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

She felt her father beginning to tremble; his voice trembled too, as
he said, after a few moments:

"Ay, my little wench, but I shall never live twice o'er."

"But perhaps you will live to see me pay everybody, father," said Tom,
speaking with a great effort.

"Ah, my lad," said Mr. Tulliver, shaking his head slowly, "but what's
broke can never be whole again; it 'ud be your doing, not mine." Then
looking up at him, "You're only sixteen; it's an up-hill fight for
you, but you mustn't throw it at your father; the raskills have been
too many for him. I've given you a good eddication,--that'll start
you."

Something in his throat half choked the last words; the flush, which
had alarmed his children because it had so often preceded a recurrence
of paralysis, had subsided, and his face looked pale and tremulous.
Tom said nothing; he was still struggling against his inclination to
rush away. His father remained quiet a minute or two, but his mind did
not seem to be wandering again.

"Have they sold me up, then?" he said more clamly, as if he were
possessed simply by the desire to know what had happened.

"Everything is sold, father; but we don't know all about the mill and
the land yet," said Tom, anxious to ward off any question leading to
the fact that Wakem was the purchaser.

"You must not be surprised to see the room look very bare downstairs,
father," said Maggie; "but there's your chair and the bureau;
_they're_ not gone."

"Let us go; help me down, Luke,--I'll go and see everything," said Mr.
Tulliver, leaning on his stick, and stretching out his other hand
toward Luke.

"Ay, sir," said Luke, as he gave his arm to his master, "you'll make
up your mind to't a bit better when you've seen iverything; you'll get
used to't. That's what my mother says about her shortness o'
breath,--she says she's made friends wi't now, though she fought
again' it sore when it just come on."

Maggie ran on before to see that all was right in the dreary parlor,
where the fire, dulled by the frosty sunshine, seemed part of the
general shabbiness. She turned her father's chair, and pushed aside
the table to make an easy way for him, and then stood with a beating
heart to see him enter and look round for the first time. Tom advanced
before him, carrying the leg-rest, and stood beside Maggie on the
hearth. Of those two young hearts Tom's suffered the most unmixed
pain, for Maggie, with all her keen susceptibility, yet felt as if the
sorrow made larger room for her love to flow in, and gave
breathing-space to her passionate nature. No true boy feels that; he
would rather go and slay the Nemean lion, or perform any round of
heroic labors, than endure perpetual appeals to his pity, for evils
over which he can make no conquest.

Mr. Tulliver paused just inside the door, resting on Luke, and looking
round him at all the bare places, which for him were filled with the
shadows of departed objects,--the daily companions of his life. His
faculties seemed to be renewing their strength from getting a footing
on this demonstration of the senses.

"Ah!" he said slowly, moving toward his chair, "they've sold me
up--they've sold me up."

Then seating himself, and laying down his stick, while Luke left the
room, he looked round again.

"They've left the big Bible," he said. "It's got everything in,--when
I was born and married; bring it me, Tom."

The quarto Bible was laid open before him at the fly-leaf, and while
he was reading with slowly travelling eyes Mrs. Tulliver entered the
room, but stood in mute surprise to find her husband down already, and
with the great Bible before him.

"Ah," he said, looking at a spot where his finger rested, "my mother
was Margaret Beaton; she died when she was forty-seven,--hers wasn't a
long-lived family; we're our mother's children, Gritty and me are,--we
shall go to our last bed before long."

He seemed to be pausing over the record of his sister's birth and
marriage, as if it were suggesting new thoughts to him; then he
suddenly looked up at Tom, and said, in a sharp tone of alarm:

"They haven't come upo' Moss for the money as I lent him, have they?"

"No, father," said Tom; "the note was burnt."

Mr. Tulliver turned his eyes on the page again, and presently said:

"Ah--Elizabeth Dodson--it's eighteen year since I married her----"

"Come next Ladyday," said Mrs. Tulliver, going up to his side and
looking at the page.

Her husband fixed his eyes earnestly on her face.

"Poor Bessy," he said, "you was a pretty lass then,--everybody said
so,--and I used to think you kept your good looks rarely. But you're
sorely aged; don't you bear me ill-will--I meant to do well by you--we
promised one another for better or for worse----"

"But I never thought it 'ud be so for worse as this," said poor Mrs.
Tulliver, with the strange, scared look that had come over her of
late; "and my poor father gave me away--and to come on so all at
once----"

"Oh, mother!" said Maggie, "don't talk in that way."

