The Mill on the Floss (42 page)

"Dear heart, Mr. Tulliver, what can you be thinking of?" said
his wife, looking up in alarm; "it's very wasteful, breaking the
coal, and we've got hardly any large coal left, and I don't know
where the rest is to come from."

"I don't think you're quite so well to-night, are you, father?"
said Maggie; "you seem uneasy."

"Why, how is it Tom doesn't come?" said Mr. Tulliver,
impatiently.

"Dear heart! is it time? I must go and get his supper," said
Mrs. Tulliver, laying down her knitting, and leaving the room.

"It's nigh upon half-past eight," said Mr. Tulliver. "He'll be
here soon. Go, go and get the big Bible, and open it at the
beginning, where everything's set down. And get the pen and
ink."

Maggie obeyed, wondering; but her father gave no further orders,
and only sat listening for Tom's footfall on the gravel, apparently
irritated by the wind, which had risen, and was roaring so as to
drown all other sounds. There was a strange light in his eyes that
rather frightened Maggie;
she
began to wish that Tom would
come, too.

"There he is, then," said Mr. Tulliver, in an excited way, when
the knock came at last. Maggie went to open the door, but her
mother came out of the kitchen hurriedly, saying, "Stop a bit,
Maggie; I'll open it."

Mrs. Tulliver had begun to be a little frightened at her boy,
but she was jealous of every office others did for him.

"Your supper's ready by the kitchen-fire, my boy," she said, as
he took off his hat and coat. "You shall have it by yourself, just
as you like, and I won't speak to you."

"I think my father wants Tom, mother," said Maggie; "he must
come into the parlor first."

Tom entered with his usual saddened evening face, but his eyes
fell immediately on the open Bible and the inkstand, and he glanced
with a look of anxious surprise at his father, who was saying,–

"Come, come, you're late; I want you."

"Is there anything the matter, father?" said Tom.

"You sit down, all of you," said Mr. Tulliver, peremptorily.

"And, Tom, sit down here; I've got something for you to write i'
the Bible."

They all three sat down, looking at him. He began to speak
slowly, looking first at his wife.

"I've made up my mind, Bessy, and I'll be as good as my word to
you. There'll be the same grave made for us to lie down in, and we
mustn't be bearing one another ill-will. I'll stop in the old
place, and I'll serve under Wakem, and I'll serve him like an
honest man; there's no Tulliver but what's honest, mind that,
Tom,"–here his voice rose,–"they'll have it to throw up against me
as I paid a dividend, but it wasn't my fault; it was because
there's raskills in the world. They've been too many for me, and I
must give in. I'll put my neck in harness,–for you've a right to
say as I've brought you into trouble, Bessy,–and I'll serve him as
honest as if he was no raskill; I'm an honest man, though I shall
never hold my head up no more. I'm a tree as is broke–a tree as is
broke."

He paused and looked on the ground. Then suddenly raising his
head, he said, in a louder yet deeper tone:

"But I won't forgive him! I know what they say, he never meant
me any harm. That's the way Old Harry props up the rascals. He's
been at the bottom of everything; but he's a fine gentleman,–I
know, I know. I shouldn't ha' gone to law, they say. But who made
it so as there was no arbitratin', and no justice to be got? It
signifies nothing to him, I know that; he's one o' them fine
gentlemen as get money by doing business for poorer folks, and when
he's made beggars of 'em he'll give 'em charity. I won't forgive
him! I wish he might be punished with shame till his own son 'ud
like to forget him. I wish he may do summat as they'd make him work
at the treadmill! But he won't,–he's too big a raskill to let the
law lay hold on him. And you mind this, Tom,–you never forgive him
neither, if you mean to be my son. There'll maybe come a time when
you may make him feel; it'll never come to me; I'n got my head
under the yoke. Now write–write it i' the Bible."

"Oh, father, what?" said Maggie, sinking down by his knee, pale
and trembling. "It's wicked to curse and bear malice."

"It isn't wicked, I tell you," said her father, fiercely. "It's
wicked as the raskills should prosper; it's the Devil's doing. Do
as I tell you, Tom. Write."

"What am I to write?" said Tom, with gloomy submission.

