Daniel Deronda
乔治.艾略特 George Eliot
CHAPTER LI. Page 1
She held the spindle as she sat,Errina with the thick-coiled matOf raven hair and deepest agate eyes,Gazing with a sad surpriseAt surging visions of her destiny--To spin the byssus drearilyIn insect-labor, while the throngOf gods and men wrought deeds that poets wrought in song.
When Deronda presented himself at the door of his mother's apartment inthe _Italia_ he felt some revival of his boyhood with its prematureagitations. The two servants in the antechamber looked at him markedly, alittle surprised that the doctor their lady had come to consult was thisstriking young gentleman whose appearance gave even the severe lines of anevening dress the credit of adornment. But Deronda could notice nothinguntil, the second door being opened, he found himself in the presence of afigure which at the other end of the large room stood awaiting hisapproach.
She was covered, except as to her face and part of her arms, with blacklace hanging loosely from the summit of her whitening hair to the longtrain stretching from her tall figure. Her arms, naked to the elbow,except for some rich bracelets, were folded before her, and the fine poiseof her head made it look handsomer than it really was. But Deronda felt nointerval of observation before he was close in front of her, holding thehand she had put out and then raising it to his lips. She still kept herhand in his and looked at him examiningly; while his chief consciousnesswas that her eyes were piercing and her face so mobile that the nextmoment she might look like a different person. For even while she wasexamining him there was a play of the brow and nostril which made a tacitlanguage. Deronda dared no movement, not able to conceive what sort ofmanifestation her feeling demanded; but he felt himself changing colorlike a girl, and yet wondering at his own lack of emotion; he had livedthrough so many ideal meetings with his mother, and they had seemed morereal than this! He could not even conjecture in what language she wouldSpeak to him. He imagined it would not be English. Suddenly, she let fallhis hand, and placed both hers on his shoulders, while her face gave out aflash of admiration in which every worn line disappeared and seemed toleave a restored youth.
"You are a beautiful creature!" she said, in a low melodious voice, withsyllables which had what might be called a foreign but agreeable outline."I knew you would be." Then she kissed him on each cheek, and he returnedthe kisses. But it was something like a greeting between royalties.
She paused a moment while the lines were coming back into her face, andthen said in a colder tone, "I am your mother. But you can have no lovefor me."
. Shall youcomprehend your mother, or only blame her?"necks and souls of women. .
"I have thought of you more than of any other being in the world," saidDeronda, his voice trembling nervously.
"I am not like what you thought I was," said the mother decisively,withdrawing her hands from his shoulders, and folding her arms as before,looking at him as if she invited him to observe her. He had often picturedher face in his imagination as one which had a likeness to his own: he sawsome of the likeness now, but amidst more striking differences. She was aremarkable looking being. What was it that gave her son a painful sense ofaloofness?--Her worn beauty had a strangeness in it as if she were notquite a human mother, but a Melusina, who had ties with some world whichis independent of ours.
"I used to think that you might be suffering," said Deronda, anxious aboveall not to wound her. "I used to wish that I could be a comfort to you."
"I _am_ suffering. But with a suffering that you can't comfort," said thePrincess, in a harder voice than before, moving to a sofa where cushionshad been carefully arranged for her. "Sit down." She pointed to a seatnear her; and then discerning some distress in Deronda's face, she added,more gently, "I am not suffering at this moment. I am at ease now. I amable to talk."
bondagethat I hated."_ over the door;to dread lest a bit of butter.
Deronda seated himself and waited for her to speak again. It seemed as ifhe were in the presence of a mysterious Fate rather than of the longed-formother. He was beginning to watch her with wonder, from the spiritualdistance to which she had thrown him.
"No," she began: "I did not send for you to comfort me. I could not knowbeforehand--I don't know now--what you will feel toward me. I have not thefoolish notion that you can love me merely because I am your mother, whenyou have never seen or heard of me in all your life. But I thought I chosesomething better for you than being with me. I did not think I deprivedyou of anything worth having."
"You cannot wish me to believe that your affection would not have beenworth having," said Deronda, finding that she paused as if she expectedhim to make some answer.
