Great Expectations, Charles Dickens [top 10 best books of all time txt] 📗

Chapter XXIII

Mr. Pocket said he was glad to see me, and he hoped I was not sorry

to see him. “For, I really am not,” he added, with his son’s smile,

“an alarming personage.” He was a young-looking man, in spite of

his perplexities and his very gray hair, and his manner seemed

quite natural. I use the word natural, in the sense of its being

unaffected; there was something comic in his distraught way, as

though it would have been downright ludicrous but for his own

perception that it was very near being so. When he had talked with

me a little, he said to Mrs. Pocket, with a rather anxious

contraction of his eyebrows, which were black and handsome,

“Belinda, I hope you have welcomed Mr. Pip?” And she looked up from

her book, and said, “Yes.” She then smiled upon me in an absent

state of mind, and asked me if I liked the taste of orange-flower

water? As the question had no bearing, near or remote, on any

foregone or subsequent transaction, I consider it to have been

thrown out, like her previous approaches, in general conversational

condescension.

I found out within a few hours, and may mention at once, that Mrs.

Pocket was the only daughter of a certain quite accidental deceased

Knight, who had invented for himself a conviction that his deceased

father would have been made a Baronet but for somebody’s determined

opposition arising out of entirely personal motives,—I forget

whose, if I ever knew,—the Sovereign’s, the Prime Minister’s, the

Lord Chancellor’s, the Archbishop of Canterbury’s, anybody’s,—and

had tacked himself on to the nobles of the earth in right of this

quite supposititious fact. I believe he had been knighted himself

for storming the English grammar at the point of the pen, in a

desperate address engrossed on vellum, on the occasion of the

laying of the first stone of some building or other, and for

handing some Royal Personage either the trowel or the mortar. Be

that as it may, he had directed Mrs. Pocket to be brought up from

her cradle as one who in the nature of things must marry a title,

and who was to be guarded from the acquisition of plebeian domestic

knowledge.

So successful a watch and ward had been established over the young

lady by this judicious parent, that she had grown up highly

ornamental, but perfectly helpless and useless. With her character

thus happily formed, in the first bloom of her youth she had

encountered Mr. Pocket: who was also in the first bloom of youth,

and not quite decided whether to mount to the Woolsack, or to roof

himself in with a mitre. As his doing the one or the other was a

mere question of time, he and Mrs. Pocket had taken Time by the

forelock (when, to judge from its length, it would seem to have

wanted cutting), and had married without the knowledge of the

judicious parent. The judicious parent, having nothing to bestow or

withhold but his blessing, had handsomely settled that dower upon

them after a short struggle, and had informed Mr. Pocket that his

wife was “a treasure for a Prince.” Mr. Pocket had invested the

Prince’s treasure in the ways of the world ever since, and it was

supposed to have brought him in but indifferent interest. Still,

Mrs. Pocket was in general the object of a queer sort of respectful

pity, because she had not married a title; while Mr. Pocket was the

object of a queer sort of forgiving reproach, because he had never

got one.

Mr. Pocket took me into the house and showed me my room: which was a

pleasant one, and so furnished as that I could use it with comfort

for my own private sitting-room. He then knocked at the doors of

two other similar rooms, and introduced me to their occupants, by

name Drummle and Startop. Drummle, an old-looking young man of a

heavy order of architecture, was whistling. Startop, younger in

years and appearance, was reading and holding his head, as if he

thought himself in danger of exploding it with too strong a charge

of knowledge.

Both Mr. and Mrs. Pocket had such a noticeable air of being in

somebody else’s hands, that I wondered who really was in possession

of the house and let them live there, until I found this unknown

power to be the servants. It was a smooth way of going on, perhaps,

in respect of saving trouble; but it had the appearance of being

expensive, for the servants felt it a duty they owed to themselves

to be nice in their eating and drinking, and to keep a deal of

company down stairs. They allowed a very liberal table to Mr. and

Mrs. Pocket, yet it always appeared to me that by far the best part

of the house to have boarded in would have been the kitchen,—

always supposing the boarder capable of self-defence, for, before I

had been there a week, a neighboring lady with whom the family

were personally unacquainted, wrote in to say that she had seen

Millers slapping the baby. This greatly distressed Mrs. Pocket, who

burst into tears on receiving the note, and said that it was an

extraordinary thing that the neighbors couldn’t mind their own

business.

By degrees I learnt, and chiefly from Herbert, that Mr. Pocket had

been educated at Harrow and at Cambridge, where he had

distinguished himself; but that when he had had the happiness of

marrying Mrs. Pocket very early in life, he had impaired his

prospects and taken up the calling of a Grinder. After grinding a

number of dull blades,—of whom it was remarkable that their

fathers, when influential, were always going to help him to

preferment, but always forgot to do it when the blades had left the

Grindstone,—he had wearied of that poor work and had come to

London. Here, after gradually failing in loftier hopes, he had

“read” with divers who had lacked opportunities or neglected them,

and had refurbished divers others for special occasions, and had

turned his acquirements to the account of literary compilation and

correction, and on such means, added to some very moderate private

resources, still maintained the house I saw.

Mr. and Mrs. Pocket had a toady neighbor; a widow lady of that

highly sympathetic nature that she agreed with everybody, blessed

everybody, and shed smiles and tears on everybody, according to

circumstances. This lady’s name was Mrs. Coiler, and I had the

honor of taking her down to dinner on the day of my installation.

She gave me to understand on the stairs, that it was a blow to dear

Mrs. Pocket that dear Mr. Pocket should be under the necessity of

receiving gentlemen to read with him. That did not extend to me,

she told me in a gush of love and confidence (at that time, I had

known her something less than five minutes); if they were all like

Me, it would be quite another thing.

“But dear Mrs. Pocket,” said Mrs. Coiler, “after her early

disappointment (not that dear Mr. Pocket was to blame in that),

requires so much luxury and elegance—”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said, to stop her, for I was afraid she was going

to cry.

“And she is of so aristocratic a disposition—”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said again, with the same object as before.

“—That it is hard,” said Mrs. Coiler, “to have dear Mr. Pocket’s

time and attention diverted from dear Mrs. Pocket.”

I could not help thinking that it might be harder if the butcher’s

time and attention were diverted from dear Mrs. Pocket; but I said

nothing, and indeed had enough to do in keeping a bashful watch

upon my company manners.

It came to my knowledge, through what passed between Mrs. Pocket and

Drummle while I was attentive to my knife and fork, spoon, glasses,

and other instruments of self-destruction, that Drummle, whose

Christian name was Bentley, was actually the next heir but one to a

baronetcy. It further appeared that the book I had seen Mrs. Pocket

reading in the garden was all about titles, and that she knew the

exact date at which her grandpapa would have come into the book, if

he ever had come at all. Drummle didn’t say much, but in his

limited way (he struck me as a sulky kind of fellow) he spoke as

one of the elect, and recognized Mrs. Pocket as a woman and a

sister. No one but themselves and Mrs. Coiler the toady neighbor

showed any interest in this part of the conversation, and it

appeared to me that it was painful to Herbert; but it promised to

last a long time, when the page came in with the announcement