A Summer Serial

Samuel Deronda

By JOHN WAIN

sAMUEL DERONDA'S parents had never heard of George Eliot, so that it was no more than a coincidence that they did not have their only son christened Daniel, particularly as, in matters of nomenclature, they were both rather drawn to the Biblical: Mr. Deronda's name was Jesse, and by another odd coincidence his wife's was Jessie. This was obviously impos- sible, as a working arrangement; quite soon after their marriage, in 1926, they had ceased to find amusement in the small con- fusions that naturally arose from the homophonous nature of their Christian names. 'How's Jesse?', a visiting neighbour might ask of Mr. Deronda, this being a well-understood convention in demotic English and meaning 'How are you?' But Mr. Deronda, while perfectly well understanding this linguistic convention, would flush darkly and mutter, 'She's very well'; alternatively, he might guess rightly, but in either case the nervous strain was not worth the small sociability; particularly as it was most people's idea of a joke, having made or caused some such mistake once in all seriousness, to repeat it the next time they called, for the sake of a laugh. There was a laugh in it for them, but not for Mr. and Mrs. Deronda, who spent almost the whole night discussing the situation on August 20, 1926. 'It's no good, Jesse,' said Mrs. Deronda, sitting in front of the glass and clipping pins into her hair to make it look curly the next morning (they had not been married many weeks and she still took a good deal of care over her appearance, except at night), 'one of us will have to be called something else, and it had better be me, what with you being the Man.' Mr. Deronda, who was already in bed, rolled on to his back and considered for a moment the idea of being the Man; then he replied, 'I've got it, Jessie. I can be called "Jess." It's quite common, that is. With a man, I mean.' But this did not please Mrs. Deronda, who had ideas about the relative positions of the sexes rather similar to those held by D. H. Lawrence. 'You're the Man, Jesse,' she urged. 'It wouldn't do to curtail you.' She seldom used unusual words such as 'curtail,' and Mr. Deronda had to search his memory for the precise meaning of the word, he having left school in 1916 and gone to work in a fruit warehouse, having no difficulty in obtain- ing employment, despite the shortage of fruit during the war. owing to his natural ability and the fact that most of the men were away in France. He had not had much time for reading at the warehouse, and his vocabulary was small. 'I couldn't dock you of a syllable, Jesse,' said Mrs. Deronda, who was very fond of her husband and wished to, look up to him, at any rate in a metaphorical sense, the literal sense being impracticable owing to her superior height, which she attributed to having been brought up, as a girl, in the bracing country air of Watford. They now lived in North London, handy for Mr. Deronda's warehouse, but not bracing. 'You'll have to go on being called Jesse, and I'll have to have another name than "Jessie,"' she said. After she had got into bed, they lay staring at the ceiling with the set expressions of people properly conscious that they were facing a lifelong decision. Whatever name they thought of, Mrs. Deronda would have to be known by it permanently; people would only make a joke of it if she chopped and changed. 'What about Edith?' Mr. Deronda asked, but she interrupted him with a sudden cry of 'Martha? "Martha? You're sure you like Martha?' Mr. Deronda asked. 'It's in the Bible,' she told him. `So's Edith,' he affirmed, assuming Sr confidence he did not feel. This she denied, and they argued over the point for a very long time, considering that Mr. Deronda had to be up in the morning early to go to the warehouse. Is 'Edith' in the Bible or not? was the question that perplexed them. Mrs. Deronda might have acquiesced, and accepted the name 'Edith,' only she wanted a name that was in the Bible, like her husband's.

The next day, when Mr. Deronda was out at the warehouse, Mrs. Deronda took down the family Bible and looked carefully through it, trying to find (or, to be precise, trying to establish the absence of) the name 'Edith.' She was not the kind of person who understood about indexes and concordances and things of that sort; she knew no other way of settling such a point than leafing slowly through the Bible until she had looked on every page for the name 'Edith.' This took her many weeks, but one evening she was able to announce to Mr. Deronda, on his return from the warehouse, that the name 'Edith' did not, in fact, appear in the Bible. Instead of demanding a recount, Mr. Deronda accepted his wife's findings, the more readily as he had privately consulted the curate of the local church. The curate did under- stand about concordances, but, being a professional, he did not need to consult one; he knew off-hand that 'Edith' was a pre- Raphaelite sort of name and would not occur in the Bible. `I must have been thinking of Hester,' said Mr. Deronda; then, blocking the curate's questions about when he might expect to see them in church (Mr. Deronda had been to church once that year, to get married, and he regarded purposeless churchgoing as overdoing things) he walked home, as his custom was, to save the fare.

