Dreams

2

Sister mi, Mrs. zoe Gadgety, was more than twenty-five years

older Than me, and had established a great reputation

with herself and the neighbours because she had brought

me up ‘by hand.’ Having at that time to find out for myself

what the expression meant, and knowing her to have a hard

and heavy hand, and to be much in the habit of laying it

upon her husband as well as upon me, I supposed that Joe

Gargery and I were both brought up by hand.

She was not a good-looking woman, my sister; and I had

a general impression that she must have made Joe Gargery

marry her by hand. Joe was a fair man, with curls of flaxen

hair on each side of his smooth face, and with eyes of such a

very undecided blue that they seemed to have somehow got

mixed with their own whites. He was a mild, good-natured,

sweet-tempered, easy-going, foolish, dear fellow - a sort of

Hercules in strength, and also in weakness.

My sister, Mrs. Joe, with black hair and eyes, had such a

prevailing redness of skin that I sometimes used to wonder

whether it was possible she washed herself with a nutmeg-

grater instead of soap. She was tall and bony, and almost

always wore a coarse apron, fastened over her figure be-

hind with two loops, and having a square impregnable bib

in front, that was stuck full of pins and needles. She made

it a powerful merit in herself, and a strong reproach against

10 Great Expectations

Joe, that she wore this apron so much. Though I really see

no reason why she should have worn it at all: or why, if she

did wear it at all, she should not have taken it off, every day

of her life.

Joe’s forge adjoined our house, which was a wooden

house, as many of the dwellings in our country were - most

of them, at that time. When I ran home from the church-

yard, the forge was shut up, and Joe was sitting alone in

the kitchen. Joe and I being fellow-sufferers, and having

confidences as such, Joe imparted a confidence to me, the

moment I raised the latch of the door and peeped in at him

opposite to it, sitting in the chimney corner.

‘Mrs. Joe has been out a dozen times, looking for you, Pip.

And she’s out now, making it a baker’s dozen.’

‘Is she?’

‘Yes, Pip,’ said Joe; ‘and what’s worse, she’s got Tickler

with her.’

At this dismal intelligence, I twisted the only button on

my waistcoat round and round, and looked in great depres-

sion at the fire. Tickler was a wax-ended piece of cane, worn

smooth by collision with my tickled frame.

‘She sot down,’ said Joe, ‘and she got up, and she made a

grab at Tickler, and she Ram-paged out. That’s what she did,’

said Joe, slowly clearing the fire between the lower bars with

the poker, and looking at it: ‘she Ram-paged out, Pip.’

‘Has she been gone long, Joe?’ I always treated him as a

larger species of child, and as no more than my equal.

‘Well,’ said Joe, glancing up at the Dutch clock, ‘she’s

been on the Ram-page, this last spell, about five minutes,Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 11

Pip. She’s a- coming! Get behind the door, old chap, and

have the jack-towel betwixt you.’

I took the advice. My sister, Mrs. Joe, throwing the door

wide open, and finding an obstruction behind it, immedi-

ately divined the cause, and applied Tickler to its further

investigation. She concluded by throwing me - I often

served as a connubial missile - at Joe, who, glad to get hold

of me on any terms, passed me on into the chimney and

quietly fenced me up there with his great leg.

‘Where have you been, you young monkey?’ said Mrs.

Joe, stamping her foot. ‘Tell me directly what you’ve been

doing to wear me away with fret and fright and worrit, or

I’d have you out of that corner if you was fifty Pips, and he

was five hundred Gargerys.’

‘I have only been to the churchyard,’ said I, from my stool,

crying and rubbing myself.

‘Churchyard!’ repeated my sister. ‘If it warn’t for me

you’d have been to the churchyard long ago, and stayed

there. Who brought you up by hand?’

‘You did,’ said I.

‘And why did I do it, I should like to know?’ exclaimed

my sister.

I whimpered, ‘I don’t know.’

