Books: The Mill on the Floss

G >> George Eliot >> The Mill on the Floss

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If Tom had had a worse disposition, he would certainly have hated the
little cherub Laura, but he was too kind-hearted a lad for that; there
was too much in him of the fibre that turns to true manliness, and to
protecting pity for the weak. I am afraid he hated Mrs. Stelling, and
contracted a lasting dislike to pale blond ringlets and broad plaits,
as directly associated with haughtiness of manner, and a frequent
reference to other people's "duty." But he couldn't help playing with
little Laura, and liking to amuse her; he even sacrificed his
percussion-caps for her sake, in despair of their ever serving a
greater purpose,--thinking the small flash and bang would delight her,
and thereby drawing down on himself a rebuke from Mrs. Stelling for
teaching her child to play with fire. Laura was a sort of
playfellow--and oh, how Tom longed for playfellows! In his secret
heart he yearned to have Maggie with him, and was almost ready to dote
on her exasperating acts of forgetfulness; though, when he was at
home, he always represented it as a great favor on his part to let
Maggie trot by his side on his pleasure excursions.

And before this dreary half-year was ended, Maggie actually came. Mrs.
Stelling had given a general invitation for the little girl to come
and stay with her brother; so when Mr. Tulliver drove over to King's
Lorton late in October, Maggie came too, with the sense that she was
taking a great journey, and beginning to see the world. It was Mr.
Tulliver's first visit to see Tom, for the lad must learn not to think
too much about home.

"Well, my lad," he said to Tom, when Mr. Stelling had left the room to
announce the arrival to his wife, and Maggie had begun to kiss Tom
freely, "you look rarely! School agrees with you."

Tom wished he had looked rather ill.

"I don't think I _am_ well, father," said Tom; "I wish you'd ask Mr.
Stelling not to let me do Euclid; it brings on the toothache, I
think."

(The toothache was the only malady to which Tom had ever been
subject.)

"Euclid, my lad,--why, what's that?" said Mr. Tulliver.

"Oh, I don't know; it's definitions, and axioms, and triangles, and
things. It's a book I've got to learn in--there's no sense in it."

"Go, go!" said Mr. Tulliver, reprovingly; "you mustn't say so. You
must learn what your master tells you. He knows what it's right for
you to learn."

"_I'll_ help you now, Tom," said Maggie, with a little air of
patronizing consolation. "I'm come to stay ever so long, if Mrs.
Stelling asks me. I've brought my box and my pinafores, haven't I,
father?"

"_You_ help me, you silly little thing!" said Tom, in such high
spirits at this announcement that he quite enjoyed the idea of
confounding Maggie by showing her a page of Euclid. "I should like to
see you doing one of _my_ lessons! Why, I learn Latin too! Girls never
learn such things. They're too silly."

"I know what Latin is very well," said Maggie, confidently, "Latin's a
language. There are Latin words in the Dictionary. There's bonus, a
gift."

"Now, you're just wrong there, Miss Maggie!" said Tom, secretly
astonished. "You think you're very wise! But 'bonus' means 'good,' as
it happens,--bonus, bona, bonum."

"Well, that's no reason why it shouldn't mean 'gift,'" said Maggie,
stoutly. "It may mean several things; almost every word does. There's
'lawn,'--it means the grass-plot, as well as the stuff pocket-
handkerchiefs are made of."

"Well done, little 'un," said Mr. Tulliver, laughing, while Tom felt
rather disgusted with Maggie's knowingness, though beyond measure
cheerful at the thought that she was going to stay with him. Her
conceit would soon be overawed by the actual inspection of his books.

Mrs. Stelling, in her pressing invitation, did not mention a longer
time than a week for Maggie's stay; but Mr. Stelling, who took her
between his knees, and asked her where she stole her dark eyes from,
insisted that she must stay a fortnight. Maggie thought Mr. Stelling
was a charming man, and Mr. Tulliver was quite proud to leave his
little wench where she would have an opportunity of showing her
cleverness to appreciating strangers. So it was agreed that she should
not be fetched home till the end of the fortnight.

