George Eliot's Daniel Deronda: Abridged

by Emma Laybourn

  Chapter Forty

  Deronda came out of the house at Chelsea longing for some bodily exercise to relieve his temper. The sight of the waiting boats at the riverside at once determined him not to go to the City by cab, but by calling a wherry and taking an oar.

  His errand was to go to Ram’s book-shop, where he had yesterday arrived too late for Mordecai’s midday watch, and had been told that he returned there between five and six. Deronda wished for further conversation with this remarkable inmate of the Cohens before redeeming his ring: he wished that their talk should not again end speedily with that drop of Mordecai’s interest which was like the removal of a drawbridge. As he plied the oar, thinking of Mordecai, he experienced his habitual change of mental light, shifting his point of view to that of the person who was in his mind.

  “If I got information about Mirah’s family from Mordecai,” thought Deronda, “I should be content if he did not tell me more about himself, or why he seemed to have some expectation from me which was disappointed. My curiosity would die; and yet it might be that we had neared and parted like two ships, each carrying an exile who would have recognized the other if the two met. Poor fellow; his voyage, I fancy, must soon be over.”

  When the wherry was approaching Blackfriars Bridge, where Deronda meant to land, it was half-past four. The grey day was dying gloriously, its western clouds broken into narrowing purple strata before a wide-spreading saffron clearness, which in the sky had a monumental calm, but on the river was reflected as a luminous, rippling movement.

  Deronda gave up the oar to draw on his Inverness cape. As he lifted his head while fastening the button, his eyes caught a well-remembered face looking toward him over the parapet of the bridge – a face of emaciated eagerness illuminated by the western light into startling distinctness and brilliancy. It was the face of Mordecai, who in his watch toward the west, had caught sight of the advancing boat, and had kept it within his gaze, at first simply because it was advancing, then with a quivering presentiment, till at last the nearing figure lifted up the face of his visions – and then immediately, with white uplifted hand, beckoned again and again.

  For Deronda, anxious that Mordecai should recognize and await him, had signalled, and the answer came straightway. Mordecai waved his cap, feeling in that moment that his prophecy was fulfilled. Obstacles all melted into the sense of completion which flooded his soul. The prefigured friend had come from the golden background, and had signalled to him: this actually was: the rest was to be.

  In three minutes Deronda had landed, had paid his boatman, and was joining Mordecai, who stood perfectly still to wait for him.

  “I was very glad to see you here,” said Deronda, “for I was intending to go to the book-shop and look for you again. I was there yesterday – perhaps they told you?”

  “Yes,” said Mordecai; “that was the reason I came to the bridge.”

  This answer, made with simple gravity, was startlingly mysterious to Deronda. Did this man really have a wandering mind, as Cohen had hinted?

  “You knew nothing of my being at Chelsea?” he said, after a moment.

  “No; but I expected you to come down the river. I have been waiting for you these five years.” Mordecai’s deep-sunk eyes were fixed on those of the friend who had at last arrived with a look of affectionate dependence, at once pathetic and solemn. Although Deronda believed the words to be based on an illusion, he could not but respond with sensitivity.

  “I will be happy if I can be of any real use to you,” he answered, very earnestly. “Shall we get into a cab and drive to – wherever you wish to go? You have probably had walking enough.”

  “Let us go to the book-shop. But now look up the river,” said Mordecai, speaking with what may be called an excited calm – so absorbed by a sense of fulfilment that he felt no barrier to a complete understanding between him and Deronda. “See the sky, how it is slowly fading. I have always loved this bridge: it is a meeting-place for the spiritual messengers. Here I have listened to the messages of earth and sky; when I was stronger I used to stay and watch for the stars in the deep heavens. But the sunset was always what I loved best. It has sunk into me and dwelt with me – fading, with my own decline: it paused – it waited, till at last it brought me my new life – my new self – who will live when this breath is all breathed out.”

  Deronda did not speak. He felt himself strangely affected. His first suspicion that Mordecai might be liable to hallucinations, obsessed by some subject which had over-strained his diseased body, gave way to a submissive expectancy. Deronda’s nature was too large and open to rest in the easy explanation, “madness.” He would rather meet than resist any claim on him in the shape of another’s need; and the solemnity of this claim lifted Mordecai into authority, like a supernatural guide who suddenly drops his mean disguise and stands revealed as a Power, calm and resolved.

  After they had stood a moment in silence Mordecai said– “Let us go now,” and when they were in the cab he added, “We will get down at the end of the street and walk to the shop. You can look at the books, and Mr. Ram will be going directly and leave us alone.” It seemed that he was alive to judgments in other minds.

