Chapter 10

The felicitous idea occurred to me a morning or two later when I woke,
that the best step I could take towards making myself uncommon was to get out of
Biddy everything she knew. In pursuance of this luminous conception I mentioned
to Biddy when I went to Mr. Wopsle’s great-aunt’s at night, that I had a
particular reason for wishing to get on in life, and that I should feel very
much obliged to her if she would impart all her learning to me. Biddy, who was
the most obliging of girls, immediately said she would, and indeed began to
carry out her promise within five minutes.

The Educational scheme or Course established by Mr. Wopsle’s great-aunt may be
resolved into the following synopsis. The pupils ate apples and put straws down
one another’s backs, until Mr. Wopsle’s great-aunt collected her energies, and
made an indiscriminate totter at them with a birch-rod. After receiving the
charge with every mark of derision, the pupils formed in line and buzzingly
passed a ragged book from hand to hand. The book had an alphabet in it, some
figures and tables, and a little spelling,—that is to say, it had had once. As
soon as this volume began to circulate, Mr. Wopsle’s great-aunt fell into a
state of coma, arising either from sleep or a rheumatic paroxysm. The pupils
then entered among themselves upon a competitive examination on the subject of
Boots, with the view of ascertaining who could tread the hardest upon whose
toes. This mental exercise lasted until Biddy made a rush at them and
distributed three defaced Bibles (shaped as if they had been unskilfully cut off
the chump end of something), more illegibly printed at the best than any
curiosities of literature I have since met with, speckled all over with
ironmould, and having various specimens of the insect world smashed between
their leaves. This part of the Course was usually lightened by several single
combats between Biddy and refractory students. When the fights were over, Biddy
gave out the number of a page, and then we all read aloud what we could,—or what
we couldn’t—in a frightful chorus; Biddy leading with a high, shrill, monotonous
voice, and none of us having the least notion of, or reverence for, what we were
reading about. When this horrible din had lasted a certain time, it mechanically
awoke Mr. Wopsle’s great-aunt, who staggered at a boy fortuitously, and pulled
his ears. This was understood to terminate the Course for the evening, and we
emerged into the air with shrieks of intellectual victory. It is fair to remark
that there was no prohibition against any pupil’s entertaining himself with a
slate or even with the ink (when there was any), but that it was not easy to
pursue that branch of study in the winter season, on account of the little
general shop in which the classes were holden—and which was also Mr. Wopsle’s
great-aunt’s sitting-room and bedchamber—being but faintly illuminated through
the agency of one low-spirited dip-candle and no snuffers.

It appeared to me that it would take time to become uncommon, under these
circumstances: nevertheless, I resolved to try it, and that very evening Biddy
entered on our special agreement, by imparting some information from her little
catalogue of Prices, under the head of moist sugar, and lending me, to copy at
home, a large old English D which she had imitated from the heading of some
newspaper, and which I supposed, until she told me what it was, to be a design
for a buckle.

Of course there was a public-house in the village, and of course Joe liked
sometimes to smoke his pipe there. I had received strict orders from my sister
to call for him at the Three Jolly Bargemen, that evening, on my way from
school, and bring him home at my peril. To the Three Jolly Bargemen, therefore,
I directed my steps.

There was a bar at the Jolly Bargemen, with some alarmingly long chalk scores in
it on the wall at the side of the door, which seemed to me to be never paid off.
They had been there ever since I could remember, and had grown more than I had.
But there was a quantity of chalk about our country, and perhaps the people
neglected no opportunity of turning it to account.

It being Saturday night, I found the landlord looking rather grimly at these
records; but as my business was with Joe and not with him, I merely wished him
good evening, and passed into the common room at the end of the passage, where
there was a bright large kitchen fire, and where Joe was smoking his pipe in
company with Mr. Wopsle and a stranger. Joe greeted me as usual with "Halloa,
Pip, old chap!" and the moment he said that, the stranger turned his head and
looked at me.

