Great Expectations
Charles Dickens
Chapter VIII Page 2
that Miss Havisham put down the jewel exactly on the spot from
which she had taken it up. As Estella dealt the cards, I glanced at
the dressing-table again, and saw that the shoe upon it, once
white, now yellow, had never been worn. I glanced down at the foot
from which the shoe was absent, and saw that the silk stocking on
it, once white, now yellow, had been trodden ragged. Without this
arrest of everything, this standing still of all the pale decayed
objects, not even the withered bridal dress on the collapsed form
could have looked so like grave-clothes, or the long veil so like a
shroud.
So she sat, corpse-like, as we played at cards; the frillings and
trimmings on her bridal dress, looking like earthy paper. I knew
nothing then of the discoveries that are occasionally made of
of being distinctly seen; but, I have often thought since, that she
must have looked as if the admission of the natural light of day
would have struck her to dust.
"He calls the knaves Jacks, this boy!" said Estella with disdain,
before our first game was out. "And what coarse hands he has! And
what thick boots!"
I had never thought of being ashamed of my hands before; but I
began to consider them a very indifferent pair. Her contempt for me
was so strong, that it became infectious, and I caught it.
She won the game, and I dealt. I misdealt, as was only natural,
when I knew she was lying in wait for me to do wrong; and she
denounced me for a stupid, clumsy laboring-boy.
"You say nothing of her," remarked Miss Havisham to me, as she
looked on. "She says many hard things of you, but you say nothing
of her. What do you think of her?"
"I don't like to say," I stammered.
"Tell me in my ear," said Miss Havisham, bending down.
"I think she is very proud," I replied, in a whisper.
"Anything else?"
"I think she is very pretty."
"Anything else?"
"I think she is very insulting." (She was looking at me then with a
look of supreme aversion.)
"Anything else?"
"I think I should like to go home."
"And never see again, though she is so pretty?"
"I am not sure that I shouldn't like to see her again, but I should
like to go home now."
"You shall go soon," said Miss Havisham, aloud. "Play the game
out."
Saving for the one weird smile at first, I should have felt almost
sure that Miss Havisham's face could not smile. It had dropped into
a watchful and brooding expression,--most likely when all the
things about her had become transfixed,--and it looked as
nothing could ever lift it up again. Her chest had dropped, so that
she stooped; and her voice had dropped, so that she spoke low, and
with a dead lull upon her; altogether, she had the appearance of
of a crushing blow.
I played the game to an end with Estella, and she beggared me. She
threw the cards down on the table when she had won them all, as if
"When shall I have you here again?" said Miss Havisham. "Let me
think."
I was beginning to remind her that to-day was Wednesday, when she
checked me with her former impatient movement of the fingers of her
right hand.
of weeks of the year. Come again after six days. You hear?"
"Yes, ma'am."
"Estella, take him down. Let him have something to eat, and let him
roam and look about him while he eats. Go, Pip."
I followed the candle down, as I had followed the candle up, and
she stood it in the place where we had found it. Until she opened
the side entrance, I had fancied, without thinking about it, that
it must necessarily be night-time. The rush of the daylight quite
confounded me, and made me feel as if I had been in the candlelight
"You are to wait here, you boy," said Estella; and disappeared and
closed the door.
I took the opportunity of being alone in the courtyard to look at
accessories was not favorable. They had never troubled me before,
but they troubled me now, as vulgar appendages. I determined to ask
which ought to be called knaves. I wished Joe had been rather more
She came back, with some bread and meat and a little mug of beer.
She put the mug down on the stones of the yard, and gave me the
bread and meat without looking at me, as insolently as if I were a
dog in disgrace. I was so humiliated, hurt, spurned, offended,
angry, sorry,--I cannot hit upon the right name for the smart--God
knows what its name was,--that tears started to my eyes. The moment
they sprang there, the girl looked at me with a quick delight in
having been the cause of them. This gave me power to keep them back
and to look at her: so, she gave a contemptuous toss--but with a
sense, I thought, of having made too sure that I was so wounded--
and left me.
