Chapter 47

Great Expectations

by Charles Dickens

Some weeks passed without bringing any change. We waited for
Wemmick, and he made no sign. If I had never known him out of Little
Britain, and had never enjoyed the privilege of being on a familiar
footing at the Castle, I might have doubted him; not so for a moment,
knowing him as I did.

My worldly affairs began to wear a gloomy appearance, and I was
pressed for money by more than one creditor. Even I myself began to
know the want of money (I mean of ready money in my own pocket), and
to relieve it by converting some easily spared articles of jewellery
into cash. But I had quite determined that it would be a heartless
fraud to take more money from my patron in the existing state of my
uncertain thoughts and plans. Therefore, I had sent him the unopened
pocket-book by Herbert, to hold in his own keeping, and I felt a kind
of satisfaction - whether it was a false kind or a true, I hardly
know - in not having profited by his generosity since his revelation
of himself.

As the time wore on, an impression settled heavily upon me that
Estella was married. Fearful of having it confirmed, though it was
all but a conviction, I avoided the newspapers, and begged Herbert
(to whom I had confided the circumstances of our last interview)
never to speak of her to me. Why I hoarded up this last wretched
little rag of the robe of hope that was rent and given to the winds,
how do I know! Why did you who read this, commit that not dissimilar
inconsistency of your own, last year, last month, last week?

It was an unhappy life that I lived, and its one dominant
anxiety, towering over all its other anxieties like a high mountain
above a range of mountains, never disappeared from my view. Still,
no new cause for fear arose. Let me start from my bed as I would,
with the terror fresh upon me that he was discovered; let me sit
listening as I would, with dread, for Herbert's returning step at
night, lest it should be fleeter than ordinary, and winged with evil
news; for all that, and much more to like purpose, the round of
things went on. Condemned to inaction and a state of constant
restlessness and suspense, I rowed about in my boat, and waited,
waited, waited, as I best could.

There were states of the tide when, having been down the river,
I could not get back through the eddy-chafed arches and starlings of
old London Bridge; then, I left my boat at a wharf near the Custom
House, to be brought up afterwards to the Temple stairs. I was not
averse to doing this, as it served to make me and my boat a commoner
incident among the water-side people there. From this slight
occasion, sprang two meetings that I have now to tell of.

One afternoon, late in the month of February, I came ashore at
the wharf at dusk. I had pulled down as far as Greenwich with the
ebb tide, and had turned with the tide. It had been a fine bright
day, but had become foggy as the sun dropped, and I had had to feel
my way back among the shipping, pretty carefully. Both in going and
returning, I had seen the signal in his window, All well.

As it was a raw evening and I was cold, I thought I would
comfort myself with dinner at once; and as I had hours of dejection
and solitude before me if I went home to the Temple, I thought I
would afterwards go to the play. The theatre where Mr. Wopsle had
achieved his questionable triumph, was in that waterside
neighbourhood (it is nowhere now), and to that theatre I resolved to
go. I was aware that Mr. Wopsle had not succeeded in reviving the
Drama, but, on the contrary, had rather partaken of its decline. He
had been ominously heard of, through the playbills, as a faithful
Black, in connexion with a little girl of noble birth, and a monkey.
And Herbert had seen him as a predatory Tartar of comic propensities,
with a face like a red brick, and an outrageous hat all over
bells.

I dined at what Herbert and I used to call a Geographical
chop-house - where there were maps of the world in porter-pot rims on
every half-yard of the table-cloths, and charts of gravy on every one
of the knives - to this day there is scarcely a single chop-house
within the Lord Mayor's dominions which is not Geographical - and
wore out the time in dozing over crumbs, staring at gas, and baking
in a hot blast of dinners. By-and-by, I roused myself and went to
the play.

