Books: The Mill on the Floss

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

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 | 32 | 33 | 34 | 35 | 36 | 37 | 38 | 39 | 40 | 41 | 42 | 43 | 44 | 45

But Philip's self-taught skill in drawing was another link between
them; for Tom found, to his disgust, that his new drawing-master gave
him no dogs and donkeys to draw, but brooks and rustic bridges and
ruins, all with a general softness of black-lead surface, indicating
that nature, if anything, was rather satiny; and as Tom's feeling for
the picturesque in landscape was at present quite latent, it is not
surprising that Mr. Goodrich's productions seemed to him an
uninteresting form of art. Mr. Tulliver, having a vague intention that
Tom should be put to some business which included the drawing out of
plans and maps, had complained to Mr. Riley, when he saw him at
Mudport, that Tom seemed to be learning nothing of that sort;
whereupon that obliging adviser had suggested that Tom should have
drawing-lessons. Mr. Tulliver must not mind paying extra for drawing;
let Tom be made a good draughtsman, and he would be able to turn his
pencil to any purpose. So it was ordered that Tom should have
drawing-lessons; and whom should Mr. Stelling have selected as a
master if not Mr. Goodrich, who was considered quite at the head of
his profession within a circuit of twelve miles round King's Lorton?
By which means Tom learned to make an extremely fine point to his
pencil, and to represent landscape with a "broad generality," which,
doubtless from a narrow tendency in his mind to details, he thought
extremely dull.

All this, you remember, happened in those dark ages when there were no
schools of design; before schoolmasters were invariably men of
scrupulous integrity, and before the clergy were all men of enlarged
minds and varied culture. In those less favored days, it is no fable
that there were other clergymen besides Mr. Stelling who had narrow
intellects and large wants, and whose income, by a logical confusion
to which Fortune, being a female as well as blindfold, is peculiarly
liable, was proportioned not to their wants but to their intellect,
with which income has clearly no inherent relation. The problem these
gentlemen had to solve was to readjust the proportion between their
wants and their income; and since wants are not easily starved to
death, the simpler method appeared to be to raise their income. There
was but one way of doing this; any of those low callings in which men
are obliged to do good work at a low price were forbidden to
clergymen; was it their fault if their only resource was to turn out
very poor work at a high price? Besides, how should Mr. Stelling be
expected to know that education was a delicate and difficult business,
any more than an animal endowed with a power of boring a hole through
a rock should be expected to have wide views of excavation? Mr.
Stelling's faculties had been early trained to boring in a straight
line, and he had no faculty to spare. But among Tom's contemporaries,
whose fathers cast their sons on clerical instruction to find them
ignorant after many days, there were many far less lucky than Tom
Tulliver. Education was almost entirely a matter of luck--usually of
ill-luck--in those distant days. The state of mind in which you take a
billiard-cue or a dice-box in your hand is one of sober certainty
compared with that of old-fashioned fathers, like Mr. Tulliver, when
they selected a school or a tutor for their sons. Excellent men, who
had been forced all their lives to spell on an impromptu-phonetic
system, and having carried on a successful business in spite of this
disadvantage, had acquired money enough to give their sons a better
start in life than they had had themselves, must necessarily take
their chance as to the conscience and the competence of the
schoolmaster whose circular fell in their way, and appeared to promise
so much more than they would ever have thought of asking for,
including the return of linen, fork, and spoon. It was happy for them
if some ambitious draper of their acquaintance had not brought up his
son to the Church, and if that young gentleman, at the age of
four-and-twenty, had not closed his college dissipations by an
imprudent marriage; otherwise, these innocent fathers, desirous of
doing the best for their offspring, could only escape the draper's son
by happening to be on the foundation of a grammar-school as yet
unvisited by commissioners, where two or three boys could have, all to
themselves, the advantages of a large and lofty building, together
with a head-master, toothless, dim-eyed and deaf, whose erudite
indistinctness and inattention were engrossed by them at the rate of
three hundred pounds a-head,--a ripe scholar, doubtless, when first
appointed; but all ripeness beneath the sun has a further stage less
esteemed in the market.

