complied, and
Provis immediately shaking hands with him, said, "Now you're on your
oath, you know. And never believe me on mine, if Pip shan't make a
gentleman on you!"