The Mill on the Floss (21 page)

Mrs. Glegg did not alter her will in consequence of this letter,
and cut off the Tulliver children from their sixth and seventh
share in her thousand pounds; for she had her principles. No one
must be able to say of her when she was dead that she had not
divided her money with perfect fairness among her own kin. In the
matter of wills, personal qualities were subordinate to the great
fundamental fact of blood; and to be determined in the distribution
of your property by caprice, and not make your legacies bear a
direct ratio to degrees of kinship, was a prospective disgrace that
would have embittered her life. This had always been a principle in
the Dodson family; it was one form of that sense of honor and
rectitude which was a proud tradition in such families,–a tradition
which has been the salt of our provincial society.

But though the letter could not shake Mrs. Glegg's principles,
it made the family breach much more difficult to mend; and as to
the effect it produced on Mrs. Glegg's opinion of Mr. Tulliver, she
begged to be understood from that time forth that she had nothing
whatever to say about him; his state of mind, apparently, was too
corrupt for her to contemplate it for a moment. It was not until
the evening before Tom went to school, at the beginning of August,
that Mrs. Glegg paid a visit to her sister Tulliver, sitting in her
gig all the while, and showing her displeasure by markedly
abstaining from all advice and criticism; for, as she observed to
her sister Deane, "Bessy must bear the consequence o' having such a
husband, though I'm sorry for her," and Mrs. Deane agreed that
Bessy was pitiable.

That evening Tom observed to Maggie: "Oh my! Maggie, aunt
Glegg's beginning to come again; I'm glad I'm going to school.
You'll
catch it all now!"

Maggie was already so full of sorrow at the thought of Tom's
going away from her, that this playful exultation of his seemed
very unkind, and she cried herself to sleep that night.

Mr. Tulliver's prompt procedure entailed on him further
promptitude in finding the convenient person who was desirous of
lending five hundred pounds on bond. "It must be no client of
Wakem's," he said to himself; and yet at the end of a fortnight it
turned out to the contrary; not because Mr. Tulliver's will was
feeble, but because external fact was stronger. Wakem's client was
the only convenient person to be found. Mr. Tulliver had a destiny
as well as Œdipus, and in this case he might plead, like Œdipus,
that his deed was inflicted on him rather than committed by
him.

Book II
School-Time

Chapter I
Tom's "First Half"

Tom Tulliver'S sufferings during the first quarter he was at
King's Lorton, under the distinguished care of the Rev. Walter
Stelling, were rather severe. At Mr. Jacob's academy life had not
presented itself to him as a difficult problem; there were plenty
of fellows to play with, and Tom being good at all active
games,–fighting especially,–had that precedence among them which
appeared to him inseparable from the personality of Tom Tulliver.
Mr. Jacobs himself, familiarly known as Old Goggles, from his habit
of wearing spectacles, imposed no painful awe; and if it was the
property of snuffy old hypocrites like him to write like
copperplate and surround their signatures with arabesques, to spell
without forethought, and to spout "my name is Norval" without
bungling, Tom, for his part, was glad he was not in danger of those
mean accomplishments. He was not going to be a snuffy schoolmaster,
he, but a substantial man, like his father, who used to go hunting
when he was younger, and rode a capital black mare,–as pretty a bit
of horse-flesh as ever you saw; Tom had heard what her points were
a hundred times.
He
meant to go hunting too, and to be
generally respected. When people were grown up, he considered,
nobody inquired about their writing and spelling; when he was a
man, he should be master of everything, and do just as he liked. It
had been very difficult for him to reconcile himself to the idea
that his school-time was to be prolonged and that he was not to be
brought up to his father's business, which he had always thought
extremely pleasant; for it was nothing but riding about, giving
orders, and going to market; and he thought that a clergyman would
give him a great many Scripture lessons, and probably make him
learn the Gospel and Epistle on a Sunday, as well as the Collect.
But in the absence of specific information, it was impossible for
him to imagine that school and a schoolmaster would be something
entirely different from the academy of Mr. Jacobs. So, not to be at
a deficiency, in case of his finding genial companions, he had
taken care to carry with him a small box of percussion-caps; not
that there was anything particular to be done with them, but they
would serve to impress strange boys with a sense of his familiarity
with guns. Thus poor Tom, though he saw very clearly through
Maggie's illusions, was not without illusions of his own, which
were to be cruelly dissipated by his enlarged experience at King's
Lorton.

