The Mill on the Floss
the gig by Luke, and the study was once more quite lonely for Tom, he
missed her grievously. He had really been brighter, and had got through
his lessons better, since she had been there; and she had asked Mr
Stelling so many questions about the Roman Empire, and whether there
really ever was a man who said, in Latin, “I would not buy it for a
farthing or a rotten nut,” or whether that had only been turned into
Latin, that Tom had actually come to a dim understanding of the fact
that there had once been people upon the earth who were so fortunate as
to know Latin without learning it through the medium of the Eton
Grammar. This luminous idea was a great addition to his historical
acquirements during this half-year, which were otherwise confined to an
epitomised history of the Jews.
But the dreary half-year _did_ come to an end. How glad Tom was to see
the last yellow leaves fluttering before the cold wind! The dark
afternoons and the first December snow seemed to him far livelier than
the August sunshine; and that he might make himself the surer about the
flight of the days that were carrying him homeward, he stuck twenty-one
sticks deep in a corner of the garden, when he was three weeks from the
holidays, and pulled one up every day with a great wrench, throwing it
to a distance with a vigor of will which would have carried it to
limbo, if it had been in the nature of sticks to travel so far.
But it was worth purchasing, even at the heavy price of the Latin
Grammar, the happiness of seeing the bright light in the parlour at
home, as the gig passed noiselessly over the snow-covered bridge; the
happiness of passing from the cold air to the warmth and the kisses and
the smiles of that familiar hearth, where the pattern of the rug and
the grate and the fire-irons were “first ideas” that it was no more
possible to criticise than the solidity and extension of matter. There
is no sense of ease like the ease we felt in those scenes where we were
born, where objects became dear to us before we had known the labour of
choice, and where the outer world seemed only an extension of our own
personality; we accepted and loved it as we accepted our own sense of
existence and our own limbs. Very commonplace, even ugly, that
furniture of our early home might look if it were put up to auction; an
improved taste in upholstery scorns it; and is not the striving after
something better and better in our surroundings the grand
characteristic that distinguishes man from the brute, or, to satisfy a
scrupulous accuracy of definition, that distinguishes the British man
from the foreign brute? But heaven knows where that striving might lead
us, if our affections had not a trick of twining round those old
inferior things; if the loves and sanctities of our life had no deep
immovable roots in memory. One’s delight in an elderberry bush
overhanging the confused leafage of a hedgerow bank, as a more
gladdening sight than the finest cistus or fuchsia spreading itself on
the softest undulating turf, is an entirely unjustifiable preference to
a nursery-gardener, or to any of those regulated minds who are free
from the weakness of any attachment that does not rest on a
demonstrable superiority of qualities. And there is no better reason
for preferring this elderberry bush than that it stirs an early memory;
that it is no novelty in my life, speaking to me merely through my
present sensibilities to form and colour, but the long companion of my
existence, that wove itself into my joys when joys were vivid.
Chapter II.
The Christmas Holidays
Fine old Christmas, with the snowy hair and ruddy face, had done his
duty that year in the noblest fashion, and had set off his rich gifts
of warmth and colour with all the heightening contrast of frost and
snow.
Snow lay on the croft and river-bank in undulations softer than the
limbs of infancy; it lay with the neatliest finished border on every
sloping roof, making the dark-red gables stand out with a new depth of
colour; it weighed heavily on the laurels and fir-trees, till it fell
from them with a shuddering sound; it clothed the rough turnip-field
with whiteness, and made the sheep look like dark blotches; the gates
were all blocked up with the sloping drifts, and here and there a
disregarded four-footed beast stood as if petrified “in unrecumbent
sadness”; there was no gleam, no shadow, for the heavens, too, were one
still, pale cloud; no sound or motion in anything but the dark river
that flowed and moaned like an unresting sorrow. But old Christmas
smiled as he laid this cruel-seeming spell on the outdoor world, for he
meant to light up home with new brightness, to deepen all the richness
of indoor colour, and give a keener edge of delight to the warm
fragrance of food; he meant to prepare a sweet imprisonment that would
strengthen the primitive fellowship of kindred, and make the sunshine
of familiar human faces as welcome as the hidden day-star. His kindness
fell but hardly on the homeless,—fell but hardly on the homes where the
hearth was not very warm, and where the food had little fragrance;
where the human faces had had no sunshine in them, but rather the
leaden, blank-eyed gaze of unexpectant want. But the fine old season
meant well; and if he has not learned the secret how to bless men
impartially, it is because his father Time, with ever-unrelenting
purpose, still hides that secret in his own mighty, slow-beating heart.
And yet this Christmas day, in spite of Tom’s fresh delight in home,
was not, he thought, somehow or other, quite so happy as it had always
been before. The red berries were just as abundant on the holly, and he
and Maggie had dressed all the windows and mantlepieces and
picture-frames on Christmas eve with as much taste as ever, wedding the
thick-set scarlet clusters with branches of the black-berried ivy.
