Chapter: "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.

Tom Tulliver, then, compared with many other British youths of his
time who have since had to scramble through life with some fragments
of more or less relevant knowledge, and a great deal of strictly
relevant ignorance, was not so very unlucky. Mr. Stelling was a
broad-chested, healthy man, with the bearing of a gentleman, a
conviction that a growing boy required a sufficiency of beef, and a
certain hearty kindness in him that made him like to see Tom looking
well and enjoying his dinner; not a man of refined conscience, or with
any deep sense of the infinite issues belonging to every-day duties,
not quite competent to his high offices; but incompetent gentlemen
must live, and without private fortune it is difficult to see how they
could all live genteelly if they had nothing to do with education or
government. Besides, it was the fault of Tom's mental constitution
that his faculties could not be nourished on the sort of knowledge Mr.
Stelling had to communicate. A boy born with a deficient power of
apprehending signs and abstractions must suffer the penalty of his
congenital deficiency, just as if he had been born with one leg
shorter than the other. A method of education sanctioned by the long
practice of our venerable ancestors was not to give way before the
exceptional dulness of a boy who was merely living at the time then
present. And Mr. Stelling was convinced that a boy so stupid at signs
and abstractions must be stupid at everything else, even if that
reverend gentleman could have taught him everything else. It was the
practice of our venerable ancestors to apply that ingenious instrument
the thumb-screw, and to tighten and tighten it in order to elicit
non-existent facts; they had a fixed opinion to begin with, that the
facts were existent, and what had they to do but to tighten the
thumb-screw? In like manner, Mr. Stelling had a fixed opinion that all
boys with any capacity could learn what it was the only regular thing
to teach; if they were slow, the thumb-screw must be tightened,--the
exercises must be insisted on with increased severity, and a page of
Virgil be awarded as a penalty, to encourage and stimulate a too
languid inclination to Latin verse.

The thumb-screw was a little relaxed, however, during this second
half-year. Philip was so advanced in his studies, and so apt, that Mr.
Stelling could obtain credit by his facility, which required little
help, much more easily than by the troublesome process of overcoming
Tom's dulness. Gentlemen with broad chests and ambitious intentions do
sometimes disappoint their friends by failing to carry the world
before them. Perhaps it is that high achievements demand some other
unusual qualification besides an unusual desire for high prizes;
perhaps it is that these stalwart gentlemen are rather indolent, their
_divinae particulum aurae_ being obstructed from soaring by a too hearty
appetite. Some reason or other there was why Mr. Stelling deferred the
execution of many spirited projects,--why he did not begin the editing
of his Greek play, or any other work of scholarship, in his leisure
hours, but, after turning the key of his private study with much
resolution, sat down to one of Theodore Hook's novels. Tom was
gradually allowed to shuffle through his lessons with less rigor, and
having Philip to help him, he was able to make some show of having
applied his mind in a confused and blundering way, without being
cross-examined into a betrayal that his mind had been entirely neutral
in the matter. He thought school much more bearable under this
modification of circumstances; and he went on contentedly enough,
picking up a promiscuous education chiefly from things that were not
intended as education at all. What was understood to be his education
was simply the practice of reading, writing, and spelling, carried on
by an elaborate appliance of unintelligible ideas, and by much failure
in the effort to learn by rote.

Nevertheless, there was a visible improvement in Tom under this
training; perhaps because he was not a boy in the abstract, existing
solely to illustrate the evils of a mistaken education, but a boy made
of flesh and blood, with dispositions not entirely at the mercy of
circumstances.

