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

Certainly the religious and moral ideas of the Dodsons and Tullivers
were of too specific a kind to be arrived at deductively, from the
statement that they were part of the Protestant population of Great
Britain. Their theory of life had its core of soundness, as all
theories must have on which decent and prosperous families have been
reared and have flourished; but it had the very slightest tincture of
theology. If, in the maiden days of the Dodson sisters, their Bibles
opened more easily at some parts than others, it was because of dried
tulip-petals, which had been distributed quite impartially, without
preference for the historical, devotional, or doctrinal. Their
religion was of a simple, semi-pagan kind, but there was no heresy in
it,--if heresy properly means choice,--for they didn't know there was
any other religion, except that of chapel-goers, which appeared to run
in families, like asthma. How _should_ they know? The vicar of their
pleasant rural parish was not a controversialist, but a good hand at
whist, and one who had a joke always ready for a blooming female
parishioner. The religion of the Dodsons consisted in revering
whatever was customary and respectable; it was necessary to be
baptized, else one could not be buried in the church-yard, and to take
the sacrament before death, as a security against more dimly
understood perils; but it was of equal necessity to have the proper
pall-bearers and well-cured hams at one's funeral, and to leave an
unimpeachable will. A Dodson would not be taxed with the omission of
anything that was becoming, or that belonged to that eternal fitness
of things which was plainly indicated in the practice of the most
substantial parishioners, and in the family traditions,--such as
obedience to parents, faithfulness to kindred, industry, rigid
honesty, thrift, the thorough scouring of wooden and copper utensils,
the hoarding of coins likely to disappear from the currency, the
production of first-rate commodities for the market, and the general
preference of whatever was home-made. The Dodsons were a very proud
race, and their pride lay in the utter frustration of all desire to
tax them with a breach of traditional duty or propriety. A wholesome
pride in many respects, since it identified honor with perfect
integrity, thoroughness of work, and faithfulness to admitted rules;
and society owes some worthy qualities in many of her members to
mothers of the Dodson class, who made their butter and their fromenty
well, and would have felt disgraced to make it otherwise. To be honest
and poor was never a Dodson motto, still less to seem rich though
being poor; rather, the family badge was to be honest and rich, and
not only rich, but richer than was supposed. To live respected, and
have the proper bearers at your funeral, was an achievement of the
ends of existence that would be entirely nullified if, on the reading
of your will, you sank in the opinion of your fellow-men, either by
turning out to be poorer than they expected, or by leaving your money
in a capricious manner, without strict regard to degrees of kin. The
right thing must always be done toward kindred. The right thing was to
correct them severely, if they were other than a credit to the family,
but still not to alienate from them the smallest rightful share in the
family shoebuckles and other property. A conspicuous quality in the
Dodson character was its genuineness; its vices and virtues alike were
phases of a proud honest egoism, which had a hearty dislike to
whatever made against its own credit and interest, and would be
frankly hard of speech to inconvenient "kin," but would never forsake
or ignore them,--would not let them want bread, but only require them
to eat it with bitter herbs.

The same sort of traditional belief ran in the Tulliver veins, but it
was carried in richer blood, having elements of generous imprudence,
warm affection, and hot-tempered rashness. Mr. Tulliver's grandfather
had been heard to say that he was descended from one Ralph Tulliver, a
wonderfully clever fellow, who had ruined himself. It is likely enough
that the clever Ralph was a high liver, rode spirited horses, and was
very decidedly of his own opinion. On the other hand, nobody had ever
heard of a Dodson who had ruined himself; it was not the way of that
family.

If such were the views of life on which the Dodsons and Tullivers had
been reared in the praiseworthy past of Pitt and high prices, you will
infer from what you already know concerning the state of society in
St. Ogg's, that there had been no highly modifying influence to act on
them in their maturer life. It was still possible, even in that later
time of anti-Catholic preaching, for people to hold many pagan ideas,
and believe themselves good church-people, notwithstanding; so we need
hardly feel any surprise at the fact that Mr. Tulliver, though a
regular church-goer, recorded his vindictiveness on the fly-leaf of
his Bible. It was not that any harm could be said concerning the vicar
of that charming rural parish to which Dorlcote Mill belonged; he was
a man of excellent family, an irreproachable bachelor, of elegant
pursuits,--had taken honors, and held a fellowship. Mr. Tulliver
regarded him with dutiful respect, as he did everything else belonging
to the church-service; but he considered that church was one thing and
common-sense another, and he wanted nobody to tell _him_ what
commonsense was. Certain seeds which are required to find a nidus for
themselves under unfavorable circumstances have been supplied by
nature with an apparatus of hooks, so that they will get a hold on
very unreceptive surfaces. The spiritual seed which had been scattered
over Mr. Tulliver had apparently been destitute of any corresponding
provision, and had slipped off to the winds again, from a total
absence of hooks.

