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

shield me from the vengeance of the terrible young man, if I

divulged to that establishment. I conceived the idea that the time

when the banns were read and when the clergyman said, “Ye are now

to declare it!” would be the time for me to rise and propose a

private conference in the vestry. I am far from being sure that I

might not have astonished our small congregation by resorting to

this extreme measure, but for its being Christmas Day and no

Sunday.

Mr. Wopsle, the clerk at church, was to dine with us; and Mr. Hubble

the wheelwright and Mrs. Hubble; and Uncle Pumblechook (Joe’s uncle,

but Mrs. Joe appropriated him), who was a well-to-do cornchandler

in the nearest town, and drove his own chaise-cart. The dinner hour

was half-past one. When Joe and I got home, we found the table

laid, and Mrs. Joe dressed, and the dinner dressing, and the front

door unlocked (it never was at any other time) for the company to

enter by, and everything most splendid. And still, not a word of

the robbery.

The time came, without bringing with it any relief to my feelings,

and the company came. Mr. Wopsle, united to a Roman nose and a

large shining bald forehead, had a deep voice which he was

uncommonly proud of; indeed it was understood among his

acquaintance that if you could only give him his head, he would

read the clergyman into fits; he himself confessed that if the

Church was “thrown open,” meaning to competition, he would not

despair of making his mark in it. The Church not being “thrown

open,” he was, as I have said, our clerk. But he punished the

Amens tremendously; and when he gave out the psalm,—always giving

the whole verse,—he looked all round the congregation first, as

much as to say, “You have heard my friend overhead; oblige me with

your opinion of this style!”

I opened the door to the company,—making believe that it was a

habit of ours to open that door,—and I opened it first to Mr.

Wopsle, next to Mr. and Mrs. Hubble, and last of all to Uncle

Pumblechook. N.B. I was not allowed to call him uncle, under the

severest penalties.

“Mrs. Joe,” said Uncle Pumblechook, a large hard-breathing

middle-aged slow man, with a mouth like a fish, dull staring eyes,

and sandy hair standing upright on his head, so that he looked as

if he had just been all but choked, and had that moment come to,

“I have brought you as the compliments of the season—I have

brought you, Mum, a bottle of sherry wine—and I have brought you,

Mum, a bottle of port wine.”

Every Christmas Day he presented himself, as a profound novelty,

with exactly the same words, and carrying the two bottles like

dumb-bells. Every Christmas Day, Mrs. Joe replied, as she now

replied, “O, Un—cle Pum-ble—chook! This is kind!” Every

Christmas Day, he retorted, as he now retorted, “It’s no more than

your merits. And now are you all bobbish, and how’s Sixpennorth of

halfpence?” meaning me.

We dined on these occasions in the kitchen, and adjourned, for the

nuts and oranges and apples to the parlor; which was a change

very like Joe’s change from his working-clothes to his Sunday

dress. My sister was uncommonly lively on the present occasion, and

indeed was generally more gracious in the society of Mrs. Hubble

than in other company. I remember Mrs. Hubble as a little curly

sharp-edged person in sky-blue, who held a conventionally juvenile

position, because she had married Mr. Hubble,—I don’t know at what

remote period,—when she was much younger than he. I remember Mr

Hubble as a tough, high-shouldered, stooping old man, of a sawdusty

fragrance, with his legs extraordinarily wide apart: so that in my

short days I always saw some miles of open country between them

when I met him coming up the lane.

Among this good company I should have felt myself, even if I hadn’t

robbed the pantry, in a false position. Not because I was squeezed

in at an acute angle of the tablecloth, with the table in my

chest, and the Pumblechookian elbow in my eye, nor because I was

not allowed to speak (I didn’t want to speak), nor because I was

regaled with the scaly tips of the drumsticks of the fowls, and

with those obscure corners of pork of which the pig, when living,

had had the least reason to be vain. No; I should not have minded

that, if they would only have left me alone. But they wouldn’t

leave me alone. They seemed to think the opportunity lost, if they

failed to point the conversation at me, every now and then, and

stick the point into me. I might have been an unfortunate little

bull in a Spanish arena, I got so smartingly touched up by these

moral goads.

It began the moment we sat down to dinner. Mr. Wopsle said grace

with theatrical declamation,—as it now appears to me, something

like a religious cross of the Ghost in Hamlet with Richard the

Third,—and ended with the very proper aspiration that we might be

truly grateful. Upon which my sister fixed me with her eye, and

said, in a low reproachful voice, “Do you hear that? Be grateful.”

“Especially,” said Mr. Pumblechook, “be grateful, boy, to them which

brought you up by hand.”

Mrs. Hubble shook her head, and contemplating me with a mournful

presentiment that I should come to no good, asked, “Why is it that

the young are never grateful?” This moral mystery seemed too much

for the company until Mr. Hubble tersely solved it by saying,

“Naterally wicious.” Everybody then murmured “True!” and looked at

me in a particularly unpleasant and personal manner.

