CHAPTER XXXVIII.

There be who hold that the deeper tragedy were a Prometheus Bound not
_after_ but _before_ he had well got the celestial fire into
the _narthex_ whereby it might be conveyed to mortals: thrust by
the Kratos and Bia of instituted methods into a solitude of despised
ideas, fastened in throbbing helplessness by the fatal pressure of
poverty and disease--a solitude where many pass by, but none regard.


"Second-sight" is a flag over disputed ground. But it is matter of
knowledge that there are persons whose yearnings, conceptions--nay,
traveled conclusions--continually take the form of images which have a
foreshadowing power; the deed they would do starts up before them in
complete shape, making a coercive type; the event they hunger for or dread
rises into vision with a seed-like growth, feeding itself fast on
unnumbered impressions. They are not always the less capable of the
argumentative process, nor less sane than the commonplace calculators of
the market: sometimes it may be that their natures have manifold openings,
like the hundred-gated Thebes, where there may naturally be a greater and
more miscellaneous inrush than through a narrow beadle-watched portal. No
doubt there are abject specimens of the visionary, as there is a minim
mammal which you might imprison in the finger of your glove. That small
relative of the elephant has no harm in him; but what great mental or
social type is free from specimens whose insignificance is both ugly and
noxious? One is afraid to think of all that the genus "patriot" embraces;
or of the elbowing there might be at the day of judgment for those who
ranked as authors, and brought volumes either in their hands or on trucks.

This apology for inevitable kinship is meant to usher in some facts about
Mordecai, whose figure 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, getting his crust by a
quiet handicraft, like Spinoza, fitted into none of Deronda's
anticipations.

It was otherwise with the effect of their meeting on Mordecai. For many
winters, while he had been conscious of an ebbing physical life, and as
widening spiritual loneliness, all his passionate desire had concentrated
itself in the yearning for some young ear into which he could pour his
mind as a testament, some soul kindred enough to accept the spiritual
product of his own brief, painful life, as a mission to be executed. It
was remarkable that the hopefulness which is often the beneficent illusion
of consumptive patients, was in Mordecai wholly diverted from the prospect
of bodily recovery and carried into the current of this yearning for
transmission. The yearning, which had panted upward from out of over-
whelming discouragements, had grown into a hope--the hope into a confident
belief, which, instead of being checked by the clear conception he had of
his hastening decline, took rather the intensity of expectant faith in a
prophecy which has only brief space to get fulfilled in.

Some years had now gone since he had first begun to measure men with a
keen glance, searching for a possibility which became more and more a
distinct conception. Such distinctness as it had at first was reached
chiefly by a method of contrast: he wanted to find a man who differed from
himself. Tracing reasons in that self for the rebuffs he had met with and
the hindrances that beset him, he imagined a man who would have all the
elements necessary for sympathy with him, but in an embodiment unlike his
own: he must be a Jew, intellectually cultured, morally fervid--in all
this a nature ready to be plenished from Mordecai's; but his face and
frame must be beautiful and strong, he must have been used to all the
refinements of social life, his voice must flow with a full and easy
current, his circumstances be free from sordid need: he must glorify the
possibilities of the Jew, not sit and wonder as Mordecai did, bearing the
stamp of his people amid the sign of poverty and waning breath. Sensitive
to physical characteristics, he had, both abroad and in England, looked
at pictures as well as men, and in a vacant hour he had sometimes lingered
in the National Gallery in search of paintings which might feed his
hopefulness with grave and noble types of the human form, such as might
well belong to men of his own race. But he returned in disappointment. The
instances are scattered but thinly over the galleries of Europe, in which
the fortune or selection even of the chief masters has given to art a face
at once young, grand, and beautiful, where, if there is any melancholy, it
is no feeble passivity, but enters into the foreshadowed capability of
heroism.

