Chapter Thirty-eight
“Second-sight” is disputed. But there are people whose yearnings and ideas have a foreshadowing power; the deed they would do starts up before them in complete shape; the event they hunger for, or dread, rises into vision. These people are not always less sane or logical than others: but it may be that their natures are more open to impressions.
The figure of Mordecai had bitten itself into Deronda’s mind as a new question which he felt an interest in getting answered. But the interest was no more than a vaguely-expectant suspense: the consumptive-looking Jew, apparently a fervid student of some kind, fitted into none of Deronda’s anticipations.
It was otherwise with the effect of their meeting on Mordecai. For many winters, he had been conscious both of ebbing physical life, and a widening spiritual loneliness. All his desire had concentrated in the yearning for some young ear into which he could pour his mind, some soul kindred enough to accept the spiritual product of his own brief, painful life. The yearning had grown into a hope – the hope into a confident belief, which, instead of being checked by his knowledge of his hastening decline, became an intense expectant faith as if in a prophecy which has only a brief time to be fulfilled.
Some years had now gone by since he had first begun to measure men with a keen glance, searching for such a person. He imagined a man who would have all the elements necessary for sympathy with him, but in a body unlike his own: he must be a Jew, cultured, morally fervent; but he must be beautiful and strong, he must be socially refined, his voice must flow with a full and easy current. His circumstances must be free from sordid need: he must glorify the possibilities of the Jew, not sit amidst poverty as Mordecai did. He had looked at pictures as well as men, and had sometimes lingered in the National Gallery in search of paintings which might feed his hopefulness with noble types of humanity that might be Jews – but he was disappointed.
Observant persons might note his emaciated figure, and dark deep-set eyes, as he stood in front of a picture that had touched him: he commonly wore a cloth cap with black fur round it, which no painter would have asked him to take off. But spectators would be likely to regard him as an odd-looking Jew, who probably made money from pictures; and Mordecai was perfectly aware of the impression he made. Experience had rendered him morbidly alive to the effect of a man’s poverty in cheapening his ideas.
But he was too sane and generous to attribute his spiritual banishment solely to prejudice; his own incapacities played a part; and hence he imagined another, flourishing man, ready to incorporate all that was worthiest from an existence which was burning itself fast away. As the more beautiful, the stronger, the more executive self took shape in his mind, he loved it beforehand with an affection half identifying, half contemplative and grateful.
Mordecai’s mind worked so constantly in images, that his trains of thought often resembled dreams. Thus, he thought of the Being answering to his need as one distantly approaching, dark against a golden sky. The reason of the golden sky lay in one of Mordecai’s habits: he liked to visit London’s bridges, especially about sunrise or sunset. Even when he was bending over watch-wheels and trinkets, his imagination took him to a far-stretching scene; his thoughts went on in wide spaces; and whenever he could, he tried to see them in reality.
As he leaned on the parapet of Blackfriars Bridge, the calm breadth of the river with its long hazy vista, the grand dim masses of tall buildings, the oncoming of boats and barges from the still distance, entered into his mood like a fine symphony. Thus the figure that represented Mordecai’s longing was mentally seen darkened by the bright sky in the background.
But in the progress of his imagination toward fuller detail, the figure began to advance, and a face became discernible; he saw youth, beauty, refinement, Jewish birth and noble gravity. This spiritual need was akin to the boy’s and girl’s picturing of the future beloved; but the stirrings of such young desire are feeble compared with the passion of an ideal life straining to embody itself, in intense resistance to oncoming death. This visionary form became a companion not only in his waking imagination, but in his sleep.
Of late the urgency of time, measured by the gradual choking of life, had turned Mordecai’s trust into an agitated watch for the fulfilment that must be at hand. Was the bell on the verge of tolling? The deliverer must be near – the deliverer who would save Mordecai’s spiritual work from oblivion, and preserve it in the heritage of his people.
Many would have seen this yearning as an insane exaggeration of his own value. But love hungers to bless, not merely to behold blessing. And while there is warmth enough in the sun to feed life, there will still be men to feel, “I am lord of this moment, and will charge it with my soul.”
Mordecai was not passive while he waited. He tried expedients, pathetically humble, for communicating himself. It was now two years since he had made his home under Ezra Cohen’s roof, where he was regarded with much good-will as a compound of workman, scholar, inspired idiot, man of piety, and dangerous heretic. During that time little Jacob had become attached to Mordecai, viewing him as an inferior, but liking him none the worse, and taking his helpful cleverness as he might have taken the services of an enslaved Djinn.
As for Mordecai, he had given Jacob his first lessons, with his habitual tenderness. Though he was fully conscious of the spiritual distance between the parents and himself, the boy moved him with that idealizing affection that comes from the glory of childhood.
This feeling had drawn him on to a sort of outpouring in the boy’s ear. When Jacob went up to Mordecai’s room after work, for example, to have a brief lesson in reading or arithmetic, he was induced to remain standing at his teacher’s knees, or chose to jump astride them, often to the patient fatigue of the wasted limbs. The inducement was perhaps the mending of a toy; and with the boy thus tethered, Mordecai would begin to repeat a Hebrew poem of his own, into which he had poured his youthful ardent idea of a blended past and future, telling Jacob to say the words after him.
