It is fairly obvious in Chapter XLIII of Great
Expectations that Pip and Drummle are rivals for the affection of Estella.
Much like two male animals, they eye one another briefly, then, when Pip espies Drummle
blocking the fire's warmth from him, he squares off against his rival by planting
himself shoulder to shoulder before the fire, and neither man gives way to the other
until Drummle finally departs.
After looking down at Pip's
boots and chuckling in, perhaps, a subtle innuendo about Estella's remark about Pip's
coarse boots as a boy (as she may have told him), Drummle derogates the remote
countryside from which Pip comes implying that it is so very
uncivilized:
"...I mean to explore those marshes for
amusement. Out-of-the-way-villages there, they tell me. Curious little public
houses--and smithies--and
that!"
After Drummle tells
the waiter that he will not dine that evening because he is "going to dine at the
lady's," Pip, employing the imagery of a fierce
dog, states,
Then, Drummle glanced at me with an insolent
triumph on his great jowled face that cut me to the heart, dull as he was, and so
exasperated me, that I felt to take him in my arms (as the robber in the story-book is
said to have taken the old lady) and seat him on the
fire.
When Drummle "rubs it
in" that he, not Pip,is going to be with Estella, Pip can hardly control himself; so, he
tells Drummle he never did wish to enter into any conversation with him, Drummle warns
him not to lose his temper as he has "lost enough without that." With arrogance he
bites off the end of his cigar, goes out to mount his horse, leans down to have a man
light his cigar while glancing sneeringly through the window at Pip, who later leaves
"out of sorts." Indeed, there is a deep antipathy between Pip and the dark
Drummle.
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