Some observant persons may perhaps remember his emaciated figure, and dark
eyes deep in their sockets, as he stood in front of a picture that had
touched him either to new or habitual meditation: he commonly wore a cloth
cap with black fur round it, which no painter would have asked iim to take
off. But spectators would be likely to think of him as an odd-looking Jew
who probably got money out of pictures; and Mordecai, when he looked at
them, was perfectly aware of the impression he made. Experience had
rendered him morbidly alive to the effect of a man's poverty and other
physical disadvantages in cheapening his ideas, unless they are those of a
Peter the Hermit who has a tocsin for the rabble. But he was too sane and
generous to attribute his spiritual banishment solely to the excusable
prejudices of others; certain incapacities of his own had made the
sentence of exclusion; and hence it was that his imagination had
constructed another man who would be something more ample than the second
soul bestowed, according to the notion of the Cabbalists, to help out the
insufficient first--who would be a blooming human life, ready to
incorporate all that was worthiest in an existence whose visible, palpable
part was burning itself fast away. His inward need for the conception of
this expanded, prolonged self was reflected as an outward necessity. The
thoughts of his heart (that ancient phrase best shadows the truth) seemed
to him too precious, too closely interwoven with the growth of things not
to have a further destiny. And 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 wrought so constantly in images, that his coherent trains
of thought often resembled the significant dreams attributed to sleepers
by waking persons in their most inventive moments: nay, they often
resembled genuine dreams in their way of breaking off the passage from the
known to the unknown. Thus, for a long while, he habitually thought of the
Being answering to his need as one distantly approaching or turning his
back toward him, darkly painted against a golden sky. The reason of the
golden sky lay in one of Mordecai's habits. He was keenly alive to some
poetic aspects of London; and a favorite resort of his, when strength and
leisure allowed, was to some of the bridges, especially about sunrise or
sunset. Even when he was bending over watch-wheels and trinkets, or seated
in a small upper room looking out on dingy bricks and dingy cracked
windows, his imagination spontaneously planted him on some spot where he
had a far-stretching scene; his thoughts went on in wide spaces; and
whenever he could, he tried to have in reality the influences of a large
sky. Leaning on the parapet of Blackfriar's Bridge, and gazing
meditatively, the breadth and calm of the river, with its long vista half
hazy, half luminous, the grand dim masses of tall forms of buildings which
were the signs of world-commerce, the oncoming of boats and barges from
the still distance into sound and color, entered into his mood and blent
themselves indistinguishably with his thinking, as a fine symphony to
which we can hardly be said to listen, makes a medium that bears up our
spiritual wings. Thus it happened that the figure representative of
Mordecai's longing was mentally seen darkened by the excess of light in
the aerial background. But in the inevitable progress of his imagination
toward fuller detail, he ceased to see the figure with its back toward
him. It began to advance, and a face became discernible; the words youth,
beauty, refinement, Jewish birth, noble gravity, turned into hardly
individual but typical form and color: gathered from his memory of faces
seen among the Jews of Holland and Bohemia, and from the paintings which
revived that memory. Reverently let it be said of this mature spiritual
need that it 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 passionate current of an ideal life straining to embody itself, made
intense by resistance to imminent dissolution. The visionary form became a
companion and auditor; keeping a place not only in the waking imagination,
but in those dreams of lighter slumber of which it is truest to say, "I
sleep, but my heart waketh"--when the disturbing trivial story of
yesterday is charged with the impassioned purpose of years.

Of late the urgency of irremediable time, measured by the gradual choking
of life, had turned Mordecai's trust into an agitated watch for the
fulfillment that must be at hand. Was the bell on the verge of tolling,
the sentence about to be executed? The deliverer's footstep must be near--
the deliverer who was to rescue Mordecai's spiritual travail from
oblivion, and give it an abiding-place in the best heritage of his people.
An insane exaggeration of his own value, even if his ideas had been as
true and precious as those of Columbus or Newton, many would have counted
this yearning, taking it as the sublimer part for a man to say, "If not I,
then another," and to hold cheap the meaning of his own life. But the
fuller nature desires to be an agent, to create, and not merely to look
on: strong love hungers to bless, and not merely to behold blessing. And
while there is warmth enough in the sun to feed an energetic life, there
will still be men to feel, "I am lord of this moment's change, and will
charge it with my soul."

