Great Expectations - Charles Dickens (i want to read a book .txt) 📗
- Author: Charles Dickens
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perhaps, nobody’s ever did?
It was Christmas Eve, and I had to stir the pudding 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, quite
unmanageable. Happily I slipped away, and deposited that part of
my conscience in my garret bedroom.
“Hark!” said I, when I had done my stirring, and was taking a final
warm in the chimney corner before being sent up to bed; “was that
great guns, Joe?”
“Ah!” said Joe. “There’s another conwict off.”
“What does that mean, Joe?” said I.
Mrs. Joe, who always took explanations upon herself, said,
snappishly, “Escaped. Escaped.” Administering the definition like
Tar-water.
While Mrs. Joe sat with her head bending over her needlework, I put
my mouth into the forms of saying to Joe, “What’s a convict?” Joe
put his mouth into the forms of returning such a highly elaborate
answer, that I could make out nothing of it but the single word
“Pip.”
“There was a conwict off last night,” said Joe, aloud, “after
sunset-gun. And they fired warning of him. And now it appears
they’re firing warning of another.”
“Who’s firing?” said I.
“Drat that boy,” interposed my sister, frowning at me over her
work, “what a questioner he is. Ask no questions, and you’ll be
told no lies.”
It was not very polite to herself, I thought, to imply that I should
be told lies by her even if I did ask questions. But she never was
polite unless there was company.
At this point Joe greatly augmented my curiosity by taking the
utmost pains to open his mouth very wide, and to put it into the
form of a word that looked to me like “sulks.” Therefore, I
naturally pointed to Mrs. Joe, and put my mouth into the form of
saying, “her?” But Joe wouldn’t hear of that, at all, and again
opened his mouth very wide, and shook the form of a most emphatic
word out of it. But I could make nothing of the word.
“Mrs. Joe,” said I, as a last resort, “I should like to know—if
you wouldn’t much mind—where the firing comes from?”
“Lord bless the boy!” exclaimed my sister, as if she didn’t quite
mean that but rather the contrary. “From the Hulks!”
“Oh-h!” said I, looking at Joe. “Hulks!”
Joe gave a reproachful cough, as much as to say, “Well, I told you
so.”
“And please, what’s Hulks?” said I.
“That’s the way with this boy!” exclaimed my sister, pointing me
out with her needle and thread, and shaking her head at me. “Answer
him one question, and he’ll ask you a dozen directly. Hulks are
prison-ships, right ‘cross th’ meshes.” We always used that name
for marshes, in our country.
“I wonder who’s put into prison-ships, and why they’re put there?”
said I, in a general way, and with quiet desperation.
It was too much for Mrs. Joe, who immediately rose. “I tell you
what, young fellow,” said she, “I didn’t bring you up by hand to
badger people’s lives out. It would be blame to me and not praise,
if I had. People are put in the Hulks because they murder, and
because they rob, and forge, and do all sorts of bad; and they
always begin by asking questions. Now, you get along to bed!”
I was never allowed a candle to light me to bed, and, as I went
up stairs in the dark, with my head tingling,—from Mrs. Joe’s
thimble having played the tambourine upon it, to accompany her last
words,—I felt fearfully sensible of the great convenience that the
hulks were handy for me. I was clearly on my way there. I had begun
by asking questions, and I was going to rob Mrs. Joe.
Since that time, which is far enough away now, I have often thought
that few people know what secrecy there is in the young under
terror. No matter how unreasonable the terror, so that it be
terror. I was in mortal terror of the young man who wanted my heart
and liver; I was in mortal terror of my interlocutor with the
iron leg; I was in mortal terror of myself, from whom an awful
promise had been extracted; I had no hope of deliverance through my
all-powerful sister, who repulsed me at every turn; I am afraid to
think of what I might have done on requirement, in the secrecy of
my terror.
If I slept at all that night, it was only to imagine myself
drifting down the river on a strong spring-tide, to the Hulks; a
ghostly pirate calling out to me through a speaking-trumpet, as I
passed the gibbet-station, that I had better come ashore and be
hanged there at once, and not put it off. I was afraid to sleep,
even if I had been inclined, for I knew that at the first faint
dawn of morning I must rob the pantry. There was no doing it in the
night, for there was no getting a light by easy friction then; to
have got one I must have struck it out of flint and steel, and
have made a noise like the very pirate himself rattling his chains.