There had been singing under the windows after midnight,—supernatural
singing, Maggie always felt, in spite of Tom’s contemptuous insistence
that the singers were old Patch, the parish clerk, and the rest of the
church choir; she trembled with awe when their carolling broke in upon
her dreams, and the image of men in fustian clothes was always thrust
away by the vision of angels resting on the parted cloud. The midnight
chant had helped as usual to lift the morning above the level of common
days; and then there were the smell of hot toast and ale from the
kitchen, at the breakfast hour; the favourite anthem, the green boughs,
and the short sermon gave the appropriate festal character to the
church-going; and aunt and uncle Moss, with all their seven children,
were looking like so many reflectors of the bright parlour-fire, when
the church-goers came back, stamping the snow from their feet. The
plum-pudding was of the same handsome roundness as ever, and came in
with the symbolic blue flames around it, as if it had been heroically
snatched from the nether fires, into which it had been thrown by
dyspeptic Puritans; the dessert was as splendid as ever, with its
golden oranges, brown nuts, and the crystalline light and dark of
apple-jelly and damson cheese; in all these things Christmas was as it
had always been since Tom could remember; it was only distinguished, if
by anything, by superior sliding and snowballs.
Christmas was cheery, but not so Mr Tulliver. He was irate and defiant;
and Tom, though he espoused his father’s quarrels and shared his
father’s sense of injury, was not without some of the feeling that
oppressed Maggie when Mr Tulliver got louder and more angry in
narration and assertion with the increased leisure of dessert. The
attention that Tom might have concentrated on his nuts and wine was
distracted by a sense that there were rascally enemies in the world,
and that the business of grown-up life could hardly be conducted
without a good deal of quarrelling. Now, Tom was not fond of
quarrelling, unless it could soon be put an end to by a fair stand-up
fight with an adversary whom he had every chance of thrashing; and his
father’s irritable talk made him uncomfortable, though he never
accounted to himself for the feeling, or conceived the notion that his
father was faulty in this respect.
The particular embodiment of the evil principle now exciting Mr
Tulliver’s determined resistance was Mr Pivart, who, having lands
higher up the Ripple, was taking measures for their irrigation, which
either were, or would be, or were bound to be (on the principle that
water was water), an infringement on Mr Tulliver’s legitimate share of
water-power. Dix, who had a mill on the stream, was a feeble auxiliary
of Old Harry compared with Pivart. Dix had been brought to his senses
by arbitration, and Wakem’s advice had not carried _him_ far. No; Dix,
Mr Tulliver considered, had been as good as nowhere in point of law;
and in the intensity of his indignation against Pivart, his contempt
for a baffled adversary like Dix began to wear the air of a friendly
attachment. He had no male audience to-day except Mr Moss, who knew
nothing, as he said, of the “natur’ o’ mills,” and could only assent to
Mr Tulliver’s arguments on the _a priori_ ground of family relationship
and monetary obligation; but Mr Tulliver did not talk with the futile
intention of convincing his audience, he talked to relieve himself;
while good Mr Moss made strong efforts to keep his eyes wide open, in
spite of the sleepiness which an unusually good dinner produced in his
hard-worked frame. Mrs Moss, more alive to the subject, and interested
in everything that affected her brother, listened and put in a word as
often as maternal preoccupations allowed.
“Why, Pivart’s a new name hereabout, brother, isn’t it?” she said; “he
didn’t own the land in father’s time, nor yours either, before I was
married.”
“New name? Yes, I should think it _is_ a new name,” said Mr Tulliver,
with angry emphasis. “Dorlcote Mill’s been in our family a hundred year
and better, and nobody ever heard of a Pivart meddling with the river,
till this fellow came and bought Bincome’s farm out of hand, before
anybody else could so much as say ‘snap.’ But I’ll _Pivart_ him!” added
Mr Tulliver, lifting his glass with a sense that he had defined his
resolution in an unmistakable manner.
“You won’t be forced to go to law with him, I hope, brother?” said Mrs
Moss, with some anxiety.
“I don’t know what I shall be forced to; but I know what I shall force
_him_ to, with his dikes and erigations, if there’s any law to be
brought to bear o’ the right side. I know well enough who’s at the
bottom of it; he’s got Wakem to back him and egg him on. I know Wakem
tells him the law can’t touch him for it, but there’s folks can handle
the law besides Wakem. It takes a big raskil to beat him; but there’s
bigger to be found, as know more o’ th’ ins and outs o’ the law, else
how came Wakem to lose Brumley’s suit for him?”
Mr Tulliver was a strictly honest man, and proud of being honest, but
he considered that in law the ends of justice could only be achieved by
employing a stronger knave to frustrate a weaker. Law was a sort of
cock-fight, in which it was the business of injured honesty to get a
game bird with the best pluck and the strongest spurs.
“Gore’s no fool; you needn’t tell me that,” he observed presently, in a
pugnacious tone, as if poor Gritty had been urging that lawyer’s
capabilities; “but, you see, he isn’t up to the law as Wakem is. And
water’s a very particular thing; you can’t pick it up with a pitchfork.
That’s why it’s been nuts to Old Harry and the lawyers. It’s plain
enough what’s the rights and the wrongs of water, if you look at it
straight-forrard; for a river’s a river, and if you’ve got a mill, you
must have water to turn it; and it’s no use telling me Pivart’s