Daniel Deronda

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"That's it, then!" said Cohen, slapping his knee. "He's been expecting
you, and it's taken hold of him. I suppose he talks about his learning to
you. It's uncommonly kind of _you_, sir; for I don't suppose there's much
to be got out of it, else it wouldn't have left him where he is. But
there's the shop." Cohen hurried out, and Jacob, who had been listening
inconveniently near to Deronda's elbow, said to him with obliging
familiarity, "I'll call Mordecai for you, if you like."

"No, Jacob," said his mother; "open the door for the gentleman, and let
him go in himself Hush! don't make a noise."

Skillful Jacob seemed to enter into the play, and turned the handle of the
door as noiselessly as possible, while Deronda went behind him and stood
on the threshold. The small room was lit only by a dying fire and one
candle with a shade over it. On the board fixed under the window, various
objects of jewelry were scattered: some books were heaped in the corner
beyond them. Mordecai was seated on a high chair at the board with his
back to the door, his hands resting on each other and on the board, a
watch propped on a stand before him. He was in a state of expectation as
sickening as that of a prisoner listening for the delayed deliverance--
when he heard Deronda's voice saying, "I am come for you. Are you ready?"

Immediately he turned without speaking, seized his furred cap which lay
near, and moved to join Deronda. It was but a moment before they were both
in the sitting-room, and Jacob, noticing the change in his friend's air
and expression, seized him by the arm and said, "See my cup and ball!"
sending the ball up close to Mordecai's face, as something likely to cheer
a convalescent. It was a sign of the relieved tension in Mordecai's mind
that he could smile and say, "Fine, fine!"

"You have forgotten your greatcoat and comforter," said young Mrs. Cohen,
and he went back into the work-room and got them.

"He's come to life again, do you see?" said Cohen, who had re-entered--
speaking in an undertone. "I told you so: I'm mostly right." Then in his
usual voice, "Well, sir, we mustn't detain you now, I suppose; but I hope
this isn't the last time we shall see you."

"Shall you come again?" said Jacob, advancing. "See, I can catch the ball;
I'll bet I catch it without stopping, if you come again."

"He has clever hands," said Deronda, looking at the grandmother. "Which
side of the family does he get them from?"

But the grandmother only nodded towards her son, who said promptly, "My
side. My wife's family are not in that line. But bless your soul! ours is
a sort of cleverness as good as gutta percha; you can twist it which way
you like. There's nothing some old gentlemen won't do if you set 'em to
it." Here Cohen winked down at Jacob's back, but it was doubtful whether
this judicious allusiveness answered its purpose, for its subject gave a
nasal whinnying laugh and stamped about singing, "Old gentlemen, old
gentlemen," in chiming cadence.

Deronda thought, "I shall never know anything decisive about these people
until I ask Cohen pointblank whether he lost a sister named Mirah when she
was six years old." The decisive moment did not yet seem easy for him to
face. Still his first sense of repulsion at the commonness of these people
was beginning to be tempered with kindlier feeling. However unrefined
their airs and speech might be, he was forced to admit some moral
refinement in their treatment of the consumptive workman, whose mental
distinction impressed them chiefly as a harmless, silent raving.

"The Cohens seem to have an affection for you," said Deronda, as soon as
he and Mordecai were off the doorstep.

"And I for them," was the immediate answer. "They have the heart of the
Israelite within them, though they are as the horse and the mule, without
understanding beyond the narrow path they tread."

"I have caused you some uneasiness, I fear," said Deronda, "by my slowness
in fulfilling my promise. I wished to come yesterday, but I found it
impossible."

"Yes--yes, I trusted you. But it is true I have been uneasy, for the
spirit of my youth has been stirred within me, and this body is not strong
enough to bear the beating of its wings. I am as a man bound and
imprisoned through long years: behold him brought to speech of his fellow
and his limbs set free: he weeps, he totters, the joy within him threatens
to break and overthrow the tabernacle of flesh."

"You must not speak too much in this evening air," said Deronda, feeling
Mordecai's words of reliance like so many cords binding him painfully.
"Cover your mouth with the woolen scarf. We are going to the _Hand and
Banner_, I suppose, and shall be in private there?"

