The Mill on the Floss (37 page)

Two hours ago, as Tom was walking to St. Ogg's, he saw the
distant future before him as he might have seen a tempting stretch
of smooth sandy beach beyond a belt of flinty shingles; he was on
the grassy bank then, and thought the shingles might soon be
passed. But now his feet were on the sharp stones; the belt of
shingles had widened, and the stretch of sand had dwindled into
narrowness.

"What did my Uncle Deane say, Tom?" said Maggie, putting her arm
through Tom's as he was warming himself rather drearily by the
kitchen fire. "Did he say he would give you a situation?"

"No, he didn't say that. He didn't quite promise me anything; he
seemed to think I couldn't have a very good situation. I'm too
young."

"But didn't he speak kindly, Tom?"

"Kindly? Pooh! what's the use of talking about that? I wouldn't
care about his speaking kindly, if I could get a situation. But
it's such a nuisance and bother; I've been at school all this while
learning Latin and things,–not a bit of good to me,–and now my
uncle says I must set about learning book-keeping and calculation,
and those things. He seems to make out I'm good for nothing."

Tom's mouth twitched with a bitter expression as he looked at
the fire.

"Oh, what a pity we haven't got Dominie Sampson!" said Maggie,
who couldn't help mingling some gayety with their sadness. "If he
had taught me book-keeping by double entry and after the Italian
method, as he did Lucy Bertram, I could teach you, Tom."

"
You
teach! Yes, I dare say. That's always the tone you
take," said Tom.

"Dear Tom, I was only joking," said Maggie, putting her cheek
against his coat-sleeve.

"But it's always the same, Maggie," said Tom, with the little
frown he put on when he was about to be justifiably severe. "You're
always setting yourself up above me and every one else, and I've
wanted to tell you about it several times. You ought not to have
spoken as you did to my uncles and aunts; you should leave it to me
to take care of my mother and you, and not put yourself forward.
You think you know better than any one, but you're almost always
wrong. I can judge much better than you can."

Poor Tom! he had just come from being lectured and made to feel
his inferiority; the reaction of his strong, self-asserting nature
must take place somehow; and here was a case in which he could
justly show himself dominant. Maggie's cheek flushed and her lip
quivered with conflicting resentment and affection, and a certain
awe as well as admiration of Tom's firmer and more effective
character. She did not answer immediately; very angry words rose to
her lips, but they were driven back again, and she said at
last:

"You often think I'm conceited, Tom, when I don't mean what I
say at all in that way. I don't mean to put myself above you; I
know you behaved better than I did yesterday. But you are always so
harsh to me, Tom."

With the last words the resentment was rising again.

"No, I'm not harsh," said Tom, with severe decision. "I'm always
kind to you, and so I shall be; I shall always take care of you.
But you must mind what I say."

Their mother came in now, and Maggie rushed away, that her burst
of tears, which she felt must come, might not happen till she was
safe upstairs. They were very bitter tears; everybody in the world
seemed so hard and unkind to Maggie; there was no indulgence, no
fondness, such as she imagined when she fashioned the world afresh
in her own thoughts. In books there were people who were always
agreeable or tender, and delighted to do things that made one
happy, and who did not show their kindness by finding fault. The
world outside the books was not a happy one, Maggie felt; it seemed
to be a world where people behaved the best to those they did not
pretend to love, and that did not belong to them. And if life had
no love in it, what else was there for Maggie? Nothing but poverty
and the companionship of her mother's narrow griefs, perhaps of her
father's heart-cutting childish dependence. There is no
hopelessness so sad as that of early youth, when the soul is made
up of wants, and has no long memories, no superadded life in the
life of others; though we who looked on think lightly of such
premature despair, as if our vision of the future lightened the
blind sufferer's present.

Maggie, in her brown frock, with her eyes reddened and her heavy
hair pushed back, looking from the bed where her father lay to the
dull walls of this sad chamber which was the centre of her world,
was a creature full of eager, passionate longings for all that was
beautiful and glad; thirsty for all knowledge; with an ear
straining after dreamy music that died away and would not come near
to her; with a blind, unconscious yearning for something that would
link together the wonderful impressions of this mysterious life,
and give her soul a sense of home in it.

