Daniel Deronda

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This imaginative stirring, as he turned out of the Juden-gasse, and
continued to saunter in the warm evening air, meaning to find his way to
the synagogue, neutralized the repellent effect of certain ugly little
incidents on his way. Turning into an old book-shop to ask the exact time
of service at the synagogue, he was affectionately directed by a
precocious Jewish youth, who entered cordially into his wanting, not the
fine new building of the Reformed but the old Rabbinical school of the
orthodox; and then cheated him like a pure Teuton, only with more amenity,
in his charge for a book quite out of request as one "nicht so leicht zu
bekommen." Meanwhile at the opposite counter a deaf and grisly tradesman
was casting a flinty look at certain cards, apparently combining
advantages of business with religion, and shoutingly proposed to him in
Jew-dialect by a dingy man in a tall coat hanging from neck to heel, a bag
in hand, and a broad low hat surmounting his chosen nose--who had no
sooner disappeared than another dingy man of the same pattern issued from
the background glooms of the shop and also shouted in the same dialect. In
fact, Deronda saw various queer-looking Israelites not altogether without
guile, and just distinguishable from queer-looking Christians of the same
mixed _morale_. In his anxiety about Mirah's relatives, he had lately been
thinking of vulgar Jews with a sort of personal alarm. But a little
comparison will often diminish our surprise and disgust at the aberrations
of Jews and other dissidents whose lives do not offer a consistent or
lovely pattern of their creed; and this evening Deronda, becoming more
conscious that he was falling into unfairness and ridiculous exaggeration,
began to use that corrective comparison: he paid his thaler too much,
without prejudice to his interests in the Hebrew destiny, or his wish to
find the _Rabbinische Schule_, which he arrived at by sunset, and entered
with a good congregation of men.

He happened to take his seat in a line with an elderly man from whom he
was distant enough to glance at him more than once as rather a noticeable
figure--his ample white beard and felt hat framing a profile of that fine
contour which may as easily be Italian as Hebrew. He returned Deronda's
notice till at last their eyes met; an undesirable chance with unknown
persons, and a reason to Deronda for not looking again; but he immediately
found an open prayer-book pushed toward him and had to bow his thanks.
However, the congregation had mustered, the reader had mounted to the
_almemor_ or platform, and the service began. Deronda, having looked
enough at the German translation of the Hebrew in the book before him to
know that he was chiefly hearing Psalms and Old Testament passages or
phrases, gave himself up to that strongest effect of chanted liturgies
which is independent of detailed verbal meaning--like the effect of an
Allegri's _Miserere_ or a Palestrina's _Magnificat_. The most powerful
movement of feeling with a liturgy is the prayer which seeks for nothing
special, but is a yearning to escape from the limitations of our own
weakness and an invocation of all Good to enter and abide with us; or else
a self-oblivious lifting up of Gladness, a _Gloria in excelsis_ that such
Good exists; both the yearning and the exaltation gathering their utmost
force from the sense of communion in a form which has expressed them both,
for long generations of struggling fellow-men. The Hebrew liturgy, like
others, has its transitions of litany, lyric, proclamation, dry statement
and blessing; but this evening, all were one for Deronda: the chant of the
_Chazaris_ or Reader's grand wide-ranging voice with its passage from
monotony to sudden cries, the outburst of sweet boys' voices from the
little choir, the devotional swaying of men's bodies backward and forward,
the very commonness of the building and shabbiness of the scene where a
national faith, which had penetrated the thinking of half the world, and
moulded the splendid forms of that world's religion, was finding a remote,
obscure echo--all were blent for him as one expression of a binding
history, tragic and yet glorious. He wondered at the strength of his own
feeling; it seemed beyond the occasion--what one might imagine to be a
divine influx in the darkness, before there was any vision to interpret.
The whole scene was a coherent strain, its burden a passionate regret,
which, if he had known the liturgy for the Day of Reconciliation, he might
have clad in its authentic burden; "Happy the eye which saw all these
things; but verily to hear only of them afflicts our soul. Happy the eye
that saw our temple and the joy of our congregation; but verily to hear
only of them afflicts our soul. Happy the eye that saw the fingers when
tuning every kind of song; but verily to hear only of them afflicts our
soul."