Chapter II

The Torn Nest Is Pierced by the Thorns

There is something sustaining in the very agitation that accompanies
the first shocks of trouble, just as an acute pain is often a
stimulus, and produces an excitement which is transient strength. It
is in the slow, changed life that follows; in the time when sorrow has
become stale, and has no longer an emotive intensity that counteracts
its pain; in the time when day follows day in dull, unexpectant
sameness, and trial is a dreary routine,--it is then that despair
threatens; it is then that the peremptory hunger of the soul is felt,
and eye and ear are strained after some unlearned secret of our
existence, which shall give to endurance the nature of satisfaction.

This time of utmost need was come to Maggie, with her short span of
thirteen years. To the usual precocity of the girl, she added that
early experience of struggle, of conflict between the inward impulse
and outward fact, which is the lot of every imaginative and passionate
nature; and the years since she hammered the nails into her wooden
Fetish among the worm-eaten shelves of the attic had been filled with
so eager a life in the triple world of Reality, Books, and Waking
Dreams, that Maggie was strangely old for her years in everything
except in her entire want of that prudence and self-command which were
the qualities that made Tom manly in the midst of his intellectual
boyishness. And now her lot was beginning to have a still, sad
monotony, which threw her more than ever on her inward self. Her
father was able to attend to business again, his affairs were settled,
and he was acting as Wakem's manager on the old spot. Tom went to and
fro every morning and evening, and became more and more silent in the
short intervals at home; what was there to say? One day was like
another; and Tom's interest in life, driven back and crushed on every
other side, was concentrating itself into the one channel of ambitious
resistance to misfortune. The peculiarities of his father and mother
were very irksome to him, now they were laid bare of all the softening
accompaniments of an easy, prosperous home; for Tom had very clear,
prosaic eyes, not apt to be dimmed by mists of feeling or imagination.
Poor Mrs. Tulliver, it seemed, would never recover her old self, her
placid household activity; how could she? The objects among which her
mind had moved complacently were all gone,--all the little hopes and
schemes and speculations, all the pleasant little cares about her
treasures which had made the world quite comprehensible to her for a
quarter of a century, since she had made her first purchase of the
sugar-tongs, had been suddenly snatched away from her, and she
remained bewildered in this empty life. Why that should have happened
to her which had not happened to other women remained an insoluble
question by which she expressed her perpetual ruminating comparison of
the past with the present. It was piteous to see the comely woman
getting thinner and more worn under a bodily as well as mental
restlessness, which made her often wander about the empty house after
her work was done, until Maggie, becoming alarmed about her, would
seek her, and bring her down by telling her how it vexed Tom that she
was injuring her health by never sitting down and resting herself. Yet
amidst this helpless imbecility there was a touching trait of humble,
self-devoting maternity, which made Maggie feel tenderly toward her
poor mother amidst all the little wearing griefs caused by her mental
feebleness. She would let Maggie do none of the work that was heaviest
and most soiling to the hands, and was quite peevish when Maggie
attempted to relieve her from her grate-brushing and scouring: "Let it
alone, my dear; your hands 'ull get as hard as hard," she would say;
"it's your mother's place to do that. I can't do the sewing--my eyes
fail me." And she would still brush and carefully tend Maggie's hair,
which she had become reconciled to, in spite of its refusal to curl,
now it was so long and massy. Maggie was not her pet child, and, in
general, would have been much better if she had been quite different;
yet the womanly heart, so bruised in its small personal desires, found
a future to rest on in the life of this young thing, and the mother
pleased herself with wearing out her own hands to save the hands that
had so much more life in them.