"Now, then, come with me into the study, Maggie," said Tom, as their
father drove away. "What do you shake and toss your head now for, you
silly?" he continued; for though her hair was now under a new
dispensation, and was brushed smoothly behind her ears, she seemed
still in imagination to be tossing it out of her eyes. "It makes you
look as if you were crazy."

"Oh, I can't help it," said Maggie, impatiently. "Don't tease me, Tom.
Oh, what books!" she exclaimed, as she saw the bookcases in the study.
"How I should like to have as many books as that!"

"Why, you couldn't read one of 'em," said Tom, triumphantly. "They're
all Latin."

"No, they aren't," said Maggie. "I can read the back of
this,--'History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.'"

"Well, what does that mean? _You_ don't know," said Tom, wagging his
head.

"But I could soon find out," said Maggie, scornfully.

"Why, how?"

"I should look inside, and see what it was about."

"You'd better not, Miss Maggie," said Tom, seeing her hand on the
volume. "Mr. Stelling lets nobody touch his books without leave, and
_I_ shall catch it, if you take it out."

"Oh, very well. Let me see all _your_ books, then," said Maggie,
turning to throw her arms round Tom's neck, and rub his cheek with her
small round nose.

Tom, in the gladness of his heart at having dear old Maggie to dispute
with and crow over again, seized her round the waist, and began to
jump with her round the large library table. Away they jumped with
more and more vigor, till Maggie's hair flew from behind her ears, and
twirled about like an animated mop. But the revolutions round the
table became more and more irregular in their sweep, till at last
reaching Mr. Stelling's reading stand, they sent it thundering down
with its heavy lexicons to the floor. Happily it was the ground-floor,
and the study was a one-storied wing to the house, so that the
downfall made no alarming resonance, though Tom stood dizzy and aghast
for a few minutes, dreading the appearance of Mr. or Mrs. Stelling.

"Oh, I say, Maggie," said Tom at last, lifting up the stand, "we must
keep quiet here, you know. If we break anything Mrs. Stelling'll make
us cry peccavi."

"What's that?" said Maggie.

"Oh, it's the Latin for a good scolding," said Tom, not without some
pride in his knowledge.

"Is she a cross woman?" said Maggie.

"I believe you!" said Tom, with an emphatic nod.

"I think all women are crosser than men," said Maggie. "Aunt Glegg's a
great deal crosser than uncle Glegg, and mother scolds me more than
father does."

"Well, _you'll_ be a woman some day," said Tom, "so _you_ needn't
talk."

"But I shall be a _clever_ woman," said Maggie, with a toss.

"Oh, I dare say, and a nasty conceited thing. Everybody'll hate you."

"But you oughtn't to hate me, Tom; it'll be very wicked of you, for I
shall be your sister."

"Yes, but if you're a nasty disagreeable thing I _shall_ hate you."

"Oh, but, Tom, you won't! I sha'n't be disagreeable. I shall be very
good to you, and I shall be good to everybody. You won't hate me
really, will you, Tom?"

"Oh, bother! never mind! Come, it's time for me to learn my lessons.
See here! what I've got to do," said Tom, drawing Maggie toward him
and showing her his theorem, while she pushed her hair behind her
ears, and prepared herself to prove her capability of helping him in
Euclid. She began to read with full confidence in her own powers, but
presently, becoming quite bewildered, her face flushed with
irritation. It was unavoidable; she must confess her incompetency, and
she was not fond of humiliation.

"It's nonsense!" she said, "and very ugly stuff; nobody need want to
make it out."

"Ah, there, now, Miss Maggie!" said Tom, drawing the book away, and
wagging his head at her, "You see you're not so clever as you thought
you were."

