The Mill on the Floss
immediately after sending in his name. Mr Deane was auditing accounts;
but he looked up as Tom entered, and putting out his hand, said, “Well,
Tom, nothing fresh the matter at home, I hope? How’s your father?”
“Much the same, thank you, uncle,” said Tom, feeling nervous. “But I
want to speak to you, please, when you’re at liberty.”
“Sit down, sit down,” said Mr Deane, relapsing into his accounts, in
which he and the managing-clerk remained so absorbed for the next
half-hour that Tom began to wonder whether he should have to sit in
this way till the bank closed,—there seemed so little tendency toward a
conclusion in the quiet, monotonous procedure of these sleek,
prosperous men of business. Would his uncle give him a place in the
bank? It would be very dull, prosy work, he thought, writing there
forever to the loud ticking of a timepiece. He preferred some other way
of getting rich. But at last there was a change; his uncle took a pen
and wrote something with a flourish at the end.
“You’ll just step up to Torry’s now, Mr Spence, will you?” said Mr
Deane, and the clock suddenly became less loud and deliberate in Tom’s
ears.
“Well, Tom,” said Mr Deane, when they were alone, turning his
substantial person a little in his chair, and taking out his snuff-box;
“what’s the business, my boy; what’s the business?” Mr Deane, who had
heard from his wife what had passed the day before, thought Tom was
come to appeal to him for some means of averting the sale.
“I hope you’ll excuse me for troubling you, uncle,” said Tom,
colouring, but speaking in a tone which, though, tremulous, had a
certain proud independence in it; “but I thought you were the best
person to advise me what to do.”
“Ah!” said Mr Deane, reserving his pinch of snuff, and looking at Tom
with new attention, “let us hear.”
“I want to get a situation, uncle, so that I may earn some money,” said
Tom, who never fell into circumlocution.
“A situation?” said Mr Deane, and then took his pinch of snuff with
elaborate justice to each nostril. Tom thought snuff-taking a most
provoking habit.
“Why, let me see, how old are you?” said Mr Deane, as he threw himself
backward again.
“Sixteen; I mean, I am going in seventeen,” said Tom, hoping his uncle
noticed how much beard he had.
“Let me see; your father had some notion of making you an engineer, I
think?”
“But I don’t think I could get any money at that for a long while,
could I?”
“That’s true; but people don’t get much money at anything, my boy, when
they’re only sixteen. You’ve had a good deal of schooling, however; I
suppose you’re pretty well up in accounts, eh? You understand book
keeping?”
“No,” said Tom, rather falteringly. “I was in Practice. But Mr Stelling
says I write a good hand, uncle. That’s my writing,” added Tom, laying
on the table a copy of the list he had made yesterday.
“Ah! that’s good, that’s good. But, you see, the best hand in the
world’ll not get you a better place than a copying-clerk’s, if you know
nothing of book-keeping,—nothing of accounts. And a copying-clerk’s a
cheap article. But what have you been learning at school, then?”
Mr Deane had not occupied himself with methods of education, and had no
precise conception of what went forward in expensive schools.
“We learned Latin,” said Tom, pausing a little between each item, as if
he were turning over the books in his school-desk to assist his
memory,—“a good deal of Latin; and the last year I did Themes, one week
in Latin and one in English; and Greek and Roman history; and Euclid;
and I began Algebra, but I left it off again; and we had one day every
week for Arithmetic. Then I used to have drawing-lessons; and there
were several other books we either read or learned out of,—English
Poetry, and Horæ Paulinæ and Blair’s Rhetoric, the last half.”
Mr Deane tapped his snuff-box again and screwed up his mouth; he felt
in the position of many estimable persons when they had read the New
Tariff, and found how many commodities were imported of which they knew
nothing; like a cautious man of business, he was not going to speak
rashly of a raw material in which he had had no experience. But the
presumption was, that if it had been good for anything, so successful a
man as himself would hardly have been ignorant of it.
About Latin he had an opinion, and thought that in case of another war,
since people would no longer wear hair-powder, it would be well to put
a tax upon Latin, as a luxury much run upon by the higher classes, and
not telling at all on the ship-owning department. But, for what he
knew, the Horæ Paulinæ might be something less neutral. On the whole,
this list of acquirements gave him a sort of repulsion toward poor Tom.
“Well,” he said at last, in rather a cold, sardonic tone, “you’ve had
three years at these things,—you must be pretty strong in ’em. Hadn’t
you better take up some line where they’ll come in handy?”
Tom coloured, and burst out, with new energy:
“I’d rather not have any employment of that sort, uncle. I don’t like
Latin and those things. I don’t know what I could do with them unless I
went as usher in a school; and I don’t know them well enough for that!
besides, I would as soon carry a pair of panniers. I don’t want to be
that sort of person. I should like to enter into some business where I
can get on,—a manly business, where I should have to look after things,
and get credit for what I did. And I shall want to keep my mother and
sister.”
“Ah, young gentleman,” said Mr Deane, with that tendency to repress
youthful hopes which stout and successful men of fifty find one of
their easiest duties, “that’s sooner said than done,—sooner said than
done.”
“But didn’t _you_ get on in that way, uncle?” said Tom, a little
irritated that Mr Deane did not enter more rapidly into his views. “I
mean, didn’t you rise from one place to another through your abilities
and good conduct?”
