Chapter 32

One day when I was busy with my books and Mr. Pocket, I received a note
by the post, the mere outside of which threw me into a great flutter; for,
though I had never seen the handwriting in which it was addressed, I divined
whose hand it was. It had no set beginning, as Dear Mr. Pip, or Dear Pip, or
Dear Sir, or Dear Anything, but ran thus:—

"I am to come to London the day after to-morrow by the midday coach. I believe
it was settled you should meet me? At all events Miss Havisham has that
impression, and I write in obedience to it. She sends you her regard.

"Yours, ESTELLA."

If there had been time, I should probably have ordered several suits of clothes
for this occasion; but as there was not, I was fain to be content with those I
had. My appetite vanished instantly, and I knew no peace or rest until the day
arrived. Not that its arrival brought me either; for, then I was worse than
ever, and began haunting the coach-office in Wood Street, Cheapside, before the
coach had left the Blue Boar in our town. For all that I knew this perfectly
well, I still felt as if it were not safe to let the coach-office be out of my
sight longer than five minutes at a time; and in this condition of unreason I
had performed the first half-hour of a watch of four or five hours, when Wemmick
ran against me.

"Halloa, Mr. Pip," said he; "how do you do? I should hardly have thought this
was your beat."

I explained that I was waiting to meet somebody who was coming up by coach, and
I inquired after the Castle and the Aged.

"Both flourishing thankye," said Wemmick, "and particularly the Aged. He’s in
wonderful feather. He’ll be eighty-two next birthday. I have a notion of firing
eighty-two times, if the neighborhood shouldn’t complain, and that cannon of
mine should prove equal to the pressure. However, this is not London talk. Where
do you think I am going to?"

"To the office?" said I, for he was tending in that direction.

"Next thing to it," returned Wemmick, "I am going to Newgate. We are in a
banker’s-parcel case just at present, and I have been down the road taking a
squint at the scene of action, and thereupon must have a word or two with our
client."

"Did your client commit the robbery?" I asked.

"Bless your soul and body, no," answered Wemmick, very drily. "But he is accused
of it. So might you or I be. Either of us might be accused of it, you know."

"Only neither of us is," I remarked.

"Yah!" said Wemmick, touching me on the breast with his forefinger; "you’re a
deep one, Mr. Pip! Would you like to have a look at Newgate? Have you time to
spare?"

I had so much time to spare, that the proposal came as a relief, notwithstanding
its irreconcilability with my latent desire to keep my eye on the coach-office.
Muttering that I would make the inquiry whether I had time to walk with him, I
went into the office, and ascertained from the clerk with the nicest precision
and much to the trying of his temper, the earliest moment at which the coach
could be expected,—which I knew beforehand, quite as well as he. I then rejoined
Mr. Wemmick, and affecting to consult my watch, and to be surprised by the
information I had received, accepted his offer.

We were at Newgate in a few minutes, and we passed through the lodge where some
fetters were hanging up on the bare walls among the prison rules, into the
interior of the jail. At that time jails were much neglected, and the period of
exaggerated reaction consequent on all public wrongdoing—and which is always its
heaviest and longest punishment—was still far off. So felons were not lodged and
fed better than soldiers, (to say nothing of paupers,) and seldom set fire to
their prisons with the excusable object of improving the flavor of their soup.
It was visiting time when Wemmick took me in, and a potman was going his rounds
with beer; and the prisoners, behind bars in yards, were buying beer, and
talking to friends; and a frowzy, ugly, disorderly, depressing scene it was.

It struck me that Wemmick walked among the prisoners much as a gardener might
walk among his plants. This was first put into my head by his seeing a shoot
that had come up in the night, and saying, "What, Captain Tom? Are you there?
Ah, indeed!" and also, "Is that Black Bill behind the cistern? Why I didn’t look
for you these two months; how do you find yourself?" Equally in his stopping at
the bars and attending to anxious whisperers,—always singly,—Wemmick with his
post-office in an immovable state, looked at them while in conference, as if he
were taking particular notice of the advance they had made, since last observed,
towards coming out in full blow at their trial.

He was highly popular, and I found that he took the familiar department of Mr.
Jaggers’s business; though something of the state of Mr. Jaggers hung about him
too, forbidding approach beyond certain limits. His personal recognition of each
successive client was comprised in a nod, and in his settling his hat a little
easier on his head with both hands, and then tightening the post-office, and
putting his hands in his pockets. In one or two instances there was a difficulty
respecting the raising of fees, and then Mr. Wemmick, backing as far as possible
from the insufficient money produced, said, "it’s no use, my boy. I’m only a
subordinate. I can’t take it. Don’t go on in that way with a subordinate. If you
are unable to make up your quantum, my boy, you had better address yourself to a
principal; there are plenty of principals in the profession, you know, and what
is not worth the while of one, may be worth the while of another; that’s my
recommendation to you, speaking as a subordinate. Don’t try on useless measures.
Why should you? Now, who’s next?"

Thus, we walked through Wemmick’s greenhouse, until he turned to me and said,
"Notice the man I shall shake hands with." I should have done so, without the
preparation, as he had shaken hands with no one yet.

Almost as soon as he had spoken, a portly upright man (whom I can see now, as I
write) in a well-worn olive-colored frock-coat, with a peculiar pallor
overspreading the red in his complexion, and eyes that went wandering about when
he tried to fix them, came up to a corner of the bars, and put his hand to his
hat—which had a greasy and fatty surface like cold broth—with a half-serious and
half-jocose military salute.