But with the cessation of the devotional sounds and the movement of many
indifferent faces and vulgar figures before him there darted into his mind
the frigid idea that he had probably been alone in his feeling, and
perhaps the only person in the congregation for whom the service was more
than a dull routine. There was just time for this chilling thought before
he had bowed to his civil neighbor and was moving away with the rest--when
he felt a hand on his arm, and turning with the rather unpleasant
sensation which this abrupt sort of claim is apt to bring, he saw close to
him the white-bearded face of that neighbor, who said to him in German,
"Excuse me, young gentleman--allow me--what is your parentage--your
mother's family--her maiden name?"

Deronda had a strongly resistant feeling: he was inclined to shake off
hastily the touch on his arm; but he managed to slip it away and said
coldly, "I am an Englishman."

The questioner looked at him dubiously still for an instant, then just
lifted his hat and turned away; whether under a sense of having made a
mistake or of having been repulsed, Deronda was uncertain. In his walk
back to the hotel he tried to still any uneasiness on the subject by
reflecting that he could not have acted differently. How could he say that
he did not know the name of his mother's family to that total stranger?--
who indeed had taken an unwarrantable liberty in the abruptness of his
question, dictated probably by some fancy of likeness such as often occurs
without real significance. The incident, he said to himself, was trivial;
but whatever import it might have, his inward shrinking on the occasion
was too strong for him to be sorry that he had cut it short. It was a
reason, however, for his not mentioning the synagogue to the Mallingers--
in addition to his usual inclination to reticence on anything that the
baronet would have been likely to call Quixotic enthusiasm. Hardly any man
could be more good-natured than Sir Hugo; indeed in his kindliness
especially to women, he did actions which others would have called
romantic; but he never took a romantic view of them, and in general smiled
at the introduction of motives on a grand scale, or of reasons that lay
very far off. This was the point of strongest difference between him and
Deronda, who rarely ate at breakfast without some silent discursive flight
after grounds for filling up his day according to the practice of his
contemporaries.

This halt at Frankfort was taken on their way home, and its impressions
were kept the more actively vibrating in him by the duty of caring for
Mirah's welfare. That question about his parentage, which if he had not
both inwardly and outwardly shaken it off as trivial, would have seemed a
threat rather than a promise of revelation, and reinforced his anxiety as
to the effect of finding Mirah's relatives and his resolve to proceed with
caution. If he made any unpleasant discovery, was he bound to a disclosure
that might cast a new net of trouble around her? He had written to Mrs.
Meyrick to announce his visit at four o'clock, and he found Mirah seated
at work with only Mrs. Meyrick and Mab, the open piano, and all the
glorious company of engravings. The dainty neatness of her hair and dress,
the glow of tranquil happiness in a face where a painter need have changed
nothing if he had wanted to put it in front of the host singing "peace on
earth and good will to men," made a contrast to his first vision of her
that was delightful to Deronda's eyes. Mirah herself was thinking of it,
and immediately on their greeting said--

"See how different I am from the miserable creature by the river! all
because you found me and brought me to the very best."

"It was my good chance to find you," said Deronda. "Any other man would
have been glad to do what I did."

"That is not the right way to be thinking about it," said Mirah, shaking
her head with decisive gravity, "I think of what really was. It was you,
and not another, who found me and were good to me."

"I agree with Mirah," said Mrs. Meyrick. "Saint Anybody is a bad saint to
pray to."

"Besides, Anybody could not have brought me to you," said Mirah, smiling
at Mrs. Meyrick. "And I would rather be with you than with any one else in
the world except my mother. I wonder if ever a poor little bird, that was
lost and could not fly, was taken and put into a warm nest where was a
mother and sisters who took to it so that everything came naturally, as if
it had been always there. I hardly thought before that the world could
ever be as happy and without fear as it is to me now." She looked
meditative a moment, and then said, "sometimes I am a _little_ afraid."

"What is it you are afraid of?" said Deronda with anxiety.

"That when I am turning at the corner of a street I may meet my father. It
seems dreadful that I should be afraid of meeting him. That is my only
sorrow," said Mirah, plaintively.

"It is surely not very probable," said Deronda, wishing that it were less
so; then, not to let the opportunity escape--"Would it be a great grief to
you now if you were never to meet your mother?"