No wonder, when there is this contrast between the outward and
the inward, that painful collisions come of it.

Chapter VI
Tending to Refute the Popular Prejudice against the Present of a
Pocket-Knife

In that dark time of December, the sale of the household
furniture lasted beyond the middle of the second day. Mr. Tulliver,
who had begun, in his intervals of consciousness, to manifest an
irritability which often appeared to have as a direct effect the
recurrence of spasmodic rigidity and insensibility, had lain in
this living death throughout the critical hours when the noise of
the sale came nearest to his chamber. Mr. Turnbull had decided that
it would be a less risk to let him remain where he was than to
remove him to Luke's cottage,–a plan which the good Luke had
proposed to Mrs. Tulliver, thinking it would be very bad if the
master were "to waken up" at the noise of the sale; and the wife
and children had sat imprisoned in the silent chamber, watching the
large prostrate figure on the bed, and trembling lest the blank
face should suddenly show some response to the sounds which fell on
their own ears with such obstinate, painful repetition.

But it was over at last, that time of importunate certainty and
eye-straining suspense. The sharp sound of a voice, almost as
metallic as the rap that followed it, had ceased; the tramping of
footsteps on the gravel had died out. Mrs. Tulliver's blond face
seemed aged ten years by the last thirty hours; the poor woman's
mind had been busy divining when her favorite things were being
knocked down by the terrible hammer; her heart had been fluttering
at the thought that first one thing and then another had gone to be
identified as hers in the hateful publicity of the Golden Lion; and
all the while she had to sit and make no sign of this inward
agitation. Such things bring lines in well-rounded faces, and
broaden the streaks of white among the hairs that once looked as if
they had been dipped in pure sunshine. Already, at three o'clock,
Kezia, the good-hearted, bad-tempered housemaid, who regarded all
people that came to the sale as her personal enemies, the dirt on
whose feet was of a peculiarly vile quality, had begun to scrub and
swill with an energy much assisted by a continual low muttering
against "folks as came to buy up other folk's things," and made
light of "scrazing" the tops of mahogany tables over which better
folks than themselves had had to–suffer a waste of tissue through
evaporation. She was not scrubbing indiscriminately, for there
would be further dirt of the same atrocious kind made by people who
had still to fetch away their purchases; but she was bent on
bringing the parlor, where that "pipe-smoking pig," the bailiff,
had sat, to such an appearance of scant comfort as could be given
to it by cleanliness and the few articles of furniture bought in
for the family. Her mistress and the young folks should have their
tea in it that night, Kezia was determined.

It was between five and six o'clock, near the usual teatime,
when she came upstairs and said that Master Tom was wanted. The
person who wanted him was in the kitchen, and in the first moments,
by the imperfect fire and candle light, Tom had not even an
indefinite sense of any acquaintance with the rather broad-set but
active figure, perhaps two years older than himself, that looked at
him with a pair of blue eyes set in a disc of freckles, and pulled
some curly red locks with a strong intention of respect. A
low-crowned oilskin-covered hat, and a certain shiny deposit of
dirt on the rest of the costume, as of tablets prepared for writing
upon, suggested a calling that had to do with boats; but this did
not help Tom's memory.

"Sarvant, Master Tom," said he of the red locks, with a smile
which seemed to break through a self-imposed air of melancholy.
"You don't know me again, I doubt," he went on, as Tom continued to
look at him inquiringly; "but I'd like to talk to you by yourself a
bit, please."

"There's a fire i' the parlor, Master Tom," said Kezia, who
objected to leaving the kitchen in the crisis of toasting.

"Come this way, then," said Tom, wondering if this young fellow
belonged to Guest & Co.'s Wharf, for his imagination ran
continually toward that particular spot; and uncle Deane might any
time be sending for him to say that there was a situation at
liberty.

The bright fire in the parlor was the only light that showed the
few chairs, the bureau, the carpetless floor, and the one table–no,
not the
one
table; there was a second table, in a corner,
with a large Bible and a few other books upon it. It was this new
strange bareness that Tom felt first, before he thought of looking
again at the face which was also lit up by the fire, and which
stole a half-shy, questioning glance at him as the entirely strange
voice said:

"Why! you don't remember Bob, then, as you gen the pocket-knife
to, Mr. Tom?"