"No, I know you won't let your poor mother speak--that's been the way
all my life--your father never minded what I said--it 'ud have been o'
no use for me to beg and pray--and it 'ud be no use now, not if I was
to go down o' my hands and knees----"

"Don't say so, Bessy," said Mr. Tulliver, whose pride, in these first
moments of humiliation, was in abeyance to the sense of some justice
in his wife's reproach. "It there's anything left as I could do to
make you amends, I wouldn't say you nay."

"Then we might stay here and get a living, and I might keep among my
own sisters,--and me been such a good wife to you, and never crossed
you from week's end to week's end--and they all say so--they say it
'ud be nothing but right, only you're so turned against Wakem."

"Mother," said Tom, severely, "this is not the time to talk about
that."

"Let her be," said Mr. Tulliver. "Say what you mean, Bessy."

"Why, now the mill and the land's all Wakem's, and he's got everything
in his hands, what's the use o' setting your face against him, when he
says you may stay here, and speaks as fair as can be, and says you may
manage the business, and have thirty shillings a-week, and a horse to
ride about to market? And where have we got to put our heads? We must
go into one o' the cottages in the village,--and me and my children
brought down to that,--and all because you must set your mind against
folks till there's no turning you."

Mr. Tulliver had sunk back in his chair trembling.

"You may do as you like wi' me, Bessy," he said, in a low voice; "I've
been the bringing of you to poverty--this world's too many for me--I'm
nought but a bankrupt; it's no use standing up for anything now."

"Father," said Tom, "I don't agree with my mother or my uncles, and I
don't think you ought to submit to be under Wakem. I get a pound
a-week now, and you can find something else to do when you get well."

"Say no more, Tom, say no more; I've had enough for this day. Give me
a kiss, Bessy, and let us bear one another no ill-will; we shall never
be young again--this world's been too many for me."

Chapter IX

An Item Added to the Family Register

That first moment of renunciation and submission was followed by days
of violent struggle in the miller's mind, as the gradual access of
bodily strength brought with it increasing ability to embrace in one
view all the conflicting conditions under which he found himself.
Feeble limbs easily resign themselves to be tethered, and when we are
subdued by sickness it seems possible to us to fulfil pledges which
the old vigor comes back and breaks. There were times when poor
Tulliver thought the fulfilment of his promise to Bessy was something
quite too hard for human nature; he had promised her without knowing
what she was going to say,--she might as well have asked him to carry
a ton weight on his back. But again, there were many feelings arguing
on her side, besides the sense that life had been made hard to her by
having married him. He saw a possibility, by much pinching, of saving
money out of his salary toward paying a second dividend to his
creditors, and it would not be easy elsewhere to get a situation such
as he could fill.

He had led an easy life, ordering much and working little, and had no
aptitude for any new business. He must perhaps take to day-labor, and
his wife must have help from her sisters,--a prospect doubly bitter to
him, now they had let all Bessy's precious things be sold, probably
because they liked to set her against him, by making her feel that he
had brought her to that pass. He listened to their admonitory talk,
when they came to urge on him what he was bound to do for poor Bessy's
sake, with averted eyes, that every now and then flashed on them
furtively when their backs were turned. Nothing but the dread of
needing their help could have made it an easier alternative to take
their advice.

But the strongest influence of all was the love of the old premises
where he had run about when he was a boy, just as Tom had done after
him. The Tullivers had lived on this spot for generations, and he had
sat listening on a low stool on winter evenings while his father
talked of the old half-timbered mill that had been there before the
last great floods which damaged it so that his grandfather pulled it
down and built the new one. It was when he got able to walk about and
look at all the old objects that he felt the strain of his clinging
affection for the old home as part of his life, part of himself. He
couldn't bear to think of himself living on any other spot than this,
where he knew the sound of every gate door, and felt that the shape
and color of every roof and weather-stain and broken hillock was good,
because his growing senses had been fed on them. Our instructed
vagrancy, which was hardly time to linger by the hedgerows, but runs
away early to the tropics, and is at home with palms and
banyans,--which is nourished on books of travel and stretches the
theatre of its imagination to the Zambesi,--can hardly get a dim
notion of what an old-fashioned man like Tulliver felt for this spot,
where all his memories centred, and where life seemed like a familiar
smooth-handled tool that the fingers clutch with loving ease. And just
now he was living in that freshened memory of the far-off time which
comes to us in the passive hours of recovery from sickness.

