Daniel Deronda

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Deronda did not speak. He felt himself strangely wrought upon. The first-
prompted suspicion that Mordecai might be liable to hallucinations of
thought--might have become a monomaniac on some subject which had given
too severe a strain to his diseased organism--gave way to a more
submissive expectancy. His nature was too large, too ready to conceive
regions beyond his own experience, to rest at once in the easy
explanation, "madness," whenever a consciousness showed some fullness and
conviction where his own was blank. It accorded with his habitual
disposition that he should meet rather than resist any claim on him in the
shape of another's need; and this claim brought with it a sense of
solemnity which seemed a radiation from Mordecai, as utterly nullifying
his outward poverty and lifting him into authority as if he had been that
preternatural guide seen in the universal legend, who suddenly drops his
mean disguise and stands a manifest Power. That impression was the more
sanctioned by a sort of resolved quietude which the persuasion of
fulfillment had produced in Mordecai's manner. After they had stood a
moment in silence he said, "Let us go now," and when they were riding he
added, "We will get down at the end of the street and walk to the shop.
You can look at the books, and Mr. Ram will be going away directly and
leave us alone."

It seemed that this enthusiast was just as cautious, just as much alive to
judgments in other minds as if he had been that antipode of all enthusiasm
called "a man of the world."

While they were rattling along in the cab, Mirah was still present with
Deronda in the midst of this strange experience, but he foresaw that the
course of conversation would be determined by Mordecai, not by himself: he
was no longer confident what questions he should be able to ask; and with
a reaction on his own mood, he inwardly said, "I suppose I am in a state
of complete superstition, just as if I were awaiting the destiny that
could interpret the oracle. But some strong relation there must be between
me and this man, since he feels it strongly. Great heaven! what relation
has proved itself more potent in the world than faith even when mistaken--
than expectation even when perpetually disappointed? Is my side of the
relation to be disappointing or fulfilling?--well, if it is ever possible
for me to fulfill I will not disappoint."

In ten minutes the two men, with as intense a consciousness as if they had
been two undeclared lovers, felt themselves alone in the small gas-lit
book-shop and turned face to face, each baring his head from an
instinctive feeling that they wished to see each other fully. Mordecai
came forward to lean his back against the little counter, while Deronda
stood against the opposite wall hardly more than four feet off. I wish I
could perpetuate those two faces, as Titian's "Tribute Money" has
perpetuated two types presenting another sort of contrast. Imagine--we all
of us can--the pathetic stamp of consumption with its brilliancy of glance
to which the sharply-defined structure of features reminding one of a
forsaken temple, give already a far-off look as of one getting unwillingly
out of reach; and imagine it on a Jewish face naturally accentuated for
the expression of an eager mind--the face of a man little above thirty,
but with that age upon it which belongs to time lengthened by suffering,
the hair and beard, still black, throwing out the yellow pallor of the
skin, the difficult breathing giving more decided marking to the mobile
nostril, the wasted yellow hands conspicuous on the folded arms: then give
to the yearning consumptive glance something of the slowly dying mother's
look, when her one loved son visits her bedside, and the flickering power
of gladness leaps out as she says, "My boy!"--for the sense of spiritual
perpetuation in another resembles that maternal transference of self.

Seeing such a portrait you would see Mordecai. And opposite to him was a
face not more distinctively oriental than many a type seen among what we
call the Latin races; rich in youthful health, and with a forcible
masculine gravity in its repose, that gave the value of judgment to the
reverence with which he met the gaze of this mysterious son of poverty who
claimed him as a long-expected friend. The more exquisite quality of
Deronda's nature--that keenly perceptive sympathetic emotiveness which ran
along with his speculative tendency--was never more thoroughly tested. He
felt nothing that could be called belief in the validity of Mordecai's
impressions concerning him or in the probability of any greatly effective
issue: what he felt was a profound sensibility to a cry from the depths of
another and accompanying that, the summons to be receptive instead of
superciliously prejudging. Receptiveness is a rare and massive power, like
fortitude; and this state of mind now gave Deronda's face its utmost
expression of calm benignant force--an expression which nourished
Mordecai's confidence and made an open way before him. He began to speak.

"You cannot know what has guided me to you and brought us together at this
moment. You are wondering."

