Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth (12 page)

So now you know.

Next, you can ask yourself, Why is it
windmills
that the idealistic Don Quixote attacks in the belief that they are wicked giants? Why not, for instance, some other tall objects, such as trees or towers? But you already know the answer. The windmills go by themselves, and have a relentless juggernaut aspect to them, in addition to the evil repute that’s attached to them just because they’re mills. (In the wonderful opera
Don Quijote
by Cristóbal Halffter, mills are played by newspaper presses. Same idea, except now the mills are relentlessly grinding out news and rumours, both false and true.) Also, mills herald the coming Industrial Revolution, a thing Quixote intuits; and it, and everything it will bring with it, are bad news for a chivalric romantic like him, just as Vanity Fair is bad news for a religious romantic like John Bunyan.

William Blake recognized the same infernal qualities in mills. By the time he wrote his famous poem “Jerusalem,” with its “dark Satanic mills,” those mills were grinding out not only flour but fabric, and in the process gobbling up a lot of sickly wage slaves. But Blake’s mills came with a ready-made Satanic reputation — one they’d inherited through the long hereditary line of mills. That line continued through the nineteenth century, spinning out such testaments to the Industrial Revolution as Elizabeth Gaskell’s mill-town classic
Mary Barton
, and, in Canada, Frederick Philip Grove’s tycoon-o-drama,
The Master of the Mill
.

Now for millers. When I was in grade three, we still had singing in school. Time to bring it back, now that the brain experts have told us it isn’t a frill after all but a necessary aid in juvenile neural-pathway growth: short form, it makes kids smarter. At any rate, we did have singing back then, and we sang some odd songs. One of these was called “The Miller of Dee,” and in the version I learned, it went like this:

There was a jolly miller once
Lived on the River Dee;
He worked and sang from morn to night,
No lark so blithe as he;
And this the burden of his song
Was ever wont to be —
I care for nobody, no, not I,
And nobody cares for me.

Why, I wonder, did anyone think this sociopathic role model was an appropriate one for us tiny songsters? There are some cleaned-up versions in which the miller cares for nobody
if
nobody cares for him, and in which he’s made to stand as a model of sturdy English-yeoman financial independence; but I learned the one in which the miller doesn’t give a hoot about anybody else, and this is most likely the original. In her article entitled “Mills and Millers in Old and New World Folksong,” Jessica Banks tells us that millers in folklore are very often rendered as thieves and cheats who steal from the peasants by short-weighing and secretly diverting some of the flour they grind to their own use. There’s a seventeenth-century proverb that goes: “Put a miller, a weaver, and a tailor together in a bag and shake them, and the first one that comes out will be a thief.” In other words, all three professions are suspected of thievery. Why? Because, instead of growing something or making something — both of which result in tangibles, and are therefore understandable — they processed something: your grain into flour, your spun yarn into cloth, your woven cloth into clothing — and this value-added quality was hard to quantify. Also, some of the raw material could be pilfered.

It’s the cheating kind of miller who turns up in Chaucer’s “Reeve’s Tale.” This miller is wealthy and proud, and he manages to bag half a bushel of the meal that rightfully belongs to the two university clerks, or students, who’ve brought him the college’s grain to be ground. But, as one of them says, there’s a law that states “that if a man in one point be aggriev’d, Then in another he shall be reliev’d”; so they exact payment for their loss by foxily seducing both the miller’s daughter and his wife, thus underlining the fact that with debts — especially debts that involve the wronged party’s sense of honour — it’s not always with money that the debt is discharged.

The other fact it underlines is that a miller’s daughter is a dangerous thing to be, because you’re likely to get the fallout from the miller’s misdeeds. The ambiguous moral nature of mills and the sinister folkloric inheritance of millers are bound to attract trouble, and you may well find yourself right in the middle of that trouble.

There’s a Grimm’s tale called “The Girl Without Hands” that goes like this: a miller finds himself in financial difficulties, and finally he has nothing left but the mill and the apple tree that stands behind it. One day the miller meets a strange old man who says he’ll make the miller rich in return for what is standing behind the mill. The miller thinks he means the apple tree and signs a written contract. (This story should be mandatory reading for all young law students as a warning about using vague language in legally binding documents.) But the strange man is Old Scratch — we readers knew that already, because who else tempts you to sign contracts of this almost-free-lunch kind? — and what is standing behind the mill is the miller’s daughter.

