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Silas Marner - Chapter 2

1. Part I, Chapter 1

2. Chapter 2

3. Chapter 3

4. Chapter 4

5. Chapter 5

6. Chapter 6

7. Chapter 7

8. Chapter 8

9. Chapter 9

10. Chapter 10

11. Chapter 11

12. Chapter 12

13. Chapter 13

14. Chapter 14

15. Chapter 15

16. Part II, Chapter 16

17. Chapter 17

18. Chapter 18

19. Chapter 19

20. Chapter 20

21. Chapter 21

22. Conclusion







CHAPTER II

Even people whose lives have been made various by learning,
sometimes find it hard to keep a fast hold on their habitual views
of life, on their faith in the Invisible, nay, on the sense that
their past joys and sorrows are a real experience, when they are
suddenly transported to a new land, where the beings around them
know nothing of their history, and share none of their ideas--
where their mother earth shows another lap, and human life has other
forms than those on which their souls have been nourished. Minds
that have been unhinged from their old faith and love, have perhaps
sought this Lethean influence of exile, in which the past becomes
dreamy because its symbols have all vanished, and the present too is
dreamy because it is linked with no memories. But even _their_
experience may hardly enable them thoroughly to imagine what was the
effect on a simple weaver like Silas Marner, when he left his own
country and people and came to settle in Raveloe. Nothing could be
more unlike his native town, set within sight of the widespread
hillsides, than this low, wooded region, where he felt hidden even
from the heavens by the screening trees and hedgerows. There was
nothing here, when he rose in the deep morning quiet and looked out
on the dewy brambles and rank tufted grass, that seemed to have any
relation with that life centring in Lantern Yard, which had once
been to him the altar-place of high dispensations. The whitewashed
walls; the little pews where well-known figures entered with a
subdued rustling, and where first one well-known voice and then
another, pitched in a peculiar key of petition, uttered phrases at
once occult and familiar, like the amulet worn on the heart; the
pulpit where the minister delivered unquestioned doctrine, and
swayed to and fro, and handled the book in a long accustomed manner;
the very pauses between the couplets of the hymn, as it was given
out, and the recurrent swell of voices in song: these things had
been the channel of divine influences to Marner--they were the
fostering home of his religious emotions--they were Christianity
and God's kingdom upon earth. A weaver who finds hard words in his
hymn-book knows nothing of abstractions; as the little child knows
nothing of parental love, but only knows one face and one lap
towards which it stretches its arms for refuge and nurture.

And what could be more unlike that Lantern Yard world than the world
in Raveloe?--orchards looking lazy with neglected plenty; the
large church in the wide churchyard, which men gazed at lounging at
their own doors in service-time; the purple-faced farmers jogging
along the lanes or turning in at the Rainbow; homesteads, where men
supped heavily and slept in the light of the evening hearth, and
where women seemed to be laying up a stock of linen for the life to
come. There were no lips in Raveloe from which a word could fall
that 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 each
territory was inhabited and ruled by its own divinities, so that a
man could cross the bordering heights and be out of the reach of his
native gods, whose presence was confined to the streams and the
groves and the hills among which he had lived from his birth. And
poor Silas was vaguely conscious of something not unlike the feeling
of primitive men, when they fled thus, in fear or in sullenness,
from the face of an unpropitious deity. It seemed to him that the
Power he had vainly trusted in among the streets and at the
prayer-meetings, was very far away from this land in which he had
taken refuge, where men lived in careless abundance, knowing and
needing nothing of that trust, which, for him, had been turned to
bitterness. The little light he possessed spread its beams so
narrowly, that frustrated belief was a curtain broad enough to
create for him the blackness of night.

His first movement after the shock had been to work in his loom; and
he went on with this unremittingly, never asking himself why, now he
was come to Raveloe, he worked far on into the night to finish the
tale of Mrs. Osgood's table-linen sooner than she expected--
without contemplating beforehand the money she would put into his
hand for the work. He seemed to weave, like the spider, from pure
impulse, without reflection. Every man's work, pursued steadily,
tends in this way to become an end in itself, and so to bridge over
the loveless chasms of his life. Silas's hand satisfied itself with
throwing the shuttle, and his eye with seeing the little squares in
the cloth complete themselves under his effort. Then there were the
calls of hunger; and Silas, in his solitude, had to provide his own
breakfast, dinner, and supper, to fetch his own water from the well,
and put his own kettle on the fire; and all these immediate
promptings helped, along with the weaving, to reduce his life to the
unquestioning activity of a spinning insect. He hated the thought
of the past; there was nothing that called out his love and
fellowship toward the strangers he had come amongst; and the future
was all dark, for there was no Unseen Love that cared for him.
Thought was arrested by utter bewilderment, now its old narrow
pathway was closed, and affection seemed to have died under the
bruise that had fallen on its keenest nerves.