"No, that is my trouble that you did not come yesterday. For this is the
evening of the club I spoke of, and we might not have any minutes alone
until late, when all the rest are gone. Perhaps we had better seek another
place. But I am used to that only. In new places the outer world presses
on me and narrows the inward vision. And the people there are familiar
with my face."

"I don't mind the club if I am allowed to go in," said Deronda. "It is
enough that you like this place best. If we have not enough time I will
come again. What sort of club is it?"

"It is called 'The Philosophers.' They are few--like the cedars of
Lebanon--poor men given to thought. But none so poor as I am: and
sometimes visitors of higher worldly rank have been brought. We are
allowed to introduce a friend, who is interested in our topics. Each
orders beer or some other kind of drink, in payment for the room. Most of
them smoke. I have gone when I could, for there are other men of my race
who come, and sometimes I have broken silence. I have pleased myself with
a faint likeness between these poor philosophers and the Masters who
handed down the thought of our race--the great Transmitters, who labored
with their hands for scant bread, but preserved and enlarged for us the
heritage of memory, and saved the soul of Israel alive as a seed among the
tombs. The heart pleases itself with faint resemblances."

"I shall be very glad to go and sit among them, if that will suit you. It
is a sort of meeting I should like to join in," said Deronda, not without
relief in the prospect of an interval before he went through the strain of
his next private conversation with Mordecai.

In three minutes they had opened the glazed door with the red curtain, and
were in the little parlor, hardly much more than fifteen feet square,
where the gaslight shone through a slight haze of smoke on what to Deronda
was a new and striking scene. Half-a-dozen men of various ages, from
between twenty and thirty to fifty, all shabbily dressed, most of them
with clay pipes in their mouths, were listening with a look of
concentrated intelligence to a man in a pepper-and-salt dress, with blonde
hair, short nose, broad forehead and general breadth, who, holding his
pipe slightly uplifted in the left hand, and beating his knee with the
right, was just finishing a quotation from Shelley (the comparison of the
avalanche in his "Prometheus Unbound")

"As thought by thought is piled, till some great truth
Is loosened, and the nations echo round."

The entrance of the new-comers broke the fixity of attention, and called
for re-arrangement of seats in the too narrow semicircle round the fire-
place and the table holding the glasses, spare pipes and tobacco. This was
the soberest of clubs; but sobriety is no reason why smoking and "talking
something" should be less imperiously needed as a means of getting a
decent status in company and debate. Mordecai was received with welcoming
voices which had a slight cadence of compassion in them, but naturally all
glances passed immediately to his companion.

"I have brought a friend who is interested in our subjects," said
Mordecai. "He has traveled and studied much."

"Is the gentlemen anonymous? Is he a Great 'Unknown?'" said the broad-
chested quoter of Shelley, with a humorous air.

"My name is Daniel Deronda. I am unknown, but not in any sense great." The
smile breaking over the stranger's grave face as he said this was so
agreeable that there was a general indistinct murmur, equivalent to a
"Hear, hear," and the broad man said--

"You recommend the name, sir, and are welcome. Here, Mordecai, come to
this corner against me," he added, evidently wishing to give the coziest
place to the one who most needed it.

Deronda was well satisfied to get a seat on the opposite side, where his
general survey of the party easily included Mordecai, who remained an
eminently striking object in this group of sharply-characterized figures,
more than one of whom, even to Daniel's little exercised discrimination,
seemed probably of Jewish descent.

In fact pure English blood (if leech or lancet can furnish us with the
precise product) did not declare itself predominantly in the party at
present assembled. Miller, the broad man, an exceptional second-hand
bookseller who knew the insides of books, had at least grand-parents who
called themselves German, and possibly far-away ancestors who denied
themselves to be Jews; Buchan, the saddler, was Scotch; Pash, the
watchmaker, was a small, dark, vivacious, triple-baked Jew; Gideon, the
optical instrument maker, was a Jew of the red-haired, generous-featured
type easily passing for Englishmen of unusually cordial manners: and
Croop, the dark-eyed shoemaker, was probably more Celtic than he knew.
Only three would have been discernable everywhere as Englishman: the wood-
inlayer Goodwin, well-built, open-faced, pleasant-voiced; the florid
laboratory assistant Marrables; and Lily, the pale, neat-faced copying-
clerk, whose light-brown hair was set up in a small parallelogram above
his well-filled forehead, and whose shirt, taken with an otherwise seedy
costume, had a freshness that might be called insular, and perhaps even
something narrower.