As soon as the great black velvet pall outside my little window was
shot with gray, I got up and went down stairs; every board upon the
way, and every crack in every board calling after me, “Stop
thief!” and “Get up, Mrs. Joe!” In the pantry, which was far more
abundantly supplied than usual, owing to the season, I was very
much alarmed by a hare hanging up by the heels, whom I rather
thought I caught when my back was half turned, winking. I had no
time for verification, no time for selection, no time for anything,
for I had no time to spare. I stole some bread, some rind of
cheese, about half a jar of mincemeat (which I tied up in my
pocket-handkerchief with my last night’s slice), some brandy from a
stone bottle (which I decanted into a glass bottle I had secretly
used for making that intoxicating fluid, Spanish-liquorice-water,
up in my room: diluting the stone bottle from a jug in the kitchen
cupboard), a meat bone with very little on it, and a beautiful
round compact pork pie. I was nearly going away without the pie,
but I was tempted to mount upon a shelf, to look what it was that
was put away so carefully in a covered earthen ware dish in a
corner, and I found it was the pie, and I took it in the hope that
it was not intended for early use, and would not be missed for some
time.
There was a door in the kitchen, communicating with the forge; I
unlocked and unbolted that door, and got a file from among Joe’s
tools. Then I put the fastenings as I had found them, opened the
door at which I had entered when I ran home last night, shut it,
and ran for the misty marshes.
It was a rimy morning, and very damp. I had seen the damp lying on
the outside of my little window, as if some goblin had been crying
there all night, and using the window for a pocket-handkerchief.
Now, I saw the damp lying on the bare hedges and spare grass, like
a coarser sort of spiders’ webs; hanging itself from twig to twig
and blade to blade. On every rail and gate, wet lay clammy, and the
marsh mist was so thick, that the wooden finger on the post
directing people to our village—a direction which they never
accepted, for they never came there—was invisible to me until I
was quite close under it. Then, as I looked up at it, while it
dripped, it seemed to my oppressed conscience like a phantom
devoting me to the Hulks.
The mist was heavier yet when I got out upon the marshes, so that
instead of my running at everything, everything seemed to run at
me. This was very disagreeable to a guilty mind. The gates and
dikes and banks came bursting at me through the mist, as if they
cried as plainly as could be, “A boy with Somebody’s else’s pork pie!
Stop him!” The cattle came upon me with like suddenness, staring
out of their eyes, and steaming out of their nostrils, “Halloa,
young thief!” One black ox, with a white cravat on,—who even had
to my awakened conscience something of a clerical air,—fixed me so
obstinately with his eyes, and moved his blunt head round in such
an accusatory manner as I moved round, that I blubbered out to him,
“I couldn’t help it, sir! It wasn’t for myself I took it!” Upon
which he put down his head, blew a cloud of smoke out of his nose,
and vanished with a kick-up of his hind-legs and a flourish of his
tail.
All this time, I was getting on towards the river; but however fast
I went, I couldn’t warm my feet, to which the damp cold seemed
riveted, as the iron was riveted to the leg of the man I was
running to meet. I knew my way to the Battery, pretty straight, for
I had been down there on a Sunday with Joe, and Joe, sitting on an
old gun, had told me that when I was ‘prentice to him, regularly
bound, we would have such Larks there! However, in the confusion of
the mist, I found myself at last too far to the right, and
consequently had to try back along the river-side, on the bank of
loose stones above the mud and the stakes that staked the tide out.
Making my way along here with all despatch, I had just crossed a
ditch which I knew to be very near the Battery, and had just
scrambled up the mound beyond the ditch, when I saw the man sitting
before me. His back was towards me, and he had his arms folded, and
was nodding forward, heavy with sleep.
I thought he would be more glad if I came upon him with his
breakfast, in that unexpected manner, so I went forward softly and
touched him on the shoulder. He instantly jumped up, and it was not
the same man, but another man!
And yet this man was dressed in coarse gray, too, and had a great
iron on his leg, and was lame, and hoarse, and cold, and was
everything that the other man was; except that he had not the same
face, and had a flat broad-brimmed low-crowned felt that on. All
this I saw in a moment, for I had only a moment to see it in: he
swore an oath at me, made a hit at me,—it was a round weak blow
that missed me and almost knocked himself down, for it made him
stumble,—and then he ran into the mist, stumbling twice as he went,
and I lost him.
“It’s the young man!” I thought, feeling my heart shoot as I
identified him. I dare say I should have felt a pain in my liver,
too, if I had known where it was.
I was soon at the Battery after that, and there was the right
Man,—hugging himself and limping to and fro, as if he had never all
night left off hugging and limping,—waiting for me. He was awfully
cold, to be sure. I half expected to see him drop down before my
face and die of deadly cold. His eyes looked so awfully hungry
too, that when I handed him the file and he laid
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