Daniel Deronda
乔治.艾略特 George Eliot
CHAPTER XXXIII. Page 1
"No man," says a Rabbi, by way of indisputable instance, "may turn thebones of his father and mother into spoons"--sure that his hearersfelt the checks against that form of economy. The market for spoonshas never expanded enough for any one to say, "Why not?" and to arguethat human progress lies in such an application of material. The onlycheck to be alleged is a sentiment, which will coerce none who do nothold that sentiments are the better part of the world's wealth.
Deronda meanwhile took to a less fashionable form of exercise than ridingin Rotton Row. He went often rambling in those parts of London which aremost inhabited by common Jews. He walked to the synagogues at times ofservice, he looked into shops, he observed faces:--a process not verypromising of particular discovery. Why did he not address himself to aninfluential Rabbi or other member of a Jewish community, to consult on thechances of finding a mother named Cohen, with a son named Ezra, and a lostdaughter named Mirah? He thought of doing so--after Christmas. The factwas, notwithstanding all his sense of poetry in common things, Deronda,where a keen personal interest was aroused, could not, more than the restof us, continuously escape suffering from the pressure of that hardunaccommodating Actual, which has never consulted our taste and isentirely unselect. Enthusiasm, we know, dwells at ease among ideas,tolerates garlic breathed in the middle ages, and sees no shabbiness inthe official trappings of classic processions: it gets squeamish whenideals press upon it as something warmly incarnate, and can hardly facethem without fainting. Lying dreamily in a boat, imagining one's self inquest of a beautiful maiden's relatives in Cordova elbowed by Jews in thetime of Ibn-Gebirol, all the physical incidents can be borne withoutshock. Or if the scenery of St. Mary Axe and Whitechapel wereimaginatively transported to the borders of the Rhine at the end of theeleventh century, when in the ears listening for the signals of theMessiah, the Hep! Hep! Hep! of the Crusaders came like the bay of blood-hounds; and in the presence of those devilish missionaries with sword andfirebrand the crouching figure of the reviled Jew turned round erect,heroic, flashing with sublime constancy in the face of torture and death--what would the dingy shops and unbeautiful faces signify to the thrill ofcontemplative emotion? But the fervor of sympathy with which wecontemplate a grandiose martyrdom is feeble compared with the enthusiasmthat keeps unslacked where there is no danger, no challenge--nothing butimpartial midday falling on commonplace, perhaps half-repulsive, objectswhich are really the beloved ideas made flesh. Here undoubtedly lies thechief poetic energy:--in the force of imagination that pierces or exaltsthe solid fact, instead of floating among cloud-pictures. To glory in aprophetic vision of knowledge covering the earth, is an easier exercise ofbelieving imagination than to see its beginning in newspaper placards,staring at you from the bridge beyond the corn-fields; and it might wellhappen to most of us dainty people that we were in the thick of the battleof Armageddon without being aware of anything more than the annoyance of alittle explosive smoke and struggling on the ground immediately about us.
It lay in Deronda's nature usually to contemn the feeble, fastidioussympathy which shrinks from the broad life of mankind; but now, with Mirahbefore him as a living reality, whose experience he had to care for, hesaw every common Jew and Jewess in the light of a comparison with her, andhad a presentiment of the collision between her idea of the unknown motherand brother and the discovered fact--a presentiment all the keener in himbecause of a suppressed consciousness that a not unlike possibility ofcollision might lie hidden in his own lot. Not that he would have lookedwith more complacency of expectation at wealthy Jews, outdoing the lordsof the Philistines in their sports; but since there was no likelihood ofMirah's friends being found among that class, their habits did notimmediately affect him. In this mood he rambled, without expectation of amore pregnant result than a little preparation of his own mind, perhapsfor future theorizing as well as practice--very much as if, Mirah beingrelated to Welsh miners, he had gone to look more closely at the ways ofthose people, not without wishing at the same time to get a little lightof detail on the history of Strikes.