"I am not impatient," said Deronda. "I am ready to listen to whatever you
may wish to disclose."

"You see some of the reasons why I needed you," said Mordecai, speaking
quietly, as if he wished to reserve his strength. "You see that I am
dying. You see that I am as one shut up behind bars by the wayside, who if
he spoke to any would be met only by head-shaking and pity. The day is
closing--the light is fading--soon we should not have been able to discern
each other. But you have come in time."

"I rejoice that I am come in time," said Deronda, feelingly. He would not
say, "I hope you are not mistaken in me,"--the very word "mistaken," he
thought, would be a cruelty at that moment.

"But the hidden reasons why I need you began afar off," said Mordecai;
"began in my early years when I was studying in another land. Then ideas,
beloved ideas, came to me, because I was a Jew. They were a trust to
fulfill, because I was a Jew. They were an inspiration, because I was a
Jew, and felt the heart of my race beating within me. They were my life; I
was not fully born till then. I counted this heart, and this breath, and
this right hand"--Mordecai had pathetically pressed his hand upon his
breast, and then stretched its wasted fingers out before him--"I counted
my sleep and my waking, and the work I fed my body with, and the sights
that fed my eyes--I counted them but as fuel to the divine flame. But I
had done as one who wanders and engraves his thought in rocky solitudes,
and before I could change my course came care and labor and disease, and
blocked the way before me, and bound me with the iron that eats itself
into the soul. Then I said, 'How shall I save the life within me from
being stifled with this stifled breath?'"

Mordecai paused to rest that poor breath which had been taxed by the
rising excitement of his speech, And also he wished to check that
excitement. Deronda dared not speak the very silence in the narrow space
seemed alive with mingled awe and compassion before this struggling
fervor. And presently Mordecai went on--

"But you may misunderstand me. I speak not as an ignorant dreamer--as one
bred up in the inland valleys, thinking ancient thoughts anew, and not
knowing them ancient, never having stood by the great waters where the
world's knowledge passes to and fro. English is my mother-tongue, England
is the native land of this body, which is but as a breaking pot of earth
around the fruit-bearing tree, whose seed might make the desert rejoice.
But my true life was nourished in Holland at the feet of my mother's
brother, a Rabbi skilled in special learning: and when he died I went to
Hamburg to study, and afterwards to Goettingen, that I might take a larger
outlook on my people, and on the Gentile world, and drank knowledge at all
sources. I was a youth; I felt free; I saw our chief seats in Germany; I
was not then in utter poverty. And I had possessed myself of a handicraft.
For I said, I care not if my lot be as that of Joshua ben Chananja: after
the last destruction he earned his bread by making needles, but in his
youth he had been a singer on the steps of the Temple, and had a memory of
what was before the glory departed. I said, let my body dwell in poverty,
and my hands be as the hands of the toiler: but let my soul be as a temple
of remembrance where the treasures of knowledge enter and the inner
sanctuary is hope. I knew what I chose. They said, 'He feeds himself on
visions,' and I denied not; for visions are the creators and feeders of
the world. I see, I measure the world as it is, which the vision will
create anew. You are not listening to one who raves aloof from the lives
of his fellows."

Mordecai paused, and Deronda, feeling that the pause was expectant, said,
"Do me the justice to believe that I was not inclined to call your words
raving. I listen that I may know, without prejudgment. I have had
experience which gives me a keen interest in the story of a spiritual
destiny embraced willingly, and embraced in youth."

"A spiritual destiny embraced willingly--in youth?" Mordecai repeated in a
corrective tone. "It was the soul fully born within me, and it came in my
boyhood. It brought its own world--a mediaeval world, where there are men
who made the ancient language live again in new psalms of exile. They had
absorbed the philosophy of the Gentile into the faith of the Jew, and they
still yearned toward a center for our race. One of their souls was born
again within me, and awakened amid the memories of their world. It
traveled into Spain and Provence; it debated with Aben-Ezra; it took ship
with Jehuda ha-Levi; it heard the roar of the Crusaders and the shrieks of
tortured Israel. And when its dumb tongue was loosed, it spoke the speech
they had made alive with the new blood of their ardor, their sorrow, and
their martyred trust: it sang with the cadence of their strain."