"Ay, Luke," he said one afternoon, as he stood looking over the
orchard gate, "I remember the day they planted those apple-trees. My
father was a huge man for planting,--it was like a merry-making to him
to get a cart full o' young trees; and I used to stand i' the cold
with him, and follow him about like a dog."

Then he turned round, and leaning against the gate-post, looked at the
opposite buildings.

"The old mill 'ud miss me, I think, Luke. There's a story as when the
mill changes hands, the river's angry; I've heard my father say it
many a time. There's no telling whether there mayn't be summat _in_
the story, for this is a puzzling world, and Old Harry's got a finger
in it--it's been too many for me, I know."

"Ay, sir," said Luke, with soothing sympathy, "what wi' the rust on
the wheat, an' the firin' o' the ricks an' that, as I've seen i' my
time,--things often looks comical; there's the bacon fat wi' our last
pig run away like butter,--it leaves nought but a scratchin'."

"It's just as if it was yesterday, now," Mr. Tulliver went on, "when
my father began the malting. I remember, the day they finished the
malt-house, I thought summat great was to come of it; for we'd a
plum-pudding that day and a bit of a feast, and I said to my
mother,--she was a fine dark-eyed woman, my mother was,--the little
wench 'ull be as like her as two peas." Here Mr. Tulliver put his
stick between his legs, and took out his snuff-box, for the greater
enjoyment of this anecdote, which dropped from him in fragments, as if
he every other moment lost narration in vision. "I was a little chap
no higher much than my mother's knee,--she was sore fond of us
children, Gritty and me,--and so I said to her, 'Mother,' I said,
'shall we have plum-pudding _every_ day because o' the malt-house? She
used to tell me o' that till her dying day. She was but a young woman
when she died, my mother was. But it's forty good year since they
finished the malt-house, and it isn't many days out of 'em all as I
haven't looked out into the yard there, the first thing in the
morning,--all weathers, from year's end to year's end. I should go off
my head in a new place. I should be like as if I'd lost my way. It's
all hard, whichever way I look at it,--the harness 'ull gall me, but
it 'ud be summat to draw along the old road, instead of a new un."

"Ay, sir," said Luke, "you'd be a deal better here nor in some new
place. I can't abide new places mysen: things is allays
awk'ard,--narrow-wheeled waggins, belike, and the stiles all another
sort, an' oat-cake i' some places, tow'rt th' head o' the Floss,
there. It's poor work, changing your country-side."

"But I doubt, Luke, they'll be for getting rid o' Ben, and making you
do with a lad; and I must help a bit wi' the mill. You'll have a worse
place."

"Ne'er mind, sir," said Luke, "I sha'n't plague mysen. I'n been wi'
you twenty year, an' you can't get twenty year wi' whistlin' for 'em,
no more nor you can make the trees grow: you mun wait till God
A'mighty sends 'em. I can't abide new victual nor new faces, _I_
can't,--you niver know but what they'll gripe you."

The walk was finished in silence after this, for Luke had disburthened
himself of thoughts to an extent that left his conversational
resources quite barren, and Mr. Tulliver had relapsed from his
recollections into a painful meditation on the choice of hardships
before him. Maggie noticed that he was unusually absent that evening
at tea; and afterward he sat leaning forward in his chair, looking at
the ground, moving his lips, and shaking his head from time to time.
Then he looked hard at Mrs. Tulliver, who was knitting opposite him,
then at Maggie, who, as she bent over her sewing, was intensely
conscious of some drama going forward in her father's mind. Suddenly
he took up the poker and broke the large coal fiercely.

"Dear heart, Mr. Tulliver, what can you be thinking of?" said his
wife, looking up in alarm; "it's very wasteful, breaking the coal, and
we've got hardly any large coal left, and I don't know where the rest
is to come from."

"I don't think you're quite so well to-night, are you, father?" said
Maggie; "you seem uneasy."

"Why, how is it Tom doesn't come?" said Mr. Tulliver, impatiently.

"Dear heart, is it time? I must go and get his supper," said Mrs.
Tulliver, laying down her knitting, and leaving the room.

"It's nigh upon half-past eight," said Mr. Tulliver. "He'll be here
soon. Go, go and get the big Bible, and open it at the beginning,
where everything's set down. And get the pen and ink."