He really did not long to find anybody in particular; and when, as hishabit was, he looked at the name over a shop door, he was well contentthat it was not Ezra Cohen. I confess, he particularly desired that EzraCohen should not keep a shop. Wishes are held to be ominous; according towhich belief the order of the world is so arranged that if you have animpious objection to a squint, your offspring is the more likely to beborn with one; also, that if you happened to desire a squint you would notget it. This desponding view of probability the hopeful entirely reject,taking their wishes as good and sufficient security for all kinds offulfilment. Who is absolutely neutral? Deronda happening one morning toturn into a little side street out of the noise and obstructions ofHolborn, felt the scale dip on the desponding side.
He was rather tired of the streets and had paused to hail a hansom cabwhich he saw coming, when his attention was caught by some fine old claspsin chased silver displayed in the window at his right hand. His firstthought was that Lady Mallinger, who had a strictly Protestant taste forsuch Catholic spoils, might like to have these missal-clasps turned into abracelet: then his eyes traveled over the other contents of the window,and he saw that the shop was that kind of pawnbroker's where the lead isgiven to jewelry, lace and all equivocal objects introduced as _bric-à-brac_. A placard in one corner announced--_Watches and Jewlery exchangedand repaired_. But his survey had been noticed from within, and a figureappeared at the door, looking round at him and saying in a tone of cordialencouragement, "Good day, sir." The instant was enough for Deronda to seethe face, unmistakably Jewish, belonged to a young man about thirty, andwincing from the shopkeeper's persuasiveness that would probably follow,he had no sooner returned the "good day," than he passed to the other sideof the street and beckoned to the cabman to draw up there. From thatstation he saw the name over the shop window--Ezra Cohen.
There might be a hundred Ezra Cohens lettered above shop windows, butDeronda had not seen them. Probably the young man interested in a possiblecustomer was Ezra himself; and he was about the age to be expected inMirah's brother, who was grown up while she was still a little child. ButDeronda's first endeavor as he drove homeward was to convince himself thatthere was not the slightest warrantable presumption of this Ezra beingMirah's brother; and next, that even if, in spite of good reasoning, heturned out to be that brother, while on inquiry the mother was found to bedead, it was not his--Deronda's--duty to make known the discovery toMirah. In inconvenient disturbance of this conclusion there came hislately-acquired knowledge that Mirah would have a religious desire to knowof her mother's death, and also to learn whether her brother were living.How far was he justified in determining another life by his own notions?Was it not his secret complaint against the way in which others hadordered his own life, that he had not open daylight on all its relations,so that he had not, like other men, the full guidance of primary duties?
The immediate relief from this inward debate was the reflection that hehad not yet made any real discovery, and that by looking into the factsmore closely he should be certified that there was no demand on him forany decision whatever. He intended to return to that shop as soon as hecould conveniently, and buy the clasps for Lady Mallinger. But he washindered for several days by Sir Hugo, who, about to make an after-dinnerspeech on a burning topic, wanted Deronda to forage for him on the legalpart of the question, besides wasting time every day on argument whichalways ended in a drawn battle. As on many other questions, they helddifferent sides, but Sir Hugo did not mind this, and when Deronda put hispoint well, said, with a mixture of satisfaction and regret--
"Confound it, Dan! why don't you make an opportunity of saying thesethings in public? You're wrong, you know. You won't succeed. You've gotthe massive sentiment--the heavy artillery of the country against you. Butit's all the better ground for a young man to display himself on. When Iwas your age, I should have taken it. And it would be quite as well foryou to be in opposition to me here and there. It would throw you more intorelief. If you would seize an occasion of this sort to make an impression,you might be in Parliament in no time. And you know that would gratifyme."
"I am sorry not to do what would gratify you, sir," said Deronda. "But Icannot persuade myself to look at politics as a profession."
"Why not? if a man is not born into public life by his position in thecountry, there's no way for him but to embrace it by his own efforts. Thebusiness of the country must be done--her Majesty's Government carried on,as the old Duke said. And it never could be, my boy, if everybody lookedat politics as if they were prophecy, and demanded an inspired vocation.If you are to get into Parliament, it won't do to sit still and wait for acall either from heaven or constituents."
"I don't want to make a living out of opinions," said Deronda; "especiallyout of borrowed opinions. Not that I mean to blame other men. I dare saymany better fellows than I don't mind getting on to a platform to praisethemselves, and giving their word of honor for a party."
