Silas Marner(织工马南)

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Silas Marner

George Eliot

ELECBOOK CLASSICS

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Low cost licenses are available. Contact us through our web site

The Electric Book Company Ltd

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ELECBOOK CLASSICS

ebc0024. George Eliot: Silas Marner

SILAS MARNER

George Eliot

Silas Marner
George Eliot                                                                                                               ElecBook Classics
4
Contents
Click on number to go to Chapter
PART 1
Chapter 1..................................................................................................7
Chapter 2................................................................................................21
Chapter 3................................................................................................31
Chapter 4................................................................................................45
Chapter 5................................................................................................54
Chapter 6................................................................................................61
Chapter 7................................................................................................74
Chapter 8................................................................................................81
Chapter 9................................................................................................92
Chapter 10............................................................................................101
Chapter 11............................................................................................120
Chapter 12............................................................................................145
Chapter 13............................................................................................153
Chapter 14............................................................................................163
Chapter 15............................................................................................179
PART 2
Chapter 16............................................................................................182
Chapter 17............................................................................................201
Chapter 18............................................................................................215
Chapter 19............................................................................................220

Silas Marner

George Eliot ElecBook Classics

Chapter 20............................................................................................232

Chapter 21............................................................................................235

Conclusion ...........................................................................................241

Silas Marner

George Eliot ElecBook Classics

PART 1

Silas Marner

George Eliot ElecBook Classics

Chapter 1

n the days when the spinning-wheels hummed busily in the

farmhouses—and even great ladies, clothed in silk and

thread-lace, had their toy spinning-wheels of polished oak—

there might be seen in districts far away among the lanes, or deep

in the bosom of the hills, certain pallid, undersized men, who, by

the side of the brawny country-folk, looked like the remnants of a

disinherited race. The shepherd’s dog barked fiercely when one of

these alien-looking men appeared on the upland, dark against the

early winter sunset; for what dog likes a figure bent under a heavy

bag?—and these pale men rarely stirred abroad without that

mysterious burden. The shepherd himself, though he had good

reason to believe that the bag held nothing but flaxen thread, or

else the long rolls of strong linen spun from that thread, was not

quite sure that this trade of weaving, indispensable though it was,

could be carried on entirely without the help of the Evil One. In

that far-off time superstition clung easily round every person or

thing that was at all unwonted, or even intermittent and

occasional merely, like the visits of the pedlar or the knife-grinder.

No one knew where wandering men had their homes or their

origin; and how was a man to be explained unless you at least

knew somebody who knew his father and mother? To the peasants

of old times, the world outside their own direct experience was a

region of vagueness and mystery; to their untravelled thought a

state of wandering was a conception as dim as the winter life of

the swallows that came back with the spring; and even a settler, if

he came from distant parts, hardly ever ceased to be viewed with a

remnant of distrust, which would have prevented any surprise if a

Silas Marner

George Eliot ElecBook Classics

long course of inoffensive conduct on his part had ended in the

commission of a crime; especially if he had any reputation for

knowledge, or showed any skill in handicraft. All cleverness,

whether in the rapid use of that difficult instrument the tongue, or

in some other art unfamiliar to villagers, was in itself suspicious:

honest folk, born and bred in a visible manner, were mostly not

overwise or clever—at least, not beyond such a matter as knowing

the signs of the weather; and the process by which rapidity and

dexterity of any kind were acquired was so wholly hidden that

they partook of the nature of conjuring. In this way it came to pass

that those scattered linen-weavers—emigrants from the town into

the country—were to the last regarded as aliens by their rustic

neighbours, and usually contracted the eccentric habits which

belong to a state of loneliness.