He was a secret-looking man whom I had never seen before. His head was all on
one side, and one of his eyes was half shut up, as if he were taking aim at
something with an invisible gun. He had a pipe in his mouth, and he took it out,
and, after slowly blowing all his smoke away and looking hard at me all the
time, nodded. So, I nodded, and then he nodded again, and made room on the
settle beside him that I might sit down there.

But as I was used to sit beside Joe whenever I entered that place of resort, I
said "No, thank you, sir," and fell into the space Joe made for me on the
opposite settle. The strange man, after glancing at Joe, and seeing that his
attention was otherwise engaged, nodded to me again when I had taken my seat,
and then rubbed his leg—in a very odd way, as it struck me.

"You was saying," said the strange man, turning to Joe, "that you was a
blacksmith."

"Yes. I said it, you know," said Joe.

"What’ll you drink, Mr.—? You didn’t mention your name, by the bye."

Joe mentioned it now, and the strange man called him by it. "What’ll you drink,
Mr. Gargery? At my expense? To top up with?"

"Well," said Joe, "to tell you the truth, I ain’t much in the habit of drinking
at anybody’s expense but my own."

"Habit? No," returned the stranger, "but once and away, and on a Saturday night
too. Come! Put a name to it, Mr. Gargery."

"I wouldn’t wish to be stiff company," said Joe. "Rum."

"Rum," repeated the stranger. "And will the other gentleman originate a
sentiment."

"Rum," said Mr. Wopsle.

"Three Rums!" cried the stranger, calling to the landlord. "Glasses round!"

"This other gentleman," observed Joe, by way of introducing Mr. Wopsle, "is a
gentleman that you would like to hear give it out. Our clerk at church."

"Aha!" said the stranger, quickly, and cocking his eye at me. "The lonely
church, right out on the marshes, with graves round it!"

"That’s it," said Joe.

The stranger, with a comfortable kind of grunt over his pipe, put his legs up on
the settle that he had to himself. He wore a flapping broad-brimmed traveller’s
hat, and under it a handkerchief tied over his head in the manner of a cap: so
that he showed no hair. As he looked at the fire, I thought I saw a cunning
expression, followed by a half-laugh, come into his face.

"I am not acquainted with this country, gentlemen, but it seems a solitary
country towards the river."

"Most marshes is solitary," said Joe.

"No doubt, no doubt. Do you find any gypsies, now, or tramps, or vagrants of any
sort, out there?"

"No," said Joe; "none but a runaway convict now and then. And we don’t find them,
easy. Eh, Mr. Wopsle?"

Mr. Wopsle, with a majestic remembrance of old discomfiture, assented; but not
warmly.

"Seems you have been out after such?" asked the stranger.

"Once," returned Joe. "Not that we wanted to take them, you understand; we went
out as lookers on; me, and Mr. Wopsle, and Pip. Didn’t us, Pip?"

"Yes, Joe."

The stranger looked at me again,—still cocking his eye, as if he were expressly
taking aim at me with his invisible gun,—and said, "He’s a likely young parcel
of bones that. What is it you call him?"

"Pip," said Joe.

"Christened Pip?"

"No, not christened Pip."

"Surname Pip?"

"No," said Joe, "it’s a kind of family name what he gave himself when a infant,
and is called by."

"Son of yours?"

"Well," said Joe, meditatively, not, of course, that it could be in anywise
necessary to consider about it, but because it was the way at the Jolly Bargemen
to seem to consider deeply about everything that was discussed over
pipes,—"well—no. No, he ain’t."

"Nevvy?" said the strange man.

"Well," said Joe, with the same appearance of profound cogitation, "he is
not—no, not to deceive you, he is not—my
nevvy."

"What the Blue Blazes is he?" asked the stranger. Which appeared to me to be an
inquiry of unnecessary strength.

Mr. Wopsle struck in upon that; as one who knew all about relationships, having
professional occasion to bear in mind what female relations a man might not
marry; and expounded the ties between me and Joe. Having his hand in, Mr. Wopsle
finished off with a most terrifically snarling passage from Richard the Third,
and seemed to think he had done quite enough to account for it when he added,
"—as the poet says."

