The Mill on the Floss
close again, and looking at Maggie with a critical eye.
“No, no,” said Mr Tulliver, “the child’s healthy enough; there’s
nothing ails her. There’s red wheat as well as white, for that matter,
and some like the dark grain best. But it ’ud be as well if Bessy ’ud
have the child’s hair cut, so as it ’ud lie smooth.”
A dreadful resolve was gathering in Maggie’s breast, but it was
arrested by the desire to know from her aunt Deane whether she would
leave Lucy behind. Aunt Deane would hardly ever let Lucy come to see
them. After various reasons for refusal, Mrs Deane appealed to Lucy
herself.
“You wouldn’t like to stay behind without mother, should you, Lucy?”
“Yes, please, mother,” said Lucy, timidly, blushing very pink all over
her little neck.
“Well done, Lucy! Let her stay, Mrs Deane, let her stay,” said Mr
Deane, a large but alert-looking man, with a type of _physique_ to be
seen in all ranks of English society,—bald crown, red whiskers, full
forehead, and general solidity without heaviness. You may see noblemen
like Mr Deane, and you may see grocers or day-labourers like him; but
the keenness of his brown eyes was less common than his contour.
He held a silver snuff-box very tightly in his hand, and now and then
exchanged a pinch with Mr Tulliver, whose box was only silver-mounted,
so that it was naturally a joke between them that Mr Tulliver wanted to
exchange snuff-boxes also. Mr Deane’s box had been given him by the
superior partners in the firm to which he belonged, at the same time
that they gave him a share in the business, in acknowledgment of his
valuable services as manager. No man was thought more highly of in St
Ogg’s than Mr Deane; and some persons were even of opinion that Miss
Susan Dodson, who was once held to have made the worst match of all the
Dodson sisters, might one day ride in a better carriage, and live in a
better house, even than her sister Pullet. There was no knowing where a
man would stop, who had got his foot into a great mill-owning,
ship-owning business like that of Guest & Co., with a banking concern
attached. And Mrs Deane, as her intimate female friends observed, was
proud and “having” enough; _she_ wouldn’t let her husband stand still
in the world for want of spurring.
“Maggie,” said Mrs Tulliver, beckoning Maggie to her, and whispering in
her ear, as soon as this point of Lucy’s staying was settled, “go and
get your hair brushed, do, for shame. I told you not to come in without
going to Martha first, you know I did.”
“Tom come out with me,” whispered Maggie, pulling his sleeve as she
passed him; and Tom followed willingly enough.
“Come upstairs with me, Tom,” she whispered, when they were outside the
door. “There’s something I want to do before dinner.”
“There’s no time to play at anything before dinner,” said Tom, whose
imagination was impatient of any intermediate prospect.
“Oh yes, there is time for this; _do_ come, Tom.”
Tom followed Maggie upstairs into her mother’s room, and saw her go at
once to a drawer, from which she took out a large pair of scissors.
“What are they for, Maggie?” said Tom, feeling his curiosity awakened.
Maggie answered by seizing her front locks and cutting them straight
across the middle of her forehead.
“Oh, my buttons! Maggie, you’ll catch it!” exclaimed Tom; “you’d better
not cut any more off.”
Snip! went the great scissors again while Tom was speaking, and he
couldn’t help feeling it was rather good fun; Maggie would look so
queer.
“Here, Tom, cut it behind for me,” said Maggie, excited by her own
daring, and anxious to finish the deed.
“You’ll catch it, you know,” said Tom, nodding his head in an
admonitory manner, and hesitating a little as he took the scissors.
“Never mind, make haste!” said Maggie, giving a little stamp with her
foot. Her cheeks were quite flushed.
The black locks were so thick, nothing could be more tempting to a lad
who had already tasted the forbidden pleasure of cutting the pony’s
mane. I speak to those who know the satisfaction of making a pair of
scissors meet through a duly resisting mass of hair. One delicious
grinding snip, and then another and another, and the hinder-locks fell
heavily on the floor, and Maggie stood cropped in a jagged, uneven
manner, but with a sense of clearness and freedom, as if she had
emerged from a wood into the open plain.
“Oh, Maggie,” said Tom, jumping round her, and slapping his knees as he
laughed, “Oh, my buttons! what a queer thing you look! Look at yourself
in the glass; you look like the idiot we throw out nutshells to at
school.”
Maggie felt an unexpected pang. She had thought beforehand chiefly at
her own deliverance from her teasing hair and teasing remarks about it,
and something also of the triumph she should have over her mother and
her aunts by this very decided course of action; she didn’t want her
hair to look pretty,—that was out of the question,—she only wanted
people to think her a clever little girl, and not to find fault with
her. But now, when Tom began to laugh at her, and say she was like an
idiot, the affair had quite a new aspect. She looked in the glass, and
still Tom laughed and clapped his hands, and Maggie’s cheeks began to
pale, and her lips to tremble a little.
“Oh, Maggie, you’ll have to go down to dinner directly,” said Tom. “Oh,
my!”
“Don’t laugh at me, Tom,” said Maggie, in a passionate tone, with an
outburst of angry tears, stamping, and giving him a push.
“Now, then, spitfire!” said Tom. “What did you cut it off for, then? I
shall go down: I can smell the dinner going in.”
He hurried downstairs and left poor Maggie to that bitter sense of the
irrevocable which was almost an everyday experience of her small soul.