Certainly a company select of the select among poor men, being drawn
together by a taste not prevalent even among the privileged heirs of
learning and its institutions; and not likely to amuse any gentleman in
search of crime or low comedy as the ground of interest in people whose
weekly income is only divisible into shillings. Deronda, even if he had
not been more than usually inclined to gravity under the influence of what
was pending between him and Mordecai, would not have set himself to find
food for laughter in the various shades of departure from the tone of
polished society sure to be observable in the air and talk of these men
who had probably snatched knowledge as most of us snatch indulgences,
making the utmost of scant opportunity. He looked around him with the
quiet air of respect habitual to him among equals, ordered whisky and
water, and offered the contents of his cigar-case, which,
characteristically enough, he always carried and hardly ever used for his
own behoof, having reasons for not smoking himself, but liking to indulge
others. Perhaps it was his weakness to be afraid of seeming straight-
laced, and turning himself into a sort of diagram instead of a growth
which can exercise the guiding attraction of fellowship. That he made a
decidedly winning impression on the company was proved by their showing
themselves no less at ease than before, and desirous of quickly resuming
their interrupted talk.

"This is what I call one of our touch-and-go nights, sir," said Miller,
who was implicitly accepted as a sort of moderator--on addressing Deronda
by way of explanation, and nodding toward each person whose name he
mentioned. "Sometimes we stick pretty close to the point. But tonight our
friend Pash, there, brought up the law of progress; and we got on
statistics; then Lily, there, saying we knew well enough before counting
that in the same state of society the same sort of things would happen,
and it was no more wonder that quantities should remain the same, than
that qualities should remain the same, for in relation to society numbers
are qualities--the number of drunkards is a quality in society--the
numbers are an index to the qualities, and give us no instruction, only
setting us to consider the causes of difference between different social
states--Lily saying this, we went off on the causes of social change, and
when you came in I was going upon the power of ideas, which I hold to be
the main transforming cause."

"I don't hold with you there, Miller," said Goodwin, the inlayer, more
concerned to carry on the subject than to wait for a word from the new
guest. "For either you mean so many sorts of things by ideas that I get no
knowledge by what you say, any more than if you said light was a cause; or
else you mean a particular sort of ideas, and then I go against your
meaning as too narrow. For, look at it in one way, all actions men put a
bit of thought into are ideas--say, sowing seed, or making a canoe, or
baking clay; and such ideas as these work themselves into life and go on
growing with it, but they can't go apart from the material that set them
to work and makes a medium for them. It's the nature of wood and stone
yielding to the knife that raises the idea of shaping them, and with
plenty of wood and stone the shaping will go on. I look at it, that such
ideas as are mixed straight away with all the other elements of life are
powerful along with 'em. The slower the mixing, the less power they have.
And as to the causes of social change, I look at it in this way--ideas are
a sort of parliament, but there's a commonwealth outside and a good deal
of the commonwealth is working at change without knowing what the
parliament is doing."

"But if you take ready mixing as your test of power," said Pash, "some of
the least practical ideas beat everything. They spread without being
understood, and enter into the language without being thought of."

"They may act by changing the distribution of gases," said Marrables;
"instruments are getting so fine now, men may come to register the spread
of a theory by observed changes in the atmosphere and corresponding
changes in the nerves."

"Yes," said Pash, his dark face lighting up rather impishly, "there is the
idea of nationalities; I dare say the wild asses are snuffing it, and
getting more gregarious."

"You don't share that idea?" said Deronda, finding a piquant incongruity
between Pash's sarcasm and the strong stamp of race on his features.

"Say, rather, he does not share that spirit," said Mordecai, who had
turned a melancholy glance on Pash. "Unless nationality is a feeling, what
force can it have as an idea?"

"Granted, Mordecai," said Pash, quite good-humoredly. "And as the feeling
of nationality is dying, I take the idea to be no better than a ghost,
already walking to announce the death."

"A sentiment may seem to be dying and yet revive into strong life," said
Deronda. "Nations have revived. We may live to see a great outburst of
force in the Arabs, who are being inspired with a new zeal."

