Chapter 14

It is a most miserable thing to feel ashamed of home. There may be black
ingratitude in the thing, and the punishment may be retributive and well
deserved; but that it is a miserable thing, I can testify.

Home had never been a very pleasant place to me, because of my sister’s temper.
But, Joe had sanctified it, and I had believed in it. I had believed in the best
parlor as a most elegant saloon; I had believed in the front door, as a
mysterious portal of the Temple of State whose solemn opening was attended with
a sacrifice of roast fowls; I had believed in the kitchen as a chaste though not
magnificent apartment; I had believed in the forge as the glowing road to
manhood and independence. Within a single year all this was changed. Now it was
all coarse and common, and I would not have had Miss Havisham and Estella see it
on any account.

How much of my ungracious condition of mind may have been my own fault, how much
Miss Havisham’s, how much my sister’s, is now of no moment to me or to any one.
The change was made in me; the thing was done. Well or ill done, excusably or
inexcusably, it was done.

Once, it had seemed to me that when I should at last roll up my shirt-sleeves
and go into the forge, Joe’s ’prentice, I should be distinguished and happy. Now
the reality was in my hold, I only felt that I was dusty with the dust of
small-coal, and that I had a weight upon my daily remembrance to which the anvil
was a feather. There have been occasions in my later life (I suppose as in most
lives) when I have felt for a time as if a thick curtain had fallen on all its
interest and romance, to shut me out from anything save dull endurance any more.
Never has that curtain dropped so heavy and blank, as when my way in life lay
stretched out straight before me through the newly entered road of
apprenticeship to Joe.

I remember that at a later period of my "time," I used to stand about the
churchyard on Sunday evenings when night was falling, comparing my own
perspective with the windy marsh view, and making out some likeness between them
by thinking how flat and low both were, and how on both there came an unknown
way and a dark mist and then the sea. I was quite as dejected on the first
working-day of my apprenticeship as in that after-time; but I am glad to know
that I never breathed a murmur to Joe while my indentures lasted. It is about
the only thing I amglad to
know of myself in that connection.

For, though it includes what I proceed to add, all the merit of what I proceed
to add was Joe’s. It was not because I was faithful, but because Joe was
faithful, that I never ran away and went for a soldier or a sailor. It was not
because I had a strong sense of the virtue of industry, but because Joe had a
strong sense of the virtue of industry, that I worked with tolerable zeal
against the grain. It is not possible to know how far the influence of any
amiable honest-hearted duty-doing man flies out into the world; but it is very
possible to know how it has touched one’s self in going by, and I know right
well that any good that intermixed itself with my apprenticeship came of plain
contented Joe, and not of restlessly aspiring discontented me.

What I wanted, who can say? How can I say,
when I never knew? What I dreaded was, that in some unlucky hour I, being at my
grimiest and commonest, should lift up my eyes and see Estella looking in at one
of the wooden windows of the forge. I was haunted by the fear that she would,
sooner or later, find me out, with a black face and hands, doing the coarsest
part of my work, and would exult over me and despise me. Often after dark, when
I was pulling the bellows for Joe, and we were singing Old Clem, and when the
thought how we used to sing it at Miss Havisham’s would seem to show me
Estella’s face in the fire, with her pretty hair fluttering in the wind and her
eyes scorning me,—often at such a time I would look towards those panels of
black night in the wall which the wooden windows then were, and would fancy that
I saw her just drawing her face away, and would believe that she had come at
last.

After that, when we went in to supper, the place and the meal would have a more
homely look than ever, and I would feel more ashamed of home than ever, in my
own ungracious breast.