But at last Mrs. Osgood's table-linen was finished, and Silas was
paid in gold. His earnings in his native town, where he worked for
a wholesale dealer, had been after a lower rate; he had been paid
weekly, and of his weekly earnings a large proportion had gone to
objects of piety and charity. Now, for the first time in his life,
he had five bright guineas put into his hand; no man expected a
share 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 countless
days of weaving? It was needless for him to ask that, for it was
pleasant to him to feel them in his palm, and look at their bright
faces, which were all his own: it was another element of life, like
the weaving and the satisfaction of hunger, subsisting quite aloof
from 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 before
the palm had grown to its full breadth; for twenty years, mysterious
money had stood to him as the symbol of earthly good, and the
immediate object of toil. He had seemed to love it little in the
years when every penny had its purpose for him; for he loved the
_purpose_ then. But now, when all purpose was gone, that habit of
looking towards the money and grasping it with a sense of fulfilled
effort made a loam that was deep enough for the seeds of desire; and
as Silas walked homeward across the fields in the twilight, he drew
out the money and thought it was brighter in the gathering gloom.

About this time an incident happened which seemed to open a
possibility of some fellowship with his neighbours. One day, taking
a pair of shoes to be mended, he saw the cobbler's wife seated by
the fire, suffering from the terrible symptoms of heart-disease and
dropsy, which he had witnessed as the precursors of his mother's
death. He felt a rush of pity at the mingled sight and remembrance,
and, recalling the relief his mother had found from a simple
preparation of foxglove, he promised Sally Oates to bring her
something that would ease her, since the doctor did her no good. In
this office of charity, Silas felt, for the first time since he had
come to Raveloe, a sense of unity between his past and present life,
which might have been the beginning of his rescue from the
insect-like existence into which his nature had shrunk. But Sally
Oates's disease had raised her into a personage of much interest and
importance among the neighbours, and the fact of her having found
relief from drinking Silas Marner's "stuff" became a matter of
general discourse. When Doctor Kimble gave physic, it was natural
that it should have an effect; but when a weaver, who came from
nobody knew where, worked wonders with a bottle of brown waters, the
occult character of the process was evident. Such a sort of thing
had not been known since the Wise Woman at Tarley died; and she had
charms as well as "stuff": everybody went to her when their
children 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, if
he didn't know a fine sight more than that? The Wise Woman had
words that she muttered to herself, so that you couldn't hear what
they were, and if she tied a bit of red thread round the child's toe
the while, it would keep off the water in the head. There were
women in Raveloe, at that present time, who had worn one of the Wise
Woman's little bags round their necks, and, in consequence, had
never had an idiot child, as Ann Coulter had. Silas Marner could
very likely do as much, and more; and now it was all clear how he
should have come from unknown parts, and be so "comical-looking".
But Sally Oates must mind and not tell the doctor, for he would be
sure to set his face against Marner: he was always angry about the
Wise Woman, and used to threaten those who went to her that they
should have none of his help any more.

Silas now found himself and his cottage suddenly beset by mothers
who wanted him to charm away the whooping-cough, or bring back the
milk, and by men who wanted stuff against the rheumatics or the
knots in the hands; and, to secure themselves against a refusal, the
applicants brought silver in their palms. Silas might have driven a
profitable trade in charms as well as in his small list of drugs;
but money on this condition was no temptation to him: he had never
known an impulse towards falsity, and he drove one after another
away with growing irritation, for the news of him as a wise man had
spread even to Tarley, and it was long before people ceased to take
long walks for the sake of asking his aid. But the hope in his
wisdom was at length changed into dread, for no one believed him
when he said he knew no charms and could work no cures, and every
man and woman who had an accident or a new attack after applying to
him, set the misfortune down to Master Marner's ill-will and
irritated glances. Thus it came to pass that his movement of pity
towards Sally Oates, which had given him a transient sense of
brotherhood, heightened the repulsion between him and his
neighbours, and made his isolation more complete.