  Meanwhile, Deronda had not forgotten Mirah: but he was no longer confident what questions he should ask; and said inwardly, “I suppose I am in a superstitious state, as if I were awaiting the fulfilment of an oracle. But there must be some strong relation between me and this man, since he feels it strongly. Great heaven! what relation is more potent than faith, even when mistaken? Will I fulfil my part, or disappoint? – well, I will not disappoint if possible.”

  In ten minutes the two men, with as intense a consciousness as two undeclared lovers, found themselves alone in the small gas-lit book-shop and turned face to face, each baring his head to see each other fully.

  Imagine the pathetic stamp of consumption with its brilliancy of glance and sharply-defined features, creating a far-off look as of one getting unwillingly out of reach; and imagine it on an eager Jewish face – the face of a man little above thirty, but aged by suffering, the black hair and beard emphasising the yellow pallor of the skin. Imagine the difficult breathing, the wasted yellow hands: then give to the yearning consumptive glance something of the dying mother’s look, when her one loved son visits her bedside, and the flickering power of gladness leaps out as she says, “My boy!”

  Seeing such a portrait you would see Mordecai. And opposite him was a face not more distinctively oriental than many of the Latin races; rich in youthful health, and with a forcible masculine gravity in its repose, as it met the gaze of this mysterious son of poverty who claimed him as a long-expected friend.

  Deronda’s keenly perceptive sympathy was never more thoroughly tested. He did not believe in the validity of Mordecai’s impressions concerning him: what he felt was a profound sensitivity to a cry from the depths of another, and the urge to be receptive rather than prejudge. Receptiveness is a rare and massive power, like fortitude; and this state of mind now gave Deronda’s face a calm benignant force which nourished Mordecai’s confidence. He began to speak.

  “You are wondering what has guided me to you and brought us together at this moment.”

  “I am not impatient,” said Deronda. “I am ready to listen.”

  “You see some of the reasons why I needed you,” said Mordecai, speaking quietly, to reserve his strength. “You see that I am dying. The day is closing – the light is fading – soon we should not have been able to discern each other. But you have come in time.”

  “I rejoice that I am come in time,” said Deronda. He would not say, “I hope you are not mistaken in me”; for he thought that would be cruel just then.

  “But the hidden reasons why I need you began afar off,” said Mordecai; “began in my early years when I was studying in another land. Then beloved ideas came to me, because I was a Jew. They were an inspiration, because I was a Jew, and I felt the heart of my race beating within me. They were my life; I was not
fully born till then. I counted this heart, and this breath, and this right hand”– Mordecai pathetically stretched out his wasted fingers – “I counted my sleep and my waking but as fuel to the divine flame. But care and labour and disease came, and blocked my way, and bound me with the iron that eats into the soul. Then I said, ‘How shall I save the life within me from being stifled?’”

  Mordecai paused to rest, and to check his rising excitement. Deronda dared not speak. The very silence seemed alive with mingled awe and compassion before this struggling fervour. Mordecai went on–

  “I speak not as an ignorant dreamer – as one bred up in the inland valleys, never having stood by the great waters where the world’s knowledge passes to and fro. England is my native land; but my true life was nourished in Holland at the feet of my uncle, a learned Rabbi: and when he died I went to Hamburg to study, and afterwards to Göttingen, that I might learn about my people, and drink knowledge at all sources. And I possessed myself of a craft. For I said, let my body dwell in poverty, and my hands be as the hands of the toiler: but let my soul be as a temple of remembrance where knowledge enters and the inner sanctuary is hope. I knew what I chose. They said, ‘He feeds himself on visions,’ and I denied it not; for visions are the creators and feeders of the world. You see, I measure the world as it is, which the vision will create anew. I am not one who raves aloof from the lives of his fellows.”

  Mordecai paused, and Deronda said, “Indeed, I would not call your words raving. I listen without prejudgment. I have had experience which gives me a keen interest in the story of a spiritual destiny embraced willingly in youth.”

  “A spiritual destiny embraced willingly in youth?” Mordecai repeated. “Rather it was the soul fully born within me, and it came in my boyhood. It brought its own world – a mediaeval world, where men made the ancient Hebrew language live again in new psalms of exile, and yearned toward a centre for our race. One of their souls was born again within me. It travelled into Spain and Provence; it debated with Aben-Ezra; it took ship with Jehuda ha-Levi; it heard the roar of the Crusaders and the shrieks of tortured Israel. And it spoke the speech they had made alive with the new blood of their ardour and their sorrow; it sang with the cadence of their strain.”

  “Have you written entirely in Hebrew, then?” said Deronda, with some anxiety as to his own knowledge of that tongue.

