The Mill on the Floss (10 page)

She did to-day, when she and Tom came in from the garden with
their father and their uncle Glegg. Maggie had thrown her bonnet
off very carelessly, and coming in with her hair rough as well as
out of curl, rushed at once to Lucy, who was standing by her
mother's knee. Certainly the contrast between the cousins was
conspicuous, and to superficial eyes was very much to the
disadvantage of Maggie though a connoisseur might have seen
"points" in her which had a higher promise for maturity than Lucy's
natty completeness. It was like the contrast between a rough, dark,
overgrown puppy and a white kitten. Lucy put up the neatest little
rosebud mouth to be kissed; everything about her was neat,–her
little round neck, with the row of coral beads; her little straight
nose, not at all snubby; her little clear eyebrows, rather darker
than her curls, to match hazel eyes, which looked up with shy
pleasure at Maggie, taller by the head, though scarcely a year
older. Maggie always looked at Lucy with delight.

She was fond of fancying a world where the people never got any
larger than children of their own age, and she made the queen of it
just like Lucy, with a little crown on her head, and a little
sceptre in her hand–only the queen was Maggie herself in Lucy's
form.

"Oh, Lucy," she burst out, after kissing her, "you'll stay with
Tom and me, won't you? Oh, kiss her, Tom."

Tom, too, had come up to Lucy, but he was not going to kiss
her–no; he came up to her with Maggie, because it seemed easier, on
the whole, than saying, "How do you do?" to all those aunts and
uncles. He stood looking at nothing in particular, with the
blushing, awkward air and semi-smile which are common to shy boys
when in company,–very much as if they had come into the world by
mistake, and found it in a degree of undress that was quite
embarrassing.

"Heyday!" said aunt Glegg, with loud emphasis. "Do little boys
and gells come into a room without taking notice of their uncles
and aunts? That wasn't the way when
I
was a little
gell."

"Go and speak to your aunts and uncles, my dears," said Mrs.
Tulliver, looking anxious and melancholy. She wanted to whisper to
Maggie a command to go and have her hair brushed.

"Well, and how do you do? And I hope you're good children, are
you?" said Aunt Glegg, in the same loud, emphatic way, as she took
their hands, hurting them with her large rings, and kissing their
cheeks much against their desire. "Look up, Tom, look up. Boys as
go to boarding-schools should hold their heads up. Look at me now."
Tom declined that pleasure apparently, for he tried to draw his
hand away. "Put your hair behind your ears, Maggie, and keep your
frock on your shoulder."

Aunt Glegg always spoke to them in this loud, emphatic way, as
if she considered them deaf, or perhaps rather idiotic; it was a
means, she thought, of making them feel that they were accountable
creatures, and might be a salutary check on naughty tendencies.
Bessy's children were so spoiled–they'd need have somebody to make
them feel their duty.

"Well, my dears," said aunt Pullet, in a compassionate voice,
"you grow wonderful fast. I doubt they'll outgrow their strength,"
she added, looking over their heads, with a melancholy expression,
at their mother. "I think the gell has too much hair. I'd have it
thinned and cut shorter, sister, if I was you; it isn't good for
her health. It's that as makes her skin so brown, I shouldn't
wonder. Don't you think so, sister Deane?"

"I can't say, I'm sure, sister," said Mrs. Deane, shutting her
lips 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-laborers 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,
shipowning 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 every-day 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?"