Tom Tulliver, then, compared with many other British youths of his
time who have since had to scramble through life with some fragments
of more or less relevant knowledge, and a great deal of strictly
relevant ignorance, was not so very unlucky. Mr. Stelling was a
broad-chested, healthy man, with the bearing of a gentleman, a
conviction that a growing boy required a sufficiency of beef, and a
certain hearty kindness in him that made him like to see Tom looking
well and enjoying his dinner; not a man of refined conscience, or with
any deep sense of the infinite issues belonging to every-day duties,
not quite competent to his high offices; but incompetent gentlemen
must live, and without private fortune it is difficult to see how they
could all live genteelly if they had nothing to do with education or
government. Besides, it was the fault of Tom's mental constitution
that his faculties could not be nourished on the sort of knowledge Mr.
Stelling had to communicate. A boy born with a deficient power of
apprehending signs and abstractions must suffer the penalty of his
congenital deficiency, just as if he had been born with one leg
shorter than the other. A method of education sanctioned by the long
practice of our venerable ancestors was not to give way before the
exceptional dulness of a boy who was merely living at the time then
present. And Mr. Stelling was convinced that a boy so stupid at signs
and abstractions must be stupid at everything else, even if that
reverend gentleman could have taught him everything else. It was the
practice of our venerable ancestors to apply that ingenious instrument
the thumb-screw, and to tighten and tighten it in order to elicit
non-existent facts; they had a fixed opinion to begin with, that the
facts were existent, and what had they to do but to tighten the
thumb-screw? In like manner, Mr. Stelling had a fixed opinion that all
boys with any capacity could learn what it was the only regular thing
to teach; if they were slow, the thumb-screw must be tightened,--the
exercises must be insisted on with increased severity, and a page of
Virgil be awarded as a penalty, to encourage and stimulate a too
languid inclination to Latin verse.

The thumb-screw was a little relaxed, however, during this second
half-year. Philip was so advanced in his studies, and so apt, that Mr.
Stelling could obtain credit by his facility, which required little
help, much more easily than by the troublesome process of overcoming
Tom's dulness. Gentlemen with broad chests and ambitious intentions do
sometimes disappoint their friends by failing to carry the world
before them. Perhaps it is that high achievements demand some other
unusual qualification besides an unusual desire for high prizes;
perhaps it is that these stalwart gentlemen are rather indolent, their
_divinae particulum aurae_ being obstructed from soaring by a too hearty
appetite. Some reason or other there was why Mr. Stelling deferred the
execution of many spirited projects,--why he did not begin the editing
of his Greek play, or any other work of scholarship, in his leisure
hours, but, after turning the key of his private study with much
resolution, sat down to one of Theodore Hook's novels. Tom was
gradually allowed to shuffle through his lessons with less rigor, and
having Philip to help him, he was able to make some show of having
applied his mind in a confused and blundering way, without being
cross-examined into a betrayal that his mind had been entirely neutral
in the matter. He thought school much more bearable under this
modification of circumstances; and he went on contentedly enough,
picking up a promiscuous education chiefly from things that were not
intended as education at all. What was understood to be his education
was simply the practice of reading, writing, and spelling, carried on
by an elaborate appliance of unintelligible ideas, and by much failure
in the effort to learn by rote.

Nevertheless, there was a visible improvement in Tom under this
training; perhaps because he was not a boy in the abstract, existing
solely to illustrate the evils of a mistaken education, but a boy made
of flesh and blood, with dispositions not entirely at the mercy of
circumstances.

There was a great improvement in his bearing, for example; and some
credit on this score was due to Mr. Poulter, the village schoolmaster,
who, being an old Peninsular soldier, was employed to drill Tom,--a
source of high mutual pleasure. Mr. Poulter, who was understood by the
company at the Black Swan to have once struck terror into the hearts
of the French, was no longer personally formidable. He had rather a
shrunken appearance, and was tremulous in the mornings, not from age,
but from the extreme perversity of the King's Lorton boys, which
nothing but gin could enable him to sustain with any firmness. Still,
he carried himself with martial erectness, had his clothes
scrupulously brushed, and his trousers tightly strapped; and on the
Wednesday and Saturday afternoons, when he came to Tom, he was always
inspired with gin and old memories, which gave him an exceptionally
spirited air, as of a superannuated charger who hears the drum. The
drilling-lessons were always protracted by episodes of warlike
narrative, much more interesting to Tom than Philip's stories out of
the Iliad; for there were no cannon in the Iliad, and besides, Tom had
felt some disgust on learning that Hector and Achilles might possibly
never have existed. But the Duke of Wellington was really alive, and
Bony had not been long dead; therefore Mr. Poulter's reminiscences of
the Peninsular War were removed from all suspicion of being mythical.
Mr. Poulter, it appeared, had been a conspicuous figure at Talavera,
and had contributed not a little to the peculiar terror with which his
regiment of infantry was regarded by the enemy. On afternoons when his
memory was more stimulated than usual, he remembered that the Duke of
Wellington had (in strict privacy, lest jealousies should be awakened)
expressed his esteem for that fine fellow Poulter. The very surgeon
who attended him in the hospital after he had received his
gunshot-wound had been profoundly impressed with the superiority of
Mr. Poulter's flesh,--no other flesh would have healed in anything
like the same time. On less personal matters connected with the
important warfare in which he had been engaged, Mr. Poulter was more
reticent, only taking care not to give the weight of his authority to
any loose notions concerning military history. Any one who pretended
to a knowledge of what occurred at the siege of Badajos was especially
an object of silent pity to Mr. Poulter; he wished that prating person
had been run down, and had the breath trampled out of him at the first
go-off, as he himself had,--he might talk about the siege of Badajos
then! Tom did not escape irritating his drilling-master occasionally,
by his curiosity concerning other military matters than Mr. Poulter's
personal experience.

