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

Chapter XXXIV

As I had grown accustomed to my expectations, I had insensibly

begun to notice their effect upon myself and those around me. Their

influence on my own character I disguised from my recognition as

much as possible, but I knew very well that it was not all good. I

lived in a state of chronic uneasiness respecting my behavior to

Joe. My conscience was not by any means comfortable about Biddy.

When I woke up in the night,—like Camilla,—I used to think, with

a weariness on my spirits, that I should have been happier and

better if I had never seen Miss Havisham’s face, and had risen to

manhood content to be partners with Joe in the honest old forge.

Many a time of an evening, when I sat alone looking at the fire, I

thought, after all there was no fire like the forge fire and the

kitchen fire at home.

Yet Estella was so inseparable from all my restlessness and

disquiet of mind, that I really fell into confusion as to the

limits of my own part in its production. That is to say, supposing

I had had no expectations, and yet had had Estella to think of, I

could not make out to my satisfaction that I should have done much

better. Now, concerning the influence of my position on others, I

was in no such difficulty, and so I perceived—though dimly enough

perhaps—that it was not beneficial to anybody, and, above all,

that it was not beneficial to Herbert. My lavish habits led his

easy nature into expenses that he could not afford, corrupted the

simplicity of his life, and disturbed his peace with anxieties and

regrets. I was not at all remorseful for having unwittingly set

those other branches of the Pocket family to the poor arts they

practised; because such littlenesses were their natural bent, and

would have been evoked by anybody else, if I had left them

slumbering. But Herbert’s was a very different case, and it often

caused me a twinge to think that I had done him evil service in

crowding his sparely furnished chambers with incongruous upholstery

work, and placing the Canary-breasted Avenger at his disposal.

So now, as an infallible way of making little ease great ease, I

began to contract a quantity of debt. I could hardly begin but

Herbert must begin too, so he soon followed. At Startop’s

suggestion, we put ourselves down for election into a club called

The Finches of the Grove: the object of which institution I have

never divined, if it were not that the members should dine

expensively once a fortnight, to quarrel among themselves as much

as possible after dinner, and to cause six waiters to get drunk on

the stairs. I know that these gratifying social ends were so

invariably accomplished, that Herbert and I understood nothing else

to be referred to in the first standing toast of the society: which

ran “Gentlemen, may the present promotion of good feeling ever

reign predominant among the Finches of the Grove.”

The Finches spent their money foolishly (the Hotel we dined at was

in Covent Garden), and the first Finch I saw when I had the honor

of joining the Grove was Bentley Drummle, at that time floundering

about town in a cab of his own, and doing a great deal of damage to

the posts at the street corners. Occasionally, he shot himself out

of his equipage headforemost over the apron; and I saw him on one

occasion deliver himself at the door of the Grove in this

unintentional way—like coals. But here I anticipate a little, for

I was not a Finch, and could not be, according to the sacred laws

of the society, until I came of age.

In my confidence in my own resources, I would willingly have taken

Herbert’s expenses on myself; but Herbert was proud, and I could

make no such proposal to him. So he got into difficulties in every

direction, and continued to look about him. When we gradually fell

into keeping late hours and late company, I noticed that he looked

about him with a desponding eye at breakfast-time; that he began to

look about him more hopefully about mid-day; that he drooped when

he came into dinner; that he seemed to descry Capital in the

distance, rather clearly, after dinner; that he all but realized

Capital towards midnight; and that at about two o’clock in the

morning, he became so deeply despondent again as to talk of buying

a rifle and going to America, with a general purpose of compelling

buffaloes to make his fortune.

I was usually at Hammersmith about half the week, and when I was at

Hammersmith I haunted Richmond, whereof separately by and by.

Herbert would often come to Hammersmith when I was there, and I

think at those seasons his father would occasionally have some

passing perception that the opening he was looking for, had not

appeared yet. But in the general tumbling up of the family, his

tumbling out in life somewhere, was a thing to transact itself

somehow. In the meantime Mr. Pocket grew grayer, and tried oftener

to lift himself out of his perplexities by the hair. While Mrs.

Pocket tripped up the family with her footstool, read her book of

dignities, lost her pocket-handkerchief, told us about her

grandpapa, and taught the young idea how to shoot, by shooting it

into bed whenever it attracted her notice.

As I am now generalizing a period of my life with the object of

clearing my way before me, I can scarcely do so better than by at

once completing the description of our usual manners and customs at

Barnard’s Inn.

We spent as much money as we could, and got as little for it as

people could make up their minds to give us. We were always more or

less miserable, and most of our acquaintance were in the same

condition. There was a gay fiction among us that we were constantly

enjoying ourselves, and a skeleton truth that we never did. To the

best of my belief, our case was in the last aspect a rather common

one.

Every morning, with an air ever new, Herbert went into the City to

look about him. I often paid him a visit in the dark back-room in

which he consorted with an ink-jar, a hat-peg, a coal-box, a

string-box, an almanac, a desk and stool, and a ruler; and I do

not remember that I ever saw him do anything else but look about

him. If we all did what we undertake to do, as faithfully as

Herbert did, we might live in a Republic of the Virtues. He had

nothing else to do, poor fellow, except at a certain hour of every

afternoon to “go to Lloyd’s”—in observance of a ceremony of

seeing his principal, I think. He never did anything else in

connection with Lloyd’s that I could find out, except come back

again. When he felt his case unusually serious, and that he

positively must find an opening, he would go on ‘Change at a busy

time, and walk in and out, in a kind of gloomy country dance

figure, among the assembled magnates. “For,” says Herbert to me,

coming home to dinner on one of those special occasions, “I find

the truth to be, Handel, that an opening won’t come to one, but one

must go to it,—so I have been.”

If we had been less attached to one another, I think we must have

hated one another regularly every morning. I detested the chambers

beyond expression at that period of repentance, and could not

endure the sight of the Avenger’s livery; which had a more

expensive and a less remunerative appearance then than at any

other time in the four-and-twenty hours. As we got more and more

into debt, breakfast became a hollower and hollower form, and, being

on one occasion at breakfast-time threatened (by letter) with legal

proceedings, “not unwholly unconnected,” as my local paper might

put it, “with jewelery,” I went so far as to seize the Avenger by

his blue collar and shake him off his feet,—so that he was

actually in the air, like a booted Cupid,—for presuming to suppose

that we wanted a roll.

At certain times—meaning at uncertain times, for they depended on

our humor—I would say to Herbert, as if it were a remarkable

discovery,—

“My dear Herbert, we are getting on badly.”

“My dear Handel,” Herbert would say to me, in all sincerity, if you

will believe me, those very words were on my lips, by a strange

coincidence.”

“Then, Herbert,” I would respond, “let us look into out affairs.”

We always derived profound satisfaction from making an appointment

for this purpose. I always thought this was business, this was the

way to confront the thing, this was the way to take the foe by the

throat. And I know Herbert thought so too.

We ordered something rather special for dinner, with a bottle of

something similarly out of the common way, in order that our minds

might be fortified for the occasion, and we might come well up to

the mark. Dinner over, we produced a bundle of pens, a copious

supply of ink, and a