There, I found a virtuous boatswain in his Majesty's service - a
most excellent man, though I could have wished his trousers not quite
so tight in some places and not quite so loose in others - who
knocked all the little men's hats over their eyes, though he was very
generous and brave, and who wouldn't hear of anybody's paying taxes,
though he was very patriotic. He had a bag of money in his pocket,
like a pudding in the cloth, and on that property married a young
person in bed-furniture, with great rejoicings; the whole population
of Portsmouth (nine in number at the last Census) turning out on the
beach, to rub their own hands and shake everybody else's, and sing
"Fill, fill!" A certain dark-complexioned Swab, however, who
wouldn't fill, or do anything else that was proposed to him, and
whose heart was openly stated (by the boatswain) to be as black as
his figure-head, proposed to two other Swabs to get all mankind into
difficulties; which was so effectually done (the Swab family having
considerable political influence) that it took half the evening to
set things right, and then it was only brought about through an
honest little grocer with a white hat, black gaiters, and red nose,
getting into a clock, with a gridiron, and listening, and coming out,
and knocking everybody down from behind with the gridiron whom he
couldn't confute with what he had overheard. This led to Mr.
Wopsle's (who had never been heard of before) coming in with a star
and garter on, as a plenipotentiary of great power direct from the
Admiralty, to say that the Swabs were all to go to prison on the
spot, and that he had brought the boatswain down the Union Jack, as a
slight acknowledgment of his public services. The boatswain,
unmanned for the first time, respectfully dried his eyes on the Jack,
and then cheering up and addressing Mr. Wopsle as Your Honour,
solicited permission to take him by the fin. Mr. Wopsle conceding
his fin with a gracious dignity, was immediately shoved into a dusty
corner while everybody danced a hornpipe; and from that corner,
surveying the public with a discontented eye, became aware of me.

The second piece was the last new grand comic Christmas
pantomime, in the first scene of which, it pained me to suspect that
I detected Mr. Wopsle with red worsted legs under a highly magnified
phosphoric countenance and a shock of red curtain-fringe for his
hair, engaged in the manufacture of thunderbolts in a mine, and
displaying great cowardice when his gigantic master came home (very
hoarse) to dinner. But he presently presented himself under worthier
circumstances; for, the Genius of Youthful Love being in want of
assistance - on account of the parental brutality of an ignorant
farmer who opposed the choice of his daughter's heart, by purposely
falling upon the object, in a flour sack, out of the firstfloor
window - summoned a sententious Enchanter; and he, coming up from the
antipodes rather unsteadily, after an apparently violent journey,
proved to be Mr. Wopsle in a high-crowned hat, with a necromantic
work in one volume under his arm. The business of this enchanter on
earth, being principally to be talked at, sung at, butted at, danced
at, and flashed at with fires of various colours, he had a good deal
of time on his hands. And I observed with great surprise, that he
devoted it to staring in my direction as if he were lost in
amazement.

There was something so remarkable in the increasing glare of Mr.
Wopsle's eye, and he seemed to be turning so many things over in his
mind and to grow so confused, that I could not make it out. I sat
thinking of it, long after he had ascended to the clouds in a large
watch-case, and still I could not make it out. I was still thinking
of it when I came out of the theatre an hour afterwards, and found
him waiting for me near the door.

"How do you do?" said I, shaking hands with him as we turned
down the street together. "I saw that you saw me."

"Saw you, Mr. Pip!" he returned. "Yes, of course I saw you.
But who else was there?"

"Who else?"

"It is the strangest thing," said Mr. Wopsle, drifting into his
lost look again; "and yet I could swear to him."

Becoming alarmed, I entreated Mr. Wopsle to explain his
meaning.

"Whether I should have noticed him at first but for your being
there," said Mr. Wopsle, going on in the same lost way, "I can't be
positive; yet I think I should."

Involuntarily I looked round me, as I was accustomed to look
round me when I went home; for, these mysterious words gave me a
chill.

"Oh! He can't be in sight," said Mr. Wopsle. "He went out,
before I went off, I saw him go."