But the constant presence of her mother's regretful bewilderment was
less painful to Maggie than that of her father's sullen,
incommunicative depression. As long as the paralysis was upon him, and
it seemed as if he might always be in a childlike condition of
dependence,--as long as he was still only half awakened to his
trouble,--Maggie had felt the strong tide of pitying love almost as an
inspiration, a new power, that would make the most difficult life easy
for his sake; but now, instead of childlike dependence, there had come
a taciturn, hard concentration of purpose, in strange contrast with
his old vehement communicativeness and high spirit; and this lasted
from day to day, and from week to week, the dull eye never brightening
with any eagerness or any joy. It is something cruelly incomprehensible
to youthful natures, this sombre sameness in middle-aged and elderly
people, whose life has resulted in disappointment and discontent, to
whose faces a smile becomes so strange that the sad lines all about
the lips and brow seem to take no notice of it, and it hurries away
again for want of a welcome. "Why will they not kindle up and be
glad sometimes?" thinks young elasticity. "It would be so easy if they
only liked to do it." And these leaden clouds that never part are apt
to create impatience even in the filial affection that streams forth in
nothing but tenderness and pity in the time of more obvious affliction.

Mr. Tulliver lingered nowhere away from home; he hurried away from
market, he refused all invitations to stay and chat, as in old times,
in the houses where he called on business. He could not be reconciled
with his lot. There was no attitude in which his pride did not feel
its bruises; and in all behavior toward him, whether kind or cold, he
detected an allusion to the change in his circumstances. Even the days
on which Wakem came to ride round the land and inquire into the
business were not so black to him as those market-days on which he had
met several creditors who had accepted a composition from him. To save
something toward the repayment of those creditors was the object
toward which he was now bending all his thoughts and efforts; and
under the influence of this all-compelling demand of his nature, the
somewhat profuse man, who hated to be stinted or to stint any one else
in his own house, was gradually metamorphosed into the keen-eyed
grudger of morsels. Mrs. Tulliver could not economize enough to
satisfy him, in their food and firing; and he would eat nothing
himself but what was of the coarsest quality. Tom, though depressed
and strongly repelled by his father's sullenness, and the dreariness
of home, entered thoroughly into his father's feelings about paying
the creditors; and the poor lad brought his first quarter's money,
with a delicious sense of achievement, and gave it to his father to
put into the tin box which held the savings. The little store of
sovereigns in the tin box seemed to be the only sight that brought a
faint beam of pleasure into the miller's eyes,--faint and transient,
for it was soon dispelled by the thought that the time would be
long--perhaps longer than his life,--before the narrow savings could
remove the hateful incubus of debt. A deficit of more than five
hundred pounds, with the accumulating interest, seemed a deep pit to
fill with the savings from thirty shillings a-week, even when Tom's
probable savings were to be added. On this one point there was entire
community of feeling in the four widely differing beings who sat round
the dying fire of sticks, which made a cheap warmth for them on the
verge of bedtime. Mrs. Tulliver carried the proud integrity of the
Dodsons in her blood, and had been brought up to think that to wrong
people of their money, which was another phrase for debt, was a sort
of moral pillory; it would have been wickedness, to her mind, to have
run counter to her husband's desire to "do the right thing," and
retrieve his name. She had a confused, dreamy notion that, if the
creditors were all paid, her plate and linen ought to come back to
her; but she had an inbred perception that while people owed money
they were unable to pay, they couldn't rightly call anything their
own. She murmured a little that Mr. Tulliver so peremptorily refused
to receive anything in repayment from Mr. and Mrs. Moss; but to all
his requirements of household economy she was submissive to the point
of denying herself the cheapest indulgences of mere flavor; her only
rebellion was to smuggle into the kitchen something that would make
rather a better supper than usual for Tom.

These narrow notions about debt, held by the old fashioned Tullivers,
may perhaps excite a smile on the faces of many readers in these days
of wide commercial views and wide philosophy, according to which
everything rights itself without any trouble of ours. The fact that my
tradesman is out of pocket by me is to be looked at through the serene
certainty that somebody else's tradesman is in pocket by somebody
else; and since there must be bad debts in the world, why, it is mere
egoism not to like that we in particular should make them instead of
our fellow-citizens. I am telling the history of very simple people,
who had never had any illuminating doubts as to personal integrity and
honor.