"Amen, amen," said Mordecai, looking at Deronda with a delight which was
the beginning of recovered energy: his attitude was more upright, his face
was less worn.

"That may hold with backward nations," said Pash, "but with us in Europe
the sentiment of nationality is destined to die out. It will last a little
longer in the quarters where oppression lasts, but nowhere else. The whole
current of progress is setting against it."

"Ay," said Buchan, in a rapid thin Scotch tone which was like the letting
in of a little cool air on the conversation, "ye've done well to bring us
round to the point. Ye're all agreed that societies change--not always and
everywhere--but on the whole and in the long run. Now, with all deference,
I would beg t' observe that we have got to examine the nature of changes
before we have a warrant to call them progress, which word is supposed to
include a bettering, though I apprehend it to be ill-chosen for that
purpose, since mere motion onward may carry us to a bog or a precipice.
And the questions I would put are three: Is all change in the direction of
progress? if not, how shall we discern which change is progress and which
not? and thirdly, how far and in what way can we act upon the course of
change so as to promote it where it is beneficial, and divert it where it
is injurious?"

But Buchan's attempt to impose his method on the talk was a failure. Lily
immediately said--

"Change and progress are merged in the idea of development. The laws of
development are being discovered, and changes taking place according to
them are necessarily progressive; that is to say, it we have any notion of
progress or improvement opposed to them, the notion is a mistake."

"I really can't see how you arrive at that sort of certitude about changes
by calling them development," said Deronda. "There will still remain the
degrees of inevitableness in relation to our own will and acts, and the
degrees of wisdom in hastening or retarding; there will still remain the
danger of mistaking a tendency which should be resisted for an inevitable
law that we must adjust ourselves to,--which seems to me as bad a
superstition or false god as any that has been set up without the
ceremonies of philosophising."

"That is a truth," said Mordecai. "Woe to the men who see no place for
resistance in this generation! I believe in a growth, a passage, and a new
unfolding of life whereof the seed is more perfect, more charged with the
elements that are pregnant with diviner form. The life of a people grows,
it is knit together and yet expanded, in joy and sorrow, in thought and
action; it absorbs the thought of other nations into its own forms, and
gives back the thought as new wealth to the world; it is a power and an
organ in the great body of the nations. But there may come a check, an
arrest; memories may be stifled, and love may be faint for the lack of
them; or memories may shrink into withered relics--the soul of a people,
whereby they know themselves to be one, may seem to be dying for want of
common action. But who shall say, 'The fountain of their life is dried up,
they shall forever cease to be a nation?' Who shall say it? Not he who
feels the life of his people stirring within his own. Shall he say, 'That
way events are wending, I will not resist?' His very soul is resistance,
and is as a seed of fire that may enkindle the souls of multitudes, and
make a new pathway for events."

"I don't deny patriotism," said Gideon, "but we all know you have a
particular meaning, Mordecai. You know Mordecai's way of thinking, I
suppose." Here Gideon had turned to Deronda, who sat next to him, but
without waiting for an answer he went on. "I'm a rational Jew myself. I
stand by my people as a sort of family relations, and I am for keeping up
our worship in a rational way. I don't approve of our people getting
baptised, because I don't believe in a Jew's conversion to the Gentile
part of Christianity. And now we have political equality, there's no
excuse for a pretense of that sort. But I am for getting rid of all of our
superstitions and exclusiveness. There's no reason now why we shouldn't
melt gradually into the populations we live among. That's the order of the
day in point of progress. I would as soon my children married Christians
as Jews. And I'm for the old maxim, 'A man's country is where he's well
off.'"

"That country's not so easy to find, Gideon," said the rapid Pash, with a
shrug and grimace. "You get ten shillings a-week more than I do, and have
only half the number of children. If somebody will introduce a brisk trade
in watches among the 'Jerusalem wares,' I'll go--eh, Mordecai, what do you
say?"