"Oh," said Maggie, pouting, "I dare say I could make it out, if I'd
learned what goes before, as you have."

"But that's what you just couldn't, Miss Wisdom," said Tom. "For it's
all the harder when you know what goes before; for then you've got to
say what definition 3 is, and what axiom V. is. But get along with you
now; I must go on with this. Here's the Latin Grammar. See what you
can make of that."

Maggie found the Latin Grammar quite soothing after her mathematical
mortification; for she delighted in new words, and quickly found that
there was an English Key at the end, which would make her very wise
about Latin, at slight expense. She presently made up her mind to skip
the rules in the Syntax, the examples became so absorbing. These
mysterious sentences, snatched from an unknown context,--like strange
horns of beasts, and leaves of unknown plants, brought from some
far-off region,--gave boundless scope to her imagination, and were all
the more fascinating because they were in a peculiar tongue of their
own, which she could learn to interpret. It was really very
interesting, the Latin Grammar that Tom had said no girls could learn;
and she was proud because she found it interesting. The most
fragmentary examples were her favourites. _Mors omnibus est communis_
would have been jejune, only she liked to know the Latin; but the
fortunate gentleman whom every one congratulated because he had a son
"endowed with _such_ a disposition" afforded her a great deal of
pleasant conjecture, and she was quite lost in the "thick grove
penetrable by no star," when Tom called out,--

"Now, then, Magsie, give us the Grammar!"

"Oh, Tom, it's such a pretty book!" she said, as she jumped out of the
large arm-chair to give it him; "it's much prettier than the
Dictionary. I could learn Latin very soon. I don't think it's at all
hard."

"Oh, I know what you've been doing," said Tom; "you've been reading
the English at the end. Any donkey can do that."

Tom seized the book and opened it with a determined and business-like
air, as much as to say that he had a lesson to learn which no donkeys
would find themselves equal to. Maggie, rather piqued, turned to the
bookcases to amuse herself with puzzling out the titles.

Presently Tom called to her: "Here, Magsie, come and hear if I can say
this. Stand at that end of the table, where Mr. Stelling sits when he
hears me."

Maggie obeyed, and took the open book.

"Where do you begin, Tom?"

"Oh, I begin at _'Appellativa arborum,'_ because I say all over again
what I've been learning this week."

Tom sailed along pretty well for three lines; and Maggie was beginning
to forget her office of prompter in speculating as to what _mas_ could
mean, which came twice over, when he stuck fast at _Sunt etiam
volucrum_.

"Don't tell me, Maggie; _Sunt etiam volucrum_--_Sunt etiam
volucrum_--_ut ostrea, cetus_----"

"No," said Maggie, opening her mouth and shaking her head.

"_Sunt etiam volucrum_," said Tom, very slowly, as if the next words
might be expected to come sooner when he gave them this strong hint
that they were waited for.

"C, e, u," said Maggie, getting impatient.

"Oh, I know--hold your tongue," said Tom. "_Ceu passer, hirundo;
Ferarum_--_ferarum_----" Tom took his pencil and made several hard
dots with it on his book-cover--"_ferarum_----"

"Oh dear, oh dear, Tom," said Maggie, "what a time you are! _Ut_----"

"_Ut ostrea_----"

"No, no," said Maggie, "_ut tigris_----"

"Oh yes, now I can do," said Tom; "it was _tigris, vulpes_, I'd
forgotten: _ut tigris, volupes; et Piscium_."

With some further stammering and repetition, Tom got through the next
few lines.

"Now, then," he said, "the next is what I've just learned for
to-morrow. Give me hold of the book a minute."

After some whispered gabbling, assisted by the beating of his fist on
the table, Tom returned the book.

"_Mascula nomina in a_," he began.

