Chapter Thirty-two
Deronda, on his return to town, assured Sir Hugo of his having lodged in Grandcourt’s mind an understanding that he could get fifty thousand pounds by giving up Diplow; and that Grandcourt appeared inclined to keep up friendly communications.
“And what did you think of the future bride?” said Sir Hugo.
“I thought better of her than I did in Leubronn. Roulette was not a good setting for her; it brought out something of the demon. At Diplow she seemed much more womanly and attractive – less hard and self-possessed.”
“Don’t flirt with her too much, Dan,” said Sir Hugo, meaning to be agreeably playful. “If you make Grandcourt savage when they come to the Abbey at Christmas, it will interfere with my affairs.”
“I can stay in town, sir.”
“No, no. Lady Mallinger and the children can’t do without you at Christmas. Only don’t make mischief – unless you can get up a duel, and manage to shoot Grandcourt, which might be worth a little inconvenience.”
“I don’t think you ever saw me flirt,” said Deronda, not amused.
“Oh, haven’t I, though?” said Sir Hugo, provokingly. “You are always looking tenderly at the women, and talking to them in a Jesuitical way. You are a dangerous young fellow.”
What was the use of being exasperated at a tasteless joke? Sir Hugo’s notion of flirting, it was to be hoped, was rather peculiar; for his own part, Deronda was sure that he had never flirted. But he was glad that the baronet had no knowledge about the repurchase of Gwendolen’s necklace to feed his taste for this kind of joking.
He would be on his guard in future; for example, in his behaviour at Mrs. Meyrick’s, where he was about to pay his first visit since his arrival from Leubronn. For Mirah was certainly a creature in whom it was difficult not to show a tender interest.
Mrs. Meyrick had sent Deronda a report of Mirah’s well-being. “We are getting fonder of her every day,” she had written. “At breakfast-time we all look forward to seeing her come in; and we listen to her as if she were a native from a new country. I have not heard a word from her lips that gives me a doubt about her. She is quite contented and full of gratitude. My daughters are learning singing from her, and they hope to get her other pupils; for she is anxious to work, like my girls. Mab says our life has become like a fairy tale, and she is afraid that Mirah will turn into a nightingale again and fly away. Her voice is just perfect: not loud and strong, but searching and melting.”
But Mrs. Meyrick did not tell him how Amy and Mab had accompanied Mirah to the synagogue, and found the Jewish faith less reconcilable with their wishes. They kept silence out of delicacy to Mirah, with whom her religion was a tender subject; but after a while Amy could not restrain a question.
“Excuse me, Mirah, but does it seem quite right to you that the women should sit behind rails in a gallery apart?”
“Yes, I never thought of anything else,” said Mirah, with mild surprise.
“And you like better to see the men with their hats on?” said Mab, cautiously proposing the smallest item of difference.
“Oh, yes. I like what I have always seen there, because it brings back to me feelings I would not part with for anything else in the world.”
After this, any criticism would have seemed to these generous little people an inhospitable cruelty. Mirah’s religion was of one fibre with her affections.
“She says she is a very bad Jewess, and does not know half her people’s religion,” said Amy, when Mirah was gone to bed. “Perhaps it would gradually melt away from her, and she would pass into Christianity like the rest of the world, if she got to love us very much, and never found her mother.”
“Oh!” cried Mab. “I wish I were not such a hideous Christian. How can an ugly Christian, who is always dropping her work, convert a beautiful Jewess, who has not a fault?”
“It may be wicked of me,” said shrewd Kate, “but I cannot help wishing that her mother may not be found. There might be something unpleasant.”
“I don’t think it, my dear,” said Mrs. Meyrick. “I believe Mirah is cut out after the pattern of her mother. And what a joy it would be to her to have such a daughter brought back again!”
Not only the Meyricks, whose knowledge had been acquired by the irregular foraging to which clever girls have usually been reduced, but Deronda himself, with all his masculine instruction, had been made aware by Mirah’s coming that they knew hardly anything about modern Judaism or Jewish history. Deronda, like his neighbours, had regarded Judaism as a sort of eccentric fossilized form which an accomplished man might dispense with studying, and leave to specialists. But Mirah, with her terrified flight from one parent, and her yearning after the other, had flashed on him the fact that Judaism was something still central in human lives; and while travelling with Sir Hugo he began to look for synagogues and books about the Jews.