She did not answer immediately, but meditated again, with her eyes fixed
on the opposite wall. Then she turned them on Deronda and said firmly, as
if she had arrived at the exact truth, "I want her to know that I have
always loved her, and if she is alive I want to comfort her. She may be
dead. If she were I should long to know where she was buried; and to know
whether my brother lives, so that we can remember her together. But I will
try not to grieve. I have thought much for so many years of her being
dead. And I shall have her with me in my mind, as I have always had. We
can never be really parted. I think I have never sinned against her. I
have always tried not to do what would hurt her. Only, she might be sorry
that I was not a good Jewess."

"In what way are you not a good Jewess?" said Deronda.

"I am ignorant, and we never observed the laws, but lived among Christians
just as they did. But I have heard my father laugh at the strictness of
the Jews about their food and all customs, and their not liking
Christians. I think my mother was strict; but she could never want me not
to like those who are better to me than any of my own people I have ever
known. I think I could obey in other things that she wished but not in
that. It is so much easier to me to share in love than in hatred. I
remember a play I read in German--since I have been here it has come into
my mind--where the heroine says something like that."

"Antigone," said Deronda.

"Ah, you know it. But I do not believe that my mother would wish me not to
love my best friends. She would be grateful to them." Here Mirah had
turned to Mrs. Meyrick, and with a sudden lighting up of her whole
countenance, she said, "Oh, if we ever do meet and know each other as we
are now, so that I could tell what would comfort her--I should be so full
of blessedness my soul would know no want but to love her!"

"God bless you, child!" said Mrs. Meyrick, the words escaping
involuntarily from her motherly heart. But to relieve the strain of
feeling she looked at Deronda and said, "It is curious that Mirah, who
remembers her mother so well it is as if she saw her, cannot recall her
brother the least bit--except the feeling of having been carried by him
when she was tired, and of his being near her when she was in her mother's
lap. It must be that he was rarely at home. He was already grown up. It is
a pity her brother should be quite a stranger to her."

"He is good; I feel sure Ezra is good," said Mirah, eagerly. "He loved my
mother--he would take care of her. I remember more of him than that. I
remember my mother's voice once calling, 'Ezra!' and then his answering
from a distance 'Mother!'"--Mirah had changed her voice a little in each
of these words and had given them a loving intonation--"and then he came
close to us. I feel sure he is good. I have always taken comfort from
that."

It was impossible to answer this either with agreement or doubt. Mrs.
Meyrick and Deronda exchanged a quick glance: about this brother she felt
as painfully dubious as he did. But Mirah went on, absorbed in her
memories--

"Is it not wonderful how I remember the voices better than anything else?
I think they must go deeper into us than other things. I have often
fancied heaven might be made of voices."

"Like your singing--yes," said Mab, who had hitherto kept a modest
silence, and now spoke bashfully, as was her wont in the presence of
Prince Camaralzaman--"Ma, do ask Mirah to sing. Mr. Deronda has not heard
her."

"Would it be disagreeable to you to sing now?" said Deronda, with a more
deferential gentleness than he had ever been conscious of before.

"Oh, I shall like it," said Mirah. "My voice has come back a little with
rest."

Perhaps her ease of manner was due to something more than the simplicity
of her nature. The circumstances of her life made her think of everything
she did as work demanded from her, in which affectation had nothing to do;
and she had begun her work before self-consciousness was born.

She immediately rose and went to the piano--a somewhat worn instrument
that seemed to get the better of its infirmities under the firm touch of
her small fingers as she preluded. Deronda placed himself where he could
see her while she sang; and she took everything as quietly as if she had
been a child going to breakfast.

Imagine her--it is always good to imagine a human creature in whom bodily
loveliness seems as properly one with the entire being as the bodily
loveliness of those wondrous transparent orbs of life that we find in the
sea--imagine her with her dark hair brushed from her temples, but yet
showing certain tiny rings there which had cunningly found their own way
back, the mass of it hanging behind just to the nape of the little neck in
curly fibres, such as renew themselves at their own will after being
bathed into straightness like that of water-grasses. Then see the perfect
cameo her profile makes, cut in a duskish shell, where by some happy
fortune there pierced a gem-like darkness for the eye and eyebrow; the
delicate nostrils defined enough to be ready for sensitive movements, the
finished ear, the firm curves of the chin and neck, entering into the
expression of a refinement which was not feebleness.