Mordecai paused again, and then said in a loud, hoarse whisper--

"While it is imprisoned in me, it will never learn another."

"Have you written entirely in Hebrew, then?" said Deronda, remembering
with some anxiety the former question as to his own knowledge of that
tongue.

"Yes--yes," said Mordecai, in a tone of deep sadness: "in my youth I
wandered toward that solitude, not feeling that it was a solitude. I had
the ranks of the great dead around me; the martyrs gathered and listened.
But soon I found that the living were deaf to me. At first I saw my life
spread as a long future: I said part of my Jewish heritage is an
unbreaking patience; part is skill to seek divers methods and find a
rooting-place where the planters despair. But there came new messengers
from the Eternal. I had to bow under the yoke that presses on the great
multitude born of woman: family troubles called me--I had to work, to
care, not for myself alone. I was left solitary again; but already the
angel of death had turned to me and beckoned, and I felt his skirts
continually on my path. I loosed not my effort. I besought hearing and
help. I spoke; I went to men of our people--to the rich in influence or
knowledge, to the rich in other wealth. But I found none to listen with
understanding. I was rebuked for error; I was offered a small sum in
charity. No wonder. I looked poor; I carried a bundle of Hebrew manuscript
with me; I said, our chief teachers are misleading the hope of our race.
Scholar and merchant were both too busy to listen. Scorn stood as
interpreter between me and them. One said, 'The book of Mormon would never
have answered in Hebrew; and if you mean to address our learned men, it is
not likely you can teach them anything.' He touched a truth there."

The last words had a perceptible irony in their hoarsened tone.

"But though you had accustomed yourself to write in Hebrew, few, surely,
can use English better," said Deronda, wanting to hint consolation in a
new effort for which he could smooth the way.

Mordecai shook his head slowly, and answered--

"Too late--too late. I can write no more. My writing would be like this
gasping breath. But the breath may wake the fount of pity--the writing
not. If I could write now and used English, I should be as one who beats a
board to summon those who have been used to no signal but a bell. My soul
has an ear to hear the faults of its own speech. New writing of mine would
be like this body"--Mordecai spread his arms--"within it there might be
the Ruach-ha-kodesh--the breath of divine thought--but, men would smile at
it and say, 'A poor Jew!' and the chief smilers would be of my own
people."

Mordecai let his hands fall, and his head sink in melancholy: for the
moment he had lost hold of his hope. Despondency, conjured up by his own
words, had floated in and hovered above him with eclipsing wings. He had
sunk into momentary darkness,

"I feel with you--I feel strongly with you," said Deronda, in a clear deep
voice which was itself a cordial, apart from the words of sympathy. "But
forgive me if I speak hastily--for what you have actually written there
need be no utter burial. The means of publication are within reach. If you
will rely on me, I can assure you of all that is necessary to that end."

"That is not enough," said Mordecai, quickly, looking up again with the
flash of recovered memory and confidence. "That is not all my trust in
you. You must be not only a hand to me, but a soul--believing my belief--
being moved by my reasons--hoping my hope-seeing the vision I point to--
beholding a glory where I behold it!"--Mordecai had taken a step nearer as
he spoke, and now laid his hand on Deronda's arm with a tight grasp; his
face little more than a foot off had something like a pale flame in it--an
intensity of reliance that acted as a peremptory claim, while he went on--
"You will be my life: it will be planted afresh; it will grow. You shall
take the inheritance; it has been gathering for ages. The generations are
crowding on my narrow life as a bridge: what has been and what is to be
are meeting there; and the bridge is breaking. But I have found you. You
have come in time, You will take the inheritance which the base son
refuses because of the tombs which the plow and harrow may not pass over
or the gold-seeker disturb: you will take the sacred inheritance of the
Jew." Deronda had become as pallid as Mordecai. Quick as an alarm of flood
or fire, there spread within him not only a compassionate dread of
discouraging this fellowman who urged a prayer as one in the last agony,
but also tie opposing dread of fatally feeding an illusion, and being
hurried on to a self-committal which might turn into a falsity. The
peculiar appeal to his tenderness overcame the repulsion that most of us
experience under a grasp and speech which assumed to dominate. The
difficulty to him was to inflict the accents of hesitation and doubt on
this ardent suffering creature, who was crowding too much of his brief
being into a moment of perhaps extravagant trust. With exquisite instinct,
Deronda, before he opened his lips, placed his palm gently on Mordecai's
straining hand--an act just then equal to many speeches. And after that he
said, without haste, as if conscious that he might be wrong--

"Do you forget what I told you when we first saw each other? Do you
remember that I said I was not of your race?"