"No, Tom," said Maggie, "that doesn't come next. It's _Nomen non
creskens genittivo_----"

"_Creskens genittivo!_" exclaimed Tom, with a derisive laugh, for Tom
had learned this omitted passage for his yesterday's lesson, and a
young gentleman does not require an intimate or extensive acquaintance
with Latin before he can feel the pitiable absurdity of a false
quantity. "_Creskens genittivo!_ What a little silly you are, Maggie!"

"Well, you needn't laugh, Tom, for you didn't remember it at all. I'm
sure it's spelt so; how was I to know?"

"Phee-e-e-h! I told you girls couldn't learn Latin. It's _Nomen non
crescens genitivo_."

"Very well, then," said Maggie, pouting. I can say that as well as you
can. And you don't mind your stops. For you ought to stop twice as
long at a semicolon as you do at a comma, and you make the longest
stops where there ought to be no stop at all."

"Oh, well, don't chatter. Let me go on."

They were presently fetched to spend the rest of the evening in the
drawing-room, and Maggie became so animated with Mr. Stelling, who,
she felt sure, admired her cleverness, that Tom was rather amazed and
alarmed at her audacity. But she was suddenly subdued by Mr.
Stelling's alluding to a little girl of whom he had heard that she
once ran away to the gypsies.

"What a very odd little girl that must be!" said Mrs. Stelling,
meaning to be playful; but a playfulness that turned on her supposed
oddity was not at all to Maggie's taste. She feared that Mr. Stelling,
after all, did not think much of her, and went to bed in rather low
spirits. Mrs. Stelling, she felt, looked at her as if she thought her
hair was very ugly because it hung down straight behind.

Nevertheless it was a very happy fortnight to Maggie, this visit to
Tom. She was allowed to be in the study while he had his lessons, and
in her various readings got very deep into the examples in the Latin
Grammar. The astronomer who hated women generally caused her so much
puzzling speculation that she one day asked Mr. Stelling if all
astronomers hated women, or whether it was only this particular
astronomer. But forestalling his answer, she said,--

"I suppose it's all astronomers; because, you know, they live up in
high towers, and if the women came there they might talk and hinder
them from looking at the stars."

Mr. Stelling liked her prattle immensely, and they were on the best
terms. She told Tom she should like to go to school to Mr. Stelling,
as he did, and learn just the same things. She knew she could do
Euclid, for she had looked into it again, and she saw what A B C
meant; they were the names of the lines.

"I'm sure you couldn't do it, now," said Tom; "and I'll just ask Mr.
Stelling if you could."

"I don't mind," said the little conceited minx, "I'll ask him myself."

"Mr. Stelling," she said, that same evening when they were in the
drawing-room, "couldn't I do Euclid, and all Tom's lessons, if you
were to teach me instead of him?"

"No, you couldn't," said Tom, indignantly. "Girls can't do Euclid; can
they, sir?"

"They can pick up a little of everything, I dare say," said Mr.
Stelling. "They've a great deal of superficial cleverness; but they
couldn't go far into anything. They're quick and shallow."

Tom, delighted with this verdict, telegraphed his triumph by wagging
his head at Maggie, behind Mr. Stelling's chair. As for Maggie, she
had hardly ever been so mortified. She had been so proud to be called
"quick" all her little life, and now it appeared that this quickness
was the brand of inferiority. It would have been better to be slow,
like Tom.

"Ha, ha! Miss Maggie!" said Tom, when they were alone; "you see it's
not such a fine thing to be quick. You'll never go far into anything,
you know."

And Maggie was so oppressed by this dreadful destiny that she had no
spirit for a retort.

But when this small apparatus of shallow quickness was fetched away in
the gig by Luke, and the study was once more quite lonely for Tom, he
missed her grievously. He had really been brighter, and had got
through his lessons better, since she had been there; and she had
asked Mr. Stelling so many questions about the Roman Empire, and
whether there really ever was a man who said, in Latin, "I would not
buy it for a farthing or a rotten nut," or whether that had only been
turned into Latin, that Tom had actually come to a dim understanding
of the fact that there had once been people upon the earth who were so
fortunate as to know Latin without learning it through the medium of
the Eton Grammar. This luminous idea was a great addition to his
historical acquirements during this half-year, which were otherwise
confined to an epitomized history of the Jews.

