Adam Bede
one as a sign of a keen impatient temperament: the blue veins stood out
like cords under the transparent yellow skin, and this intimidating
brow was softened by no tendency to baldness, for the grey bristly
hair, cut down to about an inch in length, stood round it in as close
ranks as ever.
“Nay, Bill, nay,” Bartle was saying in a kind tone, as he nodded to
Adam, “begin that again, and then perhaps, it’ll come to you what d-r-y
spells. It’s the same lesson you read last week, you know.”
“Bill” was a sturdy fellow, aged four-and-twenty, an excellent
stone-sawyer, who could get as good wages as any man in the trade of
his years; but he found a reading lesson in words of one syllable a
harder matter to deal with than the hardest stone he had ever had to
saw. The letters, he complained, were so “uncommon alike, there was no
tellin’ ’em one from another,” the sawyer’s business not being
concerned with minute differences such as exist between a letter with
its tail turned up and a letter with its tail turned down. But Bill had
a firm determination that he would learn to read, founded chiefly on
two reasons: first, that Tom Hazelow, his cousin, could read anything
“right off,” whether it was print or writing, and Tom had sent him a
letter from twenty miles off, saying how he was prospering in the world
and had got an overlooker’s place; secondly, that Sam Phillips, who
sawed with him, had learned to read when he was turned twenty, and what
could be done by a little fellow like Sam Phillips, Bill considered,
could be done by himself, seeing that he could pound Sam into wet clay
if circumstances required it. So here he was, pointing his big finger
towards three words at once, and turning his head on one side that he
might keep better hold with his eye of the one word which was to be
discriminated out of the group. The amount of knowledge Bartle Massey
must possess was something so dim and vast that Bill’s imagination
recoiled before it: he would hardly have ventured to deny that the
schoolmaster might have something to do in bringing about the regular
return of daylight and the changes in the weather.
The man seated next to Bill was of a very different type: he was a
Methodist brickmaker who, after spending thirty years of his life in
perfect satisfaction with his ignorance, had lately “got religion,” and
along with it the desire to read the Bible. But with him, too, learning
was a heavy business, and on his way out to-night he had offered as
usual a special prayer for help, seeing that he had undertaken this
hard task with a single eye to the nourishment of his soul—that he
might have a greater abundance of texts and hymns wherewith to banish
evil memories and the temptations of old habit—or, in brief language,
the devil. For the brickmaker had been a notorious poacher, and was
suspected, though there was no good evidence against him, of being the
man who had shot a neighbouring gamekeeper in the leg. However that
might be, it is certain that shortly after the accident referred to,
which was coincident with the arrival of an awakening Methodist
preacher at Treddleston, a great change had been observed in the
brickmaker; and though he was still known in the neighbourhood by his
old sobriquet of “Brimstone,” there was nothing he held in so much
horror as any further transactions with that evil-smelling element. He
was a broad-chested fellow with a fervid temperament, which helped him
better in imbibing religious ideas than in the dry process of acquiring
the mere human knowledge of the alphabet. Indeed, he had been already a
little shaken in his resolution by a brother Methodist, who assured him
that the letter was a mere obstruction to the Spirit, and expressed a
fear that Brimstone was too eager for the knowledge that puffeth up.
The third beginner was a much more promising pupil. He was a tall but
thin and wiry man, nearly as old as Brimstone, with a very pale face
and hands stained a deep blue. He was a dyer, who in the course of
dipping homespun wool and old women’s petticoats had got fired with the
ambition to learn a great deal more about the strange secrets of
colour. He had already a high reputation in the district for his dyes,
and he was bent on discovering some method by which he could reduce the
expense of crimsons and scarlets. The druggist at Treddleston had given
him a notion that he might save himself a great deal of labour and
expense if he could learn to read, and so he had begun to give his
spare hours to the night-school, resolving that his “little chap”
should lose no time in coming to Mr. Massey’s day-school as soon as he
was old enough.
It was touching to see these three big men, with the marks of their
hard labour about them, anxiously bending over the worn books and
painfully making out, “The grass is green,” “The sticks are dry,” “The
corn is ripe”—a very hard lesson to pass to after columns of single
words all alike except in the first letter. It was almost as if three
rough animals were making humble efforts to learn how they might become
human. And it touched the tenderest fibre in Bartle Massey’s nature,
for such full-grown children as these were the only pupils for whom he
had no severe epithets and no impatient tones. He was not gifted with
an imperturbable temper, and on music-nights it was apparent that
patience could never be an easy virtue to him; but this evening, as he
glances over his spectacles at Bill Downes, the sawyer, who is turning
his head on one side with a desperate sense of blankness before the
letters d-r-y, his eyes shed their mildest and most encouraging light.
After the reading class, two youths between sixteen and nineteen came
up with the imaginary bills of parcels, which they had been writing out
on their slates and were now required to calculate “off-hand”—a test
which they stood with such imperfect success that Bartle Massey, whose
eyes had been glaring at them ominously through his spectacles for some
minutes, at length burst out in a bitter, high-pitched tone, pausing
between every sentence to rap the floor with a knobbed stick which
rested between his legs.
