The Mill on the Floss (26 page)

"Why, that's a donkey with panniers, and a spaniel, and
partridges in the corn!" he exclaimed, his tongue being completely
loosed by surprise and admiration. "Oh my buttons! I wish I could
draw like that. I'm to learn drawing this half; I wonder if I shall
learn to make dogs and donkeys!"

"Oh, you can do them without learning," said Philip; "I never
learned drawing."

"Never learned?" said Tom, in amazement. "Why, when I make dogs
and horses, and those things, the heads and the legs won't come
right; though I can see how they ought to be very well. I can make
houses, and all sorts of chimneys,–chimneys going all down the
wall,–and windows in the roof, and all that. But I dare say I could
do dogs and horses if I was to try more," he added, reflecting that
Philip might falsely suppose that he was going to "knock under," if
he were too frank about the imperfection of his
accomplishments.

"Oh, yes," said Philip, "it's very easy. You've only to look
well at things, and draw them over and over again. What you do
wrong once, you can alter the next time."

"But haven't you been taught
any
thing?" said Tom,
beginning to have a puzzled suspicion that Philip's crooked back
might be the source of remarkable faculties. "I thought you'd been
to school a long while."

"Yes," said Philip, smiling; "I've been taught Latin and Greek
and mathematics, and writing and such things."

"Oh, but I say, you don't like Latin, though, do you?" said Tom,
lowering his voice confidentially.

"Pretty well; I don't care much about it," said Philip.

"Ah, but perhaps you haven't got into the
Propria quæ
maribus
," said Tom, nodding his head sideways, as much as to
say, "that was the test; it was easy talking till you came to
that
."

Philip felt some bitter complacency in the promising stupidity
of this well-made, active-looking boy; but made polite by his own
extreme sensitiveness, as well as by his desire to conciliate, he
checked his inclination to laugh, and said quietly,–

"I've done with the grammar; I don't learn that any more."

"Then you won't have the same lessons as I shall?" said Tom,
with a sense of disappointment.

"No; but I dare say I can help you. I shall be very glad to help
you if I can."

Tom did not say "Thank you," for he was quite absorbed in the
thought that Wakem's son did not seem so spiteful a fellow as might
have been expected.

"I say," he said presently, "do you love your father?"

"Yes," said Philip, coloring deeply; "don't you love yours?"

"Oh yes–I only wanted to know," said Tom, rather ashamed of
himself, now he saw Philip coloring and looking uncomfortable. He
found much difficulty in adjusting his attitude of mind toward the
son of Lawyer Wakem, and it had occurred to him that if Philip
disliked his father, that fact might go some way toward clearing up
his perplexity.

"Shall you learn drawing now?" he said, by way of changing the
subject.

"No," said Philip. "My father wishes me to give all my time to
other things now."

"What! Latin and Euclid, and those things?" said Tom.

"Yes," said Philip, who had left off using his pencil, and was
resting his head on one hand, while Tom was learning forward on
both elbows, and looking with increasing admiration at the dog and
the donkey.

"And you don't mind that?" said Tom, with strong curiosity.

"No; I like to know what everybody else knows. I can study what
I like by-and-by."

"I can't think why anybody should learn Latin," said Tom. "It's
no good."

"It's part of the education of a gentleman," said Philip. "All
gentlemen learn the same things."

"What! do you think Sir John Crake, the master of the harriers,
knows Latin?" said Tom, who had often thought he should like to
resemble Sir John Crake.

"He learned it when he was a boy, of course," said Philip. "But
I dare say he's forgotten it."

"Oh, well, I can do that, then," said Tom, not with any
epigrammatic intention, but with serious satisfaction at the idea
that, as far as Latin was concerned, there was no hindrance to his
resembling Sir John Crake. "Only you're obliged to remember it
while you're at school, else you've got to learn ever so many lines
of 'Speaker.' Mr. Stelling's very particular–did you know? He'll
have you up ten times if you say 'nam' for 'jam,'–he won't let you
go a letter wrong,
I
can tell you."

"Oh, I don't mind," said Philip, unable to choke a laugh; "I can
remember things easily. And there are some lessons I'm very fond
of. I'm very fond of Greek history, and everything about the
Greeks. I should like to have been a Greek and fought the Persians,
and then have come home and have written tragedies, or else have
been listened to by everybody for my wisdom, like Socrates, and
have died a grand death." (Philip, you perceive, was not without a
wish to impress the well-made barbarian with a sense of his mental
superiority.)