But when she was gone, I looked about me for a place to hide my
face in, and got behind one of the gates in the brewery-lane, and
leaned my sleeve against the wall there, and leaned my forehead on
it and cried. As I cried, I kicked the wall, and took a hard twist
at my hair; so bitter were my feelings, and so sharp was the smart
My sister's bringing up had made me sensitive. In the little world
in which children have their existence whosoever brings them up,
is nothing so finely perceived and so finely felt as
injustice. It may be only small injustice that the child can be
exposed to; but the child is small, and its world is small, and its
rocking-horse stands as many hands high, according to scale, as a
big-boned Irish hunter. Within myself, I had sustained, from my
babyhood, a perpetual conflict with injustice. I had known, from
the time when I could speak, that my sister, in her capricious and
violent coercion, was unjust to me. I had cherished a profound
conviction that her bringing me up by hand gave her no right to
bring me up by jerks. Through all my punishments, disgraces, fasts,
and vigils, and other penitential performances, I had nursed this
assurance; and to my communing so much with it, in a solitary and
unprotected way, I in great part refer the fact that I was morally
timid and very sensitive.
I got rid of my injured feelings for the time by kicking them into
the brewery wall, and twisting them out of my hair, and then I
smoothed my face with my sleeve, and came from behind the gate. The
bread and meat were acceptable, and the beer was warming and
tingling, and I was soon in spirits to look about me.
the brewery-yard, which had been blown crooked on its pole by some
high wind, and would have made the pigeons think themselves at sea,
if there had been any pigeons there to be rocked by it. But there
were no pigeons in the dove-cot, no horses in the stable, no pigs
in the sty, no malt in the storehouse, no smells of grains and
brewery might have evaporated with its last reek of smoke. In a
by-yard, there was a wilderness of empty casks, which had a certain
too sour to be accepted as a sample of the beer that was gone,--and
in this respect I remember those recluses as being like most
others.
Behind the furthest end of the brewery, was a rank garden with an
old wall; not so high but that I could struggle up and hold on long
enough to look over it, and see that the rank garden was the garden
of the house, and that it was overgrown with tangled weeds, but
that there was a track upon the green and yellow paths, as if some
one sometimes walked there, and that Estella was walking away from
me even then. But she seemed to be everywhere. For when I yielded
to the temptation presented by the casks, and began to walk on
them, I saw her walking on them at the end of the yard of casks.
She had her back towards me, and held her pretty brown hair spread
large paved lofty place in which they used to make the beer, and
where the brewing utensils still were. When I first went into it,
and, rather oppressed by its gloom, stood near the door looking
about me, I saw her pass among the extinguished fires, and ascend
some light iron stairs, and go out by a gallery high overhead, as
if she were going out into the sky.
It was in this place, and at this moment, that a strange thing
happened to my fancy. I thought it a strange thing then, and I
thought it a stranger thing long afterwards. I turned my eyes--a
little dimmed by looking up at the frosty light--towards a great
wooden beam in a low nook of the building near me on my right hand,
and I saw a figure hanging there by the neck. A figure all in
yellow white, with but one shoe to the feet; and it hung so, that I
could see that the faded trimmings of the dress were like earthy
paper, and that the face was Miss Havisham's, with a movement going
over the whole countenance as if she were trying to call to me. In
that it had not been there a moment before, I at first ran from it,
and then ran towards it. And my terror was greatest of all when I
Nothing less than the frosty light of the cheerful sky, the sight
would have brought me round. Even those aids, I might not have
come to myself as soon as I did, but that I saw Estella approaching
with the keys, to let me out. She would have some fair reason for
looking down upon me, I thought, if she saw me frightened; and she
would have no fair reason.
that my hands were so coarse and my boots were so thick, and she
opened the gate, and stood holding it. I was passing out without
looking at her, when she touched me with a taunting hand.
"Why don't you cry?"
"Because I don't want to."
"You do," said she. "You have been crying till you are half blind,
and you are near crying again now."
She laughed contemptuously, pushed me out, and locked the gate upon
to find him not at home. So, leaving word with the shopman on what
day I was wanted at Miss Havisham's again, I set off on the
four-mile walk to our forge; pondering, as I went along, on all I
had seen, and deeply revolving I was a common laboring-boy;
that my hands were coarse; that my boots were thick; that I had
much more ignorant than I had considered myself last night, and
generally that I was in a low-lived bad way.