Chapter II

by George Eliot

　　Even people whose lives have been made various by learning,sometimes find it hard to keep a fast hold on their habitual viewsof life, on their faith in the Invisible, nay, on the sense thattheir past joys and sorrows are a real experience, when they aresuddenly transported to a new land, where the beings around themknow nothing of their history, and share none of their ideas--where their mother earth shows another lap, and human life has otherforms than those on which their souls have been nourished. Mindsthat have been unhinged from their old faith and love, have perhapssought this Lethean influence of exile, in which the past becomesdreamy because its symbols have all vanished, and the present too isdreamy because it is linked with no memories. But even theirexperience may hardly enable them thoroughly to imagine what was theeffect on a simple weaver like Silas Marner, when he left his owncountry and people and came to settle in Raveloe. Nothing could bemore unlike his native town, set within sight of the widespreadhillsides, than this low, wooded region, where he felt hidden evenfrom the heavens by the screening trees and hedgerows. There wasnothing here, when he rose in the deep morning quiet and looked outon the dewy brambles and rank tufted grass, that seemed to have anyrelation with that life centring in Lantern Yard, which had oncebeen to him the altar-place of high dispensations. The whitewashedwalls; the little pews where well-known figures entered with asubdued rustling, and where first one well-known voice and thenanother, pitched in a peculiar key of petition, uttered phrases atonce occult and familiar, like the amulet worn on the heart; thepulpit where the minister delivered unquestioned doctrine, andswayed to and fro, and handled the book in a long accustomed manner;the very pauses between the couplets of the hymn, as it was givenout, and the recurrent swell of voices in song: these things hadbeen the channel of divine influences to Marner--they were thefostering home of his religious emotions--they were Christianityand God's kingdom upon earth. A weaver who finds hard words in hishymn-book knows nothing of abstractions; as the little child knowsnothing of parental love, but only knows one face and one laptowards which it stretches its arms for refuge and nurture.And what could be more unlike that Lantern Yard world than the worldin Raveloe?--orchards looking lazy with neglected plenty; thelarge church in the wide churchyard, which men gazed at lounging attheir own doors in service-time; the purple-faced farmers joggingalong the lanes or turning in at the Rainbow; homesteads, where mensupped heavily and slept in the light of the evening hearth, andwhere women seemed to be laying up a stock of linen for the life tocome. There were no lips in Raveloe from which a word could fallthat would stir Silas Marner's benumbed faith to a sense of pain.In the early ages of the world, we know, it was believed that eachterritory was inhabited and ruled by its own divinities, so that aman could cross the bordering heights and be out of the reach of hisnative gods, whose presence was confined to the streams and thegroves and the hills among which he had lived from his birth. Andpoor Silas was vaguely conscious of something not unlike the feelingof primitive men, when they fled thus, in fear or in sullenness,from the face of an unpropitious deity. It seemed to him that thePower he had vainly trusted in among the streets and at theprayer-meetings, was very far away from this land in which he hadtaken refuge, where men lived in careless abundance, knowing andneeding nothing of that trust, which, for him, had been turned tobitterness. The little light he possessed spread its beams sonarrowly, that frustrated belief was a curtain broad enough tocreate for him the blackness of night.His first movement after the shock had been to work in his loom; andhe went on with this unremittingly, never asking himself why, now hewas come to Raveloe, he worked far on into the night to finish thetale of Mrs. Osgood's table-linen sooner than she expected--without contemplating beforehand the money she would put into hishand for the work. He seemed to weave, like the spider, from pureimpulse, without reflection. Every man's work, pursued steadily,tends in this way to become an end in itself, and so to bridge overthe loveless chasms of his life. Silas's hand satisfied itself withthrowing the shuttle, and his eye with seeing the little squares inthe cloth complete themselves under his effort. Then there were thecalls of hunger; and Silas, in his solitude, had to provide his ownbreakfast, dinner, and supper, to fetch his own water from the well,and put his own kettle on the fire; and all these immediatepromptings helped, along with the weaving, to reduce his life to theunquestioning activity of a spinning insect. He hated the thoughtof the past; there was nothing that called out his love andfellowship toward the strangers he had come amongst; and the futurewas all dark, for there was no Unseen Love that cared for him.Thought was arrested by utter bewilderment, now its old narrowpathway was closed, and affection seemed to have died under thebruise that had fallen on its keenest nerves.But at last Mrs. Osgood's table-linen was finished, and Silas waspaid in gold. His earnings in his native town, where he worked fora wholesale dealer, had been after a lower rate; he had been paidweekly, and of his weekly earnings a large proportion had gone toobjects of piety and charity. Now, for the first time in his life,he had five bright guineas put into his hand; no man expected ashare of them, and he loved no man that he should offer him a share.But what were the guineas to him who saw no vista beyond countlessdays of weaving? It was needless for him to ask