Have you ever thought about what fiction is? Probably, such a question may seem surprising: and so everything is clear. Every person throughout his life has to repeatedly create the works he needs for specific purposes - statements, autobiographies, dictations - using not gypsum or clay, not musical notes, not paints, but just a word. At the same time, almost every person will be very surprised if he is told that he thereby created a work of fiction, which is very different from visual art, music and sculpture making. However, everyone understands that a student's essay or dictation is fundamentally different from novels, short stories, news that are created by professional writers. In the works of professionals there is the most important difference - excogitation. But, oddly enough, in a school literature course, you don’t realize the full power of fiction. So using our website in your free time discover fiction for yourself. Adam Bede by George Eliot (ebook reader for pc .TXT) 📖
- Author: George Eliot
Book online «Adam Bede by George Eliot (ebook reader for pc .TXT) 📖». Author George Eliot
“Match!” said Bartle. “Aye, as vinegar matches one’s teeth. If a man says a word, his wife ’ll match it with a contradiction; if he’s a mind for hot meat, his wife ’ll match it with cold bacon; if he laughs, she’ll match him with whimpering. She’s such a match as the horse-fly is to th’ horse: she’s got the right venom to sting him with—the right venom to sting him with.”
“Yes,” said Mrs. Poyser, “I know what the men like—a poor soft, as ’ud simper at ’em like the picture o’ the sun, whether they did right or wrong, an’ say thank you for a kick, an’ pretend she didna know which end she stood uppermost, till her husband told her. That’s what a man wants in a wife, mostly; he wants to make sure o’ one fool as ’ull tell him he’s wise. But there’s some men can do wi’out that—they think so much o’ themselves a’ready. An’ that’s how it is there’s old bachelors.”
“Come, Craig,” said Mr. Poyser jocosely, “you mun get married pretty quick, else you’ll be set down for an old bachelor; an’ you see what the women ’ull think on you.”
“Well,” said Mr. Craig, willing to conciliate Mrs. Poyser and setting a high value on his own compliments, “I like a cleverish woman—a woman o’ sperrit—a managing woman.”
“You’re out there, Craig,” said Bartle, dryly; “you’re out there. You judge o’ your garden-stuff on a better plan than that. You pick the things for what they can excel in—for what they can excel in. You don’t value your peas for their roots, or your carrots for their flowers. Now, that’s the way you should choose women. Their cleverness ’ll never come to much—never come to much—but they make excellent simpletons, ripe and strong-flavoured.”
“What dost say to that?” said Mr. Poyser, throwing himself back and looking merrily at his wife.
“Say!” answered Mrs. Poyser, with dangerous fire kindling in her eye. “Why, I say as some folks’ tongues are like the clocks as run on strikin’, not to tell you the time o’ the day, but because there’s summat wrong i’ their own inside...”
Mrs. Poyser would probably have brought her rejoinder to a further climax, if every one’s attention had not at this moment been called to the other end of the table, where the lyricism, which had at first only manifested itself by David’s sotto voce performance of “My love’s a rose without a thorn,” had gradually assumed a rather deafening and complex character. Tim, thinking slightly of David’s vocalization, was impelled to supersede that feeble buzz by a spirited commencement of “Three Merry Mowers,” but David was not to be put down so easily, and showed himself capable of a copious crescendo, which was rendering it doubtful whether the rose would not predominate over the mowers, when old Kester, with an entirely unmoved and immovable aspect, suddenly set up a quavering treble—as if he had been an alarum, and the time was come for him to go off.
The company at Alick’s end of the table took this form of vocal entertainment very much as a matter of course, being free from musical prejudices; but Bartle Massey laid down his pipe and put his fingers in his ears; and Adam, who had been longing to go ever since he had heard Dinah was not in the house, rose and said he must bid good-night.
“I’ll go with you, lad,” said Bartle; “I’ll go with you before my ears are split.”
“I’ll go round by the Common and see you home, if you like, Mr. Massey,” said Adam.
“Aye, aye!” said Bartle; “then we can have a bit o’ talk together. I never get hold of you now.”
“Eh! It’s a pity but you’d sit it out,” said Martin Poyser. “They’ll all go soon, for th’ missis niver lets ’em stay past ten.”
But Adam was resolute, so the good-nights were said, and the two friends turned out on their starlight walk together.
“There’s that poor fool, Vixen, whimpering for me at home,” said Bartle. “I can never bring her here with me for fear she should be struck with Mrs. Poyser’s eye, and the poor bitch might go limping for ever after.”
“I’ve never any need to drive Gyp back,” said Adam, laughing. “He always turns back of his own head when he finds out I’m coming here.”
“Aye, aye,” said Bartle. “A terrible woman!—made of needles, made of needles. But I stick to Martin—I shall always stick to Martin. And he likes the needles, God help him! He’s a cushion made on purpose for ’em.”
“But she’s a downright good-natur’d woman, for all that,” said Adam, “and as true as the daylight. She’s a bit cross wi’ the dogs when they offer to come in th’ house, but if they depended on her, she’d take care and have ’em well fed. If her tongue’s keen, her heart’s tender: I’ve seen that in times o’ trouble. She’s one o’ those women as are better than their word.”
“Well, well,” said Bartle, “I don’t say th’ apple isn’t sound at the core; but it sets my teeth on edge—it sets my teeth on edge.”