It was on this journey that he first entered a Jewish synagogue, at Frankfort, where his group rested one Friday. In exploring the Judengasse, the Jewish ghetto, which he had seen long before, he remembered well enough its picturesque old houses; what his eyes chiefly dwelt on now were the human types there; and his thought, busily connecting them with the past of their race, stirred that fibre of historic sympathy which had grown within him.
His early-wakened sensibility and reflectiveness had developed into a many-sided sympathy. The indefiniteness of his sentiments threatened to hinder any persistent course of action: as soon as he took up any side, he began to see things as they probably appeared to others; so that any strong partisanship, unless it were against oppression, seemed insincere to him. He tended to fall into that reflective analysis which neutralizes sympathy. Few men were able to keep themselves clearer of vices than he; yet he hated vices only mildly, thinking of them as part of human nature, which he should trace with understanding and pity. He was fervidly democratic in his feeling for the multitude, and yet, through his affections, intensely conservative, loath to part with ancient forms which, for him, were alive with memory and sentiment.
He suspected himself of loving too well the losing causes of the world. And yet his fear of falling into an unreasoning narrow hatred constrained him: he apologized for the heirs of privilege; he shrank with dislike from the loser’s bitterness. His too diffusive sympathy was in danger of paralyzing the force of his indignation against wrong; and he had become so keenly aware of this that he longed for some event, or inward light, to urge him into action, and focus his energy. He was ceasing to care for knowledge unless it spoke to his emotions; and he dreaded, as if it were a dwelling-place of lost souls, that dead anatomy of culture which turns the universe into a mere ceaseless answer to queries, and knows, not everything, but everything else about everything – as if one should know everything about the scent of violets while being unable to detect it oneself.
But how and whence was the needed event to come? – the influence that would make him what he longed to be – an organic part of social life, instead of roaming in it like a yearning disembodied spirit, stirred with a vague social passion, but without a home to render fellowship real? It is one thing to see your road, another to cut it.
He found some of the fault in the way he had been brought up, which had laid no special demands on him and had given him no fixed relationship except a doubtful one; but he also knew that he had fallen into a meditative numbness, and was gliding farther and farther from that energetic life which he would have proclaimed to be the best of all life, and the only way worth living. He wanted some way of keeping emotion strong. To pound the objects of sentiment into small dust, yet keep sentiment alive and active, was something like the famous recipe for making cannon – first take a round hole and then enclose it with iron; whatever you do holding fast to the hole.
This was the under-current in Deronda’s mind while he was reading law or imperfectly attending to polite conversation. Meanwhile he had not set about any function in particular with zeal and steadiness.
Under his calm exterior he felt the presence of poetry in everyday events. The Judengasse set him musing on two poetic elements of our historic life: the faint beginnings of faiths and institutions; and their obscure lingering decay, the dust with which they are covered only enhancing their former grandeur and glory.
This imaginative stirring, as he left the Judengasse and sauntered in the warm evening air, meaning to find his way to the synagogue, neutralized the repellent effect of certain ugly little incidents on his way. Turning into an old book-shop to ask the time of service at the old orthodox synagogue, he was affectionately directed by a precocious Jewish youth, who then cheated him in charging him for a book. Meanwhile at the opposite counter a deaf tradesman was conversing with a dingy man in a tall coat hanging from neck to heel, a bag in hand, who shouted at him in Jew-dialect, and who had no sooner disappeared than another dingy man of the same pattern issued from the gloom of the shop and shouted in the same dialect.
In fact, Deronda saw various queer-looking Israelites just distinguishable from queer-looking Christians of the same mixed morals. In his anxiety about Mirah’s relatives, he had lately been thinking of vulgar Jews with a sort of personal alarm. But this evening, conscious that he was falling into an unfair and ridiculous exaggeration, he began to correct his own prejudices. At sunset, he arrived at the Rabbinische Schule, and entered with a good congregation of men.
He happened to take his seat in a line with an elderly man, whose ample white beard and felt hat framed a fine profile which might as easily be Italian as Hebrew. Their eyes met; an undesirable chance with unknown persons, and a reason to Deronda for not looking again; but he immediately found an open prayer-book pushed toward him and had to bow his thanks.
The reader had mounted to the almemor or platform, and the service began. Deronda, having looked enough at the German translation of the Hebrew in the book before him to know that he was hearing Psalms and Old Testament passages, gave himself up to that strong effect of chanted liturgies which is independent of meaning – like the effect of an Allegri’s Miserere or a Palestrina’s Magnificat. The most powerful feeling with a liturgy is the prayer which yearns to escape from the limitations of our own weakness and asks Good to enter and abide with us; or else a lifting up of Gladness, a Gloria in excelsis that such Good exists; both the yearning and the exultation gathering force from the sense of communion which has lasted through long generations of struggling fellow-men.
