The Mill on the Floss (43 page)

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.