by George Eliot
“Stop!” said Jacob, running to Deronda as he entered. “Don’t tread on my plate. Stop and see me throw it up again.”
Deronda complied, exchanging a smile of understanding with the grandmother, and the plate bore several tossings before it came to pieces; then the visitor was allowed to come forward and seat himself. He observed that the door from which Mordecai had issued on the former visit was now closed, but he wished to show his interest in the Cohens before disclosing a yet stronger interest in their singular inmate.
It was not until he had Adelaide on his knee, and was setting up the paper figures in their dance on the table, while Jacob was already practicing with the cup and ball, that Deronda said—
“Is Mordecai in just now?”
“Where is he, Addy?” said Cohen, who had seized an interval of business to come and look on.
“In the workroom there,” said his wife, nodding toward the closed door.
“The fact is, sir,” said Cohen, “we don’t know what’s come to him this last day or two. He’s always what I may call a little touched, you know”—here Cohen pointed to his own forehead—”not quite so rational in all things, like you and me; but he’s mostly wonderful regular and industrious so far as a poor creature can be, and takes as much delight in the boy as anybody could. But this last day or two he’s been moving about like a sleep-walker, or else sitting as still as a wax figure.”
“It’s the disease, poor dear creature,” said the grandmother, tenderly. “I doubt whether he can stand long against it.”
“No; I think its only something he’s got in his head.” said Mrs. Cohen the younger. “He’s been turning over writing continually, and when I speak to him it takes him ever so long to hear and answer.”
“You may think us a little weak ourselves,” said Cohen, apologetically. “But my wife and mother wouldn’t part with him if he was a still worse encumbrance. It isn’t that we don’t know the long and short of matters, but it’s our principle. There’s fools do business at a loss and don’t know it. I’m not one of ‘em.”
“Oh, Mordecai carries a blessing inside him,” said the grandmother.
“He’s got something the matter inside him,” said Jacob, coming up to correct this erratum of his grandmother’s. “He said he couldn’t talk to me, and he wouldn’t have a bit o’ bun.”
“So far from wondering at your feeling for him,” said Deronda, “I already feel something of the same sort myself. I have lately talked to him at Ram’s book-shop—in fact, I promised to call for him here, that we might go out together.”
“That’s it, then!” said Cohen, slapping his knee. “He’s been expecting you, and it’s taken hold of him. I suppose he talks about his learning to you. It’s uncommonly kind of you, sir; for I don’t suppose there’s much to be got out of it, else it wouldn’t have left him where he is. But there’s the shop.” Cohen hurried out, and Jacob, who had been listening inconveniently near to Deronda’s elbow, said to him with obliging familiarity, “I’ll call Mordecai for you, if you like.”
“No, Jacob,” said his mother; “open the door for the gentleman, and let him go in himself Hush! don’t make a noise.”
Skillful Jacob seemed to enter into the play, and turned the handle of the door as noiselessly as possible, while Deronda went behind him and stood on the threshold. The small room was lit only by a dying fire and one candle with a shade over it. On the board fixed under the window, various objects of jewelry were scattered: some books were heaped in the corner beyond them. Mordecai was seated on a high chair at the board with his back to the door, his hands resting on each other and on the board, a watch propped on a stand before him. He was in a state of expectation as sickening as that of a prisoner listening for the delayed deliverance—when he heard Deronda’s voice saying, “I am come for you. Are you ready?”
Immediately he turned without speaking, seized his furred cap which lay near, and moved to join Deronda. It was but a moment before they were both in the sitting-room, and Jacob, noticing the change in his friend’s air and expression, seized him by the arm and said, “See my cup and ball!” sending the ball up close to Mordecai’s face, as something likely to cheer a convalescent. It was a sign of the relieved tension in Mordecai’s mind that he could smile and say, “Fine, fine!”
“You have forgotten your greatcoat and comforter,” said young Mrs. Cohen, and he went back into the workroom and got them.
