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 mid-day 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 is 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 neighbourhood 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 as
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 wrong-doing - 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 flavour 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 frouzy, 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 postoffice, and
putting his hands in his pockets. In one or two instances, there was 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-coloured frock-coat, with a peculiar pallor
over-spreading 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-bye, 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 favour of your wearing
another ring - in acknowledgment of your attentions.'
`I'll accept the will for the deed,' said Wemmick. `By-the-bye; 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-bye!' 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 waterside
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.
`Oh 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 humour.
`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?
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