The rough-handled pocket-knife was taken out in the same moment,
and the largest blade opened by way of irresistible
demonstration.

"What! Bob Jakin?" said Tom, not with any cordial delight, for
he felt a little ashamed of that early intimacy symbolized by the
pocket-knife, and was not at all sure that Bob's motives for
recalling it were entirely admirable.

"Ay, ay, Bob Jakin, if Jakin it must be, 'cause there's so many
Bobs as you went arter the squerrils with, that day as I plumped
right down from the bough, and bruised my shins a good un–but I got
the squerril tight for all that, an' a scratter it was. An' this
littlish blade's broke, you see, but I wouldn't hev a new un put
in, 'cause they might be cheatin' me an' givin' me another knife
instid, for there isn't such a blade i' the country,–it's got used
to my hand, like. An' there was niver nobody else gen me nothin'
but what I got by my own sharpness, only you, Mr. Tom; if it wasn't
Bill Fawks as gen me the terrier pup istid o' drowndin't it, an' I
had to jaw him a good un afore he'd give it me."

Bob spoke with a sharp and rather treble volubility, and got
through his long speech with surprising despatch, giving the blade
of his knife an affectionate rub on his sleeve when he had
finished.

"Well, Bob," said Tom, with a slight air of patronage, the
foregoing reminscences having disposed him to be as friendly as was
becoming, though there was no part of his acquaintance with Bob
that he remembered better than the cause of their parting quarrel;
"is there anything I can do for you?"

"Why, no, Mr. Tom," answered Bob, shutting up his knife with a
click and returning it to his pocket, where he seemed to be feeling
for something else. "I shouldn't ha' come back upon you now ye're
i' trouble, an' folks say as the master, as I used to frighten the
birds for, an' he flogged me a bit for fun when he catched me
eatin' the turnip, as they say he'll niver lift up his head no
more,–I shouldn't ha' come now to ax you to gi' me another knife
'cause you gen me one afore. If a chap gives me one black eye,
that's enough for me; I sha'n't ax him for another afore I sarve
him out; an' a good turn's worth as much as a bad un, anyhow. I
shall niver grow down'ards again, Mr. Tom, an' you war the little
chap as I liked the best when
I
war a little chap, for all
you leathered me, and wouldn't look at me again. There's Dick
Brumby, there, I could leather him as much as I'd a mind; but lors!
you get tired o' leatherin' a chap when you can niver make him see
what you want him to shy at. I'n seen chaps as 'ud stand starin' at
a bough till their eyes shot out, afore they'd see as a bird's tail
warn't a leaf. It's poor work goin' wi' such raff. But you war
allays a rare un at shying, Mr. Tom, an' I could trusten to you for
droppin' down wi' your stick in the nick o' time at a runnin' rat,
or a stoat, or that, when I war a-beatin' the bushes."

Bob had drawn out a dirty canvas bag, and would perhaps not have
paused just then if Maggie had not entered the room and darted a
look of surprise and curiosity at him, whereupon he pulled his red
locks again with due respect. But the next moment the sense of the
altered room came upon Maggie with a force that overpowered the
thought of Bob's presence. Her eyes had immediately glanced from
him to the place where the bookcase had hung; there was nothing now
but the oblong unfaded space on the wall, and below it the small
table with the Bible and the few other books.

"Oh, Tom!" she burst out, clasping her hands, "where are the
books? I thought my uncle Glegg said he would buy them. Didn't he?
Are those all they've left us?"

"I suppose so," said Tom, with a sort of desperate indifference.
"Why should they buy many books when they bought so little
furniture?"

"Oh, but, Tom," said Maggie, her eyes filling with tears, as she
rushed up to the table to see what books had been rescued. "Our
dear old Pilgrim's Progress that you colored with your little
paints; and that picture of Pilgrim with a mantle on, looking just
like a turtle–oh dear!" Maggie went on, half sobbing as she turned
over the few books, "I thought we should never part with that while
we lived; everything is going away from us; the end of our lives
will have nothing in it like the beginning!"