“He’s come to life again, do you see?” said Cohen, who had re-entered—speaking in an undertone. “I told you so: I’m mostly right.” Then in his usual voice, “Well, sir, we mustn’t detain you now, I suppose; but I hope this isn’t the last time we shall see you.”
“Shall you come again?” said Jacob, advancing. “See, I can catch the ball; I’ll bet I catch it without stopping, if you come again.”
“He has clever hands,” said Deronda, looking at the grandmother. “Which side of the family does he get them from?”
But the grandmother only nodded towards her son, who said promptly, “My side. My wife’s family are not in that line. But bless your soul! ours is a sort of cleverness as good as gutta percha; you can twist it which way you like. There’s nothing some old gentlemen won’t do if you set ‘em to it.” Here Cohen winked down at Jacob’s back, but it was doubtful whether this judicious allusiveness answered its purpose, for its subject gave a nasal whinnying laugh and stamped about singing, “Old gentlemen, old gentlemen,” in chiming cadence.
Deronda thought, “I shall never know anything decisive about these people until I ask Cohen pointblank whether he lost a sister named Mirah when she was six years old.” The decisive moment did not yet seem easy for him to face. Still his first sense of repulsion at the commonness of these people was beginning to be tempered with kindlier feeling. However unrefined their airs and speech might be, he was forced to admit some moral refinement in their treatment of the consumptive workman, whose mental distinction impressed them chiefly as a harmless, silent raving.
“The Cohens seem to have an affection for you,” said Deronda, as soon as he and Mordecai were off the doorstep.
“And I for them,” was the immediate answer. “They have the heart of the Israelite within them, though they are as the horse and the mule, without understanding beyond the narrow path they tread.”
“I have caused you some uneasiness, I fear,” said Deronda, “by my slowness in fulfilling my promise. I wished to come yesterday, but I found it impossible.”
“Yes—yes, I trusted you. But it is true I have been uneasy, for the spirit of my youth has been stirred within me, and this body is not strong enough to bear the beating of its wings. I am as a man bound and imprisoned through long years: behold him brought to speech of his fellow and his limbs set free: he weeps, he totters, the joy within him threatens to break and overthrow the tabernacle of flesh.”
“You must not speak too much in this evening air,” said Deronda, feeling Mordecai’s words of reliance like so many cords binding him painfully. “Cover your mouth with the woolen scarf. We are going to the Hand and Banner, I suppose, and shall be in private there?”
“No, that is my trouble that you did not come yesterday. For this is the evening of the club I spoke of, and we might not have any minutes alone until late, when all the rest are gone. Perhaps we had better seek another place. But I am used to that only. In new places the outer world presses on me and narrows the inward vision. And the people there are familiar with my face.”
“I don’t mind the club if I am allowed to go in,” said Deronda. “It is enough that you like this place best. If we have not enough time I will come again. What sort of club is it?”
“It is called ‘The Philosophers.’ They are few—like the cedars of Lebanon—poor men given to thought. But none so poor as I am: and sometimes visitors of higher worldly rank have been brought. We are allowed to introduce a friend, who is interested in our topics. Each orders beer or some other kind of drink, in payment for the room. Most
of them smoke. I have gone when I could, for there are other men of my race who come, and sometimes I have broken silence. I have pleased myself with a faint likeness between these poor philosophers and the Masters who handed down the thought of our race—the great Transmitters, who labored with their hands for scant bread, but preserved and enlarged for us the heritage of memory, and saved the soul of Israel alive as a seed among the tombs. The heart pleases itself with faint resemblances.”
“I shall be very glad to go and sit among them, if that will suit you. It is a sort of meeting I should like to join in,” said Deronda, not without relief in the prospect of an interval before he went through the strain of his next private conversation with Mordecai.