But with that mingling of inconsequence which belongs to us all, and not
unhappily, since it saves us from many effects of mistake, Mordecai's
confidence in the friend to come did not suffice to make him passive, and
he tried expedients, pathetically humble, such as happened to be within
his reach, for communicating something of himself. It was now two years
since he had taken up his abode under Ezra Cohen's roof, where he was
regarded with much good-will as a compound of workman, dominie, vessel of
charity, inspired idiot, man of piety, and (if he were inquired into)
dangerous heretic. During that time little Jacob had advanced into
knickerbockers, and into that quickness of apprehension which has been
already made manifest in relation to hardware and exchange. He had also
advanced in attachment to Mordecai, regarding 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, and his habitual tenderness easily turned
into the teacher's fatherhood. Though he was fully conscious of the
spiritual distance between the parents and himself, and would never have
attempted any communication to them from his peculiar world, the boy moved
him with that idealizing affection which merges the qualities of the
individual child in the glory of childhood and the possibilities of a long
future. And this feeling had drawn him on, at first without premeditation,
and afterward with conscious purpose, to a sort of outpouring in the ear
of the boy which might have seemed wild enough to any excellent man of
business who overheard it. But none overheard when Jacob went up to
Mordecai's room one day, for example, in which there was little work to be
done, or at an hour when the work was ended, and after a brief lesson in
English reading or in numeration, 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, or some little mechanical device in which Mordecai's well-practiced
finger-tips had an exceptional skill; and with the boy thus tethered, he
would begin to repeat a Hebrew poem of his own, into which years before he
had poured his first youthful ardors for that conception of a blended past
and future which was the mistress of his soul, telling Jacob to say the
words after him.

"The boy will get them engraved within him," thought Mordecai; "it is a
way of printing."

None readier than Jacob at this fascinating game of imitating
unintelligible words; and if no opposing diversion occurred he would
sometimes carry on his share in it as long as the teacher's breath would
last out. For Mordecai threw into each repetition the fervor befitting a
sacred occasion. In such instances, Jacob would show no other distraction
than reaching out and surveying the contents of his pockets; or drawing
down the skin of his cheeks to make his eyes look awful, and rolling his
head to complete the effect; or alternately handling his own nose and
Mordecai's as if to test the relation of their masses. Under all this the
fervid reciter would not pause, satisfied if the young organs of speech
would submit themselves. But most commonly a sudden impulse sent Jacob
leaping away into some antic or active amusement, when, instead of
following the recitation he would return upon the foregoing words most
ready to his tongue, and mouth or gabble, with a see-saw suited to the
action of his limbs, a verse on which Mordecai had spent some of his too
scanty heart's blood. Yet he waited with such patience as a prophet needs,
and began his strange printing again undiscouraged on the morrow, saying
inwardly--

"My words may rule him some day. Their meaning may flash out on him. It is
so with a nation--after many days."

Meanwhile Jacob's sense of power was increased and his time enlivened by a
store of magical articulation with which he made the baby crow, or drove
the large cat into a dark corner, or promised himself to frighten any
incidental Christian of his own years. One week he had unfortunately seen
a street mountebank, and this carried off his muscular imitativeness in
sad divergence from New Hebrew poetry, after the model of Jehuda ha-Levi.
Mordecai had arrived at a fresh passage in his poem; for as soon as Jacob
had got well used to one portion, he was led on to another, and a fresh
combination of sounds generally answered better in keeping him fast for a
few minutes. The consumptive voice, generally a strong high baritone, with
its variously mingling hoarseness, like a haze amidst illuminations, and
its occasional incipient gasp had more than the usual excitement, while it
gave forth Hebrew verses with a meaning something like this:--

"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 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."