But the dreary half-year _did_ come to an end. How glad Tom was to see
the last yellow leaves fluttering before the cold wind! The dark
afternoons and the first December snow seemed to him far livelier than
the August sunshine; and that he might make himself the surer about
the flight of the days that were carrying him homeward, he stuck
twenty-one sticks deep in a corner of the garden, when he was three
weeks from the holidays, and pulled one up every day with a great
wrench, throwing it to a distance with a vigor of will which would
have carried it to limbo, if it had been in the nature of sticks to
travel so far.

But it was worth purchasing, even at the heavy price of the Latin
Grammar, the happiness of seeing the bright light in the parlor at
home, as the gig passed noiselessly over the snow-covered bridge; the
happiness of passing from the cold air to the warmth and the kisses
and the smiles of that familiar hearth, where the pattern of the rug
and the grate and the fire-irons were "first ideas" that it was no
more possible to criticise than the solidity and extension of matter.
There is no sense of ease like the ease we felt in those scenes where
we were born, where objects became dear to us before we had known the
labor of choice, and where the outer world seemed only an extension of
our own personality; we accepted and loved it as we accepted our own
sense of existence and our own limbs. Very commonplace, even ugly,
that furniture of our early home might look if it were put up to
auction; an improved taste in upholstery scorns it; and is not the
striving after something better and better in our surroundings the
grand characteristic that distinguishes man from the brute, or, to
satisfy a scrupulous accuracy of definition, that distinguishes the
British man from the foreign brute? But heaven knows where that
striving might lead us, if our affections had not a trick of twining
round those old inferior things; if the loves and sanctities of our
life had no deep immovable roots in memory. One's delight in an
elderberry bush overhanging the confused leafage of a hedgerow bank,
as a more gladdening sight than the finest cistus or fuchsia spreading
itself on the softest undulating turf, is an entirely unjustifiable
preference to a nursery-gardener, or to any of those regulated minds
who are free from the weakness of any attachment that does not rest on
a demonstrable superiority of qualities. And there is no better reason
for preferring this elderberry bush than that it stirs an early
memory; that it is no novelty in my life, speaking to me merely
through my present sensibilities to form and color, but the long
companion of my existence, that wove itself into my joys when joys
were vivid.

Chapter II

The Christmas Holidays

Fine old Christmas, with the snowy hair and ruddy face, had done his
duty that year in the noblest fashion, and had set off his rich gifts
of warmth and color with all the heightening contrast of frost and
snow.

Snow lay on the croft and river-bank in undulations softer than the
limbs of infancy; it lay with the neatliest finished border on every
sloping roof, making the dark-red gables stand out with a new depth of
color; it weighed heavily on the laurels and fir-trees, till it fell
from them with a shuddering sound; it clothed the rough turnip-field
with whiteness, and made the sheep look like dark blotches; the gates
were all blocked up with the sloping drifts, and here and there a
disregarded four-footed beast stood as if petrified "in unrecumbent
sadness"; there was no gleam, no shadow, for the heavens, too, were
one still, pale cloud; no sound or motion in anything but the dark
river that flowed and moaned like an unresting sorrow. But old
Christmas smiled as he laid this cruel-seeming spell on the outdoor
world, for he meant to light up home with new brightness, to deepen
all the richness of indoor color, and give a keener edge of delight to
the warm fragrance of food; he meant to prepare a sweet imprisonment
that would strengthen the primitive fellowship of kindred, and make
the sunshine of familiar human faces as welcome as the hidden
day-star. His kindness fell but hardly on the homeless,--fell but
hardly on the homes where the hearth was not very warm, and where the
food had little fragrance; where the human faces had had no sunshine
in them, but rather the leaden, blank-eyed gaze of unexpectant want.
But the fine old season meant well; and if he has not learned the
secret how to bless men impartially, it is because his father Time,
with ever-unrelenting unrelenting purpose, still hides that secret in
his own mighty, slow-beating heart.

