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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 parlour 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 in to 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.
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