Great Expectations by Charles Dickens (speed reading book TXT) 📕

The journey from our town to the metropolis was a journey of about

five hours. It was a little past midday when the four-horse

stage-coach by which I was a passenger, got into the ravel of

traffic frayed out about the Cross Keys, Wood Street, Cheapside,

London.

We Britons had at that time particularly settled that it was

treasonable to doubt our having and our being the best of

everything: otherwise, while I was scared by the immensity of

London, I think I might have had some faint doubts whether it was

not rather ugly, crooked, narrow, and dirty.

Mr. Jaggers had duly sent me his address; it was, Little Britain,

and he had written after it on his card, “just out of Smithfield,

and close by the coach-office.” Nevertheless, a hackney-coachman,

who seemed to have as many capes to his greasy great-coat as he was

years old, packed me up in his coach and hemmed me in with a

folding and jingling barrier of steps, as if he were going to take

me fifty miles. His getting on his box, which I remember to have

been decorated with an old weather-stained pea-green hammercloth

moth-eaten into rags, was quite a work of time. It was a wonderful

equipage, with six great coronets outside, and ragged things behind

for I don’t know how many footmen to hold on by, and a harrow below

them, to prevent amateur footmen from yielding to the temptation.

I had scarcely had time to enjoy the coach and to think how like a

straw-yard it was, and yet how like a rag-shop, and to wonder why

the horses’ nose-bags were kept inside, when I observed the

coachman beginning to get down, as if we were going to stop

presently. And stop we presently did, in a gloomy street, at

certain offices with an open door, whereon was painted MR. JAGGERS.

“How much?” I asked the coachman.

The coachman answered, “A shilling—unless you wish to make it

more.”

I naturally said I had no wish to make it more.

“Then it must be a shilling,” observed the coachman. “I don’t want

to get into trouble. I know him!” He darkly closed an eye at Mr.

Jaggers’s name, and shook his head.

When he had got his shilling, and had in course of time completed

the ascent to his box, and had got away (which appeared to relieve

his mind), I went into the front office with my little portmanteau

in my hand and asked, Was Mr. Jaggers at home?

“He is not,” returned the clerk. “He is in Court at present. Am I

addressing Mr. Pip?”

I signified that he was addressing Mr. Pip.

“Mr. Jaggers left word, would you wait in his room. He couldn’t say

how long he might be, having a case on. But it stands to reason,

his time being valuable, that he won’t be longer than he can help.”

With those words, the clerk opened a door, and ushered me into an

inner chamber at the back. Here, we found a gentleman with one eye,

in a velveteen suit and knee-breeches, who wiped his nose with his

sleeve on being interrupted in the perusal of the newspaper.

“Go and wait outside, Mike,” said the clerk.

I began to say that I hoped I was not interrupting, when the clerk

shoved this gentleman out with as little ceremony as I ever saw

used, and tossing his fur cap out after him, left me alone.

Mr. Jaggers’s room was lighted by a skylight only, and was a most

dismal place; the skylight, eccentrically pitched like a broken

head, and the distorted adjoining houses looking as if they had

twisted themselves to peep down at me through it. There were not so

many papers about, as I should have expected to see; and there were

some odd objects about, that I should not have expected to see,—

such as an old rusty pistol, a sword in a scabbard, several

strange-looking boxes and packages, and two dreadful casts on a

shelf, of faces peculiarly swollen, and twitchy about the nose. Mr.

Jaggers’s own high-backed chair was of deadly black horsehair,

with rows of brass nails round it, like a coffin; and I fancied I

could see how he leaned back in it, and bit his forefinger at the

clients. The room was but small, and the clients seemed to have had

a habit of backing up against the wall; the wall, especially

opposite to Mr. Jaggers’s chair, being greasy with shoulders. I

recalled, too, that the one-eyed gentleman had shuffled forth

against the wall when I was the innocent cause of his being turned

out.

I sat down in the cliental chair placed over against Mr. Jaggers’s

chair, and became fascinated by the dismal atmosphere of the place.

I called to mind that the clerk had the same air of knowing

something to everybody else’s disadvantage, as his master had. I

wondered how many other clerks there were upstairs, and whether

they all claimed to have the same detrimental mastery of their

fellow-creatures. I wondered what was the history of all the odd

litter about the room, and how it came there. I wondered whether

the two swollen faces were of Mr. Jaggers’s family, and, if he were

so unfortunate as to have had a pair of such ill-looking relations,

why he stuck them on that dusty perch for the blacks and flies to

settle on, instead of giving them a place at home. Of course I had

no experience of a London summer day, and my spirits may have been

oppressed by the hot exhausted air, and by the dust and grit that

lay thick on everything. But I sat wondering and waiting in Mr.

Jaggers’s close room, until I really could not bear the two casts

on the shelf above Mr. Jaggers’s chair, and got up and went out.

When I told the clerk that I would take a turn in the air while I

waited, he advised me to go round the corner and I should come into

Smithfield. So I came into Smithfield; and the shameful place,

being all asmear with filth and fat and blood and foam, seemed to

stick to me. So, I rubbed it off with all possible speed by turning

into a street where I saw the great black dome of Saint Paul’s

bulging at me from behind a grim stone building which a bystander

said was Newgate Prison. Following the wall of the jail, I found

the roadway covered with straw to deaden the noise of passing

vehicles; and from this, and from the quantity of people standing

about smelling strongly of spirits and beer, I inferred that the

trials were on.

While I looked about me here, an exceedingly dirty and partially

drunk minister of justice asked me if I would like to step in and

hear a trial or so: informing me that he could give me a front

place for half a crown, whence I should command a full view of the

Lord Chief Justice in his wig and robes,—mentioning that awful

personage like waxwork, and presently offering him at the reduced

price of eighteen-pence. As I declined the proposal on the plea of

an appointment, he was so good as to take me into a yard and show

me where the gallows was kept, and also where people were publicly

whipped, and then he showed me the Debtors’ Door, out of which

culprits came to be hanged; heightening the interest of that

dreadful portal by giving me to understand that “four on ‘em”