The Hebrew liturgy, like others, has its transitions of litany, lyric, proclamation, dry statement and blessing; but this evening, all were one for Deronda: the chant of the Chazan’s or Reader’s grand wide-ranging voice with its passage from monotony to sudden cries, the outburst of sweet boys’ voices from the little choir, the devotional swaying of men’s bodies backward and forward, the very shabbiness of the building where a national faith which had penetrated the thinking of half the world was finding a remote echo: all were blended for him as one expression of a tragic, glorious history.
He wondered at the strength of his own feeling. The service embodied a passionate regret, which, if he had known the liturgy for the Day of Reconciliation, he might have understood as; “Happy the eye which saw all these things; but verily to hear only of them afflicts our soul. Happy the eye that saw our temple and the joy of our congregation; but verily to hear only of them afflicts our soul. Happy the eye that saw the fingers when tuning every kind of song; but verily to hear only of them afflicts our soul.”
But with the end of the service and the movement of many indifferent faces there darted into his mind the frigid idea that he had probably been alone in his feeling, and perhaps the only person in the congregation for whom the service was more than a dull routine. He was moving away with the rest, when he felt a hand on his arm, and turning saw the white-bearded face of his neighbour, who said to him in German, “Excuse me, young gentleman – what is your parentage – your mother’s family – her maiden name?”
Deronda felt resistant, and inclined to shake off the touch on his arm. He said coldly, “I am an Englishman.”
The questioner looked at him dubiously for an instant, and then lifted his hat and turned away; whether under a sense of having made a mistake or of having been repulsed, Deronda was uncertain. In his walk back to the hotel he reflected that he could not have acted differently. How could he say that he did not know the name of his mother’s family to that total stranger?– who indeed had taken a liberty in asking the abrupt question, probably thinking he saw some likeness. The incident, he told himself, was trivial; but it was a reason, however, for his not mentioning the synagogue to the Mallingers.
This halt at Frankfort was taken on their way home, and its impressions were kept alive in him by the duty of caring for Mirah’s welfare. That question about his parentage, though trivial, reinforced his anxiety as to the effect of finding Mirah’s relatives, and his resolve to proceed with caution. If he made any unpleasant discovery, was he bound to tell her and perhaps cast a new net of trouble around her?
When he visited the Meyricks at four o’clock, he found Mirah seated with Mrs. Meyrick and Mab by the open piano, with all the glorious company of engravings. The dainty neatness of her hair and dress, and the glow of tranquil happiness in her face, made a contrast to his first vision of her that was delightful to Deronda’s eyes. Mirah herself was thinking of it, and on their greeting said–
“See how different I am from the miserable creature by the river! All because you found me and brought me to the very best.”
“It was my good chance to find you,” said Deronda. “Any other man would have been glad to do what I did.”
“That is not the right way to think about it,” said Mirah, shaking her head with decisive gravity, “It was you, and not another, who found me and were good to me.”
“I agree with Mirah,” said Mrs. Meyrick. “Saint Anybody is a bad saint to pray to.”
“Besides, Anybody could not have brought me to you,” said Mirah, smiling at Mrs. Meyrick. “And I would rather be with you than with anyone in the world except my mother. I feel like a lost bird put into a warm nest. I hardly thought before that the world could ever be as happy and without fear as it is to me now.” She looked meditative a moment, and then said plaintively, “Sometimes I am a little afraid that I may meet my father in the street. It seems dreadful that I should be afraid of meeting him. That is my only sorrow.”
“It is not very probable,” said Deronda, wishing that it were less so; then, not to let the opportunity escape– “Would it be a great grief to you if you were never to meet your mother?”
She did not answer immediately. Then she said firmly, “I want her to know that I have always loved her, and if she is alive I want to comfort her. She may be dead. If she were, I should long to know where she was buried; and to know whether my brother lives, so that we can remember her together. But I would try not to grieve. I shall have her with me in my mind, as I have always had. We can never be really parted. I have always tried not to do what would hurt her. Only, she might be sorry that I was not a good Jewess.”
“In what way are you not a good Jewess?” asked Deronda.
“I am ignorant, and we never observed the laws, but lived among Christians just as they did. I have heard my father laugh at the strictness of the Jews about their food and customs, and not liking Christians. I think my mother was strict; but she could never want me not to like people who have been so good to me. I do not believe that my mother would wish me not to love my best friends. She would be grateful to them.” Here Mirah turned to Mrs. Meyrick, and with a sudden lighting up of her face, said, “Oh, if we ever do meet, I should be so full of blessedness my soul would know no want but to love her!”