"Why, were the Greeks great fighters?" said Tom, who saw a vista
in this direction. "Is there anything like David and Goliath and
Samson in the Greek history? Those are the only bits I like in the
history of the Jews."

"Oh, there are very fine stories of that sort about the
Greeks,–about the heroes of early times who killed the wild beasts,
as Samson did. And in the Odyssey–that's a beautiful poem–there's a
more wonderful giant than Goliath,–Polypheme, who had only one eye
in the middle of his forehead; and Ulysses, a little fellow, but
very wise and cunning, got a red-hot pine-tree and stuck it into
this one eye, and made him roar like a thousand bulls."

"Oh, what fun!" said Tom, jumping away from the table, and
stamping first with one leg and then the other. "I say, can you
tell me all about those stories? Because I sha'n't learn Greek, you
know. Shall I?" he added, pausing in his stamping with a sudden
alarm, lest the contrary might be possible. "Does every gentleman
learn Greek? Will Mr. Stelling make me begin with it, do you
think?"

"No, I should think not, very likely not," said Philip. "But you
may read those stories without knowing Greek. I've got them in
English."

"Oh, but I don't like reading; I'd sooner have you tell them me.
But only the fighting ones, you know. My sister Maggie is always
wanting to tell me stories, but they're stupid things. Girls'
stories always are. Can you tell a good many fighting stories?"

"Oh yes," said Philip; "lots of them, besides the Greek stories.
I can tell you about Richard Cœur-de-Lion and Saladin, and about
William Wallace and Robert Bruce and James Douglas,–I know no
end."

"You're older than I am, aren't you?" said Tom.

"Why, how old are
you?
I'm fifteen."

"I'm only going in fourteen," said Tom. "But I thrashed all the
fellows at Jacob's–that's where I was before I came here. And I
beat 'em all at bandy and climbing. And I wish Mr. Stelling would
let us go fishing.
I
could show you how to fish. You
could
fish, couldn't you? It's only standing, and sitting
still, you know."

Tom, in his turn, wished to make the balance dip in his favor.
This hunchback must not suppose that his acquaintance with fighting
stories put him on a par with an actual fighting hero, like Tom
Tulliver. Philip winced under this allusion to his unfitness for
active sports, and he answered almost peevishly,–

"I can't bear fishing. I think people look like fools sitting
watching a line hour after hour, or else throwing and throwing, and
catching nothing."

"Ah, but you wouldn't say they looked like fools when they
landed a big pike, I can tell you," said Tom, who had never caught
anything that was "big" in his life, but whose imagination was on
the stretch with indignant zeal for the honor of sport. Wakem's
son, it was plain, had his disagreeable points, and must be kept in
due check. Happily for the harmony of this first interview, they
were now called to dinner, and Philip was not allowed to develop
farther his unsound views on the subject of fishing. But Tom said
to himself, that was just what he should have expected from a
hunchback.

Chapter IV
"The Young Idea"

The alterations of feeling in that first dialogue between Tom
and Philip continued to make their intercourse even after many
weeks of schoolboy intimacy. Tom never quite lost the feeling that
Philip, being the son of a "rascal," was his natural enemy; never
thoroughly overcame his repulsion to Philip's deformity. He was a
boy who adhered tenaciously to impressions once received; as with
all minds in which mere perception predominates over thought and
emotion, the external remained to him rigidly what it was in the
first instance. But then it was impossible not to like Philip's
company when he was in a good humor; he could help one so well in
one's Latin exercises, which Tom regarded as a kind of puzzle that
could only be found out by a lucky chance; and he could tell such
wonderful fighting stories about Hal of the Wynd, for example, and
other heroes who were especial favorites with Tom, because they
laid about them with heavy strokes. He had small opinion of
Saladin, whose cimeter could cut a cushion in two in an instant;
who wanted to cut cushions? That was a stupid story, and he didn't
care to hear it again. But when Robert Bruce, on the black pony,
rose in his stirrups, and lifting his good battle-axe, cracked at
once the helmet and the skull of the too hasty knight at
Bannockburn, then Tom felt all the exaltation of sympathy, and if
he had had a cocoanut at hand, he would have cracked it at once
with the poker. Philip in his happier moods indulged Tom to the top
of his bent, heightening the crash and bang and fury of every fight
with all the artillery of epithets and similes at his command. But
he was not always in a good humor or happy mood. The slight spurt
of peevish susceptibility which had escaped him in their first
interview was a symptom of a perpetually recurring mental ailment,
half of it nervous irritability, half of it the heart-bitterness
produced by the sense of his deformity. In these fits of
susceptibility every glance seemed to him to be charged either with
offensive pity or with ill-repressed disgust; at the very least it
was an indifferent glance, and Philip felt indifference as a child
of the south feels the chill air of a northern spring. Poor Tom's
blundering patronage when they were out of doors together would
sometimes make him turn upon the well-meaning lad quite savagely;
and his eyes, usually sad and quiet, would flash with anything but
playful lightning. No wonder Tom retained his suspicions of the
humpback.