that, for it waspleasant to him to feel them in his palm, and look at their brightfaces, which were all his own: it was another element of life, likethe weaving and the satisfaction of hunger, subsisting quite alooffrom the life of belief and love from which he had been cut off.The weaver's hand had known the touch of hard-won money even beforethe palm had grown to its full breadth; for twenty years, mysteriousmoney had stood to him as the symbol of earthly good, and theimmediate object of toil. He had seemed to love it little in theyears when every penny had its purpose for him; for he loved thepurpose then. But now, when all purpose was gone, that habit oflooking towards the money and grasping it with a sense of fulfilledeffort made a loam that was deep enough for the seeds of desire; andas Silas walked homeward across the fields in the twilight, he drewout the money and thought it was brighter in the gathering gloom.About this time an incident happened which seemed to open apossibility of some fellowship with his neighbours. One day, takinga pair of shoes to be mended, he saw the cobbler's wife seated bythe fire, suffering from the terrible symptoms of heart-disease anddropsy, which he had witnessed as the precursors of his mother'sdeath. He felt a rush of pity at the mingled sight and remembrance,and, recalling the relief his mother had found from a simplepreparation of foxglove, he promised Sally Oates to bring hersomething that would ease her, since the doctor did her no good. Inthis office of charity, Silas felt, for the first time since he hadcome to Raveloe, a sense of unity between his past and present life,which might have been the beginning of his rescue from theinsect-like existence into which his nature had shrunk. But SallyOates's disease had raised her into a personage of much interest andimportance among the neighbours, and the fact of her having foundrelief from drinking Silas Marner's "stuff" became a matter ofgeneral discourse. When Doctor Kimble gave physic, it was naturalthat it should have an effect; but when a weaver, who came fromnobody knew where, worked wonders with a bottle of brown waters, theoccult character of the process was evident. Such a sort of thinghad not been known since the Wise Woman at Tarley died; and she hadcharms as well as "stuff": everybody went to her when theirchildren had fits. Silas Marner must be a person of the same sort,for how did he know what would bring back Sally Oates's breath, ifhe didn't know a fine sight more than that? The Wise Woman hadwords that she muttered to herself, so that you couldn't hear whatthey were, and if she tied a bit of red thread round the child's toethe while, it would keep off the water in the head. There werewomen in Raveloe, at that present time, who had worn one of the WiseWoman's little bags round their necks, and, in consequence, hadnever had an idiot child, as Ann Coulter had. Silas Marner couldvery likely do as much, and more; and now it was all clear how heshould have come from unknown parts, and be so "comical-looking".But Sally Oates must mind and not tell the doctor, for he would besure to set his face against Marner: he was always angry about theWise Woman, and used to threaten those who went to her that theyshould have none of his help any more.Silas now found himself and his cottage suddenly beset by motherswho wanted him to charm away the whooping-cough, or bring back themilk, and by men who wanted stuff against the rheumatics or theknots in the hands; and, to secure themselves against a refusal, theapplicants brought silver in their palms. Silas might have driven aprofitable trade in charms as well as in his small list of drugs;but money on this condition was no temptation to him: he had neverknown an impulse towards falsity, and he drove one after anotheraway with growing irritation, for the news of him as a wise man hadspread even to Tarley, and it was long before people ceased to takelong walks for the sake of asking his aid. But the hope in hiswisdom was at length changed into dread, for no one believed himwhen he said he knew no charms and could work no cures, and everyman and woman who had an accident or a new attack after applying tohim, set the misfortune down to Master Marner's ill-will andirritated glances. Thus it came to pass that his movement of pitytowards Sally Oates, which had given him a transient sense ofbrotherhood, heightened the repulsion between him and hisneighbours, and made his isolation more complete.Gradually the guineas, the crowns, and the half-crowns grew to aheap, and Marner drew less and less for his own wants, trying tosolve the problem of keeping himself strong enough to work sixteenhours a-day on as small an outlay as possible. Have not men, shutup in solitary imprisonment, found an interest in marking themoments by straight strokes of a certain length on the wall, untilthe growth of the sum of straight strokes, arranged in triangles,has become a mastering purpose? Do we not wile away moments ofinanity or fatigued waiting by repeating some trivial movement orsound, until the repetition has bred a want, which is incipienthabit? That will help us to understand how the love of accumulatingmoney grows an absorbing passion in men whose imaginations, even inthe very beginning of their hoard, showed them no purpose beyond it.Marner wanted the heaps of ten to grow into a square, and then intoa larger square; and every added guinea, while it was itself asatisfaction, bred a new desire. In this strange world, made ahopeless riddle to him, he might, if he had had a less intensenature, have sat weaving, weaving--looking towards the end of hispattern, or towards the end of his web, till he forgot the riddle,and everything else but his immediate sensations; but the money hadcome to mark off his weaving into periods, and the money not