Joe’s station and influence were something feebler (if possible)

when there was company than when there was none. But he always

aided and comforted me when he could, in some way of his own, and

he always did so at dinner-time by giving me gravy, if there were

any. There being plenty of gravy to-day, Joe spooned into my plate,

at this point, about half a pint.

A little later on in the dinner, Mr. Wopsle reviewed the sermon with

some severity, and intimated—in the usual hypothetical case of

the Church being “thrown open”—what kind of sermon he would have

given them. After favoring them with some heads of that discourse,

he remarked that he considered the subject of the day’s homily,

ill chosen; which was the less excusable, he added, when there were

so many subjects “going about.”

“True again,” said Uncle Pumblechook. “You’ve hit it, sir! Plenty of

subjects going about, for them that know how to put salt upon their

tails. That’s what’s wanted. A man needn’t go far to find a

subject, if he’s ready with his salt-box.” Mr. Pumblechook added,

after a short interval of reflection, “Look at Pork alone. There’s

a subject! If you want a subject, look at Pork!”

“True, sir. Many a moral for the young,” returned Mr. Wopsle,—and I

knew he was going to lug me in, before he said it; “might be

deduced from that text.”

(“You listen to this,” said my sister to me, in a severe

parenthesis.)

Joe gave me some more gravy.

“Swine,” pursued Mr. Wopsle, in his deepest voice, and pointing his

fork at my blushes, as if he were mentioning my Christian name,—

“swine were the companions of the prodigal. The gluttony of Swine

is put before us, as an example to the young.” (I thought this

pretty well in him who had been praising up the pork for being so

plump and juicy.) “What is detestable in a pig is more detestable

in a boy.”

“Or girl,” suggested Mr. Hubble.

“Of course, or girl, Mr. Hubble,” assented Mr. Wopsle, rather

irritably, “but there is no girl present.”

“Besides,” said Mr. Pumblechook, turning sharp on me, “think what

you’ve got to be grateful for. If you’d been born a Squeaker—”

“He was, if ever a child was,” said my sister, most emphatically.

Joe gave me some more gravy.

“Well, but I mean a four-footed Squeaker,” said Mr. Pumblechook. “If

you had been born such, would you have been here now? Not you—”

“Unless in that form,” said Mr. Wopsle, nodding towards the dish.

“But I don’t mean in that form, sir,” returned Mr. Pumblechook, who

had an objection to being interrupted; “I mean, enjoying himself

with his elders and betters, and improving himself with their

conversation, and rolling in the lap of luxury. Would he have been

doing that? No, he wouldn’t. And what would have been your

destination?” turning on me again. “You would have been disposed of

for so many shillings according to the market price of the article,

and Dunstable the butcher would have come up to you as you lay in

your straw, and he would have whipped you under his left arm, and

with his right he would have tucked up his frock to get a penknife

from out of his waistcoat-pocket, and he would have shed your

blood and had your life. No bringing up by hand then. Not a bit of

it!”

Joe offered me more gravy, which I was afraid to take.

“He was a world of trouble to you, ma’am,” said Mrs. Hubble,

commiserating my sister.

“Trouble?” echoed my sister; “trouble?” and then entered on a

fearful catalogue of all the illnesses I had been guilty of, and

all the acts of sleeplessness I had committed, and all the high

places I had tumbled from, and all the low places I had tumbled

into, and all the injuries I had done myself, and all the times she

had wished me in my grave, and I had contumaciously refused to go

there.

I think the Romans must have aggravated one another very much, with

their noses. Perhaps, they became the restless people they were, in

consequence. Anyhow, Mr. Wopsle’s Roman nose so aggravated me,

during the recital of my misdemeanours, that I should have liked to

pull it until he howled. But, all I had endured up to this time

was nothing in comparison with the awful feelings that took

possession of me when the pause was broken which ensued upon my

sister’s recital, and in which pause everybody had looked at me (as

I felt painfully conscious) with indignation and abhorrence.

“Yet,” said Mr. Pumblechook, leading the company gently back to the

theme from which they had strayed, “Pork—regarded as biled —is

rich, too; ain’t it?”

“Have a little brandy, uncle,” said my sister.

O Heavens, it had come at last! He would find it was weak, he would

say it was weak, and I was lost! I held tight to the leg of the

table under the cloth, with both hands, and awaited my fate.

My sister went for the stone bottle, came back with the stone

bottle, and poured his brandy out: no one else taking any. The

wretched man trifled with his glass,—took it up, looked at it

through the light, put it down,—prolonged my misery. All this

time Mrs. Joe and Joe were briskly clearing the table for the pie

and pudding.

I couldn’t keep my eyes off him. Always holding tight by the leg of

the table with my hands and feet, I saw the miserable creature

finger his glass playfully, take it up, smile, throw his head back,

and drink the brandy off. Instantly afterwards, the company were

seized with unspeakable consternation, owing to his springing to

his feet, turning round several times in an appalling spasmodic

whooping-cough dance, and rushing out at the door; he then became

visible through the window, violently plunging and expectorating,

making the most hideous faces, and apparently out of his mind.

I held on tight, while Mrs. Joe and Joe ran to him. I didn’t