And yet this Christmas day, in spite of Tom's fresh delight in home,
was not, he thought, somehow or other, quite so happy as it had always
been before. The red berries were just as abundant on the holly, and
he and Maggie had dressed all the windows and mantlepieces and
picture-frames on Christmas eve with as much taste as ever, wedding
the thick-set scarlet clusters with branches of the black-berried ivy.
There had been singing under the windows after midnight,--supernatural
singing, Maggie always felt, in spite of Tom's contemptuous insistence
that the singers were old Patch, the parish clerk, and the rest of the
church choir; she trembled with awe when their carolling broke in upon
her dreams, and the image of men in fustian clothes was always thrust
away by the vision of angels resting on the parted cloud. The midnight
chant had helped as usual to lift the morning above the level of
common days; and then there were the smell of hot toast and ale from
the kitchen, at the breakfast hour; the favorite anthem, the green
boughs, and the short sermon gave the appropriate festal character to
the church-going; and aunt and uncle Moss, with all their seven
children, were looking like so many reflectors of the bright
parlor-fire, when the church-goers came back, stamping the snow from
their feet. The plum-pudding was of the same handsome roundness as
ever, and came in with the symbolic blue flames around it, as if it
had been heroically snatched from the nether fires, into which it had
been thrown by dyspeptic Puritans; the dessert was as splendid as
ever, with its golden oranges, brown nuts, and the crystalline light
and dark of apple-jelly and damson cheese; in all these things
Christmas was as it had always been since Tom could remember; it was
only distinguished, it by anything, by superior sliding and snowballs.

Christmas was cheery, but not so Mr. Tulliver. He was irate and
defiant; and Tom, though he espoused his father's quarrels and shared
his father's sense of injury, was not without some of the feeling that
oppressed Maggie when Mr. Tulliver got louder and more angry in
narration and assertion with the increased leisure of dessert. The
attention that Tom might have concentrated on his nuts and wine was
distracted by a sense that there were rascally enemies in the world,
and that the business of grown-up life could hardly be conducted
without a good deal of quarrelling. Now, Tom was not fond of
quarrelling, unless it could soon be put an end to by a fair stand-up
fight with an adversary whom he had every chance of thrashing; and his
father's irritable talk made him uncomfortable, though he never
accounted to himself for the feeling, or conceived the notion that his
father was faulty in this respect.

The particular embodiment of the evil principle now exciting Mr.
Tulliver's determined resistance was Mr. Pivart, who, having lands
higher up the Ripple, was taking measures for their irrigation, which
either were, or would be, or were bound to be (on the principle that
water was water), an infringement on Mr. Tulliver's legitimate share
of water-power. Dix, who had a mill on the stream, was a feeble
auxiliary of Old Harry compared with Pivart. Dix had been brought to
his senses by arbitration, and Wakem's advice had not carried _him_
far. No; Dix, Mr. Tulliver considered, had been as good as nowhere in
point of law; and in the intensity of his indignation against Pivart,
his contempt for a baffled adversary like Dix began to wear the air of
a friendly attachment. He had no male audience to-day except Mr. Moss,
who knew nothing, as he said, of the "natur' o' mills," and could only
assent to Mr. Tulliver's arguments on the _a priori_ ground of family
relationship and monetary obligation; but Mr. Tulliver did not talk
with the futile intention of convincing his audience, he talked to
relieve himself; while good Mr. Moss made strong efforts to keep his
eyes wide open, in spite of the sleepiness which an unusually good
dinner produced in his hard-worked frame. Mrs. Moss, more alive to the
subject, and interested in everything that affected her brother,
listened and put in a word as often as maternal preoccupations
allowed.