In three minutes they had opened the glazed door with the red curtain, and were in the little parlor, hardly much more than fifteen feet square, where the gaslight shone through a slight haze of smoke on what to Deronda was a new and striking scene. Half-a-dozen men of various ages, from between twenty and thirty to fifty, all shabbily dressed, most of them with clay pipes in their mouths, were listening with a look of concentrated intelligence to a man in a pepper-and-salt dress, with blonde hair, short nose, broad forehead and general breadth, who, holding his pipe slightly uplifted in the left hand, and beating his knee with the right, was just finishing a quotation from Shelley (the comparison of the avalanche in his “Prometheus Unbound”)
“As thought by thought is piled, till some great truth Is loosened, and the nations echo round.”
The entrance of the new-comers broke the fixity of attention, and called for rearrangement of seats in the too narrow semicircle round the fireplace and the table holding the glasses, spare pipes and tobacco. This was the soberest of clubs; but sobriety is no reason why smoking and “taking something” should be less imperiously needed as a means of getting a decent status in company and debate. Mordecai was received with welcoming voices which had a slight cadence of compassion in them, but naturally all glances passed immediately to his companion.
“I have brought a friend who is interested in our subjects,” said Mordecai. “He has traveled and studied much.”
“Is the gentlemen anonymous? Is he a Great ‘Unknown?’” said the broad-chested quoter of Shelley, with a humorous air.
“My name is Daniel Deronda. I am unknown, but not in any sense great.” The smile breaking over the stranger’s grave face as he said this was so agreeable that there was a general indistinct murmur, equivalent to a “Hear, hear,” and the broad man said—
“You recommend the name, sir, and are welcome. Here, Mordecai, come to this corner against me,” he added, evidently wishing to give the coziest place to the one who most needed it.
Deronda was well satisfied to get a seat on the opposite side, where his general survey of the party easily included Mordecai, who remained an eminently striking object in this group of sharply-characterized figures, more than one of whom, even to Daniel’s little exercised discrimination, seemed probably of Jewish descent.
In fact pure English blood (if leech or lancet can furnish us with the precise product) did not declare itself predominantly in the party at present assembled. Miller, the broad man, an exceptional secondhand bookseller who knew the insides of books, had at least grand-parents who called themselves German, and possibly far-away ancestors who denied themselves to be Jews; Buchan, the saddler, was Scotch; Pash, the watchmaker, was a small, dark, vivacious, triple-baked Jew; Gideon, the optical instrument maker, was a Jew of the red-haired, generous-featured type easily passing for Englishmen of unusually cordial manners: and Croop, the dark-eyed shoemaker, was probably more Celtic than he knew. Only three would have been discernable everywhere as Englishman: the wood-inlayer Goodwin, well-built, open-faced, pleasant-voiced; the florid laboratory assistant Marrables; and Lily, the pale, neat-faced copying-clerk, whose light-brown hair was set up in a small parallelogram above his well-filled forehead, and whose shirt, taken with an otherwise seedy costume, had a freshness that might be called insular, and perhaps even something narrower.
Certainly a company select of the select among poor men, being drawn together by a taste not prevalent even among the privileged heirs of learning and its institutions; and not likely to amuse any gentleman in search of crime or low comedy as the ground of interest in people whose weekly income is only divisible into shillings. Deronda, even if he had not been more than usually inclined to gravity under the influence of what was pending between him and Mordecai, would not have set himself to find food for laughter in the various shades of departure from the tone of polished society sure to be observable in the air and talk of these men who had probably snatched knowledge as most of us snatch indulgences, making the utmost of scant opportunity. He looked around him with the quiet air of respect habitual to him among equals, ordered whisky and water, and offered the contents of his cigar-case, which, characteristically enough, he always carried and hardly ever used for his own behoof, having reasons for not smoking himself, but liking to indulge others. Perhaps it was his weakness to be afraid of seeming straight-laced, and turning himself into a sort of diagram instead of a growth which can exercise the guiding attraction of fellowship. That he made a decidedly winning impression on the company was proved by their showing themselves no less at ease than before, and desirous of quickly resuming their interrupted talk.