She sang Beethoven's "Per pieta non dirmi addio" with a subdued but
searching pathos which had that essential of perfect singing, the making
one oblivious of art or manner, and only possessing one with the song. It
was the sort of voice that gives the impression of being meant like a
bird's wooing for an audience near and beloved. Deronda began by looking
at her, but felt himself presently covering his eyes with his hand,
wanting to seclude the melody in darkness; then he refrained from what
might seem oddity, and was ready to meet the look of mute appeal which she
turned toward him at the end.

"I think I never enjoyed a song more than that," he said, gratefully.

"You like my singing? I am so glad," she said, with a smile of delight.
"It has been a great pain to me, because it failed in what it was wanted
for. But now we think I can use it to get my bread. I have really been
taught well. And now I have two pupils, that Miss Meyrick found for me.
They pay me nearly two crowns for their two lessons."

"I think I know some ladies who would find you many pupils after
Christmas," said Deronda. "You would not mind singing before any one who
wished to hear you?"

"Oh no, I want to do something to get money. I could teach reading and
speaking, Mrs. Meyrick thinks. But if no one would learn of me, that is
difficult." Mirah smiled with a touch of merriment he had not seen in her
before. "I dare say I should find her poor--I mean my mother. I should
want to get money for her. And I can not always live on charity; though"--
here she turned so as to take all three of her companions in one glance--
"it is the sweetest charity in all the world."

"I should think you can get rich," said Deronda, smiling. "Great ladies
will perhaps like you to teach their daughters, We shall see. But now do
sing again to us."

She went on willingly, singing with ready memory various things by
Gordigiani and Schubert; then, when she had left the piano, Mab said,
entreatingly, "Oh, Mirah, if you would not mind singing the little hymn."

"It is too childish," said Mirah. "It is like lisping."

"What is the hymn?" said Deronda.

"It is the Hebrew hymn she remembers her mother singing over her when she
lay in her cot," said Mrs. Meyrick.

"I should like very much to hear it," said Deronda, "if you think I am
worthy to hear what is so sacred."

"I will sing it if you like," said Mirah, "but I don't sing real words--
only here and there a syllable like hers--the rest is lisping. Do you know
Hebrew? because if you do, my singing will seem childish nonsense."

Deronda shook his head. "It will be quite good Hebrew to me."

Mirah crossed her little feet and hands in her easiest attitude, and then
lifted up her head at an angle which seemed to be directed to some
invisible face bent over her, while she sang a little hymn of quaint
melancholy intervals, with syllables that really seemed childish lisping
to her audience; the voice in which she gave it forth had gathered even a
sweeter, more cooing tenderness than was heard in her other songs.

"If I were ever to know the real words, I should still go on in my old way
with them," said Mirah, when she had repeated the hymn several times.

"Why not?" said Deronda. "The lisped syllables are very full of meaning."

"Yes, indeed," said Mrs. Meyrick. "A mother hears something of a lisp in
her children's talk to the very last. Their words are not just what
everybody else says, though they may be spelled the same. If I were to
live till my Hans got old, I should still see the boy in him. A mother's
love, I often say, is like a tree that has got all the wood in it, from
the very first it made."

"Is not that the way with friendship, too?" said Deronda, smiling. "We
must not let the mothers be too arrogant."

The little woman shook her head over her darning.

"It is easier to find an old mother than an old friend. Friendships begin
with liking or gratitude--roots that can be pulled up. Mother's love
begins deeper down."

"Like what you were saying about the influence of voices," said Deronda,
looking at Mirah. "I don't think your hymn would have had more expression
for me if I had known the words. I went to the synagogue at Frankfort
before I came home, and the service impressed me just as much as if I had
followed the words--perhaps more."

"Oh, was it great to you? Did it go to your heart?" said Mirah, eagerly.
"I thought none but our people would feel that. I thought it was all shut
away like a river in a deep valley, where only heaven saw--I mean---" she
hesitated feeling that she could not disentangle her thought from its
imagery.

"I understand," said Deronda. "But there is not really such a separation--
deeper down, as Mrs. Meyrick says. Our religion is chiefly a Hebrew
religion; and since Jews are men, their religious feelings must have much
in common with those of other men--just as their poetry, though in one
sense peculiar, has a great deal in common with the poetry of other
nations. Still it is to be expected that a Jew would feel the forms of his
people's religion more than one of another race--and yet"--here Deronda
hesitated in his turn--"that is perhaps not always so."