Maggie obeyed, wondering; but her father gave no further orders, and
only sat listening for Tom's footfall on the gravel, apparently
irritated by the wind, which had risen, and was roaring so as to drown
all other sounds. There was a strange light in his eyes that rather
frightened Maggie; _she_ began to wish that Tom would come, too.

"There he is, then," said Mr. Tulliver, in an excited way, when the
knock came at last. Maggie went to open the door, but her mother came
out of the kitchen hurriedly, saying, "Stop a bit, Maggie; I'll open
it."

Mrs. Tulliver had begun to be a little frightened at her boy, but she
was jealous of every office others did for him.

"Your supper's ready by the kitchen-fire, my boy," she said, as he
took off his hat and coat. "You shall have it by yourself, just as you
like, and I won't speak to you."

"I think my father wants Tom, mother," said Maggie; "he must come into
the parlor first."

Tom entered with his usual saddened evening face, but his eyes fell
immediately on the open Bible and the inkstand, and he glanced with a
look of anxious surprise at his father, who was saying,--

"Come, come, you're late; I want you."

"Is there anything the matter, father?" said Tom.

"You sit down, all of you," said Mr. Tulliver, peremptorily.

"And, Tom, sit down here; I've got something for you to write i' the
Bible."

They all three sat down, looking at him. He began to speak slowly,
looking first at his wife.

"I've made up my mind, Bessy, and I'll be as good as my word to you.
There'll be the same grave made for us to lie down in, and we mustn't
be bearing one another ill-will. I'll stop in the old place, and I'll
serve under Wakem, and I'll serve him like an honest man; there's no
Tulliver but what's honest, mind that, Tom,"--here his voice
rose,--"they'll have it to throw up against me as I paid a dividend,
but it wasn't my fault; it was because there's raskills in the world.
They've been too many for me, and I must give in. I'll put my neck in
harness,--for you've a right to say as I've brought you into trouble,
Bessy,--and I'll serve him as honest as if he was no raskill; I'm an
honest man, though I shall never hold my head up no more. I'm a tree
as is broke--a tree as is broke."

He paused and looked on the ground. Then suddenly raising his head, he
said, in a louder yet deeper tone:

"But I won't forgive him! I know what they say, he never meant me any
harm. That's the way Old Harry props up the rascals. He's been at the
bottom of everything; but he's a fine gentleman,--I know, I know. I
shouldn't ha' gone to law, they say. But who made it so as there was
no arbitratin', and no justice to be got? It signifies nothing to him,
I know that; he's one o' them fine gentlemen as get money by doing
business for poorer folks, and when he's made beggars of 'em he'll
give 'em charity. I won't forgive him! I wish he might be punished
with shame till his own son 'ud like to forget him. I wish he may do
summat as they'd make him work at the treadmill! But he won't,--he's
too big a raskill to let the law lay hold on him. And you mind this,
Tom,--you never forgive him neither, if you mean to be my son.
There'll maybe come a time when you may make him feel; it'll never
come to me; I'n got my head under the yoke. Now write--write it i' the
Bible."

"Oh, father, what?" said Maggie, sinking down by his knee, pale and
trembling. "It's wicked to curse and bear malice."

"It isn't wicked, I tell you," said her father, fiercely. "It's wicked
as the raskills should prosper; it's the Devil's doing. Do as I tell
you, Tom. Write."

"What am I to write?" said Tom, with gloomy submission.

"Write as your father, Edward Tulliver, took service under John Wakem,
the man as had helped to ruin him, because I'd promised my wife to
make her what amends I could for her trouble, and because I wanted to
die in th' old place where I was born and my father was born. Put that
i' the right words--you know how--and then write, as I don't forgive
Wakem for all that; and for all I'll serve him honest, I wish evil may
befall him. Write that."

There was a dead silence as Tom's pen moved along the paper; Mrs.
Tulliver looked scared, and Maggie trembled like a leaf.

"Now let me hear what you've wrote," said Mr. Tulliver, Tom read aloud
slowly.

"Now write--write as you'll remember what Wakem's done to your father,
and you'll make him and his feel it, if ever the day comes. And sign
your name Thomas Tulliver."

"Oh no, father, dear father!" said Maggie, almost choked with fear.
"You shouldn't make Tom write that."

"Be quiet, Maggie!" said Tom. "I _shall_ write it."