"Write as your father, Edward Tulliver, took service under John
Wakem, the man as had helped to ruin him, because I'd promised my
wife to make her what amends I could for her trouble, and because I
wanted to die in th' old place where I was born and my father was
born. Put that i' the right words–you know how–and then write, as I
don't forgive Wakem for all that; and for all I'll serve him
honest, I wish evil may befall him. Write that."

There was a dead silence as Tom's pen moved along the paper;
Mrs. Tulliver looked scared, and Maggie trembled like a leaf.

"Now let me hear what you've wrote," said Mr. Tulliver, Tom read
aloud slowly.

"Now write–write as you'll remember what Wakem's done to your
father, and you'll make him and his feel it, if ever the day comes.
And sign your name Thomas Tulliver."

"Oh no, father, dear father!" said Maggie, almost choked with
fear. "You shouldn't make Tom write that."

"Be quiet, Maggie!" said Tom. "I
shall
write it."

Book IV
The Valley of Humiliation

Chapter I
A Variation of Protestantism Unknown to Bossuet

Journeying down the Rhone on a summer's day, you have perhaps
felt the sunshine made dreary by those ruined villages which stud
the banks in certain parts of its course, telling how the swift
river once rose, like an angry, destroying god, sweeping down the
feeble generations whose breath is in their nostrils, and making
their dwellings a desolation. Strange contrast, you may have
thought, between the effect produced on us by these dismal remnants
of commonplace houses, which in their best days were but the sign
of a sordid life, belonging in all its details to our own vulgar
era, and the effect produced by those ruins on the castled Rhine,
which have crumbled and mellowed into such harmony with the green
and rocky steeps that they seem to have a natural fitness, like the
mountain-pine; nay, even in the day when they were built they must
have had this fitness, as if they had been raised by an earth-born
race, who had inherited from their mighty parent a sublime instinct
of form. And that was a day of romance; If those robber-barons were
somewhat grim and drunken ogres, they had a certain grandeur of the
wild beast in them,–they were forest boars with tusks, tearing and
rending, not the ordinary domestic grunter; they represented the
demon forces forever in collision with beauty, virtue, and the
gentle uses of life; they made a fine contrast in the picture with
the wandering minstrel, the soft-lipped princess, the pious
recluse, and the timid Israelite. That was a time of color, when
the sunlight fell on glancing steel and floating banners; a time of
adventure and fierce struggle,–nay, of living, religious art and
religious enthusiasm; for were not cathedrals built in those days,
and did not great emperors leave their Western palaces to die
before the infidel strongholds in the sacred East? Therefore it is
that these Rhine castles thrill me with a sense of poetry; they
belong to the grand historic life of humanity, and raise up for me
the vision of an echo. But these dead-tinted, hollow-eyed, angular
skeletons of villages on the Rhone oppress me with the feeling that
human life–very much of it–is a narrow, ugly, grovelling existence,
which even calamity does not elevate, but rather tends to exhibit
in all its bare vulgarity of conception; and I have a cruel
conviction that the lives these ruins are the traces of were part
of a gross sum of obscure vitality, that will be swept into the
same oblivion with the generations of ants and beavers.

Perhaps something akin to this oppressive feeling may have
weighed upon you in watching this old-fashioned family life on the
banks of the Floss, which even sorrow hardly suffices to lift above
the level of the tragi-comic. It is a sordid life, you say, this of
the Tullivers and Dodsons, irradiated by no sublime principles, no
romantic visions, no active, self-renouncing faith; moved by none
of those wild, uncontrollable passions which create the dark
shadows of misery and crime; without that primitive, rough
simplicity of wants, that hard, submissive, ill-paid toil, that
childlike spelling-out of what nature has written, which gives its
poetry to peasant life. Here one has conventional worldly notions
and habits without instruction and without polish, surely the most
prosaic form of human life; proud respectability in a gig of
unfashionable build; worldliness without side-dishes. Observing
these people narrowly, even when the iron hand of misfortune has
shaken them from their unquestioning hold on the world, one sees
little trace of religion, still less of a distinctively Christian
creed. Their belief in the Unseen, so far as it manifests itself at
all, seems to be rather a pagan kind; their moral notions, though
held with strong tenacity, seem to have no standard beyond
hereditary custom. You could not live among such people; you are
stifled for want of an outlet toward something beautiful, great, or
noble; you are irritated with these dull men and women, as a kind
of population out of keeping with the earth on which they
live,–with this rich plain where the great river flows forever
onward, and links the small pulse of the old English town with the
beatings of the world's mighty heart. A vigorous superstition, that
lashes its gods or lashes its own back, seems to be more congruous
with the mystery of the human lot, than the mental condition of
these emmet-like Dodsons and Tullivers.