The term of the contract is three years, and when the three years are up, the Devil appears to collect what’s due, and wants to carry away the miller’s daughter — who, in Jungian terms, is a stand-in for the better side of the miller’s soul. But she’s a pious girl, and washes herself very clean, and since cleanliness is next to godliness the Devil has no power over her. He orders the miller to take away her washing water so she’ll get dirty, but she cries so much on her hands that they stay very clean; so the Devil orders the hands cut off. But she similarly washes the stumps, so — three times lucky — the Devil has to go away, cheated of his bargain.

The rest of the story tells what happens to the miller’s daughter when she travels out into the world, being understandably reluctant to stay with a father who’s sold her to the Devil and cut off her hands. She’s protected by an angel, who helps her eat a pear from the king’s pear tree. This leads to marriage with the king, who makes her some silver hands. But the Devil still takes an interest in her, and tries to get her killed by the time-honoured device of exchanging the king’s letters with letters of his own that falsely accuse her of having given birth to a monster — the usual sign that a girl has been wicked and unchaste — and order her to be put to death; so off she goes into the world again, supplied with a second guardian angel. Since “The Girl Without Hands” is a fairy tale, it all comes out right for her, with the king restored, and a lovely child; and she’s been such a very good girl that her hands grow back as well.

George Eliot’s
The Mill on the Floss
is not a fairy tale. Maggie and Tom Tulliver live at Dorlecote Mill with their father, Mr. Tulliver, the miller, who finds himself in financial difficulties. He doesn’t meet the Devil and sign a contract with him, but he does the nineteenth-century equivalent: he puts himself and his family into danger because he’s prone to pigheaded lawsuits. His lawsuits are about who owns the rights to the water in the River Floss: Tulliver is fighting such things as dams and irrigation projects that he’s convinced will affect the flow of water to his mill. The lawyer acting for his opponents is Lawyer Wakem, and it’s upon this lawyer that Tulliver focuses his fury and resentment.

Tulliver is an honest miller, Eliot tells us repeatedly; she has to tell us repeatedly, because his honesty goes against type. It’s his adversary, Lawyer Wakem, who’s the crafty, tricky miller of folklore; and he actually becomes a miller, in a way, since he eventually buys Tulliver’s own mill. If Tulliver had been more dishonest, he might have grasped the rules of the game. As it is, he’s merely angry, and ill-advised, and baffled by what he calls “the raskills.” He loses his final lawsuit and has to pay heavy costs and damages, thus plunging himself and his family into debt, and the shock of losing everything causes him to have a stroke that renders him a temporary invalid. The mortgage on the mill is foreclosed, the household goods are seized and sold, and both Tom and Maggie — still teenagers — have to leave school and go out into the hard world of wage-earning to fend for themselves in the narrow provincial society that surrounds them.

This novel is usually read as the proto-feminist story of clever, impetuous, idealistic, passionate but thwarted Maggie Tulliver, a woman born before her time — which it largely is. But what if we read it as the story of Mr. Tulliver’s debt? For it’s this debt that’s the engine of the novel: it shoves the plot along, changes the mental states of the characters, and determines their scope of action. Without her father’s debts, Maggie might have attracted a solid husband, but as it is, she’s left penniless, which, in the nineteenth century, left her very vulnerable: not having money, then as now, severely limits one’s choices, in matters of shopping and pair-bonding both. Maggie’s a girl without hands, since in that era of limited opportunities for women there’s not much honest work she can do to earn real money, and she’s not skilled as a crafts-woman: even her sewing is plain rather than fancy.