"I'll tell you what, Dan," said Sir Hugo, "a man who sets his face againstevery sort of humbug is simply a three-cornered, impracticable fellow.There's a bad style of humbug, but there is also a good style--one thatoils the wheels and makes progress possible. If you are to rule men, youmust rule them through their own ideas; and I agree with the Archbishop atNaples who had a St. Januarius procession against the plague. It's no usehaving an Order in Council against popular shallowness. There is no actionpossible without a little acting."
"One may be obliged to give way to an occasional necessity," said Deronda."But it is one thing to say, 'In this particular case I am forced to puton this foolscap and grin,' and another to buy a pocket foolscap andpractice myself in grinning. I can't see any real public expediency thatdoes not keep an ideal before it which makes a limit of deviation from thedirect path. But if I were to set up for a public man I might mistake mysuccess for public expediency."
It was after this dialogue, which was rather jarring to him, that Derondaset out on his meditated second visit to Ezra Cohen's. He entered thestreet at the end opposite to the Holborn entrance, and an inwardreluctance slackened his pace while his thoughts were transferring what hehad just been saying about public expediency to the entirely privatedifficulty which brought him back again into this unattractivethoroughfare. It might soon become an immediate practical question withhim how far he could call it a wise expediency to conceal the fact ofclose kindred. Such questions turning up constantly in life are oftendecided in a rough-and-ready way; and to many it will appear an over-refinement in Deronda that he should make any great point of a matterconfined to his own knowledge. But we have seen the reasons why he hadcome to regard concealment as a bane of life, and the necessity ofconcealment as a mark by which lines of action were to be avoided. Theprospect of being urged against the confirmed habit of his mind wasnaturally grating. He even paused here and there before the most plausibleshop-windows for a gentleman to look into, half inclined to decide that hewould not increase his knowledge about that modern Ezra, who was certainlynot a leader among his people--a hesitation which proved how, in a manmuch given to reasoning, a bare possibility may weigh more than the best-clad likelihood; for Deronda's reasoning had decided that all likelihoodwas against this man's being Mirah's brother.
One of the shop-windows he paused before was that of a second-hand book-shop, where, on a narrow table outside, the literature of the ages wasrepresented in judicious mixture, from the immortal verse of Homer to themortal prose of the railway novel. That the mixture was judicious wasapparent from Deronda's finding in it something that he wanted--namely,that wonderful bit of autobiography, the life of the Polish Jew, SalomonMaimon; which, as he could easily slip it into his pocket, he took fromits place, and entered the shop to pay for, expecting to see behind thecounter a grimy personage showing that _nonchalance_ about sales whichseems to belong universally to the second-hand book-business. In mostother trades you find generous men who are anxious to sell you their waresfor your own welfare; but even a Jew will not urge Simson's Euclid on youwith an affectionate assurance that you will have pleasure in reading it,and that he wishes he had twenty more of the article, so much is it inrequest. One is led to fear that a secondhand bookseller may belong tothat unhappy class of men who have no belief in the good of what they gettheir living by, yet keep conscience enough to be morose rather thanunctuous in their vocation.
But instead of the ordinary tradesman, he saw, on the dark background ofbooks in the long narrow shop, a figure that was somewhat startling in itsunusualness. A man in threadbare clothing, whose age was difficult toguess--from the dead yellowish flatness of the flesh, something like anold ivory carving--was seated on a stool against some bookshelves thatprojected beyond the short counter, doing nothing more remarkable thanreading yesterday's _Times_; but when he let the paper rest on his lap andlooked at the incoming customer, the thought glanced through Deronda thatprecisely such a physiognomy as that might possibly have been seen in aprophet of the Exile, or in some New Hebrew poet of the mediæval time. Itwas a fine typical Jewish face, wrought into intensity of expressionapparently by a strenuous eager experience in which all the satisfactionhad been indirect and far off, and perhaps by some bodily suffering also,which involved that absence of ease in the present. The features wereclear-cut, not large; the brow not high but broad, and fully defined bythe crisp black hair. It might never have been a particularly handsomeface, but it must always have been forcible; and now with its dark, far-off gaze, and yellow pallor in relief on the gloom of the backward shop,one might have imagined one's self coming upon it in some past prison ofthe Inquisition, which a mob had suddenly burst upon; while the look fixedon an incidental customer seemed eager and questioning enough to have beenturned on one who might have been a messenger either of delivery or ofdeath. The figure was probably familiar and unexciting enough to theinhabitants of this street; but to Deronda's mind it brought so strange ablending of the unwonted with the common, that there was a perceptibleinterval of mutual observation before he asked his question; "What is theprice of this book?"