Book IV

_The Valley of Humiliation_

Chapter I

A Variation of Protestantism Unknown to Bossuet

Journeying down the Rhone on a summer's day, you have perhaps felt the
sunshine made dreary by those ruined villages which stud the banks in
certain parts of its course, telling how the swift river once rose,
like an angry, destroying god, sweeping down the feeble generations
whose breath is in their nostrils, and making their dwellings a
desolation. Strange contrast, you may have thought, between the
effect produced on us by these dismal remnants of commonplace
houses, which in their best days were but the sign of a sordid life,
belonging in all its details to our own vulgar era, and the effect
produced by those ruins on the castled Rhine, which have crumbled and
mellowed into such harmony with the green and rocky steeps that they
seem to have a natural fitness, like the mountain-pine; nay, even in
the day when they were built they must have had this fitness, as if
they had been raised by an earth-born race, who had inherited from
their mighty parent a sublime instinct of form. And that was a day of
romance; If those robber-barons were somewhat grim and drunken ogres,
they had a certain grandeur of the wild beast in them,--they were
forest boars with tusks, tearing and rending, not the ordinary
domestic grunter; they represented the demon forces forever in
collision with beauty, virtue, and the gentle uses of life; they made
a fine contrast in the picture with the wandering minstrel, the
soft-lipped princess, the pious recluse, and the timid Israelite. That
was a time of color, when the sunlight fell on glancing steel and
floating banners; a time of adventure and fierce struggle,--nay, of
living, religious art and religious enthusiasm; for were not
cathedrals built in those days, and did not great emperors leave their
Western palaces to die before the infidel strongholds in the sacred
East? Therefore it is that these Rhine castles thrill me with a sense
of poetry; they belong to the grand historic life of humanity, and
raise up for me the vision of an echo. But these dead-tinted,
hollow-eyed, angular skeletons of villages on the Rhone oppress me
with the feeling that human life--very much of it--is a narrow, ugly,
grovelling existence, which even calamity does not elevate, but rather
tends to exhibit in all its bare vulgarity of conception; and I have a
cruel conviction that the lives these ruins are the traces of were
part of a gross sum of obscure vitality, that will be swept into the
same oblivion with the generations of ants and beavers.

Perhaps something akin to this oppressive feeling may have weighed
upon you in watching this old-fashioned family life on the banks of
the Floss, which even sorrow hardly suffices to lift above the level
of the tragi-comic. It is a sordid life, you say, this of the
Tullivers and Dodsons, irradiated by no sublime principles, no
romantic visions, no active, self-renouncing faith; moved by none of
those wild, uncontrollable passions which create the dark shadows of
misery and crime; without that primitive, rough simplicity of wants,
that hard, submissive, ill-paid toil, that childlike spelling-out of
what nature has written, which gives its poetry to peasant life. Here
one has conventional worldly notions and habits without instruction
and without polish, surely the most prosaic form of human life; proud
respectability in a gig of unfashionable build; worldliness without
side-dishes. Observing these people narrowly, even when the iron hand
of misfortune has shaken them from their unquestioning hold on the
world, one sees little trace of religion, still less of a
distinctively Christian creed. Their belief in the Unseen, so far as
it manifests itself at all, seems to be rather a pagan kind; their
moral notions, though held with strong tenacity, seem to have no
standard beyond hereditary custom. You could not live among such
people; you are stifled for want of an outlet toward something
beautiful, great, or noble; you are irritated with these dull men and
women, as a kind of population out of keeping with the earth on which
they live,--with this rich plain where the great river flows forever
onward, and links the small pulse of the old English town with the
beatings of the world's mighty heart. A vigorous superstition, that
lashes its gods or lashes its own back, seems to be more congruous
with the mystery of the human lot, than the mental condition of these
emmet-like Dodsons and Tullivers.

I share with you this sense of oppressive narrowness; but it is
necessary that we should feel it, if we care to understand how it
acted on the lives of Tom and Maggie,--how it has acted on young
natures in many generations, that in the onward tendency of human
things have risen above the mental level of the generation before
them, to which they have been nevertheless tied by the strongest
fibres of their hearts. The suffering, whether of martyr or victim,
which belongs to every historical advance of mankind, is represented
in this way in every town, and by hundreds of obscure hearths; and we
need not shrink from this comparison of small things with great; for
does not science tell us that its highest striving is after the
ascertainment of a unity which shall bind the smallest things with the
greatest? In natural science, I have understood, there is nothing
petty to the mind that has a large vision of relations, and to which
every single object suggests a vast sum of conditions. It is surely
the same with the observation of human life.