Chapter II

The Torn Nest Is Pierced by the Thorns


There is something sustaining in the very agitation that accompanies
the first shocks of trouble, just as an acute pain is often a
stimulus, and produces an excitement which is transient strength. It
is in the slow, changed life that follows; in the time when sorrow has
become stale, and has no longer an emotive intensity that counteracts
its pain; in the time when day follows day in dull, unexpectant
sameness, and trial is a dreary routine,--it is then that despair
threatens; it is then that the peremptory hunger of the soul is felt,
and eye and ear are strained after some unlearned secret of our
existence, which shall give to endurance the nature of satisfaction.

This time of utmost need was come to Maggie, with her short span of
thirteen years. To the usual precocity of the girl, she added that
early experience of struggle, of conflict between the inward impulse
and outward fact, which is the lot of every imaginative and passionate
nature; and the years since she hammered the nails into her wooden
Fetish among the worm-eaten shelves of the attic had been filled with
so eager a life in the triple world of Reality, Books, and Waking
Dreams, that Maggie was strangely old for her years in everything
except in her entire want of that prudence and self-command which were
the qualities that made Tom manly in the midst of his intellectual
boyishness. And now her lot was beginning to have a still, sad
monotony, which threw her more than ever on her inward self. Her
father was able to attend to business again, his affairs were settled,
and he was acting as Wakem's manager on the old spot. Tom went to and
fro every morning and evening, and became more and more silent in the
short intervals at home; what was there to say? One day was like
another; and Tom's interest in life, driven back and crushed on every
other side, was concentrating itself into the one channel of ambitious
resistance to misfortune. The peculiarities of his father and mother
were very irksome to him, now they were laid bare of all the softening
accompaniments of an easy, prosperous home; for Tom had very clear,
prosaic eyes, not apt to be dimmed by mists of feeling or imagination.
Poor Mrs. Tulliver, it seemed, would never recover her old self, her
placid household activity; how could she? The objects among which her
mind had moved complacently were all gone,--all the little hopes and
schemes and speculations, all the pleasant little cares about her
treasures which had made the world quite comprehensible to her for a
quarter of a century, since she had made her first purchase of the
sugar-tongs, had been suddenly snatched away from her, and she
remained bewildered in this empty life. Why that should have happened
to her which had not happened to other women remained an insoluble
question by which she expressed her perpetual ruminating comparison of
the past with the present. It was piteous to see the comely woman
getting thinner and more worn under a bodily as well as mental
restlessness, which made her often wander about the empty house after
her work was done, until Maggie, becoming alarmed about her, would
seek her, and bring her down by telling her how it vexed Tom that she
was injuring her health by never sitting down and resting herself. Yet
amidst this helpless imbecility there was a touching trait of humble,
self-devoting maternity, which made Maggie feel tenderly toward her
poor mother amidst all the little wearing griefs caused by her mental
feebleness. She would let Maggie do none of the work that was heaviest
and most soiling to the hands, and was quite peevish when Maggie
attempted to relieve her from her grate-brushing and scouring: "Let it
alone, my dear; your hands 'ull get as hard as hard," she would say;
"it's your mother's place to do that. I can't do the sewing--my eyes
fail me." And she would still brush and carefully tend Maggie's hair,
which she had become reconciled to, in spite of its refusal to curl,
now it was so long and massy. Maggie was not her pet child, and, in
general, would have been much better if she had been quite different;
yet the womanly heart, so bruised in its small personal desires, found
a future to rest on in the life of this young thing, and the mother
pleased herself with wearing out her own hands to save the hands that
had so much more life in them.

But the constant presence of her mother's regretful bewilderment was
less painful to Maggie than that of her father's sullen,
incommunicative depression. As long as the paralysis was upon him, and
it seemed as if he might always be in a childlike condition of
dependence,--as long as he was still only half awakened to his
trouble,--Maggie had felt the strong tide of pitying love almost as an
inspiration, a new power, that would make the most difficult life easy
for his sake; but now, instead of childlike dependence, there had come
a taciturn, hard concentration of purpose, in strange contrast with
his old vehement communicativeness and high spirit; and this lasted
from day to day, and from week to week, the dull eye never brightening
with any eagerness or any joy. It is something cruelly incomprehensible
to youthful natures, this sombre sameness in middle-aged and elderly
people, whose life has resulted in disappointment and discontent, to
whose faces a smile becomes so strange that the sad lines all about
the lips and brow seem to take no notice of it, and it hurries away
again for want of a welcome. "Why will they not kindle up and be
glad sometimes?" thinks young elasticity. "It would be so easy if they
only liked to do it." And these leaden clouds that never part are apt
to create impatience even in the filial affection that streams forth in
nothing but tenderness and pity in the time of more obvious affliction.