Gradually the guineas, the crowns, and the half-crowns grew to a
heap, and Marner drew less and less for his own wants, trying to
solve the problem of keeping himself strong enough to work sixteen
hours a-day on as small an outlay as possible. Have not men, shut
up in solitary imprisonment, found an interest in marking the
moments by straight strokes of a certain length on the wall, until
the growth of the sum of straight strokes, arranged in triangles,
has become a mastering purpose? Do we not wile away moments of
inanity or fatigued waiting by repeating some trivial movement or
sound, until the repetition has bred a want, which is incipient
habit? That will help us to understand how the love of accumulating
money grows an absorbing passion in men whose imaginations, even in
the very beginning of their hoard, showed them no purpose beyond it.
Marner wanted the heaps of ten to grow into a square, and then into
a larger square; and every added guinea, while it was itself a
satisfaction, bred a new desire. In this strange world, made a
hopeless riddle to him, he might, if he had had a less intense
nature, have sat weaving, weaving--looking towards the end of his
pattern, or towards the end of his web, till he forgot the riddle,
and everything else but his immediate sensations; but the money had
come to mark off his weaving into periods, and the money not only
grew, but it remained with him. He began to think it was conscious
of him, as his loom was, and he would on no account have exchanged
those coins, which had become his familiars, for other coins with
unknown faces. He handled them, he counted them, till their form
and colour were like the satisfaction of a thirst to him; but it was
only in the night, when his work was done, that he drew them out to
enjoy their companionship. He had taken up some bricks in his floor
underneath his loom, and here he had made a hole in which he set the
iron pot that contained his guineas and silver coins, covering the
bricks with sand whenever he replaced them. Not that the idea of
being robbed presented itself often or strongly to his mind:
hoarding was common in country districts in those days; there were
old labourers in the parish of Raveloe who were known to have their
savings by them, probably inside their flock-beds; but their rustic
neighbours, though not all of them as honest as their ancestors in
the days of King Alfred, had not imaginations bold enough to lay a
plan of burglary. How could they have spent the money in their own
village 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, his
guineas rising in the iron pot, and his life narrowing and hardening
itself more and more into a mere pulsation of desire and
satisfaction that had no relation to any other being. His life had
reduced itself to the functions of weaving and hoarding, without any
contemplation of an end towards which the functions tended. The
same sort of process has perhaps been undergone by wiser men, when
they have been cut off from faith and love--only, instead of a
loom and a heap of guineas, they have had some erudite research,
some ingenious project, or some well-knit theory. Strangely
Marner's face and figure shrank and bent themselves into a constant
mechanical relation to the objects of his life, so that he produced
the same sort of impression as a handle or a crooked tube, which has
no meaning standing apart. The prominent eyes that used to look
trusting and dreamy, now looked as if they had been made to see only
one kind of thing that was very small, like tiny grain, for which
they hunted everywhere: and he was so withered and yellow, that,
though he was not yet forty, the children always called him "Old
Master 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 one
of his daily tasks to fetch his water from a well a couple of fields
off, and for this purpose, ever since he came to Raveloe, he had had
a brown earthenware pot, which he held as his most precious utensil
among the very few conveniences he had granted himself. It had been
his companion for twelve years, always standing on the same spot,
always lending its handle to him in the early morning, so that its
form had an expression for him of willing helpfulness, and the
impress of its handle on his palm gave a satisfaction mingled with
that of having the fresh clear water. One day as he was returning
from the well, he stumbled against the step of the stile, and his
brown pot, falling with force against the stones that overarched the
ditch below him, was broken in three pieces. Silas picked up the
pieces and carried them home with grief in his heart. The brown pot
could never be of use to him any more, but he stuck the bits
together and propped the ruin in its old place for a memorial.

This is the history of Silas Marner, until the fifteenth year after
he came to Raveloe. The livelong day he sat in his loom, his ear
filled with its monotony, his eyes bent close down on the slow
growth of sameness in the brownish web, his muscles moving with such
even repetition that their pause seemed almost as much a constraint
as the holding of his breath. But at night came his revelry: at
night he closed his shutters, and made fast his doors, and drew
forth his gold. Long ago the heap of coins had become too large for
the iron pot to hold them, and he had made for them two thick
leather bags, which wasted no room in their resting-place, but lent
themselves flexibly to every corner. How the guineas shone as they
came pouring out of the dark leather mouths! The silver bore no
large proportion in amount to the gold, because the long pieces of
linen which formed his chief work were always partly paid for in
gold, 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--the
crowns and half-crowns that were his own earnings, begotten by his
labour; he loved them all. He spread them out in heaps and bathed
his hands in them; then he counted them and set them up in regular
piles, and felt their rounded outline between his thumb and fingers,
and thought fondly of the guineas that were only half-earned by the
work in his loom, as if they had been unborn children--thought of
the guineas that were coming slowly through the coming years,
through all his life, which spread far away before him, the end
quite hidden by countless days of weaving. No wonder his thoughts
were still with his loom and his money when he made his journeys
through the fields and the lanes to fetch and carry home his work,
so that his steps never wandered to the hedge-banks and the
lane-side in search of the once familiar herbs: these too belonged
to the past, from which his life had shrunk away, like a rivulet
that has sunk far down from the grassy fringe of its old breadth
into a little shivering thread, that cuts a groove for itself in the
barren sand.

But about the Christmas of that fifteenth year, a second great
change came over Marner's life, and his history became blent in a
singular manner with the life of his neighbours.




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