Great Expectations | Page 9

I naturally pointed to Mrs. Joe, and put my mouth into the form of saying,
"her?" But Joe wouldn't hear of that, at all, and again opened his mouth very wide, and
shook the form of a most emphatic word out of it. But I could make nothing of the word.
"Mrs. Joe," said I, as a last resort, "I should like to know--if you wouldn't much
mind--where the firing comes from?"
"Lord bless the boy!" exclaimed my sister, as if she didn't quite mean that but rather the
contrary. "From the Hulks!"
"Oh-h!" said I, looking at Joe. "Hulks!"
Joe gave a reproachful cough, as much as to say, "Well, I told you so."
"And please, what's Hulks?" said I.
"That's the way with this boy!" exclaimed my sister, pointing me out with her needle and
thread, and shaking her head at me. "Answer him one question, and he'll ask you a dozen
directly. Hulks are prison-ships, right 'cross th' meshes." We always used that name for
marshes, in our country.
"I wonder who's put into prison-ships, and why they're put there?" said I, in a general
way, and with quiet desperation.
It was too much for Mrs. Joe, who immediately rose. "I tell you what, young fellow," said
she, "I didn't bring you up by hand to badger people's lives out. It would be blame to me
and not praise, if I had. People are put in the Hulks because they murder, and because
they rob, and forge, and do all sorts of bad; and they always begin by asking questions.
Now, you get along to bed!"
I was never allowed a candle to light me to bed, and, as I went up stairs in the dark, with

my head tingling,--from Mrs. Joe's thimble having played the tambourine upon it, to
accompany her last words,--I felt fearfully sensible of the great convenience that the
hulks were handy for me. I was clearly on my way there. I had begun by asking questions,
and I was going to rob Mrs. Joe.
Since that time, which is far enough away now, I have often thought that few people
know what secrecy there is in the young under terror. No matter how unreasonable the
terror, so that it be terror. I was in mortal terror of the young man who wanted my heart
and liver; I was in mortal terror of my interlocutor with the iron leg; I was in mortal terror
of myself, from whom an awful promise had been extracted; I had no hope of deliverance
through my all-powerful sister, who repulsed me at every turn; I am afraid to think of
what I might have done on requirement, in the secrecy of my terror.
If I slept at all that night, it was only to imagine myself drifting down the river on a
strong spring-tide, to the Hulks; a ghostly pirate calling out to me through a
speaking-trumpet, as I passed the gibbet-station, that I had better come ashore and be
hanged there at once, and not put it off. I was afraid to sleep, even if I had been inclined,
for I knew that at the first faint dawn of morning I must rob the pantry. There was no
doing it in the night, for there was no getting a light by easy friction then; to have got one
I must have struck it out of flint and steel, and have made a noise like the very pirate
himself rattling his chains.
As soon as the great black velvet pall outside my little window was shot with gray, I got
up and went down stairs; every board upon the way, and every crack in every board
calling after me, "Stop thief!" and "Get up, Mrs. Joe!" In the pantry, which was far more
abundantly supplied than usual, owing to the season, I was very much alarmed by a hare
hanging up by the heels, whom I rather thought I caught when my back was half turned,
winking. I had no time for verification, no time for selection, no time for anything, for I
had no time to spare. I stole some bread, some rind of cheese, about half a jar of
mincemeat (which I tied up in my pocket-handkerchief with my last night's slice), some
brandy from a stone bottle (which I decanted into a glass bottle I had secretly used for
making that intoxicating fluid, Spanish-liquorice-water, up in my room: diluting the stone
bottle from a jug in the kitchen cupboard), a meat bone with very little on it, and a
beautiful round compact pork pie. I was nearly going away without the pie, but I was
tempted to mount upon a shelf, to look what it was that was put away so carefully in a
covered