"And General Wolfe, Mr. Poulter,--wasn't he a wonderful fighter?" said
Tom, who held the notion that all the martial heroes commemorated on
the public-house signs were engaged in the war with Bony.

"Not at all!" said Mr. Poulter, contemptuously. "Nothing o' the sort!
Heads up!" he added, in a tone of stern command, which delighted Tom,
and made him feel as if he were a regiment in his own person.

"No, no!" Mr. Poulter would continue, on coming to a pause in his
discipline; "they'd better not talk to me about General Wolfe. He did
nothing but die of his wound; that's a poor haction, I consider. Any
other man 'ud have died o' the wounds I've had. One of my sword-cuts
'ud ha' killed a fellow like General Wolfe."

"Mr. Poulter," Tom would say, at any allusion to the sword, "I wish
you'd bring your sword and do the sword-exercise!"

For a long while Mr. Poulter only shook his head in a significant
manner at this request, and smiled patronizingly, as Jupiter may have
done when Semele urged her too ambitious request. But one afternoon,
when a sudden shower of heavy rain had detained Mr. Poulter twenty
minutes longer than usual at the Black Swan, the sword was
brought,--just for Tom to look at.

"And this is the real sword you fought with in all the battles, Mr.
Poulter?" said Tom, handling the hilt. "Has it ever cut a Frenchman's
head off?"

"Head off? Ah! and would, if he'd had three heads."

"But you had a gun and bayonet besides?" said Tom. "_I_ should like
the gun and bayonet best, because you could shoot 'em first and spear
'em after. Bang! Ps-s-s-s!" Tom gave the requisite pantomime to
indicate the double enjoyment of pulling the trigger and thrusting the
spear.

"Ah, but the sword's the thing when you come to close fighting," said
Mr. Poulter, involuntarily falling in with Tom's enthusiasm, and
drawing the sword so suddenly that Tom leaped back with much agility.

"Oh, but, Mr. Poulter, if you're going to do the exercise," said Tom,
a little conscious that he had not stood his ground as became an
Englishman, "let me go and call Philip. He'll like to see you, you
know."

"What! the humpbacked lad?" said Mr. Poulter, contemptuously; "what's
the use of _his_ looking on?"

"Oh, but he knows a great deal about fighting," said Tom, "and how
they used to fight with bows and arrows, and battle-axes."

"Let him come, then. I'll show him something different from his bows
and arrows," said Mr. Poulter, coughing and drawing himself up, while
he gave a little preliminary play to his wrist.

Tom ran in to Philip, who was enjoying his afternoon's holiday at the
piano, in the drawing-room, picking out tunes for himself and singing
them. He was supremely happy, perched like an amorphous bundle on the
high stool, with his head thrown back, his eyes fixed on the opposite
cornice, and his lips wide open, sending forth, with all his might,
impromptu syllables to a tune of Arne's which had hit his fancy.

"Come, Philip," said Tom, bursting in; "don't stay roaring 'la la'
there; come and see old Poulter do his sword-exercise in the
carriage-house!"

The jar of this interruption, the discord of Tom's tones coming across
the notes to which Philip was vibrating in soul and body, would have
been enough to unhinge his temper, even if there had been no question
of Poulter the drilling-master; and Tom, in the hurry of seizing
something to say to prevent Mr. Poulter from thinking he was afraid of
the sword when he sprang away from it, had alighted on this
proposition to fetch Philip, though he knew well enough that Philip
hated to hear him mention his drilling-lessons. Tom would never have
done so inconsiderate a thing except under the severe stress of his
personal pride.