He had not been there a fortnight before it was evident to him
that life, complicated not only with the Latin grammar but with a
new standard of English pronunciation, was a very difficult
business, made all the more obscure by a thick mist of bash
fulness. Tom, as you have observed, was never an exception among
boys for ease of address; but the difficulty of enunciating a
monosyllable in reply to Mr. or Mrs. Stelling was so great, that he
even dreaded to be asked at table whether he would have more
pudding. As to the percussion-caps, he had almost resolved, in the
bitterness of his heart, that he would throw them into a
neighboring pond; for not only was he the solitary pupil, but he
began even to have a certain scepticism about guns, and a general
sense that his theory of life was undermined. For Mr. Stelling
thought nothing of guns, or horses either, apparently; and yet it
was impossible for Tom to despise Mr. Stelling as he had despised
Old Goggles. If there were anything that was not thoroughly genuine
about Mr. Stelling, it lay quite beyond Tom's power to detect it;
it is only by a wide comparison of facts that the wisest full-grown
man can distinguish well-rolled barrels from mere supernal
thunder.

Mr. Stelling was a well-sized, broad-chested man, not yet
thirty, with flaxen hair standing erect, and large lightish-gray
eyes, which were always very wide open; he had a sonorous bass
voice, and an air of defiant self-confidence inclining to
brazenness. He had entered on his career with great vigor, and
intended to make a considerable impression on his fellowmen. The
Rev. Walter Stelling was not a man who would remain among the
"inferior clergy" all his life. He had a true British determination
to push his way in the world,–as a schoolmaster, in the first
place, for there were capital masterships of grammar-schools to be
had, and Mr. Stelling meant to have one of them; but as a preacher
also, for he meant always to preach in a striking manner, so as to
have his congregation swelled by admirers from neighboring
parishes, and to produce a great sensation whenever he took
occasional duty for a brother clergyman of minor gifts. The style
of preaching he had chosen was the extemporaneous, which was held
little short of the miraculous in rural parishes like King's
Lorton. Some passages of Massillon and Bourdaloue, which he knew by
heart, were really very effective when rolled out in Mr. Stelling's
deepest tones; but as comparatively feeble appeals of his own were
delivered in the same loud and impressive manner, they were often
thought quite as striking by his hearers. Mr. Stelling's doctrine
was of no particular school; if anything, it had a tinge of
evangelicalism, for that was "the telling thing" just then in the
diocese to which King's Lorton belonged. In short, Mr. Stelling was
a man who meant to rise in his profession, and to rise by merit,
clearly, since he had no interest beyond what might be promised by
a problematic relationship to a great lawyer who had not yet become
Lord Chancellor. A clergyman who has such vigorous intentions
naturally gets a little into debt at starting; it is not to be
expected that he will live in the meagre style of a man who means
to be a poor curate all his life; and if the few hundreds Mr.
Timpson advanced toward his daughter's fortune did not suffice for
the purchase of handsome furniture, together with a stock of wine,
a grand piano, and the laying out of a superior flower-garden, it
followed in the most rigorous manner, either that these things must
be procured by some other means, or else that the Rev. Mr. Stelling
must go without them, which last alternative would be an absurd
procrastination of the fruits of success, where success was
certain. Mr. Stelling was so broad-chested and resolute that he
felt equal to anything; he would become celebrated by shaking the
consciences of his hearers, and he would by and by edit a Greek
play, and invent several new readings. He had not yet selected the
play, for having been married little more than two years, his
leisure time had been much occupied with attentions to Mrs.
Stelling; but he had told that fine woman what he meant to do some
day, and she felt great confidence in her husband, as a man who
understood everything of that sort.

