Bab Bab 19 · Chapter XIX

.

“I pity the man who can travel from Dan to Beersheba, and say, ‘’Tis

all barren’: and so it is: and so is all the world to him who will not

cultivate the fruits it offers.”—STERNE: _Sentimental Journey_.

To say that Deronda was romantic would be to misrepresent him; but

under his calm and somewhat self-repressed exterior there was a fervor

which made him easily find poetry and romance among the events of

everyday life. And perhaps poetry and romance are as plentiful as ever

in the world except for those phlegmatic natures who I suspect would in

any age have regarded them as a dull form of erroneous thinking. They

exist very easily in the same room with the microscope and even in

railway carriages: what banishes them in the vacuum in gentlemen and

lady passengers. How should all the apparatus of heaven and earth, from

the farthest firmament to the tender bosom of the mother who nourished

us, make poetry for a mind that had no movements of awe and tenderness,

no sense of fellowship which thrills from the near to the distant, and

back again from the distant to the near?

To Deronda this event of finding Mirah was as heart-stirring as

anything that befell Orestes or Rinaldo. He sat up half the night,

living again through the moments since he had first discerned Mirah on

the river-brink, with the fresh and fresh vividness which belongs to

emotive memory. When he took up a book to try and dull this urgency of

inward vision, the printed words were no more than a network through

which he saw and heard everything as clearly as before—saw not only

the actual events of two hours, but possibilities of what had been and

what might be which those events were enough to feed with the warm

blood of passionate hope and fear. Something in his own experience

caused Mirah’s search after her mother to lay hold with peculiar force

on his imagination. The first prompting of sympathy was to aid her in

her search: if given persons were extant in London there were ways of

finding them, as subtle as scientific experiment, the right machinery

being set at work. But here the mixed feelings which belonged to

Deronda’s kindred experience naturally transfused themselves into his

anxiety on behalf of Mirah.

The desire to know his own mother, or to know about her, was constantly

haunted with dread; and in imagining what might befall Mirah it quickly

occurred to him that finding the mother and brother from whom she had

been parted when she was a little one might turn out to be a calamity.

When she was in the boat she said that her mother and brother were

good; but the goodness might have been chiefly in her own ignorant

innocence and yearning memory, and the ten or twelve years since the

parting had been time enough for much worsening. Spite of his strong

tendency to side with the objects of prejudice, and in general with

those who got the worst of it, his interest had never been practically

drawn toward existing Jews, and the facts he knew about them, whether

they walked conspicuous in fine apparel or lurked in by-streets, were

chiefly of a sort most repugnant to him. Of learned and accomplished

Jews he took it for granted that they had dropped their religion, and

wished to be merged in the people of their native lands. Scorn flung at

a Jew as such would have roused all his sympathy in griefs of

inheritance; but the indiscriminate scorn of a race will often strike a

specimen who has well earned it on his own account, and might fairly be

gibbeted as a rascally son of Adam. It appears that the Caribs, who

know little of theology, regard thieving as a practice peculiarly

connected with Christian tenets, and probably they could allege

experimental grounds for this opinion. Deronda could not escape (who

can?) knowing ugly stories of Jewish characteristics and occupations;

and though one of his favorite protests was against the severance of

past and present history, he was like others who shared his protest, in

never having cared to reach any more special conclusions about actual

Jews than that they retained the virtues and vices of a long-oppressed

race. But now that Mirah’s longing roused his mind to a closer survey

of details, very disagreeable images urged themselves of what it might

be to find out this middle-aged Jewess and her son. To be sure, there

was the exquisite refinement and charm of the creature herself to make

a presumption in favor of her immediate kindred, but—he must wait to

know more: perhaps through Mrs. Meyrick he might gather some guiding

hints from Mirah’s own lips. Her voice, her accent, her looks—all the

sweet purity that clothed her as with a consecrating garment made him

shrink the more from giving her, either ideally or practically, an

association with what was hateful or contaminating. But these fine

words with which we fumigate and becloud unpleasant facts are not the

language in which we think. Deronda’s thinking went on in rapid images

of what might be: he saw himself guided by some official scout into a

dingy street; he entered through a dim doorway, and saw a hawk-eyed

woman, rough-headed, and unwashed, cheapening a hungry girl’s last bit

of finery; or in some quarter only the more hideous for being smarter,

he found himself under the breath of a young Jew talkative and

familiar, willing to show his acquaintance with gentlemen’s tastes, and

not fastidious in any transactions with which they would favor him—and

so on through the brief chapter of his experience in this kind. Excuse

him: his mind was not apt to run spontaneously into insulting ideas, or

to practice a form of wit which identifies Moses with the advertisement

sheet; but he was just now governed by dread, and if Mirah’s parents

had been Christian, the chief difference would have been that his

forebodings would have been fed with wider knowledge. It was the habit

of his mind to connect dread with unknown parentage, and in this case

as well as his own there was enough to make the connection reasonable.

But what was to be done with Mirah? She needed shelter and protection

in the fullest sense, and all his chivalrous sentiment roused itself to

insist that the sooner and the more fully he could engage for her the

interest of others besides himself, the better he should fulfill her

claims on him. He had no right to provide for her entirely, though he

might be able to do so; the very depth of the impression she had

produced made him desire that she should understand herself to be

entirely independent of him; and vague visions of the future which he

tried to dispel as fantastic left their influence in an anxiety

stronger than any motive he could give for it, that those who saw his

actions closely should be acquainted from the first with the history of

his relation to Mirah. He had learned to hate secrecy about the grand

ties and obligations of his life—to hate it the more because a strong

spell of interwoven sensibilities hindered him from breaking such

secrecy. Deronda had made a vow to himself that—since the truths which

disgrace mortals are not all of their own making—the truth should

never be made a disgrace to another by his act. He was not without

terror lest he should break this vow, and fall into the apologetic

philosophy which explains the world into containing nothing better than

one’s own conduct.

At one moment he resolved to tell the whole of his adventure to Sir

Hugo and Lady Mallinger the next morning at breakfast, but the

possibility that something quite new might reveal itself on his next

visit to Mrs. Meyrick’s checked this impulse, and he finally went to

sleep on the conclusion that he would wait until that visit had been

made.