I share with you this sense of oppressive narrowness; but it is
necessary that we should feel it, if we care to understand how it
acted on the lives of Tom and Maggie,–how it has acted on young
natures in many generations, that in the onward tendency of human
things have risen above the mental level of the generation before
them, to which they have been nevertheless tied by the strongest
fibres of their hearts. The suffering, whether of martyr or victim,
which belongs to every historical advance of mankind, is
represented in this way in every town, and by hundreds of obscure
hearths; and we need not shrink from this comparison of small
things with great; for does not science tell us that its highest
striving is after the ascertainment of a unity which shall bind the
smallest things with the greatest? In natural science, I have
understood, there is nothing petty to the mind that has a large
vision of relations, and to which every single object suggests a
vast sum of conditions. It is surely the same with the observation
of human life.

Certainly the religious and moral ideas of the Dodsons and
Tullivers were of too specific a kind to be arrived at deductively,
from the statement that they were part of the Protestant population
of Great Britain. Their theory of life had its core of soundness,
as all theories must have on which decent and prosperous families
have been reared and have flourished; but it had the very slightest
tincture of theology. If, in the maiden days of the Dodson sisters,
their Bibles opened more easily at some parts than others, it was
because of dried tulip-petals, which had been distributed quite
impartially, without preference for the historical, devotional, or
doctrinal. Their religion was of a simple, semi-pagan kind, but
there was no heresy in it,–if heresy properly means choice,–for
they didn't know there was any other religion, except that of
chapel-goers, which appeared to run in families, like asthma. How
should
they know? The vicar of their pleasant rural parish
was not a controversialist, but a good hand at whist, and one who
had a joke always ready for a blooming female parishioner. The
religion of the Dodsons consisted in revering whatever was
customary and respectable; it was necessary to be baptized, else
one could not be buried in the church-yard, and to take the
sacrament before death, as a security against more dimly understood
perils; but it was of equal necessity to have the proper
pall-bearers and well-cured hams at one's funeral, and to leave an
unimpeachable will. A Dodson would not be taxed with the omission
of anything that was becoming, or that belonged to that eternal
fitness of things which was plainly indicated in the practice of
the most substantial parishioners, and in the family
traditions,–such as obedience to parents, faithfulness to kindred,
industry, rigid honesty, thrift, the thorough scouring of wooden
and copper utensils, the hoarding of coins likely to disappear from
the currency, the production of first-rate commodities for the
market, and the general preference of whatever was home-made. The
Dodsons were a very proud race, and their pride lay in the utter
frustration of all desire to tax them with a breach of traditional
duty or propriety. A wholesome pride in many respects, since it
identified honor with perfect integrity, thoroughness of work, and
faithfulness to admitted rules; and society owes some worthy
qualities in many of her members to mothers of the Dodson class,
who made their butter and their fromenty well, and would have felt
disgraced to make it otherwise. To be honest and poor was never a
Dodson motto, still less to seem rich though being poor; rather,
the family badge was to be honest and rich, and not only rich, but
richer than was supposed. To live respected, and have the proper
bearers at your funeral, was an achievement of the ends of
existence that would be entirely nullified if, on the reading of
your will, you sank in the opinion of your fellow-men, either by
turning out to be poorer than they expected, or by leaving your
money in a capricious manner, without strict regard to degrees of
kin. The right thing must always be done toward kindred. The right
thing was to correct them severely, if they were other than a
credit to the family, but still not to alienate from them the
smallest rightful share in the family shoebuckles and other
property. A conspicuous quality in the Dodson character was its
genuineness; its vices and virtues alike were phases of a proud
honest egoism, which had a hearty dislike to whatever made against
its own credit and interest, and would be frankly hard of speech to
inconvenient "kin," but would never forsake or ignore them,–would
not let them want bread, but only require them to eat it with
bitter herbs.