“The boy will get them engraved within him,” he thought.
None readier than Jacob at this fascinating game of imitating unintelligible words; and he would sometimes carry on as long as the teacher’s breath would last out, showing no other distraction than surveying the contents of his pockets; or pulling down the skin of his cheeks to make his eyes look awful, or alternately handling his own nose and Mordecai’s to compare them. Under all this the fervid reciter would not pause. But most commonly a sudden impulse sent Jacob leaping away into some active amusement. Yet Mordecai waited with such patience as a prophet needs, and began again undiscouraged on the morrow, saying inwardly–
“My words may rule him some day. Their meaning may flash out on him.” Meanwhile Jacob’s sense of power was increased by a store of magical chants with which he made the baby laugh, or drove the cat away, or promised himself to frighten any incidental Christian his own age. As soon as he got used to one portion of the poem, Mordecai began a fresh passage.
The consumptive voice, with its hoarseness and its occasional gasp, was on one occasion chanting Hebrew verses with this meaning:
“Away from me the garment of forgetfulness
Withering the heart;
The oil and wine from presses of the Goyim,
Poisoned with scorn.
Solitude is on the sides of Mount Nebo,
In its heart a tomb:
There the buried ark and golden cherubim
Make hidden light:
There the solemn faces gaze unchanged,
The wings are spread unbroken:
Shut beneath in silent awful speech
The Law lies graven.
Solitude and darkness are my covering,
And my heart a tomb;
Smite and shatter it, O Gabriel!
Shatter it as the clay of the founder
Around the golden image.”
As Mordecai intoned this last invocation, he was unaware that Jacob had ceased to foll
ow him and had moved away. Having recently watched a mountebank in the street, the lad threw himself on his hands with his feet in the air, and was picking up a coin with his lips. The sudden sight jarred Mordecai horribly, as if it had been a Satanic grin upon his prayer.
“Child! child!” he called out with a strange cry that startled Jacob to his feet, and then he sank backward with a shudder, closing his eyes.
“What?” said Jacob, quickly. Not getting an answer, he shook Mordecai’s knees to rouse him. Mordecai opened his eyes with a fierce expression, leaned forward, grasped the little shoulders, and said in a hoarse whisper—
“A curse is on your generation, child. They will open the mountain and drag forth the golden wings and coin them into money! And they shall get themselves a new name, but the angel of ignominy, with the fiery brand, shall know them, and their heart shall be the tomb of dead desires that turn their life to rottenness.”
Mordecai’s behaviour was so new and mysterious to Jacob that it was as if the indulgent companion had turned into something unknown and terrifying. Little Jacob was shaken into awe, and he stood trembling with a sense that the house was tumbling in and they were not going to have dinner any more. But when the terrible speech had ended, the shock resolved itself into tears; Jacob lifted up his face and wept aloud.
This sign of childish grief at once recalled Mordecai to his usual gentle self: he drew the curly head toward him and pressed it tenderly against his breast. On this, Jacob, feeling the danger over, howled at ease, improving upon his own performance – a transition from impulse into art. Indeed, the next day he undertook to terrify Adelaide Rebekah in like manner, and succeeded very well.
But Mordecai suffered a check: he judged himself severely. All the more his mind was strained toward that friend to come, with whom he would have a calm certainty of fellowship and understanding.
It was just then that, in the old book-shop, he was struck by Deronda’s appearance; and it is perhaps comprehensible now why he looked at the newcomer with a sudden eager interest: he saw a face and frame which seemed to him to realize the long-conceived type. But the disclaimer of Jewish birth was a severe backward thrust, shaking his confidence.
Nevertheless, when he found Deronda at the Cohens’ table, the first impression returned with added force; and in asking Deronda if he knew Hebrew, Mordecai was so possessed by the new inrush of belief, that he had forgotten the absence of any other condition to the fulfilment of his hopes.
But the answering “No” struck them all down again, and the frustration was more painful than before. After turning his back on the visitor that Sabbath evening, Mordecai went through days of deep discouragement, like that of men on a doomed ship, who having strained their eyes after a sail, and beheld it with rejoicing, see it drift away. But the long-contemplated figure in his mind came to take on Deronda’s face, until the vision had the force of an outward call, keeping his expectation awake. It was Deronda now who was seen in the often painful night-watches – whose figure, never with its back turned, was seen in moments of soothed reverie, painted on that golden sky which was the doubly blessed symbol of advancing day and of approaching rest.
Mordecai knew that the nameless stranger was to come and redeem his ring; and the wish to see him again was growing into a belief that he should see him. He felt an increasing agitation which hindered him from steady occupation. He could not go on with his printing of Hebrew on little Jacob’s mind; or with his attendance at a weekly club, which was another effort of the same forlorn hope: something else was coming.
The one thing he longed for was to get to the river, which he could do but seldom and with difficulty. He yearned with a poet’s yearning for the wide sky, the far-reaching vista of bridges, the tender, fluctuating lights on the water, which seems to breathe with a life that can shiver and mourn, be comforted and rejoice.