Mr. Tulliver lingered nowhere away from home; he hurried away from
market, he refused all invitations to stay and chat, as in old times,
in the houses where he called on business. He could not be reconciled
with his lot. There was no attitude in which his pride did not feel
its bruises; and in all behavior toward him, whether kind or cold, he
detected an allusion to the change in his circumstances. Even the days
on which Wakem came to ride round the land and inquire into the
business were not so black to him as those market-days on which he had
met several creditors who had accepted a composition from him. To save
something toward the repayment of those creditors was the object
toward which he was now bending all his thoughts and efforts; and
under the influence of this all-compelling demand of his nature, the
somewhat profuse man, who hated to be stinted or to stint any one else
in his own house, was gradually metamorphosed into the keen-eyed
grudger of morsels. Mrs. Tulliver could not economize enough to
satisfy him, in their food and firing; and he would eat nothing
himself but what was of the coarsest quality. Tom, though depressed
and strongly repelled by his father's sullenness, and the dreariness
of home, entered thoroughly into his father's feelings about paying
the creditors; and the poor lad brought his first quarter's money,
with a delicious sense of achievement, and gave it to his father to
put into the tin box which held the savings. The little store of
sovereigns in the tin box seemed to be the only sight that brought a
faint beam of pleasure into the miller's eyes,--faint and transient,
for it was soon dispelled by the thought that the time would be
long--perhaps longer than his life,--before the narrow savings could
remove the hateful incubus of debt. A deficit of more than five
hundred pounds, with the accumulating interest, seemed a deep pit to
fill with the savings from thirty shillings a-week, even when Tom's
probable savings were to be added. On this one point there was entire
community of feeling in the four widely differing beings who sat round
the dying fire of sticks, which made a cheap warmth for them on the
verge of bedtime. Mrs. Tulliver carried the proud integrity of the
Dodsons in her blood, and had been brought up to think that to wrong
people of their money, which was another phrase for debt, was a sort
of moral pillory; it would have been wickedness, to her mind, to have
run counter to her husband's desire to "do the right thing," and
retrieve his name. She had a confused, dreamy notion that, if the
creditors were all paid, her plate and linen ought to come back to
her; but she had an inbred perception that while people owed money
they were unable to pay, they couldn't rightly call anything their
own. She murmured a little that Mr. Tulliver so peremptorily refused
to receive anything in repayment from Mr. and Mrs. Moss; but to all
his requirements of household economy she was submissive to the point
of denying herself the cheapest indulgences of mere flavor; her only
rebellion was to smuggle into the kitchen something that would make
rather a better supper than usual for Tom.

These narrow notions about debt, held by the old fashioned Tullivers,
may perhaps excite a smile on the faces of many readers in these days
of wide commercial views and wide philosophy, according to which
everything rights itself without any trouble of ours. The fact that my
tradesman is out of pocket by me is to be looked at through the serene
certainty that somebody else's tradesman is in pocket by somebody
else; and since there must be bad debts in the world, why, it is mere
egoism not to like that we in particular should make them instead of
our fellow-citizens. I am telling the history of very simple people,
who had never had any illuminating doubts as to personal integrity and
honor.

Under all this grim melancholy and narrowing concentration of desire,
Mr. Tulliver retained the feeling toward his "little wench" which made
her presence a need to him, though it would not suffice to cheer him.
She was still the desire of his eyes; but the sweet spring of fatherly
love was now mingled with bitterness, like everything else. When
Maggie laid down her work at night, it was her habit to get a low
stool and sit by her father's knee, leaning her cheek against it. How
she wished he would stroke her head, or give some sign that he was
soothed by the sense that he had a daughter who loved him! But now she
got no answer to her little caresses, either from her father or from
Tom,--the two idols of her life. Tom was weary and abstracted in the
short intervals when he was at home, and her father was bitterly
preoccupied with the thought that the girl was growing up, was
shooting up into a woman; and how was she to do well in life? She had
a poor chance for marrying, down in the world as they were. And he
hated the thought of her marrying poorly, as her aunt Gritty had done;
_that_ would be a thing to make him turn in his grave,--the little
wench so pulled down by children and toil, as her aunt Moss was. When
uncultured minds, confined to a narrow range of personal experience,
are under the pressure of continued misfortune, their inward life is
apt to become a perpetually repeated round of sad and bitter thoughts;
the same words, the same scenes, are revolved over and over again, the
same mood accompanies them; the end of the year finds them as much
what they were at the beginning as if they were machines set to a
recurrent series of movements.

The sameness of the days was broken by few visitors. Uncles and aunts
paid only short visits now; of course, they could not stay to meals,
and the constraint caused by Mr. Tulliver's savage silence, which
seemed to add to the hollow resonance of the bare, uncarpeted room
when the aunts were talking, heightened the unpleasantness of these
family visits on all sides, and tended to make them rare. As for other
acquaintances, there is a chill air surrounding those who are down in
the world, and people are glad to get away from them, as from a cold
room; human beings, mere men and women, without furniture, without
anything to offer you, who have ceased to count as anybody, present an
embarrassing negation of reasons for wishing to see them, or of
subjects on which to converse with them. At that distant day, there
was a dreary isolation in the civilized Christian society of these
realms for families that had dropped below their original level,
unless they belonged to a sectarian church, which gets some warmth of
brotherhood by walling in the sacred fire.