The Mill on the Floss (19 page)

This legend, one sees, reflects from a far-off time the
visitation of the floods, which, even when they left human life
untouched, were widely fatal to the helpless cattle, and swept as
sudden death over all smaller living things. But the town knew
worse troubles even than the floods,–troubles of the civil wars,
when it was a continual fighting-place, where first Puritans
thanked God for the blood of the Loyalists, and then Loyalists
thanked God for the blood of the Puritans. Many honest citizens
lost all their possessions for conscience' sake in those times, and
went forth beggared from their native town. Doubtless there are
many houses standing now on which those honest citizens turned
their backs in sorrow,–quaint-gabled houses looking on the river,
jammed between newer warehouses, and penetrated by surprising
passages, which turn and turn at sharp angles till they lead you
out on a muddy strand overflowed continually by the rushing tide.
Everywhere the brick houses have a mellow look, and in Mrs. Glegg's
day there was no incongruous new-fashioned smartness, no
plate-glass in shop-windows, no fresh stucco-facing or other
fallacious attempt to make fine old red St. Ogg's wear the air of a
town that sprang up yesterday. The shop-windows were small and
unpretending; for the farmers' wives and daughters who came to do
their shopping on market-days were not to be withdrawn from their
regular well-known shops; and the tradesmen had no wares intended
for customers who would go on their way and be seen no more. Ah!
even Mrs. Glegg's day seems far back in the past now, separated
from us by changes that widen the years. War and the rumor of war
had then died out from the minds of men, and if they were ever
thought of by the farmers in drab greatcoats, who shook the grain
out of their sample-bags and buzzed over it in the full
market-place, it was as a state of things that belonged to a past
golden age when prices were high. Surely the time was gone forever
when the broad river could bring up unwelcome ships; Russia was
only the place where the linseed came from,–the more the
better,–making grist for the great vertical millstones with their
scythe-like arms, roaring and grinding and carefully sweeping as if
an informing soul were in them. The Catholics, bad harvests, and
the mysterious fluctuations of trade were the three evils mankind
had to fear; even the floods had not been great of late years. The
mind of St. Ogg's did not look extensively before or after. It
inherited a long past without thinking of it, and had no eyes for
the spirits that walk the streets. Since the centuries when St. Ogg
with his boat and the Virgin Mother at the prow had been seen on
the wide water, so many memories had been left behind, and had
gradually vanished like the receding hilltops! And the present time
was like the level plain where men lose their belief in volcanoes
and earthquakes, thinking to-morrow will be as yesterday, and the
giant forces that used to shake the earth are forever laid to
sleep. The days were gone when people could be greatly wrought upon
by their faith, still less change it; the Catholics were formidable
because they would lay hold of government and property, and burn
men alive; not because any sane and honest parishioner of St. Ogg's
could be brought to believe in the Pope. One aged person remembered
how a rude multitude had been swayed when John Wesley preached in
the cattle-market; but for a long while it had not been expected of
preachers that they should shake the souls of men. An occasional
burst of fervor in Dissenting pulpits on the subject of infant
baptism was the only symptom of a zeal unsuited to sober times when
men had done with change. Protestantism sat at ease, unmindful of
schisms, careless of proselytism: Dissent was an inheritance along
with a superior pew and a business connection; and Churchmanship
only wondered contemptuously at Dissent as a foolish habit that
clung greatly to families in the grocery and chandlering lines,
though not incompatible with prosperous wholesale dealing. But with
the Catholic Question had come a slight wind of controversy to
break the calm: the elderly rector had become occasionally
historical and argumentative; and Mr. Spray, the Independent
minister, had begun to preach political sermons, in which he
distinguished with much subtlety between his fervent belief in the
right of the Catholics to the franchise and his fervent belief in
their eternal perdition. Most of Mr. Spray's hearers, however, were
incapable of following his subtleties, and many old-fashioned
Dissenters were much pained by his "siding with the Catholics";
while others thought he had better let politics alone. Public
spirit was not held in high esteem at St. Ogg's, and men who busied
themselves with political questions were regarded with some
suspicion, as dangerous characters; they were usually persons who
had little or no business of their own to manage, or, if they had,
were likely enough to become insolvent.

