Great Expectations
Charles Dickens
Chapter LVII Page 1
Now that I was left wholly to myself, I gave notice of my intention
to quit the chambers in the Temple as soon as my tenancy could
legally determine, and in the meanwhile to underlet them. At once I
any money, and began to be seriously alarmed by the state of my
affairs. I ought rather to write that I should have been alarmed if
I had had energy and concentration enough to help me to the clear
ill. The late stress upon me had enabled me to put off illness, but
not to put it away; I knew that it was coming on me now, and I knew
very little else, and was even careless as to that.
For a day or two, I lay on the sofa, or on the floor,--anywhere,
according as I happened to sink down,--with a heavy head and aching
limbs, and no purpose, and no power. Then there came, one night
which appeared of great duration, and which teemed with anxiety and
horror; and when in the morning I tried to sit up in my bed and
think of it, I found I could not do so.
WhetI really had been down in Garden Court in the dead of the
night, groping about for the boat that I supposed to be there;
whether I had two or three times come to myself on the staircase
great terror, not knowing how I had got out of bed; whether I
was coming up the stairs, and that the lights were blown out;
whether I had been inexpressibly harassed by the distracted
talking, laughing, and groaning of some one, and had half
suspected those sounds to be of my own making; whethad
been a closed iron furnace in a dark corner of the room, and a
voice had called out, over and over again, that Miss Havisham was
consuming within it,--these were things that I tried to settle with
myself and get into some order, as I lay that morning on my bed.
But the vapor of a limekiln would come between me and them,
disordering them all, and it was through the vapor at last that I
saw two men looking at me.
"What do you want?" I asked, starting; "I don't know you."
"Well, sir," returned one of them, bending down and touching me on
the shoulder, "this is a matter that you'll soon arrange, I dare
say, but you're arrested."
"What is the debt?"
"Hundred and twenty-three pound, fifteen, six. Jeweller's account,
I think."
"What is to be done?"
"You had better come to my house," said the man. "I keep a very
nice house."
I made some attempt to get up and dress myself. When I next
attended to them, they were standing a little off from the bed,
looking at me. I still lay there.
"You see my state," said I. "I would come with you if I could; but
indeed I am quite unable. If you take me from here, I think I shall
die by the way."
Perhaps they replied, or argued the point, or tried to encourage me
to believe that I was better than I thought. Forasmuch as they hang
in my memory by only this one slender thread, I don't know what
they did, except that they forbore to remove me.
That I had a fever and was avoided, that I suffered greatly, that I
often lost my reason, that the time seemed interminable, that I
confounded impossible existences my own identity; that I was a
brick in the house-wall, and yet entreating to be released from the
giddy place where the builders had set me; that I was a steel beam
of a vast engine, clashing and whirling over a gulf, and yet that I
implored in my own person to have the engine stopped, and my part
in it hammered off; that I passed through these phases of disease,
I know of my own remembrance, and did in some sort know at the
time. That I sometimes struggled with real people, in the belief
that they meant to do me good, and would then sink exhausted in
their arms, and suffer them to lay me down, I also knew at the
time. But, above all, I knew that there was a constant tendency in
all these people,--who, when I was very ill, would present all
kinds of extraordinary transformations of the human face, and would
be much dilated in size,--above all, I say, I knew that there was
an extraordinary tendency in all these people, sooner or later, to
settle down into the likeness of Joe.
After I had turned the worst point of my illness, I began to notice
that while all its other features changed, this one consistent
feature did not change. Whoever came about me, still settled down
into Joe. I opened my eyes in the night, and I saw, in the great
chair at the bedside, Joe. I opened my eyes in the day, and,
sitting on the window-seat, smoking his pipe in the shaded open
window, still I saw Joe. I asked for cooling drink, and the dear
hand that gave it me was Joe's. I sank back on my pillow after
drinking, and the face that looked so hopefully and tenderly upon
At last, one day, I took courage, and said, "Is it Joe?"
And the dear old home-voice answered, "Which it air, old chap."
"O Joe, you break my heart! Look angry at me, Joe. Strike me, Joe.
Tell me of my ingratitude. Don't be so good to me!"
For Joe had actually laid his head down on the pillow at my side,
and put his arm round my neck, in his joy that I knew him.
"Which dear old Pip, old chap," said Joe, "you and me was ever
friends. And when you're well enough to go out for a ride--what
larks!"
After which, Joe withdrew to the window, and stood with his back
towards me, wiping his eyes. And as my extreme weakness prevented
me from getting up and going to him, I lay there, penitently
whispering, "O God bless him! O God bless this gentle Christian
man!"
Joe's eyes were red when I next found him beside me; but I was
holding his hand, and we both felt happy.
"Which you meantersay, Pip, how long have your illness lasted, dear
old chap?"
"Yes, Joe."
"It's the end of May, Pip. To-morrow is the first of June."
"Pretty nigh, old chap. For, as I says to Biddy when the news of
your being ill were brought by letter, which it were brought by the
post, and being formerly single he is now married though underpaid
object on his part, and marriage were the great wish of his hart--"
"It is so delightful to hear you, Joe! But I interrupt you in what
you said to Biddy."
"Which it were," said Joe, "that how you might be amongst
strangers, and that how you and me having been ever friends, a
wisit at such a moment might not prove unacceptabobble. And Biddy,
her word were, 'Go to him, without loss of time.' That," said Joe,
summing up with his judicial air, "were the word of Biddy. 'Go to
him,' Biddy say, 'without loss of time.' In short, I shouldn't
greatly deceive you," Joe added, after a little grave reflection,
"if I represented to you that the word of that young woman were,
'without a minute's loss of time.'"