Under all this grim melancholy and narrowing concentration of desire,
Mr. Tulliver retained the feeling toward his "little wench" which made
her presence a need to him, though it would not suffice to cheer him.
She was still the desire of his eyes; but the sweet spring of fatherly
love was now mingled with bitterness, like everything else. When
Maggie laid down her work at night, it was her habit to get a low
stool and sit by her father's knee, leaning her cheek against it. How
she wished he would stroke her head, or give some sign that he was
soothed by the sense that he had a daughter who loved him! But now she
got no answer to her little caresses, either from her father or from
Tom,--the two idols of her life. Tom was weary and abstracted in the
short intervals when he was at home, and her father was bitterly
preoccupied with the thought that the girl was growing up, was
shooting up into a woman; and how was she to do well in life? She had
a poor chance for marrying, down in the world as they were. And he
hated the thought of her marrying poorly, as her aunt Gritty had done;
_that_ would be a thing to make him turn in his grave,--the little
wench so pulled down by children and toil, as her aunt Moss was. When
uncultured minds, confined to a narrow range of personal experience,
are under the pressure of continued misfortune, their inward life is
apt to become a perpetually repeated round of sad and bitter thoughts;
the same words, the same scenes, are revolved over and over again, the
same mood accompanies them; the end of the year finds them as much
what they were at the beginning as if they were machines set to a
recurrent series of movements.

The sameness of the days was broken by few visitors. Uncles and aunts
paid only short visits now; of course, they could not stay to meals,
and the constraint caused by Mr. Tulliver's savage silence, which
seemed to add to the hollow resonance of the bare, uncarpeted room
when the aunts were talking, heightened the unpleasantness of these
family visits on all sides, and tended to make them rare. As for other
acquaintances, there is a chill air surrounding those who are down in
the world, and people are glad to get away from them, as from a cold
room; human beings, mere men and women, without furniture, without
anything to offer you, who have ceased to count as anybody, present an
embarrassing negation of reasons for wishing to see them, or of
subjects on which to converse with them. At that distant day, there
was a dreary isolation in the civilized Christian society of these
realms for families that had dropped below their original level,
unless they belonged to a sectarian church, which gets some warmth of
brotherhood by walling in the sacred fire.

Chapter III

A Voice from the Past

One afternoon, when the chestnuts were coming into flower, Maggie had
brought her chair outside the front door, and was seated there with a
book on her knees. Her dark eyes had wandered from the book, but they
did not seem to be enjoying the sunshine which pierced the screen of
jasmine on the projecting porch at her right, and threw leafy shadows
on her pale round cheek; they seemed rather to be searching for
something that was not disclosed by the sunshine. It had been a more
miserable day than usual; her father, after a visit of Wakem's had had
a paroxysm of rage, in which for some trifling fault he had beaten the
boy who served in the mill. Once before, since his illness, he had had
a similar paroxysm, in which he had beaten his horse, and the scene
had left a lasting terror in Maggie's mind. The thought had risen,
that some time or other he might beat her mother if she happened to
speak in her feeble way at the wrong moment. The keenest of all dread
with her was lest her father should add to his present misfortune the
wretchedness of doing something irretrievably disgraceful. The
battered school-book of Tom's which she held on her knees could give
her no fortitude under the pressure of that dread; and again and again
her eyes had filled with tears, as they wandered vaguely, seeing
neither the chestnut-trees, nor the distant horizon, but only future
scenes of home-sorrow.

Suddenly she was roused by the sound of the opening gate and of
footsteps on the gravel. It was not Tom who was entering, but a man in
a sealskin cap and a blue plush waistcoat, carrying a pack on his
back, and followed closely by a bullterrier of brindled coat and
defiant aspect.

"Oh, Bob, it's you!" said Maggie, starting up with a smile of pleased
recognition, for there had been no abundance of kind acts to efface
the recollection of Bob's generosity; "I'm so glad to see you."

"Thank you, Miss," said Bob, lifting his cap and showing a delighted
face, but immediately relieving himself of some accompanying
embarrassment by looking down at his dog, and saying in a tone of
disgust, "Get out wi' you, you thunderin' sawney!"

"My brother is not at home yet, Bob," said Maggie; "he is always at
St. Ogg's in the daytime."

"Well, Miss," said Bob, "I should be glad to see Mr. Tom, but that
isn't just what I'm come for,--look here!"

Bob was in the act of depositing his pack on the door-step, and with
it a row of small books fastened together with string.