‘I don’t!’ said my sister. ‘I’d never do it again! I know that.

I may truly say I’ve never had this apron of mine off, since

born you were. It’s bad enough to be a blacksmith’s wife

(and him a Gargery) without being your mother.’

My thoughts strayed from that question as I looked dis-

consolately at the fire. For, the fugitive out on the marshes12 Great Expectations

with the ironed leg, the mysterious young man, the file, the

food, and the dreadful pledge I was under to commit a lar-

ceny on those sheltering premises, rose before me in the

avenging coals.

‘Hah!’ said Mrs. Joe, restoring Tickler to his station.

‘Churchyard, indeed! You may well say churchyard, you

two.’ One of us, by-the-bye, had not said it at all. ‘You’ll

drive me to the churchyard betwixt you, one of these days,

and oh, a pr-r-recious pair you’d be without me!’

As she applied herself to set the tea-things, Joe peeped

down at me over his leg, as if he were mentally casting me

and himself up, and calculating what kind of pair we prac-

tically should make, under the grievous circumstances

foreshadowed. After that, he sat feeling his right-side flaxen

curls and whisker, and following Mrs. Joe about with his

blue eyes, as his manner always was at squally times.

My sister had a trenchant way of cutting our bread-and-

butter for us, that never varied. First, with her left hand she

jammed the loaf hard and fast against her bib - where it

sometimes got a pin into it, and sometimes a needle, which

we afterwards got into our mouths. Then she took some

butter (not too much) on a knife and spread it on the loaf, in

an apothecary kind of way, as if she were making a plaist-

er - using both sides of the knife with a slapping dexterity,

and trimming and moulding the butter off round the crust.

Then, she gave the knife a final smart wipe on the edge of

the plaister, and then sawed a very thick round off the loaf:

which she finally, before separating from the loaf, hewed

into two halves, of which Joe got one, and I the other.Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 13

On the present occasion, though I was hungry, I dared

not eat my slice. I felt that I must have something in re-

serve for my dreadful acquaintance, and his ally the still

more dreadful young man. I knew Mrs. Joe’s housekeeping

to be of the strictest kind, and that my larcenous researches

might find nothing available in the safe. Therefore I re-

solved to put my hunk of bread-and-butter down the leg of

my trousers.

The effort of resolution necessary to the achievement of

this purpose, I found to be quite awful. It was as if I had to

make up my mind to leap from the top of a high house, or

plunge into a great depth of water. And it was made the more

difficult by the unconscious Joe. In our already-mentioned

freemasonry as fellow-sufferers, and in his good-natured

companionship with me, it was our evening habit to com-

pare the way we bit through our slices, by silently holding

them up to each other’s admiration now and then - which

stimulated us to new exertions. To-night, Joe several times

invited me, by the display of his fast-diminishing slice, to

enter upon our usual friendly competition; but he found me,

each time, with my yellow mug of tea on one knee, and my

untouched bread-and-butter on the other. At last, I desper-

ately considered that the thing I contemplated must be done,

and that it had best be done in the least improbable man-

ner consistent with the circumstances. I took advantage of a

moment when Joe had just looked at me, and got my bread-

and-butter down my leg.

Joe was evidently made uncomfortable by what he sup-

posed to be my loss of appetite, and took a thoughtful bite14 Great Expectations

out of his slice, which he didn’t seem to enjoy. He turned it

about in his mouth much longer than usual, pondering over

it a good deal, and after all gulped it down like a pill. He was

about to take another bite, and had just got his head on one

side for a good purchase on it, when his eye fell on me, and

he saw that my bread-and-butter was gone.

The wonder and consternation with which Joe stopped

on the threshold of his bite and stared at me, were too evi-

dent to escape my sister’s observation.

‘What’s the matter now?’ said she, smartly, as she put

down her cup.