In the absorbing enthusiasm with which Mordecai had intoned rather than
spoken this last invocation, he was unconscious that Jacob had ceased to
follow him and had started away from his knees; but pausing he saw, as by
a sudden flash, that the lad had thrown himself on his hands with his feet
in the air, mountebank fashion, and was picking up with his lips a bright
farthing which was a favorite among his pocket treasures. This might have
been reckoned among the tricks Mordecai was used to, but at this moment it
jarred him 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. Then, not getting an immediate answer, he
pressed Mordecai's knees with a shaking movement, in order to rouse him.
Mordecai opened his eyes with a fierce expression in them, leaned forward,
grasped the little shoulders, and said in a quick, 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 the solemn faces
they will break up into ear-rings for wanton women! 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."

The aspect and action of Mordecai were so new and mysterious to Jacob--
they carried such a burden of obscure threat--it was as if the patient,
indulgent companion had turned into something unknown and terrific: the
sunken dark eyes and hoarse accents close to him, the thin grappling
fingers, shook Jacob's little frame into awe, and while Mordecai was
speaking 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 and the pinch was relaxed, the shock resolved itself into
tears; Jacob lifted up his small patriarchal countenance and wept aloud.
This sign of childish grief at once recalled Mordecai to his usual gentle
self: he was not able to speak again at present, but with a maternal
action he drew the curly head toward him and pressed it tenderly against
his breast. On this Jacob, feeling the danger well-nigh over, howled at
ease, beginning to imitate his own performance and improve upon it--a sort
of transition from impulse into art often observable. Indeed, the next day
he undertook to terrify Adelaide Rebekah in like manner, and succeeded
very well.

But Mordecai suffered a check which lasted long, from the consciousness of
a misapplied agitation; sane as well as excitable, he judged severely his
moments of aberration into futile eagerness, and felt discredited with
himself. All the more his mind was strained toward the discernment of that
friend to come, with whom he would have a calm certainty of fellowship and
understanding.

It was just then that, in his usual midday guardianship of the old book-
shop, he was struck by the appearance of Deronda, and it is perhaps
comprehensible now why Mordecai's glance took on a sudden eager interest
as he looked at the new-comer: he saw a face and frame which seemed to him
to realize the long-conceived type. But the disclaimer of Jewish birth was
for the moment a backward thrust of double severity, the particular
disappointment tending to shake his confidence in the more indefinite
expectation. Nevertheless, when he found Deronda seated at the Cohens'
table, the disclaimer was for the moment nullified: the first impression
returned with added force, seeming to be guaranteed by this second meeting
under circumstance more peculiar than the former; 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
fulfillment 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 a
deep discouragement, like that of men on a doomed ship, who having
strained their eyes after a sail, and beheld it with rejoicing, behold it
never advance, and say, "Our sick eyes make it." But the long-contemplated
figure had come as an emotional sequence of Mordecai's firmest theoretic
convictions; it had been wrought from the imagery of his most passionate
life; and it inevitably reappeared--reappeared in a more specific self-
asserting form than ever. Deronda had that sort of resemblance to the
preconceived type which a finely individual bust or portrait has to the
more generalized copy left in our minds after a long interval: we renew
our memory with delight, but we hardly know with how much correction. And
now, his face met Mordecai's inward gaze as it had always belonged to the
awaited friend, raying out, moreover, some of that influence which belongs
to breathing flesh; till by-and-by it seemed that discouragement had
turned into a new obstinacy of resistance, and the ever-recurrent vision
had the force of an outward call to disregard counter-evidence, and keep
expectation awake. It was Deronda now who was seen in the often painful
night-watches, when we are all liable to be held with the clutch of a
single thought--whose figure, never with its back turned, was seen in
moments of soothed reverie or soothed dozing, 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, in spite of contrary chances, the wish to see him again was growing
into a belief that he should see him. In the January weeks, he felt an
increasing agitation of that subdued hidden quality which hinders nervous
people from any steady occupation on the eve of an anticipated change. 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 as far as 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 and fluctuating lights on the water
which seems to breathe with a life that can shiver and mourn, be comforted
and rejoice.