Deronda, all ear for these hints of Mordecai's opinion, was inwardly
wondering at his persistence in coming to this club. For an enthusiastic
spirit to meet continually the fixed indifference of men familiar with the
object of his enthusiasm is the acceptance of a slow martyrdom, beside
which the fate of a missionary tomahawked without any considerate
rejection of his doctrines seems hardly worthy of compassion. But Mordecai
gave no sign of shrinking: this was a moment of spiritual fullness, and he
cared more for the utterance of his faith than for its immediate
reception. With a fervor which had no temper in it, but seemed rather the
rush of feeling in the opportunity of speech, he answered Pash:--

"What I say is, let every man keep far away from the brotherhood and
inheritance he despises. Thousands on thousands of our race have mixed
with the Gentiles as Celt with Saxon, and they may inherit the blessing
that belongs to the Gentile. You cannot follow them. You are one of the
multitudes over this globe who must walk among the nations and be known as
Jews, and with words on their lips which mean, 'I wish I had not been born
a Jew, I disown any bond with the long travail of my race, I will outdo
the Gentile in mocking at our separateness,' they all the while feel
breathing on them the breath of contempt because they are Jews, and they
will breathe it back poisonously. Can a fresh-made garment of citizenship
weave itself straightway into the flesh and change the slow deposit of
eighteen centuries? What is the citizenship of him who walks among a
people he has no hardy kindred and fellowship with, and has lost the sense
of brotherhood with his own race? It is a charter of selfish ambition and
rivalry in low greed. He is an alien of spirit, whatever he may be in
form; he sucks the blood of mankind, he is not a man, sharing in no loves,
sharing in no subjection of the soul, he mocks it all. Is it not truth I
speak, Pash?"

"Not exactly, Mordecai," said Pash, "if you mean that I think the worse of
myself for being a Jew. What I thank our fathers for is that there are
fewer blockheads among us than among other races. But perhaps you are
right in thinking the Christians don't like me so well for it."

"Catholics and Protestants have not liked each other much better," said
the genial Gideon. "We must wait patiently for prejudices to die out. Many
of our people are on a footing with the best, and there's been a good
filtering of our blood into high families. I am for making our
expectations rational."

"And so am I!" said Mordecai, quickly, leaning forward with the eagerness
of one who pleads in some decisive crisis, his long, thin hands clasped
together on his lap. "I, too, claim to be a rational Jew. But what is it
to be rational--what is it to feel the light of the divine reason growing
stronger within and without? It is to see more and more of the hidden
bonds that bind and consecrate change as a dependent growth--yea,
consecrate it with kinship: the past becomes my parent and the future
stretches toward me the appealing arms of children. Is it rational to
drain away the sap of special kindred that makes the families of men rich
in interchanged wealth, and various as the forests are various with the
glory of the cedar and the palm? When it is rational to say, 'I know not
my father or my mother, let my children be aliens to me, that no prayer of
mine may touch them,' then it will be rational for the Jew to say, 'I will
seek to know no difference between me and the Gentile, I will not cherish
the prophetic consciousness of our nationality--let the Hebrew cease to
be, and let all his memorials be antiquarian trifles, dead as the wall-
paintings of a conjectured race. Yet let his child learn by rote the
speech of the Greek, where he abjures his fellow-citizens by the bravery
of those who fought foremost at Marathon--let him learn to say that was
noble in the Greek, that is the spirit of an immortal nation! But the Jew
has no memories that bind him to action; let him laugh that his nation is
degraded from a nation; let him hold the monuments of his law which
carried within its frame the breath of social justice, of charity, and of
household sanctities--let him hold the energy of the prophets, the patient
care of the Masters, the fortitude of martyred generations, as mere stuff
for a professorship. The business of the Jew in all things is to be even
as the rich Gentile."

Mordecai threw himself back in his chair, and there was a moment's
silence. Not one member of the club shared his point of view or his
emotion; but his whole personality and speech had on them the effect of a
dramatic representation which had some pathos in it, though no practical
consequences; and usually he was at once indulged and contradicted.
Deronda's mind went back upon what must have been the tragic pressure of
outward conditions hindering this man, whose force he felt to be telling
on himself, from making any world for his thought in the minds of others--
like a poet among people of a strange speech, who may have a poetry of
their own, but have no ear for his cadence, no answering thrill to his
discovery of the latent virtues in his mother tongue.

The cool Buchan was the first to speak, and hint the loss of time. "I
submit," said he, "that ye're traveling away from the questions I put
concerning progress."