There was a great improvement in his bearing, for example; and some
credit on this score was due to Mr. Poulter, the village schoolmaster,
who, being an old Peninsular soldier, was employed to drill Tom,--a
source of high mutual pleasure. Mr. Poulter, who was understood by the
company at the Black Swan to have once struck terror into the hearts
of the French, was no longer personally formidable. He had rather a
shrunken appearance, and was tremulous in the mornings, not from age,
but from the extreme perversity of the King's Lorton boys, which
nothing but gin could enable him to sustain with any firmness. Still,
he carried himself with martial erectness, had his clothes
scrupulously brushed, and his trousers tightly strapped; and on the
Wednesday and Saturday afternoons, when he came to Tom, he was always
inspired with gin and old memories, which gave him an exceptionally
spirited air, as of a superannuated charger who hears the drum. The
drilling-lessons were always protracted by episodes of warlike
narrative, much more interesting to Tom than Philip's stories out of
the Iliad; for there were no cannon in the Iliad, and besides, Tom had
felt some disgust on learning that Hector and Achilles might possibly
never have existed. But the Duke of Wellington was really alive, and
Bony had not been long dead; therefore Mr. Poulter's reminiscences of
the Peninsular War were removed from all suspicion of being mythical.
Mr. Poulter, it appeared, had been a conspicuous figure at Talavera,
and had contributed not a little to the peculiar terror with which his
regiment of infantry was regarded by the enemy. On afternoons when his
memory was more stimulated than usual, he remembered that the Duke of
Wellington had (in strict privacy, lest jealousies should be awakened)
expressed his esteem for that fine fellow Poulter. The very surgeon
who attended him in the hospital after he had received his
gunshot-wound had been profoundly impressed with the superiority of
Mr. Poulter's flesh,--no other flesh would have healed in anything
like the same time. On less personal matters connected with the
important warfare in which he had been engaged, Mr. Poulter was more
reticent, only taking care not to give the weight of his authority to
any loose notions concerning military history. Any one who pretended
to a knowledge of what occurred at the siege of Badajos was especially
an object of silent pity to Mr. Poulter; he wished that prating person
had been run down, and had the breath trampled out of him at the first
go-off, as he himself had,--he might talk about the siege of Badajos
then! Tom did not escape irritating his drilling-master occasionally,
by his curiosity concerning other military matters than Mr. Poulter's
personal experience.

"And General Wolfe, Mr. Poulter,--wasn't he a wonderful fighter?" said
Tom, who held the notion that all the martial heroes commemorated on
the public-house signs were engaged in the war with Bony.

"Not at all!" said Mr. Poulter, contemptuously. "Nothing o' the sort!
Heads up!" he added, in a tone of stern command, which delighted Tom,
and made him feel as if he were a regiment in his own person.

"No, no!" Mr. Poulter would continue, on coming to a pause in his
discipline; "they'd better not talk to me about General Wolfe. He did
nothing but die of his wound; that's a poor haction, I consider. Any
other man 'ud have died o' the wounds I've had. One of my sword-cuts
'ud ha' killed a fellow like General Wolfe."

"Mr. Poulter," Tom would say, at any allusion to the sword, "I wish
you'd bring your sword and do the sword-exercise!"

For a long while Mr. Poulter only shook his head in a significant
manner at this request, and smiled patronizingly, as Jupiter may have
done when Semele urged her too ambitious request. But one afternoon,
when a sudden shower of heavy rain had detained Mr. Poulter twenty
minutes longer than usual at the Black Swan, the sword was
brought,--just for Tom to look at.

"And this is the real sword you fought with in all the battles, Mr.
Poulter?" said Tom, handling the hilt. "Has it ever cut a Frenchman's
head off?"

"Head off? Ah! and would, if he'd had three heads."

"But you had a gun and bayonet besides?" said Tom. "_I_ should like
the gun and bayonet best, because you could shoot 'em first and spear
'em after. Bang! Ps-s-s-s!" Tom gave the requisite pantomime to
indicate the double enjoyment of pulling the trigger and thrusting the
spear.

"Ah, but the sword's the thing when you come to close fighting," said
Mr. Poulter, involuntarily falling in with Tom's enthusiasm, and
drawing the sword so suddenly that Tom leaped back with much agility.

"Oh, but, Mr. Poulter, if you're going to do the exercise," said Tom,
a little conscious that he had not stood his ground as became an
Englishman, "let me go and call Philip. He'll like to see you, you
know."

"What! the humpbacked lad?" said Mr. Poulter, contemptuously; "what's
the use of _his_ looking on?"

"Oh, but he knows a great deal about fighting," said Tom, "and how
they used to fight with bows and arrows, and battle-axes."