“Ay, ay, sir,” said Mr Deane, spreading himself in his chair a little,
and entering with great readiness into a retrospect of his own career.
“But I’ll tell you how I got on. It wasn’t by getting astride a stick
and thinking it would turn into a horse if I sat on it long enough. I
kept my eyes and ears open, sir, and I wasn’t too fond of my own back,
and I made my master’s interest my own. Why, with only looking into
what went on in the mill, I found out how there was a waste of five
hundred a-year that might be hindered. Why, sir, I hadn’t more
schooling to begin with than a charity boy; but I saw pretty soon that
I couldn’t get on far enough without mastering accounts, and I learned
’em between working hours, after I’d been unlading. Look here.” Mr
Deane opened a book and pointed to the page. “I write a good hand
enough, and I’ll match anybody at all sorts of reckoning by the head;
and I got it all by hard work, and paid for it out of my own
earnings,—often out of my own dinner and supper. And I looked into the
nature of all the things we had to do in the business, and picked up
knowledge as I went about my work, and turned it over in my head. Why,
I’m no mechanic,—I never pretended to be—but I’ve thought of a thing or
two that the mechanics never thought of, and it’s made a fine
difference in our returns. And there isn’t an article shipped or
unshipped at our wharf but I know the quality of it. If I got places,
sir, it was because I made myself fit for ’em. If you want to slip into
a round hole, you must make a ball of yourself; that’s where it is.”
Mr Deane tapped his box again. He had been led on by pure enthusiasm in
his subject, and had really forgotten what bearing this retrospective
survey had on his listener. He had found occasion for saying the same
thing more than once before, and was not distinctly aware that he had
not his port-wine before him.
“Well, uncle,” said Tom, with a slight complaint in his tone, “that’s
what I should like to do. Can’t _I_ get on in the same way?”
“In the same way?” said Mr Deane, eyeing Tom with quiet deliberation.
“There go two or three questions to that, Master Tom. That depends on
what sort of material you are, to begin with, and whether you’ve been
put into the right mill. But I’ll tell you what it is. Your poor father
went the wrong way to work in giving you an education. It wasn’t my
business, and I didn’t interfere; but it is as I thought it would be.
You’ve had a sort of learning that’s all very well for a young fellow
like our Mr Stephen Guest, who’ll have nothing to do but sign checks
all his life, and may as well have Latin inside his head as any other
sort of stuffing.”
“But, uncle,” said Tom, earnestly, “I don’t see why the Latin need
hinder me from getting on in business. I shall soon forget it all; it
makes no difference to me. I had to do my lessons at school, but I
always thought they’d never be of any use to me afterward; I didn’t
care about them.”
“Ay, ay, that’s all very well,” said Mr Deane; “but it doesn’t alter
what I was going to say. Your Latin and rigmarole may soon dry off you,
but you’ll be but a bare stick after that. Besides, it’s whitened your
hands and taken the rough work out of you. And what do you know? Why,
you know nothing about book-keeping, to begin with, and not so much of
reckoning as a common shopman. You’ll have to begin at a low round of
the ladder, let me tell you, if you mean to get on in life. It’s no use
forgetting the education your father’s been paying for, if you don’t
give yourself a new un.”
Tom bit his lips hard; he felt as if the tears were rising, and he
would rather die than let them.
“You want me to help you to a situation,” Mr Deane went on; “well, I’ve
no fault to find with that. I’m willing to do something for you. But
you youngsters nowadays think you’re to begin with living well and
working easy; you’ve no notion of running afoot before you get
horseback. Now, you must remember what you are,—you’re a lad of
sixteen, trained to nothing particular. There’s heaps of your sort,
like so many pebbles, made to fit in nowhere. Well, you might be
apprenticed to some business,—a chemist’s and druggist’s perhaps; your
Latin might come in a bit there——”
Tom was going to speak, but Mr Deane put up his hand and said:
“Stop! hear what I’ve got to say. You don’t want to be a ’prentice,—I
know, I know,—you want to make more haste, and you don’t want to stand
behind a counter. But if you’re a copying-clerk, you’ll have to stand
behind a desk, and stare at your ink and paper all day; there isn’t
much out-look there, and you won’t be much wiser at the end of the year
than at the beginning. The world isn’t made of pen, ink, and paper, and
if you’re to get on in the world, young man, you must know what the
world’s made of. Now the best chance for you ’ud be to have a place on
a wharf, or in a warehouse, where you’d learn the smell of things, but
you wouldn’t like that, I’ll be bound; you’d have to stand cold and
wet, and be shouldered about by rough fellows. You’re too fine a
gentleman for that.”
Mr Deane paused and looked hard at Tom, who certainly felt some inward
struggle before he could reply.
“I would rather do what will be best for me in the end, sir; I would
put up with what was disagreeable.”
“That’s well, if you can carry it out. But you must remember it isn’t
only laying hold of a rope, you must go on pulling. It’s the mistake
you lads make that have got nothing either in your brains or your
pocket, to think you’ve got a better start in the world if you stick
yourselves in a place where you can keep your coats clean, and have the
shopwenches take you for fine gentlemen. That wasn’t the way _I_
started, young man; when I was sixteen, my jacket smelt of tar, and I
wasn’t afraid of handling cheeses. That’s the reason I can wear good