After taking the book and examining the fly-leaves without rising, thesupposed bookseller said, "There is no mark, and Mr. Ram is not in now. Iam keeping the shop while he is gone to dinner. What are you disposed togive for it?" He held the book close on his lap with his hand on it andlooked examiningly at Deronda, over whom there came the disagreeable idea,that possibly this striking personage wanted to see how much could be gotout of a customer's ignorance of prices. But without further reflection hesaid, "Don't you know how much it is worth?"
"Not its market-price. May I ask have you read it?"
"No. I have read an account of it, which makes me want to buy it."
"You are a man of learning--you are interested in Jewish history?" Thiswas said in a deepened tone of eager inquiry.
"I am certainly interested in Jewish history," said Deronda, quietly,curiosity overcoming his dislike to the sort of inspection as well asquestioning he was under.
But immediately the strange Jew rose from his sitting posture, and Derondafelt a thin hand pressing his arm tightly, while a hoarse, excited voice,not much above a loud whisper, said--
"You are perhaps of our race?"
Deronda colored deeply, not liking the grasp, and then answered with aslight shake of the head, "No." The grasp was relaxed, the hand withdrawn,the eagerness of the face collapsed into uninterested melancholy, as ifsome possessing spirit which had leaped into the eyes and gestures hadsunk back again to the inmost recesses of the frame; and moving furtheroff as he held out the little book, the stranger said in a tone of distantcivility, "I believe Mr. Ram will be satisfied with half-a-crown, sir."
The effect of this change on Deronda--he afterward smiled when he recalledit--was oddly embarrassing and humiliating, as if some high dignitary hadfound him deficient and given him his _congé_. There was nothing furtherto be said, however: he paid his half-crown and carried off his _SalomonMaimon's Lebensgeschichte_ with a mere "good-morning."
He felt some vexation at the sudden arrest of the interview, and theapparent prohibition that he should know more of this man, who wascertainly something out of the common way--as different probably as a Jewcould well be from Ezra Cohen, through whose door Deronda was presentlyentering, and whose flourishing face glistening on the way to fatness washanging over the counter in negotiation with some one on the other side ofthe partition, concerning two plated stoppers and three teaspoons, whichlay spread before him. Seeing Deronda enter, he called out "Mother!Mother!" and then with a familiar nod and smile, said, "Coming, sir--coming directly."
Deronda could not help looking toward the door from the back with someanxiety, which was not soothed when he saw a vigorous woman beyond fiftyenter and approach to serve him. Not that there was anything veryrepulsive about her: the worst that could be said was that she had thatlook of having made her toilet with little water, and by twilight, whichis common to unyouthful people of her class, and of having presumablyslept in her large earrings, if not in her rings and necklace. In fact,what caused a sinking of heart in Deronda was, her not being so coarse andugly as to exclude the idea of her being Mirah's mother. Any one who haslooked at a face to try and discern signs of known kinship in it willunderstand his process of conjecture--how he tried to think away the fatwhich had gradually disguised the outlines of youth, and to discern whatone may call the elementary expressions of the face. He was sorry to seeno absolute negative to his fears. Just as it was conceivable that thisEzra, brought up to trade, might resemble the scapegrace father ineverything but his knowledge and talent, so it was not impossible thatthis mother might have had a lovely refined daughter whose type of featureand expression was like Mirah's. The eyebrows had a vexatious similarityof line; and who shall decide how far a face may be masked when theuncherishing years have thrust it far onward in the ever-new procession ofyouth and age? The good-humor of the glance remained and shone out in amotherly way at Deronda, as she said, in a mild guttural tone--