The Forge and Satis House (The First Stage of Pip's Expectations, Chapters 1–19)

THE FIRST STAGE OF PIP'S EXPECTATIONS

My father's family name being Pirrip, and my Christian name Philip, my infant tongue could make of both names nothing longer or more explicit than Pip. So, I called myself Pip, and came to be called Pip.

Ours was the marsh country, down by the river, within, as the river wound, twenty miles of the sea. My first most vivid and broad impression of the identity of things seems to me to have been gained on a memorable raw afternoon towards evening. At such a time I found out for certain that this bleak place overgrown with nettles was the churchyard; and that Philip Pirrip, late of this parish, and also Georgiana wife of the above, were dead and buried; and that the dark flat wilderness beyond the churchyard, intersected with dikes and mounds and gates, with scattered cattle feeding on it, was the marshes; and that the low leaden line beyond was the river; and that the distant savage lair from which the wind was rushing was the sea; and that the small bundle of shivers growing afraid of it all and beginning to cry, was Pip.

"Hold your noise!" cried a terrible voice, as a man started up from among the graves at the side of the church porch. "Keep still, you little devil, or I'll cut your throat!"

A fearful man, all in coarse grey, with a great iron on his leg. A man with no hat, and with broken shoes, and with an old rag tied round his head. A man who had been soaked in water, and smothered in mud, and lamed by stones, and cut by flints, and stung by nettles, and torn by briars; who limped, and shivered, and glared and growled; and whose teeth chattered in his head as he seized me by the chin.

He turned me upside down, and emptied my pockets, and found a piece of bread, which he ate ravenously. Then he told me that I was to bring him, early the next morning, a file and wittles, to the old Battery out on the marshes, and never to say a word to anybody; or else a young man who was hid with him, in comparison with which young man he was an Angel, would get at me, and tear my heart and liver out.

I lived with my sister, Mrs. Joe Gargery, more than twenty years older than I, and with her husband, Joe, the blacksmith. My sister had established a great reputation with herself and the neighbours because she had brought me up "by hand." She had a hard and heavy hand, and was much in the habit of laying it upon her husband as well as upon me. Joe was a mild, good-natured, sweet-tempered, easy-going, foolish, dear fellow, a sort of Hercules in strength, and also in weakness. "Mrs. Joe has been out a dozen times, looking for you, Pip," he warned me, "and she's out now, making it a baker's dozen. And what's worse, she's got Tickler with her." Tickler was a wax-ended piece of cane, worn smooth by collision with my tickled frame.

It was Christmas Eve. In the night I stole bread and cheese, some brandy, and a beautiful round compact pork pie; and before dawn I took a file from Joe's tools and ran out onto the misty marshes. There I came first upon another man in grey, with a bruised face, who ran off into the mist; then upon my convict, who ate like a dog, and filed at his iron like a madman.

That Christmas Day, at dinner, with Uncle Pumblechook and the other guests, I waited in terror for the moment when my sister would go to fetch the pork pie. "You must taste," said my sister, addressing the guests with her best grace, "you must taste, to finish with, such a delightful and delicious present of Uncle Pumblechook's!" I ran for my life, and at the door I ran head foremost into a party of soldiers, one of whom held out a pair of handcuffs to me, saying, "Here you are, look sharp, come on!"

They had come to ask Joe to mend the lock of a pair of handcuffs; they were hunting two escaped convicts on the marshes. Joe and I and Mr. Wopsle went with them. In the dark we heard shouting, and found the two convicts fighting in a ditch, my convict holding the other down. "Mind!" said my convict. "I took him! I give him up to you! Mind that!" When he saw me, he looked at me, and I shook my head, to tell him that I had not betrayed him. Then he said, turning to the sergeant: "I wish to say something respecting this escape. I took some wittles, up at the village over yonder: a dram of liquor, and a pie." "Have you happened to miss such an article as a pie, blacksmith?" asked the sergeant. "My wife did, at the very moment when you came in." "So," said my convict, turning his eyes on Joe, "you're the blacksmith, are you? Then I'm sorry to say, I've eat your pie." "God knows you're welcome to it, so far as it was ever mine," returned Joe. "We don't know what you have done, but we wouldn't have you starved to death for it, poor miserable fellow-creatur." And he was taken back to the prison ship that lay out in the river, like a wicked Noah's ark.

I learned my letters, more or less, at the evening school kept by Mr. Wopsle's great-aunt, with the help of her granddaughter, Biddy, an orphan like myself. And then, one day, Uncle Pumblechook announced that Miss Havisham, an immensely rich and grim lady who lived in a large and dismal house in the town, barricaded against robbers, and who led a life of seclusion, wanted a boy to go and play there.

The house was of old brick, and dismal, and had a great many iron bars to it. A young lady opened the gate, very pretty and very proud, of about my own age, though she seemed much older than I, being a girl, and beautiful and self-possessed; and she was as scornful of me as if she had been one-and-twenty, and a queen. Her name was Estella. She led me through dark passages, with a candle, to a door, and left me there.

