The Mill on the Floss

Chapter II

The Torn Nest Is Pierced by the Thorns

There is something sustaining in the very agitation that accompaniesthe first shocks of trouble, just as an acute pain is often astimulus, and produces an excitement which is transient strength. Itis in the slow, changed life that follows; in the time when sorrow hasbecome stale, and has no longer an emotive intensity that counteractsits pain; in the time when day follows day in dull, unexpectantsameness, and trial is a dreary routine,--it is then that despairthreatens; it is then that the peremptory hunger of the soul is felt,and eye and ear are strained after some unlearned secret of ourexistence, which shall give to endurance the nature of satisfaction.

This time of utmost need was come to Maggie, with her short span ofthirteen years. To the usual precocity of the girl, she added thatearly experience of struggle, of conflict between the inward impulseand outward fact, which is the lot of every imaginative and passionatenature; and the years since she hammered the nails into her woodenFetish among the worm-eaten shelves of the attic had been filled withso eager a life in the triple world of Reality, Books, and WakingDreams, that Maggie was strangely old for her years in everythingexcept in her entire want of that prudence and self-command which werethe qualities that made Tom manly in the midst of his intellectualboyishness. And now her lot was beginning to have a still, sadmonotony, which threw her more than ever on her inward self. Herfather 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 andfro every morning and evening, and became more and more silent in theshort intervals at home; what was there to say? One day was likeanother; and Tom's interest in life, driven back and crushed on everyother side, was concentrating itself into the one channel of ambitiousresistance to misfortune. The peculiarities of his father and motherwere very irksome to him, now they were laid bare of all the softeningaccompaniments 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, herplacid household activity; how could she? The objects among which hermind had moved complacently were all gone,--all the little hopes andschemes and speculations, all the pleasant little cares about hertreasures which had made the world quite comprehensible to her for aquarter of a century, since she had made her first purchase of thesugar-tongs, had been suddenly snatched away from her, and sheremained bewildered in this empty life. Why that should have happenedto her which had not happened to other women remained an insolublequestion by which she expressed her perpetual ruminating comparison ofthe past with the present. It was piteous to see the comely womangetting thinner and more worn under a bodily as well as mentalrestlessness, which made her often wander about the empty house afterher work was done, until Maggie, becoming alarmed about her, wouldseek her, and bring her down by telling her how it vexed Tom that shewas injuring her health by never sitting down and resting herself. Yetamidst this helpless imbecility there was a touching trait of humble,self-devoting maternity, which made Maggie feel tenderly toward herpoor mother amidst all the little wearing griefs caused by her mentalfeebleness. She would let Maggie do none of the work that was heaviestand most soiling to the hands, and was quite peevish when Maggieattempted to relieve her from her grate-brushing and scouring: ”Let italone, 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 eyesfail 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, ingeneral, would have been much better if she had been quite different;yet the womanly heart, so bruised in its small personal desires, founda future to rest on in the life of this young thing, and the motherpleased herself with wearing out her own hands to save the hands thathad so much more life in them.

But the constant presence of her mother's regretful bewilderment wasless painful to Maggie than that of her father's sullen,incommunicative depression. As long as the paralysis was upon him, andit seemed as if he might always be in a childlike condition ofdependence,--as long as he was still only half awakened to histrouble,--Maggie had felt the strong tide of pitying love almost as aninspiration, a new power, that would make the most difficult life easyfor his sake; but now, instead of childlike dependence, there had comea taciturn, hard concentration of purpose, in strange contrast withhis old vehement communicativeness and high spirit; and this lastedfrom day to day, and from week to week, the dull eye never brighteningwith any eagerness or any joy. It is something cruelly incomprehensibleto youthful natures, this sombre sameness in middle-aged and elderlypeople, whose life has resulted in disappointment and discontent, towhose faces a smile becomes so strange that the sad lines all aboutthe lips and brow seem to take no notice of it, and it hurries awayagain for want of a welcome. ”Why will they not kindle up and beglad sometimes?” thinks young elasticity. ”It would be so easy if theyonly liked to do it.” And these leaden clouds that never part are aptto create impatience even in the filial affection that streams forth innothing but tenderness and pity in the time of more obvious affliction.