Apparently, however, they were not the object to which he wished to
call Maggie's attention, but rather something which he had carried
under his arm, wrapped in a red handkerchief.

"See here!" he said again, laying the red parcel on the others and
unfolding it; "you won't think I'm a-makin' too free, Miss, I hope,
but I lighted on these books, and I thought they might make up to you
a bit for them as you've lost; for I heared you speak o' picturs,--an'
as for picturs, _look_ here!"

The opening of the red handkerchief had disclosed a superannuated
"Keepsake" and six or seven numbers of a "Portrait Gallery," in royal
octavo; and the emphatic request to look referred to a portrait of
George the Fourth in all the majesty of his depressed cranium and
voluminous neckcloth.

"There's all sorts o' genelmen here," Bob went on, turning over the
leaves with some excitement, "wi' all sorts o' nones,--an' some bald
an' some wi' wigs,--Parlament genelmen, I reckon. An' here," he added,
opening the "Keepsake,"--"_here's_ ladies for you, some wi' curly hair
and some wi' smooth, an' some a-smiling wi' their heads o' one side,
an' some as if they were goin' to cry,--look here,--a-sittin' on the
ground out o' door, dressed like the ladies I'n seen get out o' the
carriages at the balls in th' Old Hall there. My eyes! I wonder what
the chaps wear as go a-courtin' 'em! I sot up till the clock was gone
twelve last night, a-lookin' at 'em,--I did,--till they stared at me
out o' the picturs as if they'd know when I spoke to 'em. But, lors! I
shouldn't know what to say to 'em. They'll be more fittin' company for
you, Miss; and the man at the book-stall, he said they banged
iverything for picturs; he said they was a fust-rate article."

"And you've bought them for me, Bob?" said Maggie, deeply touched by
this simple kindness. "How very, very good of you! But I'm afraid you
gave a great deal of money for them."

"Not me!" said Bob. "I'd ha' gev three times the money if they'll make
up to you a bit for them as was sold away from you, Miss. For I'n
niver forgot how you looked when you fretted about the books bein'
gone; it's stuck by me as if it was a pictur hingin' before me. An'
when I see'd the book open upo' the stall, wi' the lady lookin' out of
it wi' eyes a bit like your'n when you was frettin',--you'll excuse my
takin' the liberty, Miss,--I thought I'd make free to buy it for you,
an' then I bought the books full o' genelmen to match; an' then"--here
Bob took up the small stringed packet of books--"I thought you might
like a bit more print as well as the picturs, an' I got these for a
sayso,--they're cram-full o' print, an' I thought they'd do no harm
comin' along wi' these bettermost books. An' I hope you won't say me
nay, an' tell me as you won't have 'em, like Mr. Tom did wi' the
suvreigns."

"No, indeed, Bob," said Maggie, "I'm very thankful to you for thinking
of me, and being so good to me and Tom. I don't think any one ever did
such a kind thing for me before. I haven't many friends who care for
me."

"Hev a dog, Miss!--they're better friends nor any Christian," said
Bob, laying down his pack again, which he had taken up with the
intention of hurrying away; for he felt considerable shyness in
talking to a young lass like Maggie, though, as he usually said of
himself, "his tongue overrun him" when he began to speak. "I can't
give you Mumps, 'cause he'd break his heart to go away from me--eh,
Mumps, what do you say, you riff-raff?" (Mumps declined to express
himself more diffusely than by a single affirmative movement of his
tail.) "But I'd get you a pup, Miss, an' welcome."

"No, thank you, Bob. We have a yard dog, and I mayn't keep a dog of my
own."

"Eh, that's a pity; else there's a pup,--if you didn't mind about it
not being thoroughbred; its mother acts in the Punch show,--an
uncommon sensible bitch; she means more sense wi' her bark nor half
the chaps can put into their talk from breakfast to sundown. There's
one chap carries pots,--a poor, low trade as any on the road,--he
says, 'Why Toby's nought but a mongrel; there's nought to look at in
her.' But I says to him, 'Why, what are you yoursen but a mongrel?
There wasn't much pickin' o' _your_ feyther an' mother, to look at
you.' Not but I like a bit o' breed myself, but I can't abide to see
one cur grinnin' at another. I wish you good evenin', Miss," said Bob,
abruptly taking up his pack again, under the consciousness that his
tongue was acting in an undisciplined manner.