Charles Dickens

Great Expectations


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uncomfortable, and — what would it signify to me, being coarse and common, if nobody had told me so!”

      Biddy turned her face suddenly towards mine, and looked far more attentively at me than she had looked at the sailing ships.

      “It was neither a very true nor a very polite thing to say,” she remarked, directing her eyes to the ships again. “Who said it?”

      I was disconcerted, for I had broken away without quite seeing where I was going to. It was not to be shuffled off now, however, and I answered, “The beautiful young lady at Miss Havisham’s, and she’s more beautiful than anybody ever was, and I admire her dreadfully, and I want to be a gentleman on her account.” Having made this lunatic confession, I began to throw my torn-up grass into the river, as if I had some thoughts of following it.

      “Do you want to be a gentleman, to spite her or to gain her over?” Biddy quietly asked me, after a pause.

      “I don’t know,” I moodily answered.

      “Because, if it is to spite her,” Biddy pursued, “I should think — but you know best — that might be better and more independently done by caring nothing for her words. And if it is to gain her over, I should think — but you know best — she was not worth gaining over.”

      Exactly what I myself had thought, many times. Exactly what was perfectly manifest to me at the moment. But how could I, a poor dazed village lad, avoid that wonderful inconsistency into which the best and wisest of men fall every day?

      “It may be all quite true,” said I to Biddy, “but I admire her dreadfully.”

      In short, I turned over on my face when I came to that, and got a good grasp on the hair on each side of my head, and wrenched it well. All the while knowing the madness of my heart to be so very mad and misplaced, that I was quite conscious it would have served my face right, if I had lifted it up by my hair, and knocked it against the pebbles as a punishment for belonging to such an idiot.

      Biddy was the wisest of girls, and she tried to reason no more with me. She put her hand, which was a comfortable hand though roughened by work, upon my hands, one after another, and gently took them out of my hair. Then she softly patted my shoulder in a soothing way, while with my face upon my sleeve I cried a little, — exactly as I had done in the brewery yard, — and felt vaguely convinced that I was very much illused by somebody, or by everybody; I can’t say which.

      “I am glad of one thing,” said Biddy, “and that is, that you have felt you could give me your confidence, Pip. And I am glad of another thing, and that is, that of course you know you may depend upon my keeping it and always so far deserving it. If your first teacher (dear! such a poor one, and so much in need of being taught herself!) had been your teacher at the present time, she thinks she knows what lesson she would set. But it would be a hard one to learn, and you have got beyond her, and it’s of no use now.” So, with a quiet sigh for me, Biddy rose from the bank, and said, with a fresh and pleasant change of voice, “Shall we walk a little farther, or go home?”

      “Biddy,” I cried, getting up, putting my arm round her neck, and giving her a kiss, “I shall always tell you everything.”

      “Till you’re a gentleman,” said Biddy.

      “You know I never shall be, so that’s always. Not that I have any occasion to tell you anything, for you know everything I know, — as I told you at home the other night.”

      “Ah!” said Biddy, quite in a whisper, as she looked away at the ships. And then repeated, with her former pleasant change, “shall we walk a little farther, or go home?”

      I said to Biddy we would walk a little farther, and we did so, and the summer afternoon toned down into the summer evening, and it was very beautiful. I began to consider whether I was not more naturally and wholesomely situated, after all, in these circumstances, than playing beggar my neighbor by candlelight in the room with the stopped clocks, and being despised by Estella. I thought it would be very good for me if I could get her out of my head, with all the rest of those remembrances and fancies, and could go to work determined to relish what I had to do, and stick to it, and make the best of it. I asked myself the question whether I did not surely know that if Estella were beside me at that moment instead of Biddy, she would make me miserable? I was obliged to admit that I did know it for a certainty, and I said to myself, “Pip, what a fool you are!”

      We talked a good deal as we walked, and all that Biddy said seemed right. Biddy was never insulting, or capricious, or Biddy to-day and somebody else tomorrow; she would have derived only pain, and no pleasure, from giving me pain; she would far rather have wounded her own breast than mine. How could it be, then, that I did not like her much the better of the two?

      “Biddy,” said I, when we were walking homeward, “I wish you could put me right.”

      “I wish I could!” said Biddy.

      “If I could only get myself to fall in love with you, — you don’t mind my speaking so openly to such an old acquaintance?”

      “Oh dear, not at all!” said Biddy. “Don’t mind me.”

      “If I could only get myself to do it, that would be the thing for me.”

      “But you never will, you see,” said Biddy.

      It did not appear quite so unlikely to me that evening, as it would have done if we had discussed it a few hours before. I therefore observed I was not quite sure of that. But Biddy said she was, and she said it decisively. In my heart I believed her to be right; and yet I took it rather ill, too, that she should be so positive on the point.

      When we came near the churchyard, we had to cross an embankment, and get over a stile near a sluice-gate. There started up, from the gate, or from the rushes, or from the ooze (which was quite in his stagnant way), Old Orlick.

      “Halloa!” he growled, “where are you two going?”

      “Where should we be going, but home?”

      “Well, then,” said he, “I’m jiggered if I don’t see you home!”

      This penalty of being jiggered was a favorite supposititious case of his. He attached no definite meaning to the word that I am aware of, but used it, like his own pretended Christian name, to affront mankind, and convey an idea of something savagely damaging. When I was younger, I had had a general belief that if he had jiggered me personally, he would have done it with a sharp and twisted hook.

      Biddy was much against his going with us, and said to me in a whisper, “Don’t let him come; I don’t like him.” As I did not like him either, I took the liberty of saying that we thanked him, but we didn’t want seeing home. He received that piece of information with a yell of laughter, and dropped back, but came slouching after us at a little distance.

      Curious to know whether Biddy suspected him of having had a hand in that murderous attack of which my sister had never been able to give any account, I asked her why she did not like him.

      “Oh!” she replied, glancing over her shoulder as he slouched after us, “because I — I am afraid he likes me.”

      “Did he ever tell you he liked you?” I asked indignantly.

      “No,” said Biddy, glancing over her shoulder again, “he never told me so; but he dances at me, whenever he can catch my eye.”

      However novel and peculiar this testimony of attachment, I did not doubt the accuracy of the interpretation. I was very hot indeed upon Old Orlick’s daring to admire her; as hot as if it were an outrage on myself.

      “But it makes no difference to you, you know,” said Biddy, calmly.

      “No, Biddy, it makes no difference to me; only I don’t like it; I don’t approve of it.”

      “Nor I neither,” said Biddy. “Though that makes no difference to you.”

      “Exactly,”