But the immediate step to future success was to bring on Tom
Tulliver during this first half-year; for, by a singular
coincidence, there had been some negotiation concerning another
pupil from the same neighborhood and it might further a decision in
Mr. Stelling's favor, if it were understood that young Tulliver,
who, Mr. Stelling observed in conjugal privacy, was rather a rough
cub, had made prodigious progress in a short time. It was on this
ground that he was severe with Tom about his lessons; he was
clearly a boy whose powers would never be developed through the
medium of the Latin grammar, without the application of some
sternness. Not that Mr. Stelling was a harsh-tempered or unkind
man; quite the contrary. He was jocose with Tom at table, and
corrected his provincialisms and his deportment in the most playful
manner; but poor Tom was only the more cowed and confused by this
double novelty, for he had never been used to jokes at all like Mr.
Stelling's; and for the first time in his life he had a painful
sense that he was all wrong somehow. When Mr. Stelling said, as the
roast-beef was being uncovered, "Now, Tulliver! which would you
rather decline, roast-beef or the Latin for it?" Tom, to whom in
his coolest moments a pun would have been a hard nut, was thrown
into a state of embarrassed alarm that made everything dim to him
except the feeling that he would rather not have anything to do
with Latin; of course he answered, "Roast-beef," whereupon there
followed much laughter and some practical joking with the plates,
from which Tom gathered that he had in some mysterious way refused
beef, and, in fact, made himself appear "a silly." If he could have
seen a fellow-pupil undergo these painful operations and survive
them in good spirits, he might sooner have taken them as a matter
of course. But there are two expensive forms of education, either
of which a parent may procure for his son by sending him as
solitary pupil to a clergyman: one is the enjoyment of the reverend
gentleman's undivided neglect; the other is the endurance of the
reverend gentleman's undivided attention. It was the latter
privilege for which Mr. Tulliver paid a high price in Tom's
initiatory months at King's Lorton.

That respectable miller and maltster had left Tom behind, and
driven homeward in a state of great mental satisfaction. He
considered that it was a happy moment for him when he had thought
of asking Riley's advice about a tutor for Tom. Mr. Stelling's eyes
were so wide open, and he talked in such an off-hand,
matter-of-fact way, answering every difficult, slow remark of Mr.
Tulliver's with, "I see, my good sir, I see"; "To be sure, to be
sure"; "You want your son to be a man who will make his way in the
world,"–that Mr. Tulliver was delighted to find in him a clergyman
whose knowledge was so applicable to the every-day affairs of this
life. Except Counsellor Wylde, whom he had heard at the last
sessions, Mr. Tulliver thought the Rev. Mr Stelling was the
shrewdest fellow he had ever met with,–not unlike Wylde, in fact;
he had the same way of sticking his thumbs in the armholes of his
waistcoat. Mr. Tulliver was not by any means an exception in
mistaking brazenness for shrewdness; most laymen thought Stelling
shrewd, and a man of remarkable powers generally; it was chiefly by
his clerical brethren that he was considered rather a dull fellow.
But he told Mr. Tulliver several stories about "Swing" and
incendiarism, and asked his advice about feeding pigs in so
thoroughly secular and judicious a manner, with so much polished
glibness of tongue, that the miller thought, here was the very
thing he wanted for Tom. He had no doubt this first-rate man was
acquainted with every branch of information, and knew exactly what
Tom must learn in order to become a match for the lawyers, which
poor Mr. Tulliver himself did
not
know, and so was
necessarily thrown for self-direction on this wide kind of
inference. It is hardly fair to laugh at him, for I have known much
more highly instructed persons than he make inferences quite as
wide, and not at all wiser.

As for Mrs. Tulliver, finding that Mrs. Stelling's views as to
the airing of linen and the frequent recurrence of hunger in a
growing boy entirely coincided with her own; moreover, that Mrs.
Stelling, though so young a woman, and only anticipating her second
confinement, had gone through very nearly the same experience as
herself with regard to the behavior and fundamental character of
the monthly nurse,–she expressed great contentment to her husband,
when they drove away, at leaving Tom with a woman who, in spite of
her youth, seemed quite sensible and motherly, and asked advice as
prettily as could be.