Great Expectations by Charles Dickens (speed reading book TXT) 📕
"Now lookee here," he said, "the question being whether you're tobe let to live. You know what a file is?"
"Yes, sir."
"And you know what wittles is?"
"Yes, sir."
After each question he tilted me over a little more, so as to giveme a greater sense of helplessness and danger.
"You get me a file." He tilted me again. "And you get me wittles."He tilted me again. "You bring 'em both to me." He tilted me again."Or I'll have your heart and liver out." He tilted me again.
I was dreadfully frightened, and so giddy that I clung to him withboth hands, and said, "If you would kindly please to let me keepupright, sir, perhaps I shouldn't be sick, and perhaps I couldattend more."
He gave me a most tremendous dip and roll,
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coarse.”
And then I told Joe that I felt very miserable, and that I hadn’t
been able to explain myself to Mrs. Joe and Pumblechook, who were so
rude to me, and that there had been a beautiful young lady at Miss
Havisham’s who was dreadfully proud, and that she had said I was
common, and that I knew I was common, and that I wished I was not
common, and that the lies had come of it somehow, though I didn’t
know how.
This was a case of metaphysics, at least as difficult for Joe to
deal with as for me. But Joe took the case altogether out of the
region of metaphysics, and by that means vanquished it.
“There’s one thing you may be sure of, Pip,” said Joe, after some
rumination, “namely, that lies is lies. Howsever they come, they
didn’t ought to come, and they come from the father of lies, and
work round to the same. Don’t you tell no more of ‘em, Pip. That
ain’t the way to get out of being common, old chap. And as to being
common, I don’t make it out at all clear. You are oncommon in some
things. You’re oncommon small. Likewise you’re a oncommon scholar.”
“No, I am ignorant and backward, Joe.”
“Why, see what a letter you wrote last night! Wrote in print even!
I’ve seen letters—Ah! and from gentlefolks!—that I’ll swear
weren’t wrote in print,” said Joe.
“I have learnt next to nothing, Joe. You think much of me. It’s
only that.”
“Well, Pip,” said Joe, “be it so or be it son’t, you must be a
common scholar afore you can be a oncommon one, I should hope! The
king upon his throne, with his crown upon his ed, can’t sit and
write his acts of Parliament in print, without having begun, when
he were a unpromoted Prince, with the alphabet.—Ah!” added Joe,
with a shake of the head that was full of meaning, “and begun at A.
too, and worked his way to Z. And I know what that is to do, though
I can’t say I’ve exactly done it.”
There was some hope in this piece of wisdom, and it rather
encouraged me.
“Whether common ones as to callings and earnings,” pursued Joe,
reflectively, “mightn’t be the better of continuing for to keep
company with common ones, instead of going out to play with
oncommon ones,—which reminds me to hope that there were a flag,
perhaps?”
“No, Joe.”
“(I’m sorry there weren’t a flag, Pip). Whether that might be or
mightn’t be, is a thing as can’t be looked into now, without
putting your sister on the Rampage; and that’s a thing not to be
thought of as being done intentional. Lookee here, Pip, at what is
said to you by a true friend. Which this to you the true friend
say. If you can’t get to be oncommon through going straight, you’ll
never get to do it through going crooked. So don’t tell no more on
‘em, Pip, and live well and die happy.”
“You are not angry with me, Joe?”
“No, old chap. But bearing in mind that them were which I
meantersay of a stunning and outdacious sort,—alluding to them
which bordered on weal-cutlets and dog-fighting,—a sincere
well-wisher would adwise, Pip, their being dropped into your
meditations, when you go up stairs to bed. That’s all, old chap,
and don’t never do it no more.”
When I got up to my little room and said my prayers, I did not
forget Joe’s recommendation, and yet my young mind was in that
disturbed and unthankful state, that I thought long after I laid me
down, how common Estella would consider Joe, a mere blacksmith; how
thick his boots, and how coarse his hands. I thought how Joe and my
sister were then sitting in the kitchen, and how I had come up to
bed from the kitchen, and how Miss Havisham and Estella never sat
in a kitchen, but were far above the level of such common doings. I
fell asleep recalling what I “used to do” when I was at Miss
Havisham’s; as though I had been there weeks or months, instead of
hours; and as though it were quite an old subject of remembrance,
instead of one that had arisen only that day.
That was a memorable day to me, for it made great changes in me.
But it is the same with any life. Imagine one selected day struck
out of it, and think how different its course would have been.
Pause you who read this, and think for a moment of the long chain
of iron or gold, of thorns or flowers, that would never have bound
you, but for the formation of the first link on one memorable day.
The felicitous idea occurred to me a morning or two later when I
woke, that the best step I could take towards making myself
uncommon was to get out of Biddy everything she knew. In pursuance
of this luminous conception I mentioned to Biddy when I went to Mr.
Wopsle’s great-aunt’s at night, that I had a particular reason for
wishing to get on in life, and that I should feel very much obliged
to her if she would impart all her learning to me. Biddy, who was
the most obliging of girls, immediately said she would, and indeed
began to carry out her promise within five minutes.
The Educational scheme or Course established by Mr. Wopsle’s
great-aunt may be resolved into the following synopsis. The pupils
ate apples and put straws down one another’s backs, until Mr.