  “Yes,” said Mordecai with deep sadness: “in my youth I wandered toward that solitude, not feeling that it was a solitude. I had the ranks of the great dead around me. But soon I found that the living were deaf to me. At first I saw my life spread as a long future: I said part of my Jewish heritage is an unbreaking patience; but then I had to bow under the yoke that presses on so many: family troubles called me – I had to work, to care, not for myself alone. I was left solitary again; but already the angel of death had beckoned, and I felt his skirts continually on my path. I loosed not my effort. I besought help. I spoke; I went to men of our people – to the rich in knowledge, and in wealth. But none listened with understanding. I was rebuked for error; I was offered a small sum in charity. No wonder. I looked poor; I carried a bundle of Hebrew manuscript with me; and I said, our chief teachers are misleading the hope of our race. Scholar and merchant both scorned me.”

  “But though you wrote in Hebrew, few, surely, can use English better,” said Deronda, wanting to hint at a new effort for which he could smooth the way.

  Mordecai shook his head slowly, and answered–

  “Too late – too late. I can write no more. My writing would be like this gasping breath.” His head bowed in melancholy: for the moment he had lost his hope. Despondency hovered above him with eclipsing wings. He had sunk into momentary darkness.

  “I feel strongly with you,” said Deronda, in a clear, deep, reviving voice. “But what you have written need not lie buried. The means of publication are within reach. I can help you to that end.”

  “That is not enough,” said Mordecai, quickly, looking up with recovered confidence. “That is not all my trust in you. You must be not only a hand to me, but a soul – believing my belief – moved by my reasons – hoping my hope – beholding a glory where I behold it!”

  Mordecai moved nearer as he spoke, and laid his hand on Deronda’s arm with a tight grasp; his face shone like a pale flame, while he went on– “You will be my life: it will be planted afresh; it will grow. You shall take the inheritance of ages. The generations are crowding on my narrow life as a bridge: what has been and what is to be are meeting there; and the bridge is breaking. But I have found you. You have come in time. You will take the sacred inheritance of the Jew.”

  Deronda had become as pale as Mordecai. Quick as an alarm, there spread within him not only a compassionate dread of discouraging this dying fellow man, but also the opposing dread of fatally feeding an illusion, and of being hurried on to a self-committal which might prove impossible to carry out. The appeal to his tenderness overcame the repulsion that most of us experience under a dominating grasp and speech. His difficulty was how to express his doubts to this ardent suffering creature. With exquisite instinct, he placed his palm gently on Mordecai’s straining hand. Then he said, without haste,–

  “Do you forget what I told you when we first saw each other? Do you remember that I said I was not of your race?”

  “It can’t be true,” Mordecai whispered immediately, with no sign of shock. The sympathetic hand upon him had fortified his feelings. There was a pause, Deronda feeling it impossible to answer. Mordecai, entirely possessed by the supreme importance of the relation between them, followed that assertion by a second, spoken in consequence of his long-cherished conviction– “You are not sure of your own origin.”

  “How do you know that?” said Daniel, shrinking away.

  Mordecai relaxed his hold. “I know it; what is my life else?” he said with a low cry of impatience. “Tell me why you deny?”

  He could have no conception what that demand meant to the hearer – how probingly it touched the hidden sensibility, the reticence of years; how the uncertainty had always for Daniel held a threat of painful revelation about his mother. But Deronda felt that any evasion or refusal would be a cruel rebuff to one who was appealing to him under the shadow of a coming doom. After a few moments, he said, with a great effort–

  “I have never known my mother. I have no knowledge about her. I have never called any man father. But I am convinced that my father is an Englishman.”

  Deronda’s deep tones had a tremor in them as he uttered this confession; and he was amazed at the strange circumstances under which he uttered it.

  “It will be seen – it will be declared,” said Mordecai, triumphantly. “The world grows, and is knit together by the growing soul; dim, dim at first, then clearer and more clear. As thoughts move within us darkly, and shake us before they are fully discerned, so events and beings are knit with us in the growth of the world. You have risen within me like a thought not fully spelled; my soul is shaken before the words are all there. The rest will come.”

  “The outward event has not always been a fulfilment of the firmest faith,” said Deronda hesitatingly, wishing neither to give any severe blow to Mordecai, nor to encourage him unwisely.

  Mordecai’s face changed from the triumphant to the firmly resistant.

  “You would remind me that I may be under an illusion – that the history of our people’s trust has been full of illusion. I face it all.” Here Mordecai paused a moment. Then bending forward, he said, in his hoarse whisper, “So it might be with my trust, if you would make it an illusion. But you will not.”

  The very sharpness of these words persuaded Deronda that here he must be firm.