"Let him come, then. I'll show him something different from his bows
and arrows," said Mr. Poulter, coughing and drawing himself up, while
he gave a little preliminary play to his wrist.

Tom ran in to Philip, who was enjoying his afternoon's holiday at the
piano, in the drawing-room, picking out tunes for himself and singing
them. He was supremely happy, perched like an amorphous bundle on the
high stool, with his head thrown back, his eyes fixed on the opposite
cornice, and his lips wide open, sending forth, with all his might,
impromptu syllables to a tune of Arne's which had hit his fancy.

"Come, Philip," said Tom, bursting in; "don't stay roaring 'la la'
there; come and see old Poulter do his sword-exercise in the
carriage-house!"

The jar of this interruption, the discord of Tom's tones coming across
the notes to which Philip was vibrating in soul and body, would have
been enough to unhinge his temper, even if there had been no question
of Poulter the drilling-master; and Tom, in the hurry of seizing
something to say to prevent Mr. Poulter from thinking he was afraid of
the sword when he sprang away from it, had alighted on this
proposition to fetch Philip, though he knew well enough that Philip
hated to hear him mention his drilling-lessons. Tom would never have
done so inconsiderate a thing except under the severe stress of his
personal pride.

Philip shuddered visibly as he paused from his music. Then turning
red, he said, with violent passion,--

"Get away, you lumbering idiot! Don't come bellowing at me; you're not
fit to speak to anything but a cart-horse!"

It was not the first time Philip had been made angry by him, but Tom
had never before been assailed with verbal missiles that he understood
so well.

"I'm fit to speak to something better than you, you poor-spirited
imp!" said Tom, lighting up immediately at Philip's fire. "You know I
won't hit you, because you're no better than a girl. But I'm an honest
man's son, and _your_ father's a rogue; everybody says so!"

Tom flung out of the room, and slammed the door after him, made
strangely heedless by his anger; for to slam doors within the hearing
of Mrs. Stelling, who was probably not far off, was an offence only to
be wiped out by twenty lines of Virgil. In fact, that lady did
presently descend from her room, in double wonder at the noise and the
subsequent cessation of Philip's music. She found him sitting in a
heap on the hassock, and crying bitterly.

"What's the matter, Wakem? what was that noise about? Who slammed the
door?"

Philip looked up, and hastily dried his eyes. "It was Tulliver who
came in--to ask me to go out with him."

"And what are you in trouble about?" said Mrs. Stelling.

Philip was not her favorite of the two pupils; he was less obliging
than Tom, who was made useful in many ways. Still, his father paid
more than Mr. Tulliver did, and she meant him to feel that she behaved
exceedingly well to him. Philip, however, met her advances toward a
good understanding very much as a caressed mollusk meets an invitation
to show himself out of his shell. Mrs. Stelling was not a loving,
tender-hearted woman; she was a woman whose skirt sat well, who
adjusted her waist and patted her curls with a preoccupied air when
she inquired after your welfare. These things, doubtless, represent a
great social power, but it is not the power of love; and no other
power could win Philip from his personal reserve.

He said, in answer to her question, "My toothache came on, and made me
hysterical again."

This had been the fact once, and Philip was glad of the recollection;
it was like an inspiration to enable him to excuse his crying. He had
to accept eau-de-Cologne and to refuse creosote in consequence; but
that was easy.

Meanwhile Tom, who had for the first time sent a poisoned arrow into
Philip's heart, had returned to the carriage-house, where he found Mr.
Poulter, with a fixed and earnest eye, wasting the perfections of his
sword-exercise on probably observant but inappreciative rats. But Mr.
Poulter was a host in himself; that is to say, he admired himself more
than a whole army of spectators could have admired him. He took no
notice of Tom's return, being too entirely absorbed in the cut and
thrust,--the solemn one, two, three, four; and Tom, not without a
slight feeling of alarm at Mr. Poulter's fixed eye and hungry-looking
sword, which seemed impatient for something else to cut besides the
air, admired the performance from as great a distance as possible. It
was not until Mr. Poulter paused and wiped the perspiration from his
forehead, that Tom felt the full charm of the sword-exercise, and
wished it to be repeated.

