The Mill on the Floss (27 page)

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
divinæ particulum
auræ
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.