Daniel Deronda
乔治.艾略特 George Eliot
CHAPTER XIX.
"I pity the man who can travel from Dan to Beersheba, and say, 'Tisall barren': and so it is: and so is all the world to him who will notcultivate the fruits it offers."--STERNE: _Sentimental Journey_.
To say that Deronda was romantic would be to misrepresent him; but underhis calm and somewhat self-repressed exterior there was a fervor whichmade him easily find poetry and romance among the events of every-daylife. And perhaps poetry and romance are as plentiful as ever in the worldexcept for those phlegmatic natures who I suspect would in any age haveregarded them as a dull form of erroneous thinking. They exist very easilyin the same room with the microscope and even in railway carriages: whatbanishes them in the vacuum in gentlemen and lady passengers. How shouldall the apparatus of heaven and earth, from the farthest firmament to thetender bosom of the mother who nourished us, make poetry for a mind thathad no movements of awe and tenderness, no sense of fellowship whichthrills from the near to the distant, and back again from the distant tothe near?
To Deronda this event of finding Mirah was as heart-stirring as anythingthat befell Orestes or Rinaldo. He sat up half the night, living againthrough the moments since he had first discerned Mirah on the river-brink,with the fresh and fresh vividness which belongs to emotive memory. Whenhe took up a book to try and dull this urgency of inward vision, theprinted words were no more than a network through which he saw and heardeverything as clearly as before--saw not only the actual events of twohours, but possibilities of what had been and what might be which thoseevents were enough to feed with the warm blood of passionate hope andfear. Something in his own experience caused Mirah's search after hermother to lay hold with peculiar force on his imagination. The firstprompting of sympathy was to aid her in her search: if given persons wereextant in London there were ways of finding them, as subtle as scientificexperiment, the right machinery being set at work. But here the mixedfeelings which belonged to Deronda's kindred experience naturallytransfused themselves into his anxiety on behalf of Mirah.
The desire to know his own mother, or to know about her, was constantlyhaunted with dread; and in imagining what might befall Mirah it quicklyoccurred to him that finding the mother and brother from whom she had beenparted when she was a little one might turn out to be a calamity. When shewas in the boat she said that her mother and brother were good; but thegoodness might have been chiefly in her own ignorant innocence andyearning memory, and the ten or twelve years since the parting had beentime enough for much worsening. Spite of his strong tendency to side withthe objects of prejudice, and in general with those who got the worst ofit, his interest had never been practically drawn toward existing Jews,and the facts he knew about them, whether they walked conspicuous in fineapparel or lurked in by-streets, were chiefly of a sort most repugnant tohim. Of learned and accomplished Jews he took it for granted that they haddropped their religion, and wished to be merged in the people of theirnative lands. Scorn flung at a Jew as such would have roused all hissympathy in griefs of inheritance; but the indiscriminate scorn of a racewill often strike a specimen who has well earned it on his own account,and might fairly be gibbeted as a rascally son of Adam. It appears thatthe Caribs, who know little of theology, regard thieving as a practicepeculiarly connected with Christian tenets, and probably they could allegeexperimental grounds for this opinion. Deronda could not escape (who can?)knowing ugly stories of Jewish characteristics and occupations; and thoughone of his favorite protests was against the severance of past and presenthistory, he was like others who shared his protest, in never having caredto reach any more special conclusions about actual Jews than that theyretained the virtues and vices of a long-oppressed race. But now thatMirah's longing roused his mind to a closer survey of details, verydisagreeable images urged themselves of what it might be to find out thismiddle-aged Jewess and her son. To be sure, there was the exquisiterefinement and charm of the creature herself to make a presumption infavor of her immediate kindred, but--he must wait to know more: perhapsthrough Mrs. Meyrick he might gather some guiding hints from Mirah's ownlips. Her voice, her accent, her looks--all the sweet purity that clothedher as with a consecrating garment made him shrink the more from givingher, either ideally or practically, an association with what was hatefulor contaminating. But these fine words with which we fumigate and becloudunpleasant facts are not the language in which we think. Deronda'sthinking went on in rapid images of what might be: he saw himself guidedby some official scout into a dingy street; he entered through a dimdoorway, and saw a hawk-eyed woman, rough-headed, and unwashed, cheapeninga hungry girl's last bit of finery; or in some quarter only the morehideous for being smarter, he found himself under the breath of a youngJew talkative and familiar, willing to show his acquaintance withgentlemen's tastes, and not fastidious in any transactions with which theywould favor him--and so on through the brief chapter of his experience inthis kind. Excuse him: his mind was not apt to run spontaneously intoinsulting ideas, or to practice a form of wit which identifies Moses withthe advertisement sheet; but he was just now governed by dread, and ifMirah's parents had been Christian, the chief difference would have beenthat his forebodings would have been fed with wider knowledge. It was thehabit of his mind to connect dread with unknown parentage, and in thiscase as well as his own there was enough to make the connectionreasonable.
But what was to be done with Mirah? She needed shelter and protection inthe fullest sense, and all his chivalrous sentiment roused itself toinsist that the sooner and the more fully he could engage for her theinterest of others besides himself, the better he should fulfill herclaims on him. He had no right to provide for her entirely, though hemight be able to do so; the very depth of the impression she had producedmade him desire that she should understand herself to be entirelyindependent of him; and vague visions of the future which he tried todispel as fantastic left their influence in an anxiety stronger than anymotive he could give for it, that those who saw his actions closely shouldbe acquainted from the first with the history of his relation to Mirah. Hehad learned to hate secrecy about the grand ties and obligations of hislife--to hate it the more because a strong spell of interwovensensibilities hindered him from breaking such secrecy. Deronda had made avow to himself that--since the truths which disgrace mortals are not allof their own making--the truth should never be made a disgrace to anotherby his act. He was not without terror lest he should break this vow, andfall into the apologetic philosophy which explains the world intocontaining nothing better than one's own conduct.
At one moment he resolved to tell the whole of his adventure to Sir Hugoand Lady Mallinger the next morning at breakfast, but the possibility thatsomething quite new might reveal itself on his next visit to Mrs.Meyrick's checked this impulse, and he finally went to sleep on theconclusion that he would wait until that visit had been made.