Ten Boys from Dickens

by Kate Dickinson Sweetser

Then I told Joe that I felt very miserable, but I hadn't liked to tell Mrs. Joe and Uncle Pumblechook about the beautiful young lady at Miss Havisham's who was so proud, and that she had said I was common, and that I wished I was not common, and that the lies had come out of it somehow, though I didn't know how.

"Well," said Joe after a good deal of thought, "there's one thing you may be sure of, Pip, namely, that lies is lies. Howsoever they come, they didn't ought to come, and they come from the father of lies and work round to the same. Don't you tell no more of 'em, Pip. They ain't the way to get out of being common, old chap. And as to being common, I don't make it out at all clear. You're sure an uncommon scholar."

This I denied in the face of Joe's most forcible arguments, and at the end of our talk, I said, "You are not angry with me, Joe?"

"No, old chap, but if you can't get to being uncommon through going straight, you'll never get to do it through going crooked. So don't tell no more on 'em, Pip. Don't never do it no more."

When I got up to my little room and said my prayers, I thought over Joe's advice and knew that it was right, and yet my mind was in such a disturbed and unthankful state, that for a long time I lay awake, not thinking over my sins, but still mourning that Joe and Mrs. Joe and I were all common.

That was a memorable day for me, and it wrought great changes in me. I began to see things and people from a new point of view, and from that day dates the beginning of my great expectations.

One night, a little later, I was at the village Public House with Joe, who was smoking his pipe with friends. In the room there was a stranger, who, when he heard me addressed as Pip, turned and looked at me. He kept looking hard at me, and nodding at me, and I returned his nods as politely as possible. Presently, after seeing that Joe was not looking, he nodded again and then rubbed his leg—in a very odd way, it struck me—and later, he stirred his rum and water pointedly at me, and he tasted it pointedly at me. And he did both, not with the spoon but with a file. He did this so that nobody but I saw the file, and then he wiped it and put it in his pocket I knew it to be Joe's file, and I knew that he was my convict the minute I saw the instrument. I sat gazing at him, spell-bound, but he took very little more notice of me; only when Joe and I started to go, he stopped us.

"Stop half a minute, Mr. Gargery," he said; "I think I've got a bright shilling somewhere in my pocket; if I have, the boy shall have it." He took it out, folded it in some crumpled paper and gave it to me. "Yours," said he. "Mind—your own!" I thanked him, staring at him beyond the bounds of good manners, and holding tight to Joe, and then we went towards home, I in a manner stupefied, and thinking only of this turning up of my old misdeed and old acquaintance.

We found my sister was not in a very bad temper, and Joe was encouraged to tell her about the shilling. I took it out of the paper to show her. "But what's this?" she said, catching up the paper. It was nothing less than two one-pound notes! Joe caught up his hat and ran with them to the Public House to restore them to their owner, only to find that he had gone. Then my sister sealed them up in a piece of paper, and put them on the top of a press in the state parlour, and there they remained.

On the appointed day I returned to Miss Havisham, and as before, was admitted by Estella. As we went up stairs we met a gentleman groping his way down. He was bald, with a large head and bushy black eyebrows. His eyes were deep set and disagreeably keen. He was nothing to me, but I observed him well as he passed.