Great Expectations by Charles Dickens, Chapter 14
It is a most miserable thing to feel ashamed of home.
There may be black ingratitude in the thing, and the punishment
may be retributive and well deserved; but that it is a miserable thing,
I can testify.
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.
I had believed in the best parlor as a most elegant
saloon; I had believed in the front door, as a mysterious portal
of the Temple of State whose solemn opening was attended with a sacrifice
of roast fowls; I had believed in the kitchen as a chaste though
not magnificent apartment; I had believed in the forge as the glowing
road to manhood and independence.
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.
How much of my ungracious condition of mind may have been my own fault,
how much Miss Havisham's, how much my sister's, is now of no moment to
me or to any one.
The change was made in me; the thing was done.
Well or ill done, excusably or inexcusably, it was
done.
Once, it had seemed to me that when I should at last roll up my
shirt-sleeves and go into the forge, Joe's 'prentice, I should be
distinguished and happy.
Now the reality was in my hold, I only felt that I was dusty with the dust of small-coal,
and that I had a weight upon my daily remembrance to which the anvil
was a feather.
There have been occasions in my later life (I suppose
as in most lives) when I have felt for a time as if a thick curtain had
fallen on all its interest and romance, to shut me out from anything
save dull endurance any more.
Never has that curtain dropped so heavy and blank, as when my way in
life lay stretched out straight before me through the newly entered road
of apprenticeship to Joe.
I remember that at a later period of my "time," I used to stand about
the churchyard on Sunday evenings when night was falling, comparing my
own perspective with the windy marsh view, and making out some likeness
between them by thinking how flat and low both were, and how on both
there came an unknown way and a dark mist and then the sea.
I was quite as dejected on the first working-day of my
apprenticeship as in that after-time; but I am glad to know that I never
breathed a murmur to Joe while my indentures lasted.
It is about the only thing I am glad to know of myself in that connection.
For, though it includes what I proceed to add, all the merit of what I
proceed to add was Joe's.
It was not because I was faithful, but because Joe was faithful, that I never ran away and
went for a soldier or a sailor.
It was not because I had a strong sense of the virtue of
industry, but because Joe had a strong sense of the virtue of industry,
that I worked with tolerable zeal against the grain.
It is not possible to know how far the influence of any amiable
honest-hearted duty-doing man flies out into the world; but it is very
possible to know how it has touched one's self in going by, and I know
right well that any good that intermixed itself with my apprenticeship came
of plain contented Joe, and not of restlessly aspiring discontented
me.
What I wanted, who can say?
How can I say, when I never knew?
What I dreaded was, that in some unlucky hour I,
being at my grimiest and commonest, should lift up my eyes and see
Estella looking in at one of the wooden windows of the forge.
I was haunted by the fear that she would, sooner or later, find me out, with
a black face and hands, doing the coarsest part of my work, and would exult
over me and despise me.
Often after dark, when I was pulling the bellows for Joe, and we were
singing Old Clem, and when the thought how we used to sing it at Miss
Havisham's would seem to show me Estella's face in the fire, with her
pretty hair fluttering in the wind and her eyes scorning me,--often at
such a time I would look towards those panels of black night in the wall
which the wooden windows then were, and would fancy that I saw her just
drawing her face away, and would believe that she had come at last.
After that, when we went into supper, the place and the meal would have
a more homely look than ever, and I would feel more ashamed of home than
ever, in my own ungracious breast.
End of Chapter 14