"It can't be true," Mordecai whispered immediately, with no sign of shock.
The sympathetic hand still upon him had fortified the feeling which was
stronger than those words of denial. There was a perceptible pause,
Deronda feeling it impossible to answer, conscious indeed that the
assertion "It can't be true"--had the pressure of argument for him.
Mordecai, too entirely possessed by the supreme importance of the relation
between himself and Deronda to have any other care in his speech, followed
up that assertion by a second, which came to his lips as a mere sequence
of his long-cherished conviction--"You are not sure of your own origin."

"How do you know that?" said Daniel, with an habitual shrinking which made
him remove his hands from Mordecai's, who also relaxed his hold, and fell
back into his former leaning position.

"I know it--I know it; what is my life else?" said Mordecai, with a low
cry of impatience. "Tell me everything: tell me why you deny?"

He could have no conception what that demand was to the hearer--how
probingly it touched the hidden sensibility, the vividly conscious
reticence of years; how the uncertainty he was insisting on as part of his
own hope had always for Daniel been a threatening possibility of painful
revelation about his mother. But the moment had influences which were not
only new but solemn to Deronda; any evasion here might turn out to be a
hateful refusal of some task that belonged to him, some act of due
fellowship; in any case it would be a cruel rebuff to a being who was
appealing to him as a forlorn hope under the shadow of a coming doom.
After a few moments, he said, with a great effort over himself--determined
to tell all the truth briefly--

"I have never known my mother. I have no knowledge about her. I have never
called any man father. But I am convinced that my father is an
Englishman."

Deronda's deep tones had a tremor in them as he uttered this confession;
and all the while there was an undercurrent of amazement in him at the
strange circumstances under which he uttered it. It seemed as if Mordecai
were hardly overrating his own power to determine the action of the friend
whom he had mysteriously chosen.

"It will be seen--it will be declared," said Mordecai, triumphantly. "The
world grows, and its frame is knit together by the growing soul; dim, dim
at first, then clearer and more clear, the consciousness discerns remote
stirrings. As thoughts move within us darkly, and shake us before they are
fully discerned--so events--so beings: they are knit with us in the growth
of the world. You have risen within me like a thought not fully spelled;
my soul is shaken before the words are all there. The rest will come--it
will come.".

"We must not lose sight of the fact that the outward event has not always
been a fulfillment of the firmest faith," said Deronda, in a tone that was
made hesitating by the painfully conflicting desires, not to give any
severe blow to Mordecai, and not to give his confidence a sanction which
might have the severest of blows in reserve.

Mordecai's face, which had been illuminated to the utmost in that last
declaration of his confidence, changed under Deronda's words, not only
into any show of collapsed trust: the force did not disappear from the
expression, but passed from the triumphant into the firmly resistant.

"You would remind me that I may be under an illusion--that the history of
our people's trust has been full of illusion. I face it all." Here
Mordecai paused a moment. Then bending his head a little forward, he said,
in his hoarse whisper, "_So if might be with my trust, if you would make
it an illusion. But you will not._"

The very sharpness with which these words penetrated Deronda made him feel
the more that here was a crisis in which he must be firm.

"What my birth was does not lie in my will," he answered. "My sense of
claims on me cannot be independent of my knowledge there. And I cannot
promise you that I will try to hasten a disclosure. Feelings which have
struck root through half my life may still hinder me from doing what I
have never been able to do. Everything must be waited for. I must know
more of the truth about my own life, and I must know more of what it would
become if it were made a part of yours."