"I don't mean to speak ill of myself," said the princess, with proudimpetuosity, "But I had not much affection to give you. I did not wantaffection. I had been stifled with it. I wanted to live out the life thatwas in me, and not to be hampered with other lives. You wonder what I was.I was no princess then." She rose with a sudden movement, and stood as shehad done before. Deronda immediately rose too; he felt breathless.
"No princess in this tame life that I live in now. I was a great singer,and I acted as well as I sang. All the rest were poor beside me. Menfollowed me from one country to another. I was lining a myriad lives inone. I did not want a child."
There was a passionate self-defence in her tone. She had cast allprecedent out of her mind. Precedent had no excuse for, her and she couldonly seek a justification in the intensest words she could find for herexperience. She seemed to fling out the last words against some possiblereproach in the mind of her son, who had to stand and hear them--clutchinghis coat-collar as if he were keeping himself above water by it, andfeeling his blood in the sort of commotion that might have been excited ifhe had seen her going through some strange rite of a religion which gave asacredness to crime. What else had she to tell him? She went on with thesame intensity and a sort of pale illumination in her face.
"I did not want to marry. I was forced into marrying your father--forced,I mean, by my father's wishes and commands; and besides, it was my bestway of getting some freedom. I could rule my husband, but not my father. Ihad a right to be free. I had a right to seek my freedom from a bondagethat I hated."
"And the bondage I hated for myself I wanted to keep you from. What bettercould the most loving mother have done? I relieved you from the bondage ofhaving been born a Jew."
"Then I _am_ a Jew?" Deronda burst out with a deep-voiced energy that madehis mother shrink a little backward against her cushions. "My father was aJew, and you are a Jewess?"
"Yes, your father was my cousin," said the mother, watching him with achange in her look, as if she saw something that she might have to beafraid of.
"I am glad of it," said Deronda, impetuously, in the veiled voice ofpassion. He could not have imagined beforehand how he would have come tosay that which he had never hitherto admitted. He could not have dreamedthat it would be in impulsive opposition to his mother. He was shaken by amixed anger which no reflection could come soon enough to check, againstthis mother who it seemed had borne him unwillingly, had willingly madeherself a stranger to him, and--perhaps--was now making herself knownunwillingly. This last suspicion seemed to flash some explanation over herspeech.
But the mother was equally shaken by an anger differently mixed, and herframe was less equal to any repression. The shaking with her was visiblyphysical, and her eyes looked the larger for her pallid excitement as shesaid violently--
"Why do you say you are glad? You are an English gentleman. I secured youthat."
achange in her look, as if she saw something that she might have to beafraid of. "It is a bitter.
"You did not know what you secured me. How could you choose my birthrightfor me?" said Deronda, throwing himself sideways into his chair again,almost unconsciously, and leaning his arm over the back, while he lookedaway from his mother.
He was fired with an intolerance that seemed foreign to him. But he wasnow trying hard to master himself and keep silence. A horror had swept inupon his anger lest he should say something too hard in this moment whichmade an epoch never to be recalled. There was a pause before his motherspoke again, and when she spoke her voice had become more firmly resistantin its finely varied tones:
"I chose for you what I would have chosen for myself. How could I knowthat you would have the spirit of my father in you? How could I know thatyou would love what I hated?--if you really love to be a Jew." The lastwords had such bitterness in them that any one overhearing might havesupposed some hatred had arisen between the mother and son.
But Deronda had recovered his fuller self. He was recalling hissensibilities to what life had been and actually was for her whose bestyears were gone, and who with the signs of suffering in her frame was nowexerting herself to tell him of a past which was not his alone but alsohers. His habitual shame at the acceptance of events as if they were hisonly, helped him even here. As he looked at his mother silently after herlast words, his face regained some of its penetrative calm; yet it seemedto have a strangely agitating influence over her: her eyes were fixed onhim with a sort of fascination, but not with any repose of maternaldelight.
"Forgive me, if I speak hastily," he said, with diffident gravity. "Whyhave you resolved now on disclosing to me what you took care to have mebrought up in ignorance of? Why--since you seem angry that I should beglad?"