She could see clearly enough, now the thing was done, that it was very
foolish, and that she should have to hear and think more about her hair
than ever; for Maggie rushed to her deeds with passionate impulse, and
then saw not only their consequences, but what would have happened if
they had not been done, with all the detail and exaggerated
circumstance of an active imagination. Tom never did the same sort of
foolish things as Maggie, having a wonderful instinctive discernment of
what would turn to his advantage or disadvantage; and so it happened,
that though he was much more wilful and inflexible than Maggie, his
mother hardly ever called him naughty. But if Tom did make a mistake of
that sort, he espoused it, and stood by it: he “didn’t mind.” If he
broke the lash of his father’s gigwhip by lashing the gate, he couldn’t
help it,—the whip shouldn’t have got caught in the hinge. If Tom
Tulliver whipped a gate, he was convinced, not that the whipping of
gates by all boys was a justifiable act, but that he, Tom Tulliver, was
justifiable in whipping that particular gate, and he wasn’t going to be
sorry. But Maggie, as she stood crying before the glass, felt it
impossible that she should go down to dinner and endure the severe eyes
and severe words of her aunts, while Tom and Lucy, and Martha, who
waited at table, and perhaps her father and her uncles, would laugh at
her; for if Tom had laughed at her, of course every one else would; and
if she had only let her hair alone, she could have sat with Tom and
Lucy, and had the apricot pudding and the custard! What could she do
but sob? She sat as helpless and despairing among her black locks as
Ajax among the slaughtered sheep. Very trivial, perhaps, this anguish
seems to weather-worn mortals who have to think of Christmas bills,
dead loves, and broken friendships; but it was not less bitter to
Maggie—perhaps it was even more bitter—than what we are fond of calling
antithetically the real troubles of mature life. “Ah, my child, you
will have real troubles to fret about by and by,” is the consolation we
have almost all of us had administered to us in our childhood, and have
repeated to other children since we have been grown up. We have all of
us sobbed so piteously, standing with tiny bare legs above our little
socks, when we lost sight of our mother or nurse in some strange place;
but we can no longer recall the poignancy of that moment and weep over
it, as we do over the remembered sufferings of five or ten years ago.
Every one of those keen moments has left its trace, and lives in us
still, but such traces have blent themselves irrecoverably with the
firmer texture of our youth and manhood; and so it comes that we can
look on at the troubles of our children with a smiling disbelief in the
reality of their pain. Is there any one who can recover the experience
of his childhood, not merely with a memory of what he did and what
happened to him, of what he liked and disliked when he was in frock and
trousers, but with an intimate penetration, a revived consciousness of
what he felt then, when it was so long from one Midsummer to another;
what he felt when his school fellows shut him out of their game because
he would pitch the ball wrong out of mere wilfulness; or on a rainy day
in the holidays, when he didn’t know how to amuse himself, and fell
from idleness into mischief, from mischief into defiance, and from
defiance into sulkiness; or when his mother absolutely refused to let
him have a tailed coat that “half,” although every other boy of his age
had gone into tails already? Surely if we could recall that early
bitterness, and the dim guesses, the strangely perspectiveless
conception of life, that gave the bitterness its intensity, we should
not pooh-pooh the griefs of our children.
“Miss Maggie, you’re to come down this minute,” said Kezia, entering
the room hurriedly. “Lawks! what have you been a-doing? I never _see_
such a fright!”
“Don’t, Kezia,” said Maggie, angrily. “Go away!”
“But I tell you you’re to come down, Miss, this minute; your mother
says so,” said Kezia, going up to Maggie and taking her by the hand to
raise her from the floor.
“Get away, Kezia; I don’t want any dinner,” said Maggie, resisting
Kezia’s arm. “I sha’n’t come.”
“Oh, well, I can’t stay. I’ve got to wait at dinner,” said Kezia, going
out again.
“Maggie, you little silly,” said Tom, peeping into the room ten minutes
after, “why don’t you come and have your dinner? There’s lots o’
goodies, and mother says you’re to come. What are you crying for, you
little spooney?”
Oh, it was dreadful! Tom was so hard and unconcerned; if _he_ had been
crying on the floor, Maggie would have cried too. And there was the
dinner, so nice; and she was _so_ hungry. It was very bitter.
But Tom was not altogether hard. He was not inclined to cry, and did
not feel that Maggie’s grief spoiled his prospect of the sweets; but he
went and put his head near her, and said in a lower, comforting tone,—
“Won’t you come, then, Magsie? Shall I bring you a bit o’ pudding when
I’ve had mine, and a custard and things?”
“Ye-e-es,” said Maggie, beginning to feel life a little more tolerable.
“Very well,” said Tom, going away. But he turned again at the door and
said, “But you’d better come, you know. There’s the dessert,—nuts, you
know, and cowslip wine.”
Maggie’s tears had ceased, and she looked reflective as Tom left her.
His good nature had taken off the keenest edge of her suffering, and
nuts with cowslip wine began to assert their legitimate influence.
Slowly she rose from amongst her scattered locks, and slowly she made
her way downstairs. Then she stood leaning with one shoulder against
the frame of the dining-parlour door, peeping in when it was ajar. She
saw Tom and Lucy with an empty chair between them, and there were the
custards on a side-table; it was too much. She slipped in and went
toward the empty chair. But she had no sooner sat down than she
repented and wished herself back again.