Wopsle’s great-aunt collected her energies, and made an
indiscriminate totter at them with a birch-rod. After receiving the
charge with every mark of derision, the pupils formed in line and
buzzingly passed a ragged book from hand to hand. The book had an
alphabet in it, some figures and tables, and a little spelling,—
that is to say, it had had once. As soon as this volume began to
circulate, Mr. Wopsle’s great-aunt fell into a state of coma,
arising either from sleep or a rheumatic paroxysm. The pupils then
entered among themselves upon a competitive examination on the
subject of Boots, with the view of ascertaining who could tread the
hardest upon whose toes. This mental exercise lasted until Biddy
made a rush at them and distributed three defaced Bibles (shaped as
if they had been unskilfully cut off the chump end of something),
more illegibly printed at the best than any curiosities of
literature I have since met with, speckled all over with ironmould,
and having various specimens of the insect world smashed between
their leaves. This part of the Course was usually lightened by
several single combats between Biddy and refractory students. When
the fights were over, Biddy gave out the number of a page, and then
we all read aloud what we could,—or what we couldn’t—in a
frightful chorus; Biddy leading with a high, shrill, monotonous
voice, and none of us having the least notion of, or reverence for,
what we were reading about. When this horrible din had lasted a
certain time, it mechanically awoke Mr. Wopsle’s great-aunt, who
staggered at a boy fortuitously, and pulled his ears. This was
understood to terminate the Course for the evening, and we emerged
into the air with shrieks of intellectual victory. It is fair to
remark that there was no prohibition against any pupil’s
entertaining himself with a slate or even with the ink (when there
was any), but that it was not easy to pursue that branch of study
in the winter season, on account of the little general shop in
which the classes were holden—and which was also Mr. Wopsle’s
great-aunt’s sitting-room and bedchamber—being but faintly
illuminated through the agency of one low-spirited dip-candle and
no snuffers.
It appeared to me that it would take time to become uncommon, under
these circumstances: nevertheless, I resolved to try it, and that
very evening Biddy entered on our special agreement, by imparting
some information from her little catalogue of Prices, under the
head of moist sugar, and lending me, to copy at home, a large old
English D which she had imitated from the heading of some
newspaper, and which I supposed, until she told me what it was, to
be a design for a buckle.
Of course there was a public-house in the village, and of course
Joe liked sometimes to smoke his pipe there. I had received strict
orders from my sister to call for him at the Three Jolly Bargemen,
that evening, on my way from school, and bring him home at my
peril. To the Three Jolly Bargemen, therefore, I directed my steps.
There was a bar at the Jolly Bargemen, with some alarmingly long
chalk scores in it on the wall at the side of the door, which
seemed to me to be never paid off. They had been there ever since I
could remember, and had grown more than I had. But there was a
quantity of chalk about our country, and perhaps the people
neglected no opportunity of turning it to account.
It being Saturday night, I found the landlord looking rather grimly
at these records; but as my business was with Joe and not with him,
I merely wished him good evening, and passed into the common room
at the end of the passage, where there was a bright large kitchen
fire, and where Joe was smoking his pipe in company with Mr. Wopsle
and a stranger. Joe greeted me as usual with “Halloa, Pip, old
chap!” and the moment he said that, the stranger turned his head
and looked at me.
He was a secret-looking man whom I had never seen before. His head
was all on one side, and one of his eyes was half shut up, as if he
were taking aim at something with an invisible gun. He had a pipe
in his mouth, and he took it out, and, after slowly blowing all his
smoke away and looking hard at me all the time, nodded. So, I
nodded, and then he nodded again, and made room on the settle
beside him that I might sit down there.
But as I was used to sit beside Joe whenever I entered that place
of resort, I said “No, thank you, sir,” and fell into the space Joe
made for me on the opposite settle. The strange man, after glancing
at Joe, and seeing that his attention was otherwise engaged, nodded
to me again when I had taken my seat, and then rubbed his leg—in
a very odd way, as it struck me.
“You was saying,” said the strange man, turning to Joe, “that you
was a blacksmith.”
“Yes. I said it, you know,” said Joe.
“What’ll you drink, Mr.—? You didn’t mention your name,
by the bye.”
Joe mentioned it now, and the strange man called him by it.
“What’ll you drink, Mr. Gargery? At my expense? To top up with?”
“Well,” said Joe, “to tell you the truth, I ain’t much in the habit
of drinking at anybody’s expense but my own.”
“Habit? No,” returned the stranger, “but once and away, and on a
Saturday night too. Come! Put a name to it, Mr. Gargery.”
“I wouldn’t wish to be stiff company,” said Joe. “Rum.”
“Rum,” repeated the stranger. “And will the other gentleman
originate a sentiment.”
“Rum,” said Mr. Wopsle.
“Three Rums!” cried the stranger, calling to the landlord. “Glasses
round!”
“This other gentleman,” observed Joe, by way of introducing Mr.
Wopsle, “is a gentleman that you would like to hear give it out.
Our clerk at church.”
“Aha!” said the stranger, quickly, and cocking his eye at me. “The
lonely church, right out on the marshes, with graves round it!”
“That’s it,” said Joe.
The stranger, with a comfortable kind of grunt over
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