"Colonel, to you!" said Wemmick; "how are you, Colonel?"

"All right, Mr. Wemmick."

"Everything was done that could be done, but the evidence was too strong for us,
Colonel."

"Yes, it was too strong, sir,—but I don’t
care."

"No, no," said Wemmick, coolly, "you don’t
care." Then, turning to me, "Served His Majesty this man. Was a soldier in the
line and bought his discharge."

I said, "Indeed?" and the man’s eyes looked at me, and then looked over my head,
and then looked all round me, and then he drew his hand across his lips and
laughed.

"I think I shall be out of this on Monday, sir," he said to Wemmick.

"Perhaps," returned my friend, "but there’s no knowing."

"I am glad to have the chance of bidding you good by, Mr. Wemmick," said the
man, stretching out his hand between two bars.

"Thankye," said Wemmick, shaking hands with him. "Same to you, Colonel."

"If what I had upon me when taken had been real, Mr. Wemmick," said the man,
unwilling to let his hand go, "I should have asked the favor of your wearing
another ring—in acknowledgment of your attentions."

"I’ll accept the will for the deed," said Wemmick. "By the by; you were quite a
pigeon-fancier." The man looked up at the sky. "I am told you had a remarkable
breed of tumblers. Could you
commission any friend of yours to bring me a pair, of you’ve no further use for
’em?"

"It shall be done, sir?"

"All right," said Wemmick, "they shall be taken care of. Good afternoon,
Colonel. Good by!" They shook hands again, and as we walked away Wemmick said to
me, "A Coiner, a very good workman. The Recorder’s report is made to-day, and he
is sure to be executed on Monday. Still you see, as far as it goes, a pair of
pigeons are portable property all the same." With that, he looked back, and
nodded at this dead plant, and then cast his eyes about him in walking out of
the yard, as if he were considering what other pot would go best in its place.

As we came out of the prison through the lodge, I found that the great
importance of my guardian was appreciated by the turnkeys, no less than by those
whom they held in charge. "Well, Mr. Wemmick," said the turnkey, who kept us
between the two studded and spiked lodge gates, and who carefully locked one
before he unlocked the other, "what’s Mr. Jaggers going to do with that
water-side murder? Is he going to make it manslaughter, or what’s he going to
make of it?"

"Why don’t you ask him?" returned Wemmick.

"O yes, I dare say!" said the turnkey.

"Now, that’s the way with them here, Mr. Pip," remarked Wemmick, turning to me
with his post-office elongated. "They don’t mind what they ask of me, the
subordinate; but you’ll never catch ’em asking any questions of my principal."

"Is this young gentleman one of the ’prentices or articled ones of your office?"
asked the turnkey, with a grin at Mr. Wemmick’s humor.

"There he goes again, you see!" cried Wemmick, "I told you so! Asks another
question of the subordinate before his first is dry! Well, supposing Mr. Pip is
one of them?"

"Why then," said the turnkey, grinning again, "he knows what Mr. Jaggers is."

"Yah!" cried Wemmick, suddenly hitting out at the turnkey in a facetious way,
"you’re dumb as one of your own keys when you have to do with my principal, you
know you are. Let us out, you old fox, or I’ll get him to bring an action
against you for false imprisonment."

The turnkey laughed, and gave us good day, and stood laughing at us over the
spikes of the wicket when we descended the steps into the street.

"Mind you, Mr. Pip," said Wemmick, gravely in my ear, as he took my arm to be
more confidential; "I don’t know that Mr. Jaggers does a better thing than the
way in which he keeps himself so high. He’s always so high. His constant height
is of a piece with his immense abilities. That Colonel durst no more take leave
of him, than that turnkey
durst ask him his intentions respecting a case. Then, between his height and
them, he slips in his subordinate,—don’t you see?—and so he has ’em, soul and
body."

I was very much impressed, and not for the first time, by my guardian’s
subtlety. To confess the truth, I very heartily wished, and not for the first
time, that I had had some other guardian of minor abilities.

Mr. Wemmick and I parted at the office in Little Britain, where suppliants for
Mr. Jaggers’s notice were lingering about as usual, and I returned to my watch
in the street of the coach-office, with some three hours on hand. I consumed the
whole time in thinking how strange it was that I should be encompassed by all
this taint of prison and crime; that, in my childhood out on our lonely marshes
on a winter evening, I should have first encountered it; that, it should have
reappeared on two occasions, starting out like a stain that was faded but not
gone; that, it should in this new way pervade my fortune and advancement. While
my mind was thus engaged, I thought of the beautiful young Estella, proud and
refined, coming towards me, and I thought with absolute abhorrence of the
contrast between the jail and her. I wished that Wemmick had not met me, or that
I had not yielded to him and gone with him, so that, of all days in the year on
this day, I might not have had Newgate in my breath and on my clothes. I beat
the prison dust off my feet as I sauntered to and fro, and I shook it out of my
dress, and I exhaled its air from my lungs. So contaminated did I feel,
remembering who was coming, that the coach came quickly after all, and I was not
yet free from the soiling consciousness of Mr. Wemmick’s conservatory, when I
saw her face at the coach window and her hand waving to me.

What was the
nameless shadow which again in that one instant had passed?