There Joe cut himself short, and informed me that I was to be
nourishment at stated frequent times, whether I felt inclined for
it or not, and that I was to submit myself to all his orders. So I
kissed his hand, and lay quiet, while he proceeded to indite a note
to Biddy, my love in it.
Evidently Biddy had taught Joe to write. As I lay in bed looking
at him, it made me, in my weak state, cry again with pleasure to
see the pride with which he set about his letter. My bedstead,
divested of its curtains, had been removed, with me upon it, into
the sitting-room, as the airiest and largest, and the carpet had
been taken away, and the room kept always fresh and wholesome night
and day. At my own writing-table, pushed into a corner and cumbered
with little bottles, Joe now sat down to his great work, first
choosing a pen from the pen-tray as if it were a chest of large
tools, and tucking up his sleeves as if he were going to wield a
crow-bar or sledgehammer. It was necessary for Joe to hold on
heavily to the table with his left elbow, and to get his right leg
well out behind him, before he could begin; and when he did begin
he made every down-stroke so slowly that it might have been six
feet long, while at every up-stroke I could hear his pen
spluttering extensively. He had a curious idea that the inkstand
was on the side of him where it was not, and constantly dipped his
Occasionally, he was tripped up by some orthographical
stumbling-block; but on the whole he got on very well indeed; and
the paper to the crown of his head with his two forefingers, he got
up and hovered about the table, trying the effect of his
performance from various points of view, as it lay there, with
unbounded satisfaction.
Not to make Joe uneasy by talking too much, even if I had been able
to talk much, I deferred asking him about Miss Havisham until next
day. He shook his head when I then asked him if she had recovered.
"Is she dead, Joe?"
by way of getting at it by degrees, "I wouldn't go so far as to say
that, for that's a deal to say; but she ain't--"
"Living, Joe?"
"That's nigher where it is," said Joe; "she ain't living."
"Did she linger long, Joe?"
"Arter you was took ill, pretty much about what you might call (if
you was put to it) a week," said Joe; still determined, on my
account, to come at everything by degrees.
"Dear Joe, have you heard what becomes of her property?"
"Well, old chap," said Joe, "it do appear that she had settled the
most of it, which I meantersay tied it up, on Miss Estella. But she
had wrote out a little coddleshell in her own hand a day or two
afore the accident, leaving a cool four thousand to Mr. Matthew
Pocket. And why, do you suppose, above all things, Pip, she left
that cool four thousand unto him? 'Because of Pip's account of him,
the said Matthew.' I am told by Biddy, that air the writing," said
Joe, repeating the legal turn as if it did him infinite good,
I never discovered from whom Joe derived the conventional
temperature of the four thousand pounds; but it appeared to make
insisting on its being cool.
This account gave me great joy, as it perfected the only good thing
I had done. I asked Joe whether he had heard if any of the other
relations had any legacies?
"Miss Sarah," said Joe, "she have twenty-five pound perannium fur
twenty pound down. Mrs.--what's the name of them wild beasts with
humps, old chap?"
"Camels?" said I, wondering why he could possibly want to know.
Joe nodded. "Mrs. Camels," by which I presently understood he meant
Camilla, "she have five pound fur to buy rushlights to put her in
spirits when she wake up in the night."
The accuracy of these recitals was sufficiently obvious to me, to
give me great confidence in Joe's information. "And now," said Joe,
"you ain't that strong yet, old chap, that you can take in more nor
one additional shovelful to-day. Old Orlick he's been a
bustin' open a dwelling-ouse."
"Whose?" said I.
"Not, I grant you, but what his manners is given to blusterous,"
said Joe, apologetically; "still, a Englishman's ouse is his
Castle, and castles must not be busted 'cept when done in war time.
And wotsume'er the failings on his part, he were a corn and
seedsman in his hart."
"Is it Pumblechook's house has been broken into, then?"
"That's it, Pip," said Joe; "and they took his till, and they took
wittles, and they slapped his face, and they pulled his nose, and
they tied him up to his bedpust, and they giv' him a dozen, and
crying out. But he knowed Orlick, and Orlick's in the county
By these approaches we arrived at unrestricted conversation. I was
weak, and Joe stayed with me, and I fancied I was little Pip again.
For the tenderness of Joe was so beautifully proportioned to my
need, that I was like a child in his hands. He would sit and talk
to me in the old confidence, and with the old simplicity, and in
the old unassertive protecting way, so that I would half believe
mental troubles of the fever that was gone. He did everything for
me except the household work, for which he had engaged a very
decent woman, after paying off the laundress on his first arrival.
"Which I do assure you, Pip," he would often say, in explanation of
that liberty; "I found her a tapping the spare bed, like a cask of
beer, and drawing off the feathers in a bucket, for sale. Which she
would have tapped yourn next, and draw'd it off with you a laying
on it, and was then a carrying away the coals gradiwally in the
soup-tureen and wegetable-dishes, and the wine and spirits in your
We looked forward to the day when I should go out for a ride, as we
had once looked forward to the day of my apprenticeship. And when
the day came, and an open carriage was got into the Lane, Joe
wrapped me up, took me in his arms, carried me down to it, and put
me in, as if I were still the small helpless creature to whom he
had so abundantly given of the wealth of his great nature.
And Joe got in beside me, and we drove away together into the
country, where the rich summer growth was already on the trees and
on the grass, and sweet summer scents filled all the air. The day
happened to be Sunday, and when I looked on the loveliness around
me, and thought how it had grown and changed, and how the little
wild-flowers had been forming, and the voices of the birds had been
strengthening, by day and by night, under the sun and under the