Читать книгу Comic Classics: Great Expectations - Jack Noel - Страница 7

MY FATHER’S FAMILY name being Pirrip, and my Christian name Philip, my infant tongue could make of both names nothing longer or more explicit than PIP.

So, I called myself Pip, and came to be called PIP.

I never saw my father or my mother, and never saw any likeness of either of them (for their days were long before the days of photographs).

My first ideas regarding what they were like were unreasonably derived from their tombstones.

The shape of the letters on my father’s tombstone gave me an odd idea that he was a square, stout, dark man, with curly black hair.

From my mother’s, I drew a childish conclusion that she was freckled and sickly.

AND SO MY STORY BEGINS

It was a memorable raw afternoon towards evening.

This bleak place overgrown with nettles was the churchyard;

where

PHILIP PIRRIP,

late of this parish,

and also

GEORGIANA

wife of the above,

were dead

and buried.

The dark flat wilderness beyond the churchyard, intersected with mounds and gates, with scattered cattle feeding on it, was the marshes.

The low leaden line beyond was the river;

and that the distant savage lair from which the wind was rushing was the sea.

And the small bundle of shivers growing afraid of it all and beginning to cry, was PIP.

A man with no hat, and with broken shoes, and with an old rag tied round his head. A man who had been soaked in water, and smothered in mud, and lamed by stones, and cut by flints, and stung by nettles, and torn by briars; who limped, and shivered, and glared, and growled; and whose teeth chattered in his head as he seized me by the chin.

“Tell us your name!” said the man. “QUICK!”

“Pip, sir.”

“Once more,” said the man, staring at me.

“Pip. Pip, sir.”

I pointed to where our village lay, a mile or more from the church.

“Who d’ye live with . . . supposin’ I LET you live, which I haven’t made up my mind about?”

“I live with my sister, sir – Mrs Joe Gargery – wife of Joe Gargery, the blacksmith, sir.”

said he. And looked down at his leg.

Then he came closer, took me by both arms, and tilted me back as far as he could hold me. “NOW LOOKEE HERE,” he said,

“You know what a FILE is?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And you know what WITTLES is?”

“Yes, sir.”

After each question he tilted me over a little more.

I said that I would get him the file, and I would get him what broken bits of food I could, and bring them to him early in the morning.

I said so, and he put me down.

He hugged his shuddering body in both his arms, as if to hold himself together, and limped towards the low church wall.

As I saw him go, picking his way among the nettles and among the brambles, he looked as if he were avoiding the hands of the dead people,

But now I was frightened again, and I ran home without stopping.