Philip shuddered visibly as he paused from his music. Then turning
red, he said, with violent passion,--

"Get away, you lumbering idiot! Don't come bellowing at me; you're not
fit to speak to anything but a cart-horse!"

It was not the first time Philip had been made angry by him, but Tom
had never before been assailed with verbal missiles that he understood
so well.

"I'm fit to speak to something better than you, you poor-spirited
imp!" said Tom, lighting up immediately at Philip's fire. "You know I
won't hit you, because you're no better than a girl. But I'm an honest
man's son, and _your_ father's a rogue; everybody says so!"

Tom flung out of the room, and slammed the door after him, made
strangely heedless by his anger; for to slam doors within the hearing
of Mrs. Stelling, who was probably not far off, was an offence only to
be wiped out by twenty lines of Virgil. In fact, that lady did
presently descend from her room, in double wonder at the noise and the
subsequent cessation of Philip's music. She found him sitting in a
heap on the hassock, and crying bitterly.

"What's the matter, Wakem? what was that noise about? Who slammed the
door?"

Philip looked up, and hastily dried his eyes. "It was Tulliver who
came in--to ask me to go out with him."

"And what are you in trouble about?" said Mrs. Stelling.

Philip was not her favorite of the two pupils; he was less obliging
than Tom, who was made useful in many ways. Still, his father paid
more than Mr. Tulliver did, and she meant him to feel that she behaved
exceedingly well to him. Philip, however, met her advances toward a
good understanding very much as a caressed mollusk meets an invitation
to show himself out of his shell. Mrs. Stelling was not a loving,
tender-hearted woman; she was a woman whose skirt sat well, who
adjusted her waist and patted her curls with a preoccupied air when
she inquired after your welfare. These things, doubtless, represent a
great social power, but it is not the power of love; and no other
power could win Philip from his personal reserve.

He said, in answer to her question, "My toothache came on, and made me
hysterical again."

This had been the fact once, and Philip was glad of the recollection;
it was like an inspiration to enable him to excuse his crying. He had
to accept eau-de-Cologne and to refuse creosote in consequence; but
that was easy.

Meanwhile Tom, who had for the first time sent a poisoned arrow into
Philip's heart, had returned to the carriage-house, where he found Mr.
Poulter, with a fixed and earnest eye, wasting the perfections of his
sword-exercise on probably observant but inappreciative rats. But Mr.
Poulter was a host in himself; that is to say, he admired himself more
than a whole army of spectators could have admired him. He took no
notice of Tom's return, being too entirely absorbed in the cut and
thrust,--the solemn one, two, three, four; and Tom, not without a
slight feeling of alarm at Mr. Poulter's fixed eye and hungry-looking
sword, which seemed impatient for something else to cut besides the
air, admired the performance from as great a distance as possible. It
was not until Mr. Poulter paused and wiped the perspiration from his
forehead, that Tom felt the full charm of the sword-exercise, and
wished it to be repeated.

"Mr. Poulter," said Tom, when the sword was being finally sheathed, "I
wish you'd lend me your sword a little while to keep."

"No no, young gentleman," said Mr. Poulter, shaking his head
decidedly; "you might do yourself some mischief with it."

"No, I'm sure I wouldn't; I'm sure I'd take care and not hurt myself.
I shouldn't take it out of the sheath much, but I could ground arms
with it, and all that."

"No, no, it won't do, I tell you; it won't do," said Mr. Poulter,
preparing to depart. "What 'ud Mr. Stelling say to me?"

"Oh, I say, do, Mr. Poulter! I'd give you my five-shilling piece if
you'd let me keep the sword a week. Look here!" said Tom, reaching out
the attractively large round of silver. The young dog calculated the
effect as well as if he had been a philosopher.

"Well," said Mr. Poulter, with still deeper gravity, "you must keep it
out of sight, you know."

"Oh yes, I'll keep it under the bed," said Tom, eagerly, "or else at
the bottom of my large box."

"And let me see, now, whether you can draw it out of the sheath
without hurting yourself." That process having been gone through more
than once, Mr. Poulter felt that he had acted with scrupulous
conscientiousness, and said, "Well, now, Master Tulliver, if I take
the crown-piece, it is to make sure as you'll do no mischief with the
sword."