“This is what I call one of our touch-and-go nights, sir,” said Miller, who was implicitly accepted as a sort of moderator—on addressing Deronda by way of explanation, and nodding toward each person whose name he mentioned. “Sometimes we stick pretty close to the point. But tonight our friend Pash, there, brought up the law of progress; and we got on statistics; then Lily, there, saying we knew well enough before counting that in the same state of society the same sort of things would happen, and it was no more wonder that quantities should remain the same, than that qualities should remain the same, for in relation to society numbers are qualities—the number of drunkards is a quality in society—the numbers are an index to the qualities, and give us no instruction, only setting us to consider the causes of difference between different social states—Lily saying this, we went off on the causes of social change, and when you came in I was going upon the power of ideas, which I hold to be the main transforming cause.”
“I don’t hold with you there, Miller,” said Goodwin, the inlayer, more concerned to carry on the subject than to wait for a word from the new guest. “For either you mean so many sorts of things by ideas that I get no knowledge by what you say, any more than if you said light was a cause; or else you mean a particular sort of ideas, and then I go against your meaning as too narrow. For, look at it in one way, all actions men put a bit of thought into are ideas—say, sowing seed, or making a canoe, or baking clay; and such ideas as these work themselves into life and go on growing with it, but they can’t go apart from the material that set them to work and makes a medium for them. It’s the nature of wood and stone yielding to the knife that raises the idea of shaping them, and with plenty of wood and stone the shaping will go on. I look at it, that such ideas as are mixed straight away with all the other elements of life are powerful along with ‘em. The slower the mixing, the less power they have. And as to the causes of social change, I look at it in this way—ideas are a sort of parliament, but there’s a commonwealth outside and a good deal of the commonwealth is working at change without knowing what the parliament is doing.”
“But if you take ready mixing as your test of power,” said Pash, “some of the least practical ideas beat everything. They spread without being understood, and enter into the language without being thought of.”
“They may act by changing the distribution of gases,” said Marrables; “instruments are getting so fine now, men may come to register the spread of a theory by observed changes in the atmosphere and corresponding changes in the nerves.”
“Yes,” said Pash, his dark face lighting up rather impishly, “there is the idea of nationalities; I dare say the
wild asses are snuffing it, and getting more gregarious.”
“You don’t share that idea?” said Deronda, finding a piquant incongruity between Pash’s sarcasm and the strong stamp of race on his features.
“Say, rather, he does not share that spirit,” said Mordecai, who had turned a melancholy glance on Pash. “Unless nationality is a feeling, what force can it have as an idea?”
“Granted, Mordecai,” said Pash, quite good-humoredly. “And as the feeling of nationality is dying, I take the idea to be no better than a ghost, already walking to announce the death.”
“A sentiment may seem to be dying and yet revive into strong life,” said Deronda. “Nations have revived. We may live to see a great outburst of force in the Arabs, who are being inspired with a new zeal.”
“Amen, amen,” said Mordecai, looking at Deronda with a delight which was the beginning of recovered energy: his attitude was more upright, his face was less worn.
“That may hold with backward nations,” said Pash, “but with us in Europe the sentiment of nationality is destined to die out. It will last a little longer in the quarters where oppression lasts, but nowhere else. The whole current of progress is setting against it.”
“Ay,” said Buchan, in a rapid thin Scotch tone which was like the letting in of a little cool air on the conversation, “ye’ve done well to bring us round to the point. Ye’re all agreed that societies change—not always and everywhere—but on the whole and in the long run. Now, with all deference, I would beg t’ observe that we have got to examine the nature of changes before we have a warrant to call them progress, which word is supposed to include a bettering, though I apprehend it to be ill-chosen for that purpose, since mere motion onward may carry us to a bog or a precipice. And the questions I would put are three: Is all change in the direction of progress? if not, how shall we discern which change is progress and which not? and thirdly, how far and in what way can we act upon the course of change so as to promote it where it is beneficial, and divert it where it is injurious?”