Mr. Tulliver lingered nowhere away from home; he hurried away frommarket, he refused all invitations to stay and chat, as in old times,in the houses where he called on business. He could not be reconciledwith his lot. There was no attitude in which his pride did not feelits bruises; and in all behavior toward him, whether kind or cold, hedetected an allusion to the change in his circumstances. Even the dayson which Wakem came to ride round the land and inquire into thebusiness were not so black to him as those market-days on which he hadmet several creditors who had accepted a composition from him. To savesomething toward the repayment of those creditors was the objecttoward which he was now bending all his thoughts and efforts; andunder the influence of this all-compelling demand of his nature, thesomewhat profuse man, who hated to be stinted or to stint any one elsein his own house, was gradually metamorphosed into the keen-eyedgrudger of morsels. Mrs. Tulliver could not economize enough tosatisfy him, in their food and firing; and he would eat nothinghimself but what was of the coarsest quality. Tom, though depressedand strongly repelled by his father's sullenness, and the drearinessof home, entered thoroughly into his father's feelings about payingthe creditors; and the poor lad brought his first quarter's money,with a delicious sense of achievement, and gave it to his father toput into the tin box which held the savings. The little store ofsovereigns in the tin box seemed to be the only sight that brought afaint beam of pleasure into the miller's eyes,--faint and transient,for it was soon dispelled by the thought that the time would belong--perhaps longer than his life,--before the narrow savings couldremove the hateful incubus of debt. A deficit of more than fivehundred pounds, with the accumulating interest, seemed a deep pit tofill with the savings from thirty shillings a-week, even when Tom'sprobable savings were to be added. On this one point there was entirecommunity of feeling in the four widely differing beings who sat roundthe dying fire of sticks, which made a cheap warmth for them on theverge of bedtime. Mrs. Tulliver carried the proud integrity of theDodsons in her blood, and had been brought up to think that to wrongpeople of their money, which was another phrase for debt, was a sortof moral pillory; it would have been wickedness, to her mind, to haverun counter to her husband's desire to ”do the right thing,” andretrieve his name. She had a confused, dreamy notion that, if thecreditors were all paid, her plate and linen ought to come back toher; but she had an inbred perception that while people owed moneythey were unable to pay, they couldn't rightly call anything theirown. She murmured a little that Mr. Tulliver so peremptorily refusedto receive anything in repayment from Mr. and Mrs. Moss; but to allhis requirements of household economy she was submissive to the pointof denying herself the cheapest indulgences of mere flavor; her onlyrebellion was to smuggle into the kitchen something that would makerather 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 daysof wide commercial views and wide philosophy, according to whicheverything rights itself without any trouble of ours. The fact that mytradesman is out of pocket by me is to be looked at through the serenecertainty that somebody else's tradesman is in pocket by somebodyelse; and since there must be bad debts in the world, why, it is mereegoism not to like that we in particular should make them instead ofour fellow-citizens. I am telling the history of very simple people,who had never had any illuminating doubts as to personal integrity andhonor.

Under all this grim melancholy and narrowing concentration of desire,Mr. Tulliver retained the feeling toward his ”little wench” which madeher 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 fatherlylove was now mingled with bitterness, like everything else. WhenMaggie laid down her work at night, it was her habit to get a lowstool and sit by her father's knee, leaning her cheek against it. Howshe wished he would stroke her head, or give some sign that he wassoothed by the sense that he had a daughter who loved him! But now shegot no answer to her little caresses, either from her father or fromTom,--the two idols of her life. Tom was weary and abstracted in theshort intervals when he was at home, and her father was bitterlypreoccupied with the thought that the girl was growing up, wasshooting up into a woman; and how was she to do well in life? She hada poor chance for marrying, down in the world as they were. And hehated 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 littlewench so pulled down by children and toil, as her aunt Moss was. Whenuncultured minds, confined to a narrow range of personal experience,are under the pressure of continued misfortune, their inward life isapt to become a perpetually repeated round of sad and bitter thoughts;the same words, the same scenes, are revolved over and over again, thesame mood accompanies them; the end of the year finds them as muchwhat they were at the beginning as if they were machines set to arecurrent series of movements.

The sameness of the days was broken by few visitors. Uncles and auntspaid only short visits now; of course, they could not stay to meals,and the constraint caused by Mr. Tulliver's savage silence, whichseemed to add to the hollow resonance of the bare, uncarpeted roomwhen the aunts were talking, heightened the unpleasantness of thesefamily visits on all sides, and tended to make them rare. As for otheracquaintances, there is a chill air surrounding those who are down inthe world, and people are glad to get away from them, as from a coldroom; human beings, mere men and women, without furniture, withoutanything to offer you, who have ceased to count as anybody, present anembarrassing negation of reasons for wishing to see them, or ofsubjects on which to converse with them. At that distant day, therewas a dreary isolation in the civilized Christian society of theserealms for families that had dropped below their original level,unless they belonged to a sectarian church, which gets some warmth ofbrotherhood by walling in the sacred fire.