Having the reason that I had, for being suspicious, I even
suspected this poor actor. I mistrusted a design to entrap me into
some admission. Therefore, I glanced at him as we walked on
together, but said nothing.

"I had a ridiculous fancy that he must be with you, Mr. Pip,
till I saw that you were quite unconscious of him, sitting behind you
there, like a ghost."

My former chill crept over me again, but I was resolved not to
speak yet, for it was quite consistent with his words that he might
be set on to induce me to connect these references with Provis. Of
course, I was perfectly sure and safe that Provis had not been
there.

"I dare say you wonder at me, Mr. Pip; indeed I see you do. But
it is so very strange! You'll hardly believe what I am going to tell
you. I could hardly believe it myself, if you told me."

"Indeed?" said I.

"No, indeed. Mr. Pip, you remember in old times a certain
Christmas Day, when you were quite a child, and I dined at Gargery's,
and some soldiers came to the door to get a pair of handcuffs
mended?"

"I remember it very well."

"And you remember that there was a chase after two convicts, and
that we joined in it, and that Gargery took you on his back, and that
I took the lead and you kept up with me as well as you could?"

"I remember it all very well." Better than he thought - except
the last clause.

"And you remember that we came up with the two in a ditch, and
that there was a scuffle between them, and that one of them had been
severely handled and much mauled about the face, by the other?"

"I see it all before me."

"And that the soldiers lighted torches, and put the two in the
centre, and that we went on to see the last of them, over the black
marshes, with the torchlight shining on their faces - I am particular
about that; with the torchlight shining on their faces, when there
was an outer ring of dark night all about us?"

"Yes," said I. "I remember all that."

"Then, Mr. Pip, one of those two prisoners sat behind you
tonight. I saw him over your shoulder."

"Steady!" I thought. I asked him then, "Which of the two do you
suppose you saw?"

"The one who had been mauled," he answered readily, "and I'll
swear I saw him! The more I think of him, the more certain I am of
him."

"This is very curious!" said I, with the best assumption I could
put on, of its being nothing more to me. "Very curious indeed!"

I cannot exaggerate the enhanced disquiet into which this
conversation threw me, or the special and peculiar terror I felt at
Compeyson's having been behind me "like a ghost." For, if he had
ever been out of my thoughts for a few moments together since the
hiding had begun, it was in those very moments when he was closest to
me; and to think that I should be so unconscious and off my guard
after all my care, was as if I had shut an avenue of a hundred doors
to keep him out, and then had found him at my elbow. I could not
doubt either that he was there, because I was there, and that however
slight an appearance of danger there might be about us, danger was
always near and active.

I put such questions to Mr. Wopsle as, When did the man come in?
He could not tell me that; he saw me, and over my shoulder he saw
the man. It was not until he had seen him for some time that he
began to identify him; but he had from the first vaguely associated
him with me, and known him as somehow belonging to me in the old
village time. How was he dressed? Prosperously, but not noticeably
otherwise; he thought, in black. Was his face at all disfigured? No,
he believed not. I believed not, too, for, although in my brooding
state I had taken no especial notice of the people behind me, I
thought it likely that a face at all disfigured would have attracted
my attention.

When Mr. Wopsle had imparted to me all that he could recall or I
extract, and when I had treated him to a little appropriate
refreshment after the fatigues of the evening, we parted. It was
between twelve and one o'clock when I reached the Temple, and the
gates were shut. No one was near me when I went in and went home.

Herbert had come in, and we held a very serious council by the
fire. But there was nothing to be done, saving to communicate to
Wemmick what I had that night found out, and to remind him that we
waited for his hint. As I thought that I might compromise him if I
went too often to the Castle, I made this communication by letter. I
wrote it before I went to bed, and went out and posted it; and again
no one was near me. Herbert and I agreed that we could do nothing
else but be very cautious. And we were very cautious indeed - more
cautious than before, if that were possible - and I for my part never
went near Chinks's Basin, except when I rowed by, and then I only
looked at Mill Pond Bank as I looked at anything else.