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

willow at a tomb with an urn on it. I noticed, too, that several

rings and seals hung at his watch-chain, as if he were quite laden

with remembrances of departed friends. He had glittering eyes,—

small, keen, and black,—and thin wide mottled lips. He had had

them, to the best of my belief, from forty to fifty years.

“So you were never in London before?” said Mr. Wemmick to me.

“No,” said I.

“I was new here once,” said Mr. Wemmick. “Rum to think of now!”

“You are well acquainted with it now?”

“Why, yes,” said Mr. Wemmick. “I know the moves of it.”

“Is it a very wicked place?” I asked, more for the sake of saying

something than for information.

“You may get cheated, robbed, and murdered in London. But there

are plenty of people anywhere, who’ll do that for you.”

“If there is bad blood between you and them,” said I, to soften it

off a little.

“O! I don’t know about bad blood,” returned Mr. Wemmick; “there’s

not much bad blood about. They’ll do it, if there’s anything to be

got by it.”

“That makes it worse.”

“You think so?” returned Mr. Wemmick. “Much about the same, I should

say.”

He wore his hat on the back of his head, and looked straight before

him: walking in a self-contained way as if there were nothing in

the streets to claim his attention. His mouth was such a post-office

of a mouth that he had a mechanical appearance of smiling. We had

got to the top of Holborn Hill before I knew that it was merely a

mechanical appearance, and that he was not smiling at all.

“Do you know where Mr. Matthew Pocket lives?” I asked Mr. Wemmick.

“Yes,” said he, nodding in the direction. “At Hammersmith, west of

London.”

“Is that far?”

“Well! Say five miles.”

“Do you know him?”

“Why, you’re a regular cross-examiner!” said Mr. Wemmick, looking at

me with an approving air. “Yes, I know him. I know him!”

There was an air of toleration or depreciation about his utterance

of these words that rather depressed me; and I was still looking

sideways at his block of a face in search of any encouraging note

to the text, when he said here we were at Barnard’s Inn. My

depression was not alleviated by the announcement, for, I had

supposed that establishment to be an hotel kept by Mr. Barnard, to

which the Blue Boar in our town was a mere public-house. Whereas I

now found Barnard to be a disembodied spirit, or a fiction, and his

inn the dingiest collection of shabby buildings ever squeezed

together in a rank corner as a club for Tom-cats.

We entered this haven through a wicket-gate, and were disgorged by

an introductory passage into a melancholy little square that looked

to me like a flat burying-ground. I thought it had the most dismal

trees in it, and the most dismal sparrows, and the most dismal

cats, and the most dismal houses (in number half a dozen or so),

that I had ever seen. I thought the windows of the sets of chambers

into which those houses were divided were in every stage of

dilapidated blind and curtain, crippled flower-pot, cracked glass,

dusty decay, and miserable makeshift; while To Let, To Let, To Let,

glared at me from empty rooms, as if no new wretches ever came

there, and the vengeance of the soul of Barnard were being slowly

appeased by the gradual suicide of the present occupants and their

unholy interment under the gravel. A frowzy mourning of soot and

smoke attired this forlorn creation of Barnard, and it had strewn

ashes on its head, and was undergoing penance and humiliation as a

mere dust-hole. Thus far my sense of sight; while dry rot and wet

rot and all the silent rots that rot in neglected roof and cellar,—

rot of rat and mouse and bug and coaching-stables near at hand

besides—addressed themselves faintly to my sense of smell, and

moaned, “Try Barnard’s Mixture.”

So imperfect was this realization of the first of my great

expectations, that I looked in dismay at Mr. Wemmick. “Ah!” said he,

mistaking me; “the retirement reminds you of the country. So it

does me.”

He led me into a corner and conducted me up a flight of stairs,—

which appeared to me to be slowly collapsing into sawdust, so that

one of those days the upper lodgers would look out at their doors

and find themselves without the means of coming down,—to a set of

chambers on the top floor. MR. POCKET, JUN., was painted on the

door, and there was a label on the letter-box, “Return shortly.”