The Meeting on the Hill
Adam understood Dinah’s haste to go away, and drew hope rather than discouragement from it. She was fearful lest the strength of her feeling towards him should hinder her from waiting and listening faithfully for the ultimate guiding voice from within.
“I wish I’d asked her to write to me, though,” he thought. “And yet even that might disturb her a bit, perhaps. She wants to be quite quiet in her old way for a while. And I’ve no right to be impatient and interrupting her with my wishes. She’s told me what her mind is, and she’s not a woman to say one thing and mean another. I’ll wait patiently.”
That was Adam’s wise resolution, and it throve excellently for the first two or three weeks on the nourishment it got from the remembrance of Dinah’s confession that Sunday afternoon. There is a wonderful amount of sustenance in the first few words of love. But towards the middle of October the resolution began to dwindle perceptibly, and showed dangerous symptoms of exhaustion. The weeks were unusually long: Dinah must surely have had more than enough time to make up her mind. Let a woman say what she will after she has once told a man that she loves him, he is a little too flushed and exalted with that first draught she offers him to care much about the taste of the second. He treads the earth with a very elastic step as he walks away from her, and makes light of all difficulties. But that sort of glow dies out: memory gets sadly diluted with time, and is not strong enough to revive us. Adam was no longer so confident as he had been. He began to fear that perhaps Dinah’s old life would have too strong a grasp upon her for any new feeling to triumph. If she had not felt this, she would surely have written to him to give him some comfort; but it appeared that she held it right to discourage him. As Adam’s confidence waned, his patience waned with it, and he thought he must write himself. He must ask Dinah not to leave him in painful doubt longer than was needful. He sat up late one night to write her a letter, but the next morning he burnt it, afraid of its effect. It would be worse to have a discouraging answer by letter than from her own lips, for her presence reconciled him to her will.
You perceive how it was: Adam was hungering for the sight of Dinah, and when that sort of hunger reaches a certain stage, a lover is likely to still it though he may have to put his future in pawn.
But what harm could he do by going to Snowfield? Dinah could not be displeased with him for it. She had not forbidden him to go. She must surely expect that he would go before long. By the second Sunday in October this view of the case had become so clear to Adam that he was already on his way to Snowfield, on horseback this time, for his hours were precious now, and he had borrowed Jonathan Burge’s good nag for the journey.
What keen memories went along the road with him! He had often been to Oakbourne and back since that first journey to Snowfield, but beyond Oakbourne the greystone walls, the broken country, the meagre trees, seemed to be telling him afresh the story of that painful past which he knew so well by heart. But no story is the same to us after a lapse of time—or rather, we who read it are no longer the same interpreters—and Adam this morning brought with him new thoughts through that grey country, thoughts which gave an altered significance to its story of the past.
That is a base and selfish, even a blasphemous, spirit which rejoices and is thankful over the past evil that has blighted or crushed another, because it has been made a source of unforeseen good to ourselves. Adam could never cease to mourn over that mystery of human sorrow which had been brought so close to him; he could never thank God for another’s misery. And if I were capable of that narrow-sighted joy in Adam’s behalf, I should still know he was not the man to feel it for himself. He would have shaken his head at such a sentiment and said, “Evil’s evil, and sorrow’s sorrow, and you can’t alter it’s natur by wrapping it up in other words. Other folks were not created for my sake, that I should think all square when things turn out well for me.”
But it is not ignoble to feel that the fuller life which a sad experience has brought us is worth our own personal share of pain. Surely it is not possible to feel otherwise, any more than it would be possible for a man with cataract to regret the painful process by which his dim blurred sight of men as trees walking had been exchanged for clear outline and effulgent day. The growth of higher feeling within us is like the growth of faculty, bringing with it a sense of added strength. We can no more wish to return to a narrower sympathy than a painter or a musician can wish to return to his cruder manner, or a philosopher to his less complete formula.
Something like this sense of enlarged being was in Adam’s mind this Sunday morning, as he rode along in vivid recollection of the past. His feeling towards Dinah, the hope of passing his life with her, had been the distant unseen point towards which that hard journey from Snowfield eighteen months ago had been leading him. Tender and deep as his love for Hetty had been—so deep that the roots of it would never be torn away—his love for Dinah was better and more precious to him, for it was the outgrowth of that fuller life which had come to him from his acquaintance with deep sorrow. “It’s like as if it was a new strength to me,” he said to himself, “to love her and know as she loves me. I shall look t’ her to help me to see things right. For she’s better than I am—there’s less o’ self in her, and pride. And it’s a feeling as gives you a sort o’ liberty, as if you could walk more fearless, when you’ve more trust in another than y’ have in yourself. I’ve always been thinking I knew better than them as belonged to me, and that’s a poor sort o’ life, when you can’t look to them nearest to you t’ help you with a bit better thought than what you’ve got inside you a’ready.”
It was more than two o’clock in the afternoon when Adam came in sight of the grey town on the hill-side and looked searchingly towards the green valley below, for the first glimpse of the old thatched roof near the ugly red mill. The scene looked less harsh in the soft October sunshine than it had in the eager time of early spring, and the one grand charm it possessed in common with all wide-stretching woodless regions—that it filled you with a new consciousness of the overarching sky—had a milder, more soothing influence than usual, on this almost cloudless day. Adam’s doubts and fears melted under this influence as the delicate weblike clouds had gradually melted away into the clear blue above him. He seemed to see Dinah’s gentle face assuring him, with its looks alone,
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