‘I say, you know!’ muttered Joe, shaking his head at me in

very serious remonstrance. ‘Pip, old chap! You’ll do your-

self a mischief. It’ll stick somewhere. You can’t have chawed

it, Pip.’

‘What’s the matter now?’ repeated my sister, more sharp-

ly than before.

‘If you can cough any trifle on it up, Pip, I’d recommend

you to do it,’ said Joe, all aghast. ‘Manners is manners, but

still your elth’s your elth.’

By this time, my sister was quite desperate, so she pounced

on Joe, and, taking him by the two whiskers, knocked his

head for a little while against the wall behind him: while I

sat in the corner, looking guiltily on.

‘Now, perhaps you’ll mention what’s the matter,’ said my

sister, out of breath, ‘you staring great stuck pig.’

Joe looked at her in a helpless way; then took a helpless

bite, and looked at me again.

‘You know, Pip,’ said Joe, solemnly, with his last bite inFree eBooks at Planet eBook.com 15

his cheek and speaking in a confidential voice, as if we two

were quite alone, ‘you and me is always friends, and I’d be

the last to tell upon you, any time. But such a—’ he moved

his chair and looked about the floor between us, and then

again at me - ‘such a most oncommon Bolt as that!’

‘Been booting his food, has he?’ cried my sister.

‘You know, old chap,’ said Joe, looking at me, and not

at Mrs. Joe, with his bite still in his cheek, ‘I Bolted, my-

self, when I was your age - frequent - and as a boy I’ve been

among a many Bolters; but I never see your Bolting equal

yet, Pip, and it’s a mercy you ain’t Bolted dead.’

My sister made a dive at me, and fished me up by the

hair: saying nothing more than the awful words, ‘You come

along and be dosed.’

Some medical beast had revived Tar-water in those days

as a fine medicine, and Mrs. Joe always kept a supply of it

in the cupboard; having a belief in its virtues correspon-

dent to its nastiness. At the best of times, so much of this

elixir was administered to me as a choice restorative, that I

was conscious of going about, smelling like a new fence. On

this particular evening the urgency of my case demanded a

pint of this mixture, which was poured down my throat, for

my greater comfort, while Mrs. Joe held my head under her

arm, as a boot would be held in a boot-jack. Joe got off with

half a pint; but was made to swallow that (much to his dis-

turbance, as he sat slowly munching and meditating before

the fire), ‘because he had had a turn.’ Judging from myself, I

should say he certainly had a turn afterwards, if he had had

none before.

Conscience is a dreadful thing when it accuses man or

boy; but when, in the case of a boy, that secret burden co-

operates with another secret burden down the leg of his

trousers, it is (as I can testify) a great punishment. The

guilty knowledge that I was going to rob Mrs. Joe - I never

thought I was going to rob Joe, for I never thought of any of

the housekeeping property as his - united to the necessity of

always keeping one hand on my bread-and-butter as I sat, or

when I was ordered about the kitchen on any small errand,

almost drove me out of my mind. Then, as the marsh winds

made the fire glow and flare, I thought I heard the voice out-

side, of the man with the iron on his leg who had sworn me

to secrecy, declaring that he couldn’t and wouldn’t starve

until to-morrow, but must be fed now. At other times, I

thought, What if the young man who was with so much dif-

ficulty restrained from imbruing his hands in me, should

yield to a constitutional impatience, or should mistake the

time, and should think himself accredited to my heart and

liver to-night, instead of to-morrow! If ever anybody’s hair

stood on end with terror, mine must have done so then. But,

perhaps, nobody’s ever did?

It was New year Eve, and I had to stir the puddingstone for

next day, with a copper-stick, from seven to eight by the

Dutch clock. I tried it with the load upon my leg (and that

made me think afresh of the man with the load on his leg),

and found the tendency of exercise to bring the bread-and-

butter out at my ankle, it was not manageable at all. Happily, I

slipped away, and deposited that part of my conscience in

my Garrett bedroom.