I entered, and found myself in a pretty large room, well lighted with wax candles. No glimpse of daylight was to be seen in it. In an arm-chair, with an elbow resting on the table and her head leaning on that hand, sat the strangest lady I have ever seen, or shall ever see. She was dressed in rich materials, satins, and lace, and silks, all of white. Her shoes were white. And she had a long white veil dependent from her hair, and she had bridal flowers in her hair, but her hair was white. I saw that everything within my view which ought to be white, had been white long ago, and had lost its lustre, and was faded and yellow. I saw that the bride within the bridal dress had withered like the dress, and like the flowers, and had no brightness left but the brightness of her sunken eyes. Her watch had stopped at twenty minutes to nine, and a clock in the room had stopped at twenty minutes to nine.

"Who is it?" said the lady at the table.

"Pip, ma'am."

"Look at me. You are not afraid of a woman who has never seen the sun since you were born?" She laid her hands, one upon the other, on her left side. "Do you know what I touch here?" "Your heart." "Broken!" She uttered the word with an eager look, and with strong emphasis, and with a weird smile that had a kind of boast in it.

She made Estella play cards with me. "Beggar him," she said. And Estella said, with disdain: "He calls the knaves, Jacks, this boy! 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. When she gave me my bread and meat in the yard, as if I were a dog in disgrace, I cried, and kicked the wall, and twisted my hair; and I was so humiliated, hurt, spurned, offended, angry, sorry, that I could not hit upon the right name for the smart.

At home, when they asked me what Miss Havisham's was like, I lied magnificently: she sat in a black velvet coach, and we had cake and wine on gold plates, and four immense dogs fought for veal cutlets out of a silver basket. Afterward, I confessed it to Joe. "There's one thing you may be sure of, Pip," said Joe, after some rumination, "namely, that lies is lies. Howsever they come, they didn't ought to come, and they come from the father of lies, and work round to the same."

I went back many times. One day, Miss Havisham showed me the room across the landing, where a long table was laid for a feast, and in the middle of it stood an object so heavily overhung with cobwebs that its form was quite undistinguishable: her bride-cake, where the speckled-legged spiders ran home to it. "When the ruin is complete," she said, "and when they lay me dead, in my bride's dress on the bride's table, which shall be done, and which will be the finished curse upon him, so much the better if it is done on this day!" She leaned on my shoulder, and I walked her round and round the room. In the garden I fought a pale young gentleman, who challenged me and kept being knocked down, and getting up again, with great good humour; and afterward Estella, flushed, let me kiss her cheek.

When I was old enough, Miss Havisham paid twenty-five guineas for me to be bound apprentice to Joe. It is a most miserable thing to feel ashamed of home. Home had never been a very pleasant place to me, because of my sister's temper. But Joe had sanctified it, and I had believed in it. Within a single year all this was changed. Now it was all coarse and common, and I would not have had Miss Havisham and Estella see it on any account.

Joe had a journeyman, Dolge Orlick, a broad-shouldered, loose-limbed, swarthy fellow of great strength, who slouched, and hated me. One evening my sister was found on the kitchen floor, struck down by a tremendous blow on the back of the head, dealt by some unknown hand; beside her lay a convict's leg-iron, which had been filed asunder. She never recovered her wits. She drew on her slate, again and again, a character that looked like a T, which turned out to be a hammer; and when Orlick was brought in, she seemed eager to be friends with him. Biddy came to live with us and keep house.

One Sunday, walking with Biddy on the marshes, I told her my secret. "Biddy, I want to be a gentleman." "Oh, I wouldn't, if I was you!" she returned. "Do you want to be a gentleman, to spite her or to gain her over?" said Biddy quietly, after a pause. I did not know.

I was in my fourth year of apprenticeship, when, one Saturday night, in the Three Jolly Bargemen, a stranger with a large head and a forefinger he bit and threw at people, a lawyer from London named Jaggers, came looking for Joe and me. "I am instructed to communicate to him," said Mr. Jaggers, throwing his finger at me sideways, "that he will come into a handsome property. Further, that it is the desire of the present possessor of that property, that he be immediately removed from his present sphere of life and from this place, and be brought up as a gentleman, in a word, as a young fellow of great expectations." The name of the person who was my benefactor was to remain a profound secret, until that person chose to reveal it. I was to go to London, to be educated by a Mr. Matthew Pocket.

My dream was out; my wild fancy was surpassed by sober reality; Miss Havisham was going to make my fortune on a grand scale. Mr. Jaggers offered Joe compensation for the loss of my services; and Joe, laying his great hand on my shoulder with a touch like that of a woman, said: "Pip is that hearty welcome to go free with his services, to honour and fortun', as no words can tell him. But if you think as Money can make compensation to me for the loss of the little child, what come to the forge, and ever the best of friends!" And he wiped his eyes.

On my last morning, I walked away fast from the forge, thinking it was easier to go than I had supposed. But at the finger-post at the end of the village I broke down. Heaven knows we need never be ashamed of our tears, for they are rain upon the blinding dust of earth, overlying our hard hearts. I was better after I had cried than before: more sorry, more aware of my own ingratitude, more gentle. And the mists had all solemnly risen now, and the world lay spread before me.

This is the end of the first stage of Pip's expectations.

(End of Episode 1 — continued in Episode 2: London)