Mordecai had folded his arms again while Deronda was speaking, and now
answered with equal firmness, though with difficult breathing--

"You _shall_ know. What are we met for, but that you should know. Your
doubts lie as light as dust on my belief. I know the philosophies of this
time and of other times; if I chose I could answer a summons before their
tribunals. I could silence the beliefs which are the mother-tongue of my
soul and speak with the rote-learned language of a system, that gives you
the spelling of all things, sure of its alphabet covering them all. I
could silence them: may not a man silence his awe or his love, and take to
finding reasons, which others demand? But if his love lies deeper than any
reasons to be found? Man finds his pathways: at first they were foot
tracks, as those of the beast in the wilderness: now they are swift and
invisible: his thought dives through the ocean, and his wishes thread the
air: has he found all the pathways yet? What reaches him, stays with him,
rules him: he must accept it, not knowing its pathway. Say, my expectation
of you has grown but as false hopes grow. That doubt is in your mind?
Well, my expectation was there, and you are come. Men have died of thirst.
But I was thirsty, and the water is on my lips? What are doubts to me? In
the hour when you come to me and say, 'I reject your soul: I know that I
am not a Jew: we have no lot in common'--I shall not doubt. I shall be
certain--certain that I have been deluded. That hour will never come!"

Deronda felt a new chord sounding in his speech: it was rather imperious
than appealing--had more of conscious power than of the yearning need
which had acted as a beseeching grasp on him before. And usually, though
he was the reverse of pugnacious, such a change of attitude toward him
would have weakened his inclination to admit a claim. But here there was
something that balanced his resistance and kept it aloof. This strong man
whose gaze was sustainedly calm and his finger-nails pink with health, who
was exercised in all questioning, and accused of excessive mental
independence, still felt a subduing influence over him in the tenacious
certitude of the fragile creature before him, whose pallid yellow nostril
was tense with effort as his breath labored under the burthen of eager
speech. The influence seemed to strengthen the bond of sympathetic
obligation. In Deronda at this moment the desire to escape what might turn
into a trying embarrassment was no more likely to determine action than
the solicitations of indolence are likely to determine it in one with whom
industry is a daily law. He answered simply--

"It is my wish to meet and satisfy your wishes wherever that is possible
to me. It is certain to me at least that I desire not to undervalue your
toil and your suffering. Let me know your thoughts. But where can we
meet?"

"I have thought of that," said Mordecai. "It is not hard for you to come
into this neighborhood later in the evening? You did so once."

"I can manage it very well occasionally," said Deronda. "You live under
the same roof with the Cohens, I think?"

Before Mordecai could answer, Mr. Ram re-entered to take his place behind
the counter. He was an elderly son of Abraham, whose childhood had fallen
on the evil times at the beginning of this century, and who remained amid
this smart and instructed generation as a preserved specimen, soaked
through and through with the effect of the poverty and contempt which were
the common heritage of most English Jews seventy years ago. He had none of
the oily cheerfulness observable in Mr. Cohen's aspect: his very features
--broad and chubby--showed that tendency to look mongrel without due
cause, which, in a miscellaneous London neighborhood, may perhaps be
compared with the marvels of imitation in insects, and may have been
nature's imperfect effort on behalf of the pure Caucasian to shield him
from the shame and spitting to which purer features would have been exposed
in the times of zeal. Mr. Ram dealt ably in books, in the same way that he
would have dealt in tins of meat and other commodities--without knowledge
or responsibility as to the proportion of rottenness or nourishment they
might contain. But he believed in Mordecai's learning as something
marvellous, and was not sorry that his conversation should be sought by a
bookish gentleman, whose visits had twice ended in a purchase. He greeted
Deronda with a crabbed good-will, and, putting on large silver spectacles,
appeared at once to abstract himself in the daily accounts.

But Deronda and Mordecai were soon in the street together, and without any
explicit agreement as to their direction, were walking toward Ezra
Cohen's.

"We can't meet there: my room is too narrow," said Mordecai, taking up the
thread of talk where they had dropped it. "But there is a tavern not far
from here where I sometimes go to a club. It is the _Hand and Banner_, in
the street at the next turning, five doors down. We can have the parlor
there any evening."

"We can try that for once," said Deronda. "But you will perhaps let me
provide you with some lodging, which would give you more freedom and
comfort than where you are."

"No; I need nothing. My outer life is as nought. I will take nothing less
precious from you than your soul's brotherhood. I will think of nothing
else yet. But I am glad you are rich. You did not need money on that
diamond ring. You had some other motive for bringing it."