This was the general aspect of things at St. Ogg's in Mrs.
Glegg's day, and at that particular period in her family history
when she had had her quarrel with Mr. Tulliver. It was a time when
ignorance was much more comfortable than at present, and was
received with all the honors in very good society, without being
obliged to dress itself in an elaborate costume of knowledge; a
time when cheap periodicals were not, and when country surgeons
never thought of asking their female patients if they were fond of
reading, but simply took it for granted that they preferred gossip;
a time when ladies in rich silk gowns wore large pockets, in which
they carried a mutton-bone to secure them against cramp. Mrs. Glegg
carried such a bone, which she had inherited from her grandmother
with a brocaded gown that would stand up empty, like a suit of
armor, and a silver-headed walking-stick; for the Dodson family had
been respectable for many generations.

Mrs. Glegg had both a front and a back parlor in her excellent
house at St. Ogg's, so that she had two points of view from which
she could observe the weakness of her fellow-beings, and reinforce
her thankfulness for her own exceptional strength of mind. From her
front window she could look down the Tofton Road, leading out of
St. Ogg's, and note the growing tendency to "gadding about" in the
wives of men not retired from business, together with a practice of
wearing woven cotton stockings, which opened a dreary prospect for
the coming generation; and from her back windows she could look
down the pleasant garden and orchard which stretched to the river,
and observe the folly of Mr. Glegg in spending his time among "them
flowers and vegetables." For Mr. Glegg, having retired from active
business as a wool-stapler for the purpose of enjoying himself
through the rest of his life, had found this last occupation so
much more severe than his business, that he had been driven into
amateur hard labor as a dissipation, and habitually relaxed by
doing the work of two ordinary gardeners. The economizing of a
gardener's wages might perhaps have induced Mrs. Glegg to wink at
this folly, if it were possible for a healthy female mind even to
simulate respect for a husband's hobby. But it is well known that
this conjugal complacency belongs only to the weaker portion of the
sex, who are scarcely alive to the responsibilities of a wife as a
constituted check on her husband's pleasures, which are hardly ever
of a rational or commendable kind.