"Oh--the reasons of our actions!" said the Princess, with a ring ofsomething like sarcastic scorn. "When you are as old as I am, it will notseem so simple a question--'Why did you do this?' People talk of theirmotives in a cut and dried way. Every woman is supposed to have the sameset of motives, or else to be a monster. I am not a monster, but I havenot felt exactly what other women feel--or say they feel, for fear ofbeing thought unlike others. When you reproach me in your heart forsending you away from me, you mean that I ought to say I felt about you asother women say they feel about their children. I did _not_ feel that. Iwas glad to be freed from you. But I did well for you, and I gave you yourfather's fortune. Do I seem now to be revoking everything?--Well, thereare reasons. I feel many things that I cannot understand. A fatal illnesshas been growing in me for a year. I shall very likely not live anotheryear. I will not deny anything I have done. I will not pretend to lovewhere I have no love. But shadows are rising round me. Sickness makesthem. If I have wronged the dead--I have but little time to do what I leftundone."
The varied transitions of tone with which this speech was delivered wereas perfect as the most accomplished actress could have made them. Thespeech was in fact a piece of what may be called sincere acting; thiswoman's nature was one in which all feeling--and all the more when it wastragic as well as real--immediately became matter of consciousrepresentation: experience immediately passed into drama, and she actedher own emotions. In a minor degree this is nothing uncommon, but in thePrincess the acting had a rare perfection of physiognomy, voice, andgesture. It would not be true to say that she felt less because of thisdouble consciousness: she felt--that is, her mind went through--all themore, but with a difference; each nucleus of pain or pleasure had a deepatmosphere of the excitement or spiritual intoxication which at onceexalts and deadens. But Deronda made no reflection of this kind. All histhoughts hung on the purport of what his mother was saying; her tones andher wonderful face entered into his agitation without being noted. What helonged for with an awed desire was to know as much as she would tell himof the strange mental conflict under which it seemed he had been broughtinto the world; what his compassionate nature made the controlling ideawithin him were the suffering and the confession that breathed through herlater words, and these forbade any further question, when she paused andremained silent, with her brow knit, her head turned a little away fromhim, and her large eyes fixed as if on something incorporeal. He must waitfor her to speak again. She did so with strange abruptness, turning hereyes upon him suddenly, and saying more quickly--
"Sir Hugo has written much about you. He tells me you have a wonderfulmind--you comprehend everything--you are wiser than he is with all hissixty years. You say you are glad to know that you were born a Jew. I amnot going to tell you that I have changed my mind about that. Yourfeelings are against mine. You don't thank me for what I did. Shall youcomprehend your mother, or only blame her?"
"There is not a fibre within me but makes me wish to comprehend her," saidDeronda, meeting her sharp gaze solemnly. "It is a bitter reversal of mylonging to think of blaming her. What I have been most trying to do forfifteen years is to have some understanding of those who differ frommyself."
"Then you have become unlike your grandfather in that." said the mother,"though you are a young copy of him in your face. He never comprehendedme, or if he did, he only thought of fettering me into obedience. I was tobe what he called 'the Jewish woman' under pain of his curse. I was tofeel everything I did not feel, and believe everything I did not believe.I was to feel awe for the bit of parchment in the _mezuza_ over the door;to dread lest a bit of butter should touch a bit of meat; to think itbeautiful that men should bind the _tephillin_ on them, and women not,--toadore the wisdom of such laws, however silly they might seem to me. I wasto love the long prayers in the ugly synagogue, and the howling, and thegabbling, and the dreadful fasts, and the tiresome feasts, and my father'sendless discoursing about our people, which was a thunder without meaningin my ears. I was to care forever about what Israel had been; and I didnot care at all. I cared for the wide world, and all that I couldrepresent in it. I hated living under the shadow of my father'sstrictness. Teaching, teaching for everlasting--'this you must be,' 'thatyou must not be'--pressed on me like a frame that got tighter and tighteras I grew. I wanted to live a large life, with freedom to do what everyone else did, and be carried along in a great current, not obliged tocare. Ah!"--here her tone changed to one of a more bitter incisiveness--"you are glad to have been born a Jew. You say so. That is because you havenot been brought up as a Jew. That separateness seems sweet to you becauseI saved you from it."
"When you resolved on that, you meant that I should never know my origin?"said Deronda, impulsively. "You have at least changed in your feeling onthat point."