"Ah no," said Mirah, sadly. "I have seen that. I have seen them mock. Is
it not like mocking your parents?--like rejoicing in your parents' shame?"

"Some minds naturally rebel against whatever they were brought up in, and
like the opposite; they see the faults in what is nearest to them," said
Deronda apologetically.

"But you are not like that," said Mirah, looking at him with unconscious
fixedness.

"No, I think not," said Deronda; "but you know I was not brought up as a
Jew."

"Ah, I am always forgetting," said Mirah, with a look of disappointed
recollection, and slightly blushing.

Deronda also felt rather embarrassed, and there was an awkward pause,
which he put an end to by saying playfully--

"Whichever way we take it, we have to tolerate each other; for if we all
went in opposition to our teaching, we must end in difference, just the
same."

"To be sure. We should go on forever in zig-zags," said Mrs. Meyrick. "I
think it is very weak-minded to make your creed up by the rule of the
contrary. Still one may honor one's parents, without following their
notions exactly, any more than the exact cut of their clothing. My father
was a Scotch Calvinist and my mother was a French Calvinist; I am neither
quite Scotch, nor quite French, nor two Calvinists rolled into one, yet I
honor my parents' memory."

"But I could not make myself not a Jewess," said Mirah, insistently, "even
if I changed my belief."

"No, my dear. But if Jews and Jewesses went on changing their religion,
and making no difference between themselves and Christians, there would
come a time when there would be no Jews to be seen," said Mrs. Meyrick,
taking that consummation very cheerfully.

"Oh, please not to say that," said Mirah, the tears gathering. "It is the
first unkind thing you ever said. I will not begin that. I will never
separate myself from my mother's people. I was forced to fly from my
father; but if he came back in age and weakness and want, and needed me,
should I say, 'This is not my father'? If he had shame, I must share it.
It was he who was given to me for my father, and not another. And so it is
with my people. I will always be a Jewess. I will love Christians when
they are good, like you. But I will always cling to my people. I will
always worship with them."

As Mirah had gone on speaking she had become possessed with a sorrowful
passion--fervent, not violent. Holding her little hands tightly clasped
and looking at Mrs. Meyrick with beseeching, she seemed to Deronda a
personification of that spirit which impelled men after a long inheritance
of professed Catholicism to leave wealth and high place and risk their
lives in flight, that they might join their own people and say, "I am a
Jew."

"Mirah, Mirah, my dear child, you mistake me!" said Mrs. Meyrick, alarmed.
"God forbid I should want you to do anything against your conscience. I
was only saying what might be if the world went on. But I had better have
left the world alone, and not wanted to be over-wise. Forgive me, come! we
will not try to take you from anybody you feel has more right to you."

"I would do anything else for you. I owe you my life," said Mirah, not yet
quite calm.

"Hush, hush, now," said Mrs. Meyrick. "I have been punished enough for
wagging my tongue foolishly--making an almanac for the Millennium, as my
husband used to say."

"But everything in the world must come to an end some time. We must bear
to think of that," said Mab, unable to hold her peace on this point. She
had already suffered from a bondage of tongue which threatened to become
severe if Mirah were to be too much indulged in this inconvenient
susceptibility to innocent remarks.

Deronda smiled at the irregular, blonde face, brought into strange
contrast by the side of Mirah's--smiled, Mab thought, rather sarcastically
as he said, "That 'prospect of everything coming to an end will not guide
us far in practice. Mirah's feelings, she tells us, are concerned with
what is."

Mab was confused and wished she had not spoken, since Mr. Deronda seemed
to think that she had found fault with Mirah; but to have spoken once is a
tyrannous reason for speaking again, and she said--

"I only meant that we must have courage to hear things, else there is
hardly anything we can talk about." Mab felt herself unanswerable here,
inclining to the opinion of Socrates: "What motive has a man to live, if
not for the pleasure of discourse?"

Deronda took his leave soon after, and when Mrs. Meyrick went outside with
him to exchange a few words about Mirah, he said, "Hans is to share my
chambers when he comes at Christmas."