"Oh no, indeed, Mr. Poulter," said Tom, delightedly handing him the
crown-piece, and grasping the sword, which, he thought, might have
been lighter with advantage.

"But if Mr. Stelling catches you carrying it in?" said Mr. Poulter,
pocketing the crown-piece provisionally while he raised this new
doubt.

"Oh, he always keeps in his upstairs study on Saturday afternoon,"
said Tom, who disliked anything sneaking, but was not disinclined to a
little stratagem in a worthy cause. So he carried off the sword in
triumph mixed with dread--dread that he might encounter Mr. or Mrs.
Stelling--to his bedroom, where, after some consideration, he hid it
in the closet behind some hanging clothes. That night he fell asleep
in the thought that he would astonish Maggie with it when she
came,--tie it round his waist with his red comforter, and make her
believe that the sword was his own, and that he was going to be a
soldier. There was nobody but Maggie who would be silly enough to
believe him, or whom he dared allow to know he had a sword; and Maggie
was really coming next week to see Tom, before she went to a
boarding-school with Lucy.

If you think a lad of thirteen would have been so childish, you must
be an exceptionally wise man, who, although you are devoted to a civil
calling, requiring you to look bland rather than formidable, yet
never, since you had a beard, threw yourself into a martial attitude,
and frowned before the looking-glass. It is doubtful whether our
soldiers would be maintained if there were not pacific people at home
who like to fancy themselves soldiers. War, like other dramatic
spectacles, might possibly cease for want of a "public."

Chapter V

Maggie's Second Visit

This last breach between the two lads was not readily mended, and for
some time they spoke to each other no more than was necessary. Their
natural antipathy of temperament made resentment an easy passage to
hatred, and in Philip the transition seemed to have begun; there was
no malignity in his disposition, but there was a susceptibility that
made him peculiarly liable to a strong sense of repulsion. The ox--we
may venture to assert it on the authority of a great classic--is not
given to use his teeth as an instrument of attack, and Tom was an
excellent bovine lad, who ran at questionable objects in a truly
ingenious bovine manner; but he had blundered on Philip's tenderest
point, and had caused him as much acute pain as if he had studied the
means with the nicest precision and the most envenomed spite. Tom saw
no reason why they should not make up this quarrel as they had done
many others, by behaving as if nothing had happened; for though he had
never before said to Philip that his father was a rogue, this idea had
so habitually made part of his feeling as to the relation between
himself and his dubious schoolfellow, who he could neither like nor
dislike, that the mere utterance did not make such an epoch to him as
it did to Philip. And he had a right to say so when Philip hectored
over _him_, and called him names. But perceiving that his first
advances toward amity were not met, he relapsed into his least
favorable disposition toward Philip, and resolved never to appeal to
him either about drawing or exercise again. They were only so far
civil to each other as was necessary to prevent their state of feud
from being observed by Mr. Stelling, who would have "put down" such
nonsense with great vigor.

When Maggie came, however, she could not help looking with growing
interest at the new schoolfellow, although he was the son of that
wicked Lawyer Wakem, who made her father so angry. She had arrived in
the middle of school-hours, and had sat by while Philip went through
his lessons with Mr. Stelling. Tom, some weeks ago, had sent her word
that Philip knew no end of stories,--not stupid stories like hers; and
she was convinced now from her own observation that he must be very
clever; she hoped he would think _her_ rather clever too, when she
came to talk to him. Maggie, moreover, had rather a tenderness for
deformed things; she preferred the wry-necked lambs, because it seemed
to her that the lambs which were quite strong and well made wouldn't
mind so much about being petted; and she was especially fond of
petting objects that would think it very delightful to be petted by
her. She loved Tom very dearly, but she often wished that he _cared_
more about her loving him.

"I think Philip Wakem seems a nice boy, Tom," she said, when they went
out of the study together into the garden, to pass the interval before
dinner. "He couldn't choose his father, you know; and I've read of
very bad men who had good sons, as well as good parents who had bad
children. And if Philip is good, I think we ought to be the more sorry
for him because his father is not a good man. _You_ like him, don't
you?"

"Oh, he's a queer fellow," said Tom, curtly, "and he's as sulky as can
be with me, because I told him his father was a rogue. And I'd a right
to tell him so, for it was true; and _he_ began it, with calling me
names. But you stop here by yourself a bit, Maggie, will you? I've got
something I want to do upstairs."