In the early years of this century, such a linen-weaver, named

Silas Marner, worked at his vocation in a stone cottage that stood

among the nutty hedgerows near the village of Raveloe, and not

far from the edge of a deserted stone-pit. The questionable sound

of Silas’s loom, so unlike the natural cheerful trotting of the

winnowing-machine, or the simpler rhythm of the flail, had a half-

fearful fascination for the Raveloe boys, who would often leave off

their nutting or birds’-nesting to peep in at the window of the

stone cottage, counterbalancing a certain awe at the mysterious

action of the loom, by a pleasant sense of scornful superiority,

drawn from the mockery of its alternating noises, along with the

bent, treadmill attitude of the weaver. But sometimes it happened

that Marner, pausing to adjust an irregularity in his thread,

became aware of the small scoundrels, and, though chary of his

time, he liked their intrusion so ill that he would descend from his

Silas Marner

George Eliot ElecBook Classics

loom, and, opening the door, would fix on them a gaze that was

always enough to make them take to their legs in terror. For how

was it possible to believe that those large brown protuberant eyes

in Silas Marner’s pale face really saw nothing very distinctly that

was not close to them, and not rather that their dreadful stare

could dart cramp, or rickets, or a wry mouth at any boy who

happened to be in the rear? They had, perhaps, heard their

fathers and mothers hint that Silas Marner could cure folk’s

rheumatism if he had a mind, and add, still more darkly, that if

you could only speak the devil fair enough, he might save you the

cost of the doctor. Such strange, lingering echoes of the old

demon-worship might perhaps even now be caught by the diligent

listener among the gray-haired peasantry; for the rude mind with

difficulty associates the ideas of power and benignity. A shadowy

conception of power that by much persuasion can be induced to

refrain from inflicting harm, is the shape most easily taken by the

sense of the Invisible in the minds of men who have always been

pressed close by primitive wants, and to whom a life of hard toil

has never been illuminated by any enthusiastic religious faith. To

them pain and mishap present a far wider range of possibilities

than gladness and enjoyment: their imagination is almost barren

of the images that feed desire and hope, but is all overgrown by

recollections that are a perpetual pasture to fear. “Is there

anything you can fancy that you would like to eat?” I once said to

an old labouring-man, who was in his last illness, and who had

refused all the food his wife had offered him. “No,” he answered;

“I’ve never been used to nothing but common victual, and I can’t

eat that.” Experience had bred no fancies in him that could raise

the phantasm of appetite.

Silas Marner

George Eliot ElecBook Classics

And Raveloe was a village where many of the old echoes

lingered, undrowned by new voices. Not that it was one of those

barren parishes lying on the outskirts of civilization—inhabited by

meagre sheep and thinly scattered shepherds: on the contrary, it

lay in the rich, central plain of what we are pleased to call Merry

England, and held farms which, speaking from a spiritual point of

view, paid highly desirable tithes. But it was nestled in a snug,

well-wooded hollow, quite an hour’s journey on horseback from

any turnpike, where it was never reached by the vibrations of the

coach-horn, or of public opinion. It was an important-looking

village, with a fine old church, and large churchyard in the heart

of it, and two or three large brick-and-stone homesteads, with

well-walled orchards and ornamental weathercocks, standing

close upon the road, and lifting more imposing fronts than the

rectory, which peeped from among the trees on the other side of

the churchyard—a village which showed at once the summits of its

social life, and told the practised eye that there was no great park

and manor-house in the vicinity, but that there were several chiefs

in Raveloe who could farm badly quite at their ease, drawing

enough money from their bad farming, in those wartimes, to live

in a rollicking fashion, and keep a jolly Christmas, Whitsun, and

Eastertide.

It was fifteen years since Silas Marner had first come to

Raveloe: he was then simply a pallid young man, with prominent,

short-sighted brown eyes, whose appearance would have had

nothing strange for people of average culture and experience, but

for the villagers near whom he had come to settle it had

mysterious peculiarities which corresponded with the exceptional

nature of his occupation, and his advent from an unknown region

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SilasMarnerGeorgeEliotELECBOOKCLASSICSThisfileisfreeforindividualuseonly.Itmustnotbealteredorresold.Organisationswishingtouseitmustfirstobtainalicence.Lowcostlicensesareavailable.Contactusthroughourwebsite©TheElectricBookCo1998TheElectricBookCompanyLtd20CambridgeDrive,LondonSE128AJ,UK+44(0)181488387...

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