Mr. Glegg on his side, too, had a double source of mental
occupation, which gave every promise of being inexhaustible. On the
one hand, he surprised himself by his discoveries in natural
history, finding that his piece of garden-ground contained
wonderful caterpillars, slugs, and insects, which, so far as he had
heard, had never before attracted human observation; and he noticed
remarkable coincidences between these zoological phenomena and the
great events of that time,–as, for example, that before the burning
of York Minster there had been mysterious serpentine marks on the
leaves of the rose-trees, together with an unusual prevalence of
slugs, which he had been puzzled to know the meaning of, until it
flashed upon him with this melancholy conflagration. (Mr. Glegg had
an unusual amount of mental activity, which, when disengaged from
the wool business, naturally made itself a pathway in other
directions.) And his second subject of meditation was the
"contrairiness" of the female mind, as typically exhibited in Mrs.
Glegg. That a creature made–in a genealogical sense–out of a man's
rib, and in this particular case maintained in the highest
respectability without any trouble of her own, should be normally
in a state of contradiction to the blandest propositions and even
to the most accommodating concessions, was a mystery in the scheme
of things to which he had often in vain sought a clew in the early
chapters of Genesis. Mr. Glegg had chosen the eldest Miss Dodson as
a handsome embodiment of female prudence and thrift, and being
himself of a money-getting, money-keeping turn, had calculated on
much conjugal harmony. But in that curious compound, the feminine
character, it may easily happen that the flavor is unpleasant in
spite of excellent ingredients; and a fine systematic stinginess
may be accompanied with a seasoning that quite spoils its relish.
Now, good Mr. Glegg himself was stingy in the most amiable manner;
his neighbors called him "near," which always means that the person
in question is a lovable skinflint. If you expressed a preference
for cheese-parings, Mr. Glegg would remember to save them for you,
with a good-natured delight in gratifying your palate, and he was
given to pet all animals which required no appreciable keep. There
was no humbug or hypocrisy about Mr. Glegg; his eyes would have
watered with true feeling over the sale of a widow's furniture,
which a five-pound note from his side pocket would have prevented;
but a donation of five pounds to a person "in a small way of life"
would have seemed to him a mad kind of lavishness rather than
"charity," which had always presented itself to him as a
contribution of small aids, not a neutralizing of misfortune. And
Mr. Glegg was just as fond of saving other people's money as his
own; he would have ridden as far round to avoid a turnpike when his
expenses were to be paid for him, as when they were to come out of
his own pocket, and was quite zealous in trying to induce
indifferent acquaintances to adopt a cheap substitute for blacking.
This inalienable habit of saving, as an end in itself, belonged to
the industrious men of business of a former generation, who made
their fortunes slowly, almost as the tracking of the fox belongs to
the harrier,–it constituted them a "race," which is nearly lost in
these days of rapid money-getting, when lavishness comes close on
the back of want. In old-fashioned times an "independence" was
hardly ever made without a little miserliness as a condition, and
you would have found that quality in every provincial district,
combined with characters as various as the fruits from which we can
extract acid. The true Harpagons were always marked and exceptional
characters; not so the worthy tax-payers, who, having once pinched
from real necessity, retained even in the midst of their
comfortable retirement, with their wallfruit and wine-bins, the
habit of regarding life as an ingenious process of nibbling out
one's livelihood without leaving any perceptible deficit, and who
would have been as immediately prompted to give up a newly taxed
luxury when they had had their clear five hundred a year, as when
they had only five hundred pounds of capital. Mr. Glegg was one of
these men, found so impracticable by chancellors of the exchequer;
and knowing this, you will be the better able to understand why he
had not swerved from the conviction that he had made an eligible
marriage, in spite of the too-pungent seasoning that nature had
given to the eldest Miss Dodson's virtues. A man with an
affectionate disposition, who finds a wife to concur with his
fundamental idea of life, easily comes to persuade himself that no
other woman would have suited him so well, and does a little daily
snapping and quarrelling without any sense of alienation. Mr.
Glegg, being of a reflective turn, and no longer occupied with
wool, had much wondering meditation on the peculiar constitution of
the female mind as unfolded to him in his domestic life; and yet he
thought Mrs. Glegg's household ways a model for her sex. It struck
him as a pitiable irregularity in other women if they did not roll
up their table-napkins with the same tightness and emphasis as Mrs.
Glegg did, if their pastry had a less leathery consistence, and
their damson cheese a less venerable hardness than hers; nay, even
the peculiar combination of grocery and druglike odors in Mrs.
Glegg's private cupboard impressed him as the only right thing in
the way of cupboard smells. I am not sure that he would not have
longed for the quarrelling again, if it had ceased for an entire
week; and it is certain that an acquiescent, mild wife would have
left his meditations comparatively jejune and barren of
mystery.

Mr. Glegg's unmistakable kind-heartedness was shown in this,
that it pained him more to see his wife at variance with
others,–even with Dolly, the servant,–than to be in a state of
cavil with her himself; and the quarrel between her and Mr.
Tulliver vexed him so much that it quite nullified the pleasure he
would otherwise have had in the state of his early cabbages, as he
walked in his garden before breakfast the next morning. Still, he
went in to breakfast with some slight hope that, now Mrs. Glegg had
"slept upon it," her anger might be subdued enough to give way to
her usually strong sense of family decorum. She had been used to
boast that there had never been any of those deadly quarrels among
the Dodsons which had disgraced other families; that no Dodson had
ever been "cut off with a shilling," and no cousin of the Dodsons
disowned; as, indeed, why should they be? For they had no cousins
who had not money out at use, or some houses of their own, at the
very least.