“Now, you see, you don’t do this thing a bit better than you did a
fortnight ago, and I’ll tell you what’s the reason. You want to learn
accounts—that’s well and good. But you think all you need do to learn
accounts is to come to me and do sums for an hour or so, two or three
times a-week; and no sooner do you get your caps on and turn out of
doors again than you sweep the whole thing clean out of your mind. You
go whistling about, and take no more care what you’re thinking of than
if your heads were gutters for any rubbish to swill through that
happened to be in the way; and if you get a good notion in ’em, it’s
pretty soon washed out again. You think knowledge is to be got
cheap—you’ll come and pay Bartle Massey sixpence a-week, and he’ll make
you clever at figures without your taking any trouble. But knowledge
isn’t to be got with paying sixpence, let me tell you. If you’re to
know figures, you must turn ’em over in your heads and keep your
thoughts fixed on ’em. There’s nothing you can’t turn into a sum, for
there’s nothing but what’s got number in it—even a fool. You may say to
yourselves, ‘I’m one fool, and Jack’s another; if my fool’s head
weighed four pound, and Jack’s three pound three ounces and three
quarters, how many pennyweights heavier would my head be than Jack’s?’
A man that had got his heart in learning figures would make sums for
himself and work ’em in his head. When he sat at his shoemaking, he’d
count his stitches by fives, and then put a price on his stitches, say
half a farthing, and then see how much money he could get in an hour;
and then ask himself how much money he’d get in a day at that rate; and
then how much ten workmen would get working three, or twenty, or a
hundred years at that rate—and all the while his needle would be going
just as fast as if he left his head empty for the devil to dance in.
But the long and the short of it is—I’ll have nobody in my night-school
that doesn’t strive to learn what he comes to learn, as hard as if he
was striving to get out of a dark hole into broad daylight. I’ll send
no man away because he’s stupid: if Billy Taft, the idiot, wanted to
learn anything, I’d not refuse to teach him. But I’ll not throw away
good knowledge on people who think they can get it by the sixpenn’orth,
and carry it away with ’em as they would an ounce of snuff. So never
come to me again, if you can’t show that you’ve been working with your
own heads, instead of thinking that you can pay for mine to work for
you. That’s the last word I’ve got to say to you.”
With this final sentence, Bartle Massey gave a sharper rap than ever
with his knobbed stick, and the discomfited lads got up to go with a
sulky look. The other pupils had happily only their writing-books to
show, in various stages of progress from pot-hooks to round text; and
mere pen-strokes, however perverse, were less exasperating to Bartle
than false arithmetic. He was a little more severe than usual on Jacob
Storey’s Z’s, of which poor Jacob had written a pageful, all with their
tops turned the wrong way, with a puzzled sense that they were not
right “somehow.” But he observed in apology, that it was a letter you
never wanted hardly, and he thought it had only been there “to finish
off th’ alphabet, like, though ampusand (&) would ha’ done as well, for
what he could see.”
At last the pupils had all taken their hats and said their
“Good-nights,” and Adam, knowing his old master’s habits, rose and
said, “Shall I put the candles out, Mr. Massey?”
“Yes, my boy, yes, all but this, which I’ll carry into the house; and
just lock the outer door, now you’re near it,” said Bartle, getting his
stick in the fitting angle to help him in descending from his stool. He
was no sooner on the ground than it became obvious why the stick was
necessary—the left leg was much shorter than the right. But the
school-master was so active with his lameness that it was hardly
thought of as a misfortune; and if you had seen him make his way along
the schoolroom floor, and up the step into his kitchen, you would
perhaps have understood why the naughty boys sometimes felt that his
pace might be indefinitely quickened and that he and his stick might
overtake them even in their swiftest run.
The moment he appeared at the kitchen door with the candle in his hand,
a faint whimpering began in the chimney-corner, and a
brown-and-tan-coloured bitch, of that wise-looking breed with short
legs and long body, known to an unmechanical generation as turnspits,
came creeping along the floor, wagging her tail, and hesitating at
every other step, as if her affections were painfully divided between
the hamper in the chimney-corner and the master, whom she could not
leave without a greeting.
“Well, Vixen, well then, how are the babbies?” said the schoolmaster,
making haste towards the chimney-corner and holding the candle over the
low hamper, where two extremely blind puppies lifted up their heads
towards the light from a nest of flannel and wool. Vixen could not even
see her master look at them without painful excitement: she got into
the hamper and got out again the next moment, and behaved with true
feminine folly, though looking all the while as wise as a dwarf with a
large old-fashioned head and body on the most abbreviated legs.
“Why, you’ve got a family, I see, Mr. Massey?” said Adam, smiling, as
he came into the kitchen. “How’s that? I thought it was against the law
here.”
“Law? What’s the use o’ law when a man’s once such a fool as to let a
woman into his house?” said Bartle, turning away from the hamper with
some bitterness. He always called Vixen a woman, and seemed to have