onlygrew, but it remained with him. He began to think it was consciousof him, as his loom was, and he would on no account have exchangedthose coins, which had become his familiars, for other coins withunknown faces. He handled them, he counted them, till their formand colour were like the satisfaction of a thirst to him; but it wasonly in the night, when his work was done, that he drew them out toenjoy their companionship. He had taken up some bricks in his floorunderneath his loom, and here he had made a hole in which he set theiron pot that contained his guineas and silver coins, covering thebricks with sand whenever he replaced them. Not that the idea ofbeing robbed presented itself often or strongly to his mind:hoarding was common in country districts in those days; there wereold labourers in the parish of Raveloe who were known to have theirsavings by them, probably inside their flock-beds; but their rusticneighbours, though not all of them as honest as their ancestors inthe days of King Alfred, had not imaginations bold enough to lay aplan of burglary. How could they have spent the money in their ownvillage without betraying themselves? They would be obliged to"run away"--a course as dark and dubious as a balloon journey.So, year after year, Silas Marner had lived in this solitude, hisguineas rising in the iron pot, and his life narrowing and hardeningitself more and more into a mere pulsation of desire andsatisfaction that had no relation to any other being. His life hadreduced itself to the functions of weaving and hoarding, without anycontemplation of an end towards which the functions tended. Thesame sort of process has perhaps been undergone by wiser men, whenthey have been cut off from faith and love--only, instead of aloom and a heap of guineas, they have had some erudite research,some ingenious project, or some well-knit theory. StrangelyMarner's face and figure shrank and bent themselves into a constantmechanical relation to the objects of his life, so that he producedthe same sort of impression as a handle or a crooked tube, which hasno meaning standing apart. The prominent eyes that used to looktrusting and dreamy, now looked as if they had been made to see onlyone kind of thing that was very small, like tiny grain, for whichthey hunted everywhere: and he was so withered and yellow, that,though he was not yet forty, the children always called him "OldMaster Marner".Yet even in this stage of withering a little incident happened,which showed that the sap of affection was not all gone. It was oneof his daily tasks to fetch his water from a well a couple of fieldsoff, and for this purpose, ever since he came to Raveloe, he had hada brown earthenware pot, which he held as his most precious utensilamong the very few conveniences he had granted himself. It had beenhis companion for twelve years, always standing on the same spot,always lending its handle to him in the early morning, so that itsform had an expression for him of willing helpfulness, and theimpress of its handle on his palm gave a satisfaction mingled withthat of having the fresh clear water. One day as he was returningfrom the well, he stumbled against the step of the stile, and hisbrown pot, falling with force against the stones that overarched theditch below him, was broken in three pieces. Silas picked up thepieces and carried them home with grief in his heart. The brown potcould never be of use to him any more, but he stuck the bitstogether and propped the ruin in its old place for a memorial.This is the history of Silas Marner, until the fifteenth year afterhe came to Raveloe. The livelong day he sat in his loom, his earfilled with its monotony, his eyes bent close down on the slowgrowth of sameness in the brownish web, his muscles moving with sucheven repetition that their pause seemed almost as much a constraintas the holding of his breath. But at night came his revelry: atnight he closed his shutters, and made fast his doors, and drewforth his gold. Long ago the heap of coins had become too large forthe iron pot to hold them, and he had made for them two thickleather bags, which wasted no room in their resting-place, but lentthemselves flexibly to every corner. How the guineas shone as theycame pouring out of the dark leather mouths! The silver bore nolarge proportion in amount to the gold, because the long pieces oflinen which formed his chief work were always partly paid for ingold, and out of the silver he supplied his own bodily wants,choosing always the shillings and sixpences to spend in this way.He loved the guineas best, but he would not change the silver--thecrowns and half-crowns that were his own earnings, begotten by hislabour; he loved them all. He spread them out in heaps and bathedhis hands in them; then he counted them and set them up in regularpiles, and felt their rounded outline between his thumb and fingers,and thought fondly of the guineas that were only half-earned by thework in his loom, as if they had been unborn children--thought ofthe guineas that were coming slowly through the coming years,through all his life, which spread far away before him, the endquite hidden by countless days of weaving. No wonder his thoughtswere still with his loom and his money when he made his journeysthrough the fields and the lanes to fetch and carry home his work,so that his steps never wandered to the hedge-banks and thelane-side in search of the once familiar herbs: these too belongedto the past, from which his life had shrunk away, like a rivuletthat has sunk far down from the grassy fringe of its old breadthinto a little shivering thread, that cuts a groove for itself in thebarren sand.But about the Christmas of that fifteenth year, a second greatchange came over Marner's life, and his history became blent in asingular manner with the life of his neighbours.