“He hardly thought you’d come so soon,” Mr. Wemmick explained. “You

don’t want me any more?”

“No, thank you,” said I.

“As I keep the cash,” Mr. Wemmick observed, “we shall most likely

meet pretty often. Good day.”

“Good day.”

I put out my hand, and Mr. Wemmick at first looked at it as if he

thought I wanted something. Then he looked at me, and said,

correcting himself,—

“To be sure! Yes. You’re in the habit of shaking hands?”

I was rather confused, thinking it must be out of the London

fashion, but said yes.

“I have got so out of it!” said Mr. Wemmick,—“except at last. Very

glad, I’m sure, to make your acquaintance. Good day!”

When we had shaken hands and he was gone, I opened the staircase

window and had nearly beheaded myself, for, the lines had rotted

away, and it came down like the guillotine. Happily it was so quick

that I had not put my head out. After this escape, I was content to

take a foggy view of the Inn through the window’s encrusting dirt,

and to stand dolefully looking out, saying to myself that London

was decidedly overrated.

Mr. Pocket, Junior’s, idea of Shortly was not mine, for I had nearly

maddened myself with looking out for half an hour, and had written

my name with my finger several times in the dirt of every pane in

the window, before I heard footsteps on the stairs. Gradually there

arose before me the hat, head, neckcloth, waistcoat, trousers,

boots, of a member of society of about my own standing. He had a

paper-bag under each arm and a pottle of strawberries in one hand,

and was out of breath.

“Mr. Pip?” said he.

“Mr. Pocket?” said I.

“Dear me!” he exclaimed. “I am extremely sorry; but I knew there

was a coach from your part of the country at midday, and I thought

you would come by that one. The fact is, I have been out on your

account,—not that that is any excuse,—for I thought, coming from

the country, you might like a little fruit after dinner, and I went

to Covent Garden Market to get it good.”

For a reason that I had, I felt as if my eyes would start out of my

head. I acknowledged his attention incoherently, and began to think

this was a dream.

“Dear me!” said Mr. Pocket, Junior. “This door sticks so!”

As he was fast making jam of his fruit by wrestling with the door

while the paper-bags were under his arms, I begged him to allow me

to hold them. He relinquished them with an agreeable smile, and

combated with the door as if it were a wild beast. It yielded so

suddenly at last, that he staggered back upon me, and I staggered

back upon the opposite door, and we both laughed. But still I felt

as if my eyes must start out of my head, and as if this must be a

dream.

“Pray come in,” said Mr. Pocket, Junior. “Allow me to lead the way.

I am rather bare here, but I hope you’ll be able to make out

tolerably well till Monday. My father thought you would get on more

agreeably through tomorrow with me than with him, and might like

to take a walk about London. I am sure I shall be very happy to

show London to you. As to our table, you won’t find that bad, I

hope, for it will be supplied from our coffee-house here, and (it

is only right I should add) at your expense, such being Mr.

Jaggers’s directions. As to our lodging, it’s not by any means

splendid, because I have my own bread to earn, and my father hasn’t

anything to give me, and I shouldn’t be willing to take it, if he

had. This is our sitting-room,—just such chairs and tables and

carpet and so forth, you see, as they could spare from home. You

mustn’t give me credit for the tablecloth and spoons and castors,

because they come for you from the coffee-house. This is my little

bedroom; rather musty, but Barnard’s is musty. This is your

bedroom; the furniture’s hired for the occasion, but I trust it

will answer the purpose; if you should want anything, I’ll go and

fetch it. The chambers are retired, and we shall be alone together,

but we shan’t fight, I dare say. But dear me, I beg your pardon,

you’re holding the fruit all this time. Pray let me take these bags

from you. I am quite ashamed.”

As I stood opposite to Mr. Pocket, Junior, delivering him the bags,

One, Two, I saw the starting appearance come into his own eyes that

I knew to be in mine, and he said, falling back,—

“Lord bless me, you’re the prowling boy!”

“And you,” said I, “are the pale young gentleman!”