“God bless you, child!” said Mrs. Meyrick involuntarily. Looking at Deronda, she said, “It is curious that Mirah, who remembers her mother so well, cannot recall her brother the least bit – except the feeling of having been carried by him when she was tired, and of his being nea
r when she was in her mother’s lap. It must be that he was rarely at home. He was already grown up.”
“He is good; I feel sure Ezra is good,” said Mirah, eagerly. “He loved my mother. I remember more of him than that. I remember my mother’s voice once calling, ‘Ezra!’ and then his answering from a distance ‘Mother!’ I feel sure he is good. I have always taken comfort from that.”
It was impossible to answer this either with agreement or doubt. Mrs. Meyrick and Deronda exchanged a quick glance: about this brother she felt as painfully dubious as he did. But Mirah went on, absorbed in her memories–
“Is it not wonderful how I remember voices better than anything else? I think they must go deeper into us than other things. I have often fancied heaven might be made of voices.”
“Like your singing – yes,” said Mab, who spoke bashfully, as was her wont in the presence of Prince Camaralzaman. “Ma, do ask Mirah to sing. Mr. Deronda has not heard her.”
“Would it be disagreeable to you to sing now?” said Deronda, with a more deferential gentleness than he had ever been conscious of before.
“Oh, I shall like it,” said Mirah. “My voice has come back a little with rest.”
Perhaps her ease of manner was due to something more than the simplicity of her nature. The circumstances of her life made her think of it as work, which she had begun before self-consciousness was born.
She immediately rose and went to the piano. Imagine her with her dark hair brushed from her temples, yet showing tiny ringlets which had cunningly found their own way back. Then see the perfect cameo of her profile, cut in a dusky shell; the dark eye, delicate nostrils, the finished ear, the firm curves of the chin and neck, all the expression of a refinement which was not feebleness.
She sang Beethoven’s “Per pietà non dirmi addio,” with a subdued but searching pathos which, like all perfect singing, made one oblivious of art or manner, and only possessed one with the song. Deronda began by looking at her, but felt himself presently covering his eyes with his hand, wanting to seclude the melody in darkness; but he was ready to meet the look of appeal which she turned toward him at the end.
“I think I never enjoyed a song more than that,” he said gratefully.
“You like my singing? I am so glad,” she said, with a smile of delight. “It has been painful to me that it failed in what it was wanted for. But now I can use it to get my bread. I have really been taught well. And I have two pupils, that Miss Meyrick found for me. They pay me nearly two crowns for their lessons.”
“I think I know some ladies who would find you many pupils after Christmas,” said Deronda. “You would not mind singing before anyone who wished to hear you?”
“Oh no, I want to do something to get money for my mother. And I can not always live on charity; though” – here she glanced at her companions – “it is the sweetest charity in all the world.”
“I should think you can get rich by teaching,” said Deronda, smiling. “But now do sing again to us.”
She went on willingly, singing with ready memory various things by Gordigiani and Schubert; and then Mab said entreatingly, “Oh, Mirah, if you would not mind singing the little hymn – the Hebrew hymn you remember your mother singing.”
“I should like very much to hear that,” said Deronda, “if you think I am worthy to hear what is so sacred.”
“I will sing it if you like,” said Mirah, “but I don’t sing real words – only here and there – the rest is childish lisping. Do you know Hebrew? because if you do, it will seem childish nonsense.”
Deronda shook his head. “It will be quite good Hebrew to me.”
Mirah crossed her little feet and hands, and then lifted up her head at an angle which seemed to be directed to some invisible face bent over her, while she sang a little hymn of quaint melancholy intervals, with lisping syllables; her voice held an even sweeter tenderness than in her other songs.
“It is very full of meaning,” said Deronda. “Even if I had known the words, I don’t think it would have had more expression for me. I went to the synagogue at Frankfort, and the service impressed me just as much as if I had followed the words.”
“Oh, did it go to your heart?” said Mirah, eagerly. “I thought none but our people would feel that. I thought it was all shut away like a river in a deep valley, where only heaven saw – I mean–” She hesitated.
“I understand,” said Deronda. “But our religion is chiefly a Hebrew religion; and all religious feelings must have much in common. Still it is to be expected that a Jew would feel the forms of his people’s religion more than that of another race – and yet” – here he hesitated in his turn – “that is perhaps not always so.”