"Mr. Poulter," said Tom, when the sword was being finally sheathed, "I
wish you'd lend me your sword a little while to keep."

"No no, young gentleman," said Mr. Poulter, shaking his head
decidedly; "you might do yourself some mischief with it."

"No, I'm sure I wouldn't; I'm sure I'd take care and not hurt myself.
I shouldn't take it out of the sheath much, but I could ground arms
with it, and all that."

"No, no, it won't do, I tell you; it won't do," said Mr. Poulter,
preparing to depart. "What 'ud Mr. Stelling say to me?"

"Oh, I say, do, Mr. Poulter! I'd give you my five-shilling piece if
you'd let me keep the sword a week. Look here!" said Tom, reaching out
the attractively large round of silver. The young dog calculated the
effect as well as if he had been a philosopher.

"Well," said Mr. Poulter, with still deeper gravity, "you must keep it
out of sight, you know."

"Oh yes, I'll keep it under the bed," said Tom, eagerly, "or else at
the bottom of my large box."

"And let me see, now, whether you can draw it out of the sheath
without hurting yourself." That process having been gone through more
than once, Mr. Poulter felt that he had acted with scrupulous
conscientiousness, and said, "Well, now, Master Tulliver, if I take
the crown-piece, it is to make sure as you'll do no mischief with the
sword."

"Oh no, indeed, Mr. Poulter," said Tom, delightedly handing him the
crown-piece, and grasping the sword, which, he thought, might have
been lighter with advantage.

"But if Mr. Stelling catches you carrying it in?" said Mr. Poulter,
pocketing the crown-piece provisionally while he raised this new
doubt.

"Oh, he always keeps in his upstairs study on Saturday afternoon,"
said Tom, who disliked anything sneaking, but was not disinclined to a
little stratagem in a worthy cause. So he carried off the sword in
triumph mixed with dread--dread that he might encounter Mr. or Mrs.
Stelling--to his bedroom, where, after some consideration, he hid it
in the closet behind some hanging clothes. That night he fell asleep
in the thought that he would astonish Maggie with it when she
came,--tie it round his waist with his red comforter, and make her
believe that the sword was his own, and that he was going to be a
soldier. There was nobody but Maggie who would be silly enough to
believe him, or whom he dared allow to know he had a sword; and Maggie
was really coming next week to see Tom, before she went to a
boarding-school with Lucy.

If you think a lad of thirteen would have been so childish, you must
be an exceptionally wise man, who, although you are devoted to a civil
calling, requiring you to look bland rather than formidable, yet
never, since you had a beard, threw yourself into a martial attitude,
and frowned before the looking-glass. It is doubtful whether our
soldiers would be maintained if there were not pacific people at home
who like to fancy themselves soldiers. War, like other dramatic
spectacles, might possibly cease for want of a "public."

 Despite his admiration for Philip's stories and drawing ability, Tom never quite overcomes the feeling that Philip is his enemy. Tom's schoolwork does not improve very much. Mr. Stelling is convinced that "a boy so stupid at signs and abstractions must be stupid at everything else," but Tom is not so very unlucky in his education; he is well fed, and gets "some fragments of more or less relevant knowledge." His bearing improves greatly through the instruction of his drillmaster, Mr. Poulter. Poulter is the village schoolmaster and a retired soldier, and his stories of combat under the Duke of Wellington are one of Tom's chief interests. For a long time Tom has badgered Mr. Poulter to bring his sword to their drill. One day the old man gives in, and Tom runs in to bring Philip to see the exhibition of swordsmanship. Philip is singing at the piano and is annoyed by the interruption. He flares up at Tom, and in return Tom calls Philip's father a rogue. After Tom leaves, Philip cries bitterly. Mrs. Stelling tries half-heartedly to comfort him, but he tells her it is only a headache. Tom is enthralled by the sword, and he bribes old Poulter to let him keep it under his bed. Tom smuggles it to his room and plans a surprise for Maggie when she comes to see him.