But Philip's self-taught skill in drawing was another link
between them; for Tom found, to his disgust, that his new
drawing-master gave him no dogs and donkeys to draw, but brooks and
rustic bridges and ruins, all with a general softness of black-lead
surface, indicating that nature, if anything, was rather satiny;
and as Tom's feeling for the picturesque in landscape was at
present quite latent, it is not surprising that Mr. Goodrich's
productions seemed to him an uninteresting form of art. Mr.
Tulliver, having a vague intention that Tom should be put to some
business which included the drawing out of plans and maps, had
complained to Mr. Riley, when he saw him at Mudport, that Tom
seemed to be learning nothing of that sort; whereupon that obliging
adviser had suggested that Tom should have drawing-lessons. Mr.
Tulliver must not mind paying extra for drawing; let Tom be made a
good draughtsman, and he would be able to turn his pencil to any
purpose. So it was ordered that Tom should have drawing-lessons;
and whom should Mr. Stelling have selected as a master if not Mr.
Goodrich, who was considered quite at the head of his profession
within a circuit of twelve miles round King's Lorton? By which
means Tom learned to make an extremely fine point to his pencil,
and to represent landscape with a "broad generality," which,
doubtless from a narrow tendency in his mind to details, he thought
extremely dull.

All this, you remember, happened in those dark ages when there
were no schools of design; before schoolmasters were invariably men
of scrupulous integrity, and before the clergy were all men of
enlarged minds and varied culture. In those less favored days, it
is no fable that there were other clergymen besides Mr. Stelling
who had narrow intellects and large wants, and whose income, by a
logical confusion to which Fortune, being a female as well as
blindfold, is peculiarly liable, was proportioned not to their
wants but to their intellect, with which income has clearly no
inherent relation. The problem these gentlemen had to solve was to
readjust the proportion between their wants and their income; and
since wants are not easily starved to death, the simpler method
appeared to be to raise their income. There was but one way of
doing this; any of those low callings in which men are obliged to
do good work at a low price were forbidden to clergymen; was it
their fault if their only resource was to turn out very poor work
at a high price? Besides, how should Mr. Stelling be expected to
know that education was a delicate and difficult business, any more
than an animal endowed with a power of boring a hole through a rock
should be expected to have wide views of excavation? Mr. Stelling's
faculties had been early trained to boring in a straight line, and
he had no faculty to spare. But among Tom's contemporaries, whose
fathers cast their sons on clerical instruction to find them
ignorant after many days, there were many far less lucky than Tom
Tulliver. Education was almost entirely a matter of luck–usually of
ill-luck–in those distant days. The state of mind in which you take
a billiard-cue or a dice-box in your hand is one of sober certainty
compared with that of old-fashioned fathers, like Mr. Tulliver,
when they selected a school or a tutor for their sons. Excellent
men, who had been forced all their lives to spell on an
impromptu-phonetic system, and having carried on a successful
business in spite of this disadvantage, had acquired money enough
to give their sons a better start in life than they had had
themselves, must necessarily take their chance as to the conscience
and the competence of the schoolmaster whose circular fell in their
way, and appeared to promise so much more than they would ever have
thought of asking for, including the return of linen, fork, and
spoon. It was happy for them if some ambitious draper of their
acquaintance had not brought up his son to the Church, and if that
young gentleman, at the age of four-and-twenty, had not closed his
college dissipations by an imprudent marriage; otherwise, these
innocent fathers, desirous of doing the best for their offspring,
could only escape the draper's son by happening to be on the
foundation of a grammar-school as yet unvisited by commissioners,
where two or three boys could have, all to themselves, the
advantages of a large and lofty building, together with a
head-master, toothless, dim-eyed and deaf, whose erudite
indistinctness and inattention were engrossed by them at the rate
of three hundred pounds a-head,–a ripe scholar, doubtless, when
first appointed; but all ripeness beneath the sun has a further
stage less esteemed in the market.