"Yes, that was what I meant. That is what I persevered in. And it is nottrue to say that I have changed. Things have changed in spite of me. I amstill the same Leonora"--she pointed with her forefinger to her breast--"here within me is the same desire, the same will, the same choice,_but_"--she spread out her hands, palm upward, on each side of her, as shepaused with a bitter compression of her lip, then let her voice fall intomuffled, rapid utterance--"events come upon us like evil enchantments: andthoughts, feelings, apparitions in the darkness are events--are they not?I don't consent. We only consent to what we love. I obey somethingtyrannic"--she spread out her hands again--"I am forced to be withered, tofeel pain, to be dying slowly. Do I love that? Well, I have been forced toobey my dead father. I have been forced to tell you that you are a Jew,and deliver to you what he commanded me to deliver."
"I beseech you to tell me what moved you--when you were young, I mean--totake the course you did," said Deronda, trying by this reference to thepast to escape from what to him was the heart-rending piteousness of thismingled suffering and defiance. "I gather that my grandfather opposed yourbent to be an artist. Though my own experience has been quite different, Ienter into the painfulness of your struggle. I can imagine the hardship ofan enforced renunciation."
"No," said the Princess, shaking her head and folding her arms with an airof decision. "You are not a woman. You may try--but you can never imaginewhat it is to have a man's force of genius in you, and yet to suffer theslavery of being a girl. To have a pattern cut out--'this is the Jewishwoman; this is what you must be; this is what you are wanted for; awoman's heart must be of such a size and no larger, else it must bepressed small, like Chinese feet; her happiness is to be made as cakesare, by a fixed receipt.' That was what my father wanted. He wished I hadbeen a son; he cared for me as a make-shift link. His heart was set on hisJudaism. He hated that Jewish women should be thought of by the Christianworld as a sort of ware to make public singers and actresses of. As if wewere not the more enviable for that! That is a chance of escaping frombondage."
"Was my grandfather a learned man?" said Deronda, eager to knowparticulars that he feared his mother might not think of.
She answered impatiently, putting up her hand, "Oh, yes,--and a cleverphysician--and good: I don't deny that he was good. A man to be admired ina play--grand, with an iron will. Like the old Foscari before he pardons.But such men turn their wives and daughters into slaves. They would rulethe world if they could; but not ruling the world, they throw all theweight of their will on the necks and souls of women. But nature sometimesthwarts them. My father had no other child than his daughter, and she waslike himself."
She had folded her arms again, and looked as if she were ready to facesome impending attempt at mastery.
"Your father was different. Unlike me--all lovingness and affection. Iknew I could rule him; and I made him secretly promise me, before Imarried him, that he would put no hindrance in the way of my being anartist. My father was on his deathbed when we were married: from the firsthe had fixed his mind on my marrying my cousin Ephraim. And when a woman'swill is as strong as the man's who wants to govern her, half her strengthmust be concealment. I meant to have my will in the end, but I could onlyhave it by seeming to obey. I had an awe of my father--always I had had anawe of him: it was impossible to help it. I hated to feel awed--I wished Icould have defied him openly; but I never could. It was what I could notimagine: I could not act it to myself that I should begin to defy myfather openly and succeed. And I never would risk failure."
This last sentence was uttered with an abrupt emphasis, and she pausedafter it as if the words had raised a crowd of remembrances whichobstructed speech. Her son was listening to her with feelings more andmore highly mixed; the first sense of being repelled by the frank coldnesswhich had replaced all his preconceptions of a mother's tender joy in thesight of him; the first impulses of indignation at what shocked his mostcherished emotions and principles--all these busy elements of collisionbetween them were subsiding for a time, and making more and more room forthat effort at just allowance and that admiration of a forcible naturewhose errors lay along high pathways, which he would have felt if, insteadof being his mother, she had been a stranger who had appealed to hissympathy. Still it was impossible to be dispassionate: he trembled lestthe next thing she had to say would be more repugnant to him than what hadgone before: he was afraid of the strange coërcion she seemed to be underto lay her mind bare: he almost wished he could say, "Tell me only what isnecessary," and then again he felt the fascination which made him watchher and listen to her eagerly. He tried to recall her to particulars byasking--