“No,” said Mirah, sadly. “I have seen that. I have seen them mock.”
“Some minds naturally rebel against whatever they were brought up to,” said Deronda apologetically.
“But you are not like that,” said Mirah.
“No, I think not; but I was not brought up as a Jew.”
“Ah, I am always forgetting,” said Mirah, with a disappointed look, and slightly blushing.
Mrs Meyrick said– “I think it is weak-minded to make your creed up by the rule of the contrary. One may honour one’s parents, without following their notions exactly. My father was a Scotch Calvinist and my mother was a French Calvinist; I am neither Scotch, nor French, nor two Calvinists rolled into one, yet I honour my parents’ memory.”
“But I could not make myself not a Jewess,” said Mirah insistently, “even if I changed my belief.”
“No, my dear. But if Jews and Jewesses changed their religion, and made no difference between themselves and Christians, there would be no Jews to be seen,” said Mrs. Meyrick cheerfully.
“Oh, please do not say that,” said Mirah, the tears gathering. “It is the first unkind thing you ever said. I will never separate myself from my mother’s people. I was forced to fly from my father; but if he came back in weakness and want, and needed me, should I say, ‘This is not my father’? If he had shame, I must share it. And so it is with my people. I will always be a Jewess. I will love Christians when they are good, like you. But I will always cling to my people.” She clasped her hands with a sorrowful passion.
“My dear child, you mistake me!” said Mrs. Meyrick, alarmed. “God forbid I should want you to do anything against your conscience. Forgive me, come!”
“I would do anything else for you. I owe you my life,” said Mirah, not yet quite calm.
“Hush, hush, now,” said Mrs. Meyrick. “I have been punished enough for wagging my tongue foolishly.”
Deronda took his leave soon after, and when Mrs. Meyrick went outside with him, he said, “Hans is to share my chambers when he comes at Christmas.”
“You have written to him about that?” said Mrs. Meyrick, her face lighting up. “How very good and thoughtful of you! You mentioned Mirah, then?”
“Yes, I concluded he knew everything from you.”
“I must confess my folly. I have not yet written a word about her. I have been meaning to do it, and yet have ended my letter without saying a word. However! Thank you a thousand times.”
Deronda divined something of what was in the mother’s mind. He had the same anxiety about Hans: no man could see this exquisite creature without feeling it possible to fall in love with her. But he urged himself to caution.
“I must exercise control. I shall see Mirah as little as possible,” he thought.
How could he be Mirah’s guardian, if he showed himself as a lover – whom she did not love – whom she would not marry? And if he encouraged any germ of lover’s feeling in himself it would lead up to that issue. Even if Mirah consented to marry a man who was not of her race and religion, her conscience would always feel remorse.
Deronda saw these consequences as we see any danger of marring our own work. It was a delight to have rescued this child, and to think of having placed her little feet in protected paths. The creature we help to save
, how we watch it and dote on its recovery!
“I would as soon hold out my finger to be bitten off as spoil her peace,” said Deronda to himself. “It was the rarest fortune that I have friends like the Meyricks to place her with – generous, delicate friends with whom she can be not only safe but happy. There could be no refuge to replace that, if it were broken up. But what is the use of my taking the vows, if that marplot Hans comes and upsets it all?”
Few things were more likely. Hans was made for mishaps: his very limbs seemed more breakable than other people’s. But it was impossible to forbid Hans’s coming to London, where he intended to get a studio. To propose that he should defer coming on some ground or other, concealing the real motive of winning time for Mirah’s position to become more independent, was impracticable.
Deronda tried to believe that both he and Mrs. Meyrick were foolishly troubling themselves about something which would probably not happen, but he did not quite succeed. The position was peculiar, and he could make no further provision against dangers until they came nearer. To discover so rare a creature as Mirah, was an exceptional event which might well bring exceptional consequences. Deronda would not let himself for a moment dwell on any thought that the consequences might enter deeply into his own life. Mirah would have no idea of loving him.
As to the search for Mirah’s mother and brother, he put off any immediate measures. His conscience was not quite easy in this desire for delay, any more than it was quite easy in his not attempting to learn the truth about his own mother: in both cases he felt that there might be an unfulfilled duty to a parent, but in both cases there was an overpowering repugnance to the possible truth.
“At least, I will look about,” he thought. “But I will not act till after Christmas.” Like many of us, he found the calendar a convenient excuse.
George Eliot's Daniel Deronda: Abridged Page 35