  “What my birth was does not lie in my will,” he answered. “And I cannot promise you to hasten a disclosure. Feelings which have struck root through half my life may still hinder me from doing what I have never been able to do. Everything must be waited for. I must know more of the truth about my own life, and I m
ust know more of what it would become if it were made a part of yours.”

  Mordecai had folded his arms, and now answered with equal firmness, though with difficult breathing–

  “You shall know. What are we met for, but that you should know? Your doubts lie as light as dust on my belief. Man finds his pathways: at first they were foot tracks, as those of the beast in the wilderness: now they are swift and invisible: his thought dives through the ocean, and his wishes thread the air: has he found all the pathways yet? What reaches him, stays with him, rules him: he must accept it, not knowing its pathway. Say, my expectation of you is a false hope. That doubt is in your mind? Well, I expected you, and you are come. Men have died of thirst. But I was thirsty, and the water is on my lips! What are doubts to me? Even if you come to me and say, ‘I reject your soul: I am not a Jew: we have no lot in common’– I shall not doubt. That hour will never come!”

  Deronda heard a new, imperious chord sounding in these words. He felt a subduing influence in the certitude of the fragile creature before him, whose breath laboured under the burden of eager speech. His feeling of sympathetic obligation grew, so that he felt no desire to escape what might turn into a trying embarrassment. He answered simply–

  “It is my wish to satisfy your wishes wherever that is possible. Certainly I desire not to undervalue your toil and your suffering. Let me know your thoughts. But where can we meet? At the Cohens’, where you live?”

  Before Mordecai could answer, Mr. Ram re-entered the shop. He was an elderly Jew with none of Mr. Cohen’s oily cheerfulness. Mr. Ram dealt ably in books, in the same way that he would have dealt in tins of meat and other commodities – without knowledge or responsibility as to the proportion of rottenness or nourishment they might contain. But he believed in Mordecai’s learning as something marvellous, and was not sorry that his conversation should be sought by a bookish gentleman, whose visits had twice ended in a purchase. He greeted Deronda with a crabbed good-will, and, putting on large silver spectacles, appeared at once to abstract himself in the daily accounts.

  But Deronda and Mordecai were soon in the street together, and without any explicit agreement, were walking toward Ezra Cohen’s.

  “We can’t meet there: my room is too narrow,” said Mordecai. “But there is a tavern not far from here where I sometimes go to a club: the Hand and Banner, in the next street, five doors down. We can use the parlour there.”

  “We can try that,” said Deronda. “But you will perhaps let me provide you with some lodging, which would give you more freedom and comfort than where you are.”

  “No; I need nothing. My outer life is as nought. I will take nothing less precious from you than your soul’s brotherhood. But I am glad you are rich. You did not need money on that diamond ring. You had some other motive for bringing it.”

  Deronda was startled by this clear-sightedness; but before he could reply Mordecai added– “It is all one. If you needed money, we should still meet again. But you are rich?”

  “Only in the sense that everyone is rich who has more than he needs for himself.”

  “I desired that your life should be free,” said Mordecai, dreamily; “mine has been a bondage.”

  It was clear that he had no interest in the reason for Deronda’s appearance at the Cohens’ beyond his own purpose. Deronda, determine to put his question, said–

  “Can you tell me why Mrs. Cohen, the mother, must not be spoken to about her daughter?”

  There was no immediate answer: Mordecai had heard the words, but had to drag his mind away from his passionate preoccupation. After a few moments, he replied–

  “I know the reason. But I will not speak of family affairs which I have heard in the privacy of the family. I dwell in their home as in a sanctuary. Their history is their own possession.”

  Deronda felt the blood mounting to his cheeks at this rebuke, and he found himself painfully baffled. He became conscious of emotional strain from the excitements of the day; and although he had the money in his pocket to redeem his ring, he recoiled from the further task of a visit to the Cohens’.

  “I will part from you now,” he said, before they reached Cohen’s door; and Mordecai paused, looking up at him with an anxious fatigued face.

  “When will you come back?” he said.

  “May I leave that unfixed? May I ask for you at the Cohens’ any evening after your hour at the book-shop? There is no objection, I suppose, to their knowing that you and I meet?”

  “None,” said Mordecai. “But the days I wait now are longer than the years of my strength. Life shrinks: what was but a tithe is now the half. My hope abides in you.”

  “I will be faithful,” said Deronda – he could not have left those words unuttered. “I will come the first evening I can. Trust me.”

  He put out his hand. Mordecai, clasping it eagerly, said– “This is come to pass, and the rest will come.”

  That was their good-bye.

  BOOK VI: REVELATIONS