<h2><SPAN name="chap32"></SPAN>Chapter XXXII.</h2>
<p class="pfirst"><span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">O</span>ne
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:—</p>
<p class="letter">
“I am to come to London the day after to-morrow by the midday 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.</p>
<p class="right">
“Yours, E<small>STELLA</small>.”</p>
<p>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 its 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.</p>
<p>“Halloa, Mr. Pip,” said he; “how do you do? I should hardly
have thought this was <i>your</i> beat.”</p>
<p>I explained that I was waiting to meet somebody who was coming up by coach, and
I inquired after the Castle and the Aged.</p>
<p>“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?”</p>
<p>“To the office?” said I, for he was tending in that direction.</p>
<p>“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 a squint at the scene of action, and thereupon must have a word
or two with our client.”</p>
<p>“Did your client commit the robbery?” I asked.</p>
<p>“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.”</p>
<p>“Only neither of us is,” I remarked.</p>
<p>“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?”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 wrongdoing—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 frowzy, ugly, disorderly,
depressing scene it was.</p>
<p>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
<i>you</i> 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.</p>
<p>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 post-office, and putting his hands in his pockets. In one or two
instances there was a 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?”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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
overspreading 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.</p>
<p>“Colonel, to you!” said Wemmick; “how are you,
Colonel?”</p>
<p>“All right, Mr. Wemmick.”</p>
<p>“Everything was done that could be done, but the evidence was too strong
for us, Colonel.”</p>
<p>“Yes, it was too strong, sir,—but <i>I</i> don’t care.”</p>
<p>“No, no,” said Wemmick, coolly, “<i>you</i> don’t
care.” Then, turning to me, “Served His Majesty this man. Was a
soldier in the line and bought his discharge.”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>“I think I shall be out of this on Monday, sir,” he said to
Wemmick.</p>
<p>“Perhaps,” returned my friend, “but there’s no
knowing.”</p>
<p>“I am glad to have the chance of bidding you good-bye, Mr.
Wemmick,” said the man, stretching out his hand between two bars.</p>
<p>“Thankye,” said Wemmick, shaking hands with him. “Same to
you, Colonel.”</p>
<p>“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.”</p>
<p>“I’ll accept the will for the deed,” said Wemmick. “By
the by; you were quite a pigeon-fancier.” The man looked up at the sky.
“I am told you had a remarkable breed of tumblers. <i>Could</i> you
commission any friend of yours to bring me a pair, if you’ve no further
use for ’em?”</p>
<p>“It shall be done, sir.”</p>
<p>“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.</p>
<p>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 water-side murder? Is he going to make it
manslaughter, or what’s he going to make of it?”</p>
<p>“Why don’t you ask him?” returned Wemmick.</p>
<p>“O yes, I dare say!” said the turnkey.</p>
<p>“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.”</p>
<p>“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.</p>
<p>“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?”</p>
<p>“Why then,” said the turnkey, grinning again, “he knows what
Mr. Jaggers is.”</p>
<p>“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.”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>“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 <i>him</i>, 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.”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>What <i>was</i> the nameless shadow which again in that one instant had passed?</p>
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