Lonely, feeling abandoned, and shut out from the good things of life, she becomes entangled in an emotional quadrangle — Philip Wakem, son of Lawyer Wakem, loves her; she loves her cousin Lucy’s suitor Stephen; Stephen loves Maggie; Maggie feels loyal to Lucy. The upshot is that Maggie is wrongly suspected of sexual misconduct, like the girl with no hands. She’s a pious girl, and renounces Stephen because she feels that to accept him and marry him would violate her Christian principles: such an act would be selfish, and would betray her cousin Lucy. But there’s no guardian angel for Maggie: she’s ruined. Almost everyone casts her off, including the minister who at first tries to defend her — his parishioners are starting to talk — and especially her beloved though hard-hearted and unforgiving brother, Tom. The mothers out there will be pleased to know that Mrs. Tulliver sticks by her, though the support of such a matron has nowhere near the authority it would have among a group of chimpanzees.

But meanwhile, unfortunate, bankrupted Mr. Tulliver has remained at Dorlecote Mill in the capacity of its manager. His boss is his enemy, Lawyer Wakem, who’s bought the mill and hired Tulliver as a complicated act of revenge: “Prosperous men take a little vengeance now and then,” says Eliot, ”as they take a diversion, when it comes easily in their way, and is no hindrance to business; and such small unimpassioned revenges have an enormous effect in life, running through all degrees of pleasant infliction, blocking the fit men out of places, and blackening characters in unpremeditated talk.”

It’s the trickle-down theory of revenge, and Wakem is happy to participate in the process.

. . . it presented itself as a pleasure to him to do the very thing that would cause Mr. Tulliver the most deadly mortification, — and a pleasure of a complex kind, not made up of crude malice, but mingling with the relish of self-approbation. To see an enemy humiliated gives a certain contentment, but this is jejune compared with the highly blent satisfaction of seeing him humiliated by your benevolent action . . . That is a sort of revenge which falls into the scale of virtue, and Wakem was not without an intention of keeping that scale respectably filled.

Tulliver takes the job so he can stay in his beloved ancestral home and provide a little security for his wife, but he resents what Wakem is doing to him, and refuses to forgive him, because forgiveness is “how Old Harry props up the raskills.” He makes Tom write in the family Bible that neither Tulliver nor Tom will ever forgive Wakem, and that he wishes evil may befall him. Maggie protests that “it’s wicked to curse and bear malice,” and she’s right; it’s especially ill-omened to use the Bible for the writing paper in such a contract — for it is a contract, and Tom has to sign it. But who’s the other party to the contract? Is it God? We doubt it. Tom has no compunctions about signing, however, being not of a naturally forgiving nature.

Tom secures a place in business, and with unrelenting work and some clever trading on the side he earns enough to pay off his father’s debts. On the day the debts are discharged, Mr. Tulliver encounters Lawyer Wakem, who insults him again; but Tulliver now feels free to throw over the job, and he gives Wakem a thrashing, “to make things a bit more even in the world.” Then he has another stroke, and departs from the world while paying tribute to the ancient notions of balance and justice: “‘I had my turn,’ he says. ‘I beat him. That was nothing but fair. I never wanted anything but what was fair.’” Some debts can’t be discharged by money payments, and this is one of them. Tulliver’s been a debtor, but he also feels himself a creditor: Wakem “owes” him for the shabby treatment he’s inflicted on Tulliver, and the debt must be paid in pain and humiliation.

The conflict between Tulliver and Wakem is one we’ve seen before: the romantic and honest against the newfangled and mystifying and cynically exploitive — except that now the once-tricky and infernal mill and its miller are on the side of the old and naive, and the trickery now resides in the sharp practice of law. Power has moved from those who process material goods to those who process the contracts that govern them. Hermes — god of commerce, thieves, lies, contrivances, tricks, and mechanisms — has switched allegiances. And so it has remained to this day: we don’t make “cheating miller” jokes any more, but how many “cheating lawyer” jokes do you know?

Things don’t turn out well for the Tullivers, any more than they do for Don Quixote. Tulliver dies, and so — not long afterwards — do Tom and Maggie, who drown together in a flood, reconciled at the final moment. Like John Bunyan’s Christian in
The Pilgrim’s Progress
— a book much read by Tom and Maggie as children — they get their final reward by passing through the waters of death. As the saying goes, death pays all debts, which is true of the moral kind of debt anyway — the kind Maggie feels she owes to Lucy.