“Assuredly,” replied Herbert.
“As to anything I say, you know,” he insisted.
“The oath applies to all.”
“I understand it to do so.”
“And look’ee here! Wotever I done,
is worked out and paid for,” he insisted again.
“So be it.”
He took out his black pipe and was going to fill it
with negrohead, when, looking at the tangle of tobacco
in his hand, he seemed to think it might perplex the
thread of his narrative. He put it back again,
stuck his pipe in a button-hole of his coat, spread
a hand on each knee, and, after turning an angry eye
on the fire for a few silent moments, looked round
at us and said what follows.
“Dear boy and Pip’s comrade. I am
not a-going fur to tell you my life, like a song or
a story-book. But to give it you short and handy,
I’ll put it at once into a mouthful of English.
In jail and out of jail, in jail and out of jail,
in jail and out of jail. There, you got it.
That’s my life pretty much, down to such times
as I got shipped off, arter Pip stood my friend.
“I’ve been done everything to, pretty
well — except hanged. I’ve been
locked up, as much as a silver tea-kettle. I’ve
been carted here and carted there, and put out of
this town and put out of that town, and stuck in the
stocks, and whipped and worried and drove. I’ve
no more notion where I was born, than you have —
if so much. I first become aware of myself,
down in Essex, a thieving turnips for my living.
Summun had run away from me — a man —
a tinker — and he’d took the fire with
him, and left me wery cold.
“I know’d my name to be Magwitch, chrisen’d
Abel. How did I know it? Much as I know’d
the birds’ names in the hedges to be chaffinch,
sparrer, thrush. I might have thought it was
all lies together, only as the birds’ names
come out true, I supposed mine did.
“So fur as I could find, there warn’t
a soul that see young Abel Magwitch, with us little
on him as in him, but wot caught fright at him, and
either drove him off, or took him up. I was took
up, took up, took up, to that extent that I reg’larly
grow’d up took up.
“This is the way it was, that when I was a ragged
little creetur as much to be pitied as ever I see
(not that I looked in the glass, for there warn’t
many insides of furnished houses known to me), I got
the name of being hardened. “This is a
terrible hardened one,” they says to prison
wisitors, picking out me. “May be said
to live in jails, this boy. “Then they
looked at me, and I looked at them, and they measured
my head, some on ’em — they had better
a-measured my stomach — and others on ’em
giv me tracts what I couldn’t read, and made
me speeches what I couldn’t understand.
They always went on agen me about the Devil.
But what the Devil was I to do? I must put
something into my stomach, mustn’t I? —
Howsomever, I’m a getting low, and I know what’s
due. Dear boy and Pip’s comrade, don’t
you be afeerd of me being low.