And here I may remark that when Mr. Wopsle referred to me, he considered it a
necessary part of such reference to rumple my hair and poke it into my eyes. I
cannot conceive why everybody of his standing who visited at our house should
always have put me through the same inflammatory process under similar
circumstances. Yet I do not call to mind that I was ever in my earlier youth the
subject of remark in our social family circle, but some large-handed person took
some such ophthalmic steps to patronize me.

All this while, the strange man looked at nobody but me, and looked at me as if
he were determined to have a shot at me at last, and bring me down. But he said
nothing after offering his Blue Blazes observation, until the glasses of rum and
water were brought; and then he made his shot, and a most extraordinary shot it
was.

It was not a verbal remark, but a proceeding in dumb-show, and was pointedly
addressed to me. He stirred his rum and water pointedly at me, and he tasted his
rum and water pointedly at me. And he stirred it and he tasted it; not with a
spoon that was brought to him, but with
a file.

He did this so that nobody but I saw the file; and when he had done it he wiped
the file and put it in a breast-pocket. I knew it to be Joe’s file, and I knew
that he knew my convict, the moment I saw the instrument. I sat gazing at him,
spell-bound. But he now reclined on his settle, taking very little notice of me,
and talking principally about turnips.

There was a delicious sense of cleaning-up and making a quiet pause before going
on in life afresh, in our village on Saturday nights, which stimulated Joe to
dare to stay out half an hour longer on Saturdays than at other times. The
half-hour and the rum and water running out together, Joe got up to go, and took
me by the hand.

"Stop half a moment, Mr. Gargery," said the strange man. "I think I’ve got a
bright new shilling somewhere in my pocket, and if I have, the boy shall have
it."

He looked it out from a handful of small change, folded it in some crumpled
paper, and gave it to me. "Yours!" said he. "Mind! Your own."

I thanked him, staring at him far beyond the bounds of good manners, and holding
tight to Joe. He gave Joe good-night, and he gave Mr. Wopsle good-night (who
went out with us), and he gave me only a look with his aiming eye,—no, not a
look, for he shut it up, but wonders may be done with an eye by hiding it.

On the way home, if I had been in a humor for talking, the talk must have been
all on my side, for Mr. Wopsle parted from us at the door of the Jolly Bargemen,
and Joe went all the way home with his mouth wide open, to rinse the rum out
with as much air as possible. But I was in a manner stupefied by this turning up
of my old misdeed and old acquaintance, and could think of nothing else.

My sister was not in a very bad temper when we presented ourselves in the
kitchen, and Joe was encouraged by that unusual circumstance to tell her about
the bright shilling. "A bad un, I’ll be bound," said Mrs. Joe triumphantly, "or
he wouldn’t have given it to the boy! Let’s look at it."

I took it out of the paper, and it proved to be a good one. "But what’s this?"
said Mrs. Joe, throwing down the shilling and catching up the paper. "Two
One-Pound notes?"

Nothing less than two fat sweltering one-pound notes that seemed to have been on
terms of the warmest intimacy with all the cattle-markets in the county. Joe
caught up his hat again, and ran with them to the Jolly Bargemen to restore them
to their owner. While he was gone, I sat down on my usual stool and looked
vacantly at my sister, feeling pretty sure that the man would not be there.

Presently, Joe came back, saying that the man was gone, but that he, Joe, had
left word at the Three Jolly Bargemen concerning the notes. Then my sister
sealed them up in a piece of paper, and put them under some dried rose-leaves in
an ornamental teapot on the top of a press in the state parlor. There they
remained, a nightmare to me, many and many a night and day.

I had sadly broken sleep when I got to bed, through thinking of the strange man
taking aim at me with his invisible gun, and of the guiltily coarse and common
thing it was, to be on secret terms of conspiracy with convicts,—a feature in my
low career that I had previously forgotten. I was haunted by the file too. A
dread possessed me that when I least expected it, the file would reappear. I
coaxed myself to sleep by thinking of Miss Havisham’s, next Wednesday; and in my
sleep I saw the file coming at me out of a door, without seeing who held it, and
I screamed myself awake.