Mrs. Deronda's views on the relative positions of the sexes remained unchanged, but the fact remained that she now adopted the name 'Martha' instead of 'Edith,' and from that day forth her marriage appeared to her to lose some of its magic. It always remained stable and happy, but she could never quite forget, or assimilate, the fact that Mr. Deronda had wanted her to choose a name which he mistakenly thought was in the Bible. In after years she would sometimes muse on this event and its probable significance in the life story of their son Samuel. This person was conceived within a week or so after the Edith episode, and Mrs. Deronda could never entirely avoid the feeling that his backward and unpleasant physique, not to speak of his unfortu- nate character, might in some way be traceable to the change in his parents' relationship which resulted from it. Being a decent woman, she did not allow herself to spend too much time in thinking about such matters, and consoled herself by saying, in a quiet voice, 'What's done cannot be undone,' several times a day during Samuel's childhood, usually just after catching sight of him.

To catch sight of Samuel Deronda was, indeed, at no time a refreshing experience. He had a glassy stare which, however often you encountered it, never failed to be disconcerting; and, however charitably you decided to overlook the physical handi- caps which an offended Nature had so liberally showered upon him, it was hard to feel any outflowing of human warmth towards a child so obviously self-sufficient.

Yet Samuel Deronda was, in his way, a happy child. Life made few demands on him, and he made almost none in return.

To piece out a tranquil existence between home and school, avoiding with equal assiduity both the rewards and the punish- ments which fell to the lot of his more strenuous fellows, was all his equable nature required. For Samuel was a philosophical little fellow. He was content to take what came his way, allowing events to make their own pace, and never indulging in futile attempts to alter the pattern of his existence. Once he had grown to a sufficient height and weight to be able to inflict punishment, when the fancy took him, on smaller children, his modest emotional requirements were met; and, though he was fully nine years old before he dared risk an encounter with a boy of five, he waited, with characteristic patience, and the years soon passed. It was the same with his intellectual attainments. The first page of his reading-book did not begin to make sense to Samuel until his glassy stare had rested on it for some five years; eventually, soon after his thirteenth birthday, the occult symbols began to relate themselves to sounds, and it was discovered that he could read. About the same time, the first page of his arithmetic book, too, began slowly yielding to the second. At the end of his statutory period of education, he could write simple sentences in a round, easily decipherable hand, add and subtract rather large sums, and—on his day—make a fair show at multiplication and division. These accomplishments were the gift which the English people, in their far-sightedness and public spirit, made to Samuel; forced on him, indeed, since he had at no time expressed any wish to learn them. We have called him a philosophical boy; he was more; he was profoundly compliant and amenable; his vitreous stare expressed, if it expressed anything, a wish to avoid offending or being offended.

Samuel's adaptability went further. His parents indicated that he had now to go to work, and to work he went. A position was found for him as office-boy in a firm that made saucepans, or gramophone pick-ups, or tomato sauce, or something of the kind; Samuel was never sure, but in any case, as he would retort if questioned by Jesse Deronda or Martha (née Jessie) Deronda,

It don't matter—I work, they pay me, right? Do the tea, sweep the place out, jussa same whatever they're making, right? Don't matter.' Jesse Deronda was satisfied with this further proof of his son's philosophic calm; but Martha Deronda, beneath her veneer of loyal acquiescence in this satisfaction, sometimes worried in private. She was not the first mother to find out that it is disconcerting to have a philosopher in the family.

After a few years, Samuel was doing more in the office than doing the tea and sweeping the place. At eighteen, he presented himself for a medical examination, but the unanimous verdict of the doctors present was that the rigours of army life, even in peacetime, would place an undue strain on his constitution, and he was rejected. This placed him, professionally, in a fortunate position. His employers did not have to feel that he would leave them for many months and come back having forgotten all he knew about the business. He was there; he would be staying there; he had better be given something to do. At the beginning of his nineteenth year, Samuel's future seemed rosy and peaceful. He had ceased to be an office boy. Someone else did the tea and swept the place. Samuel was a junior clerk.

Happy is the country, and still more happy the individual, that has no history. Samuel had now been begotten, born, 'educated, and settled in life. Unless he wished to go in for a spot of begetting himself, he had nothing further to do except die, and even this could reasonably be put off for more than forty years. But it was exactly this begetting business that now stepped in and threw the boy's blameless existence into a hurricane of confusion. He wished—to be precise—to beget with the wrong person. Instead of finding, as he might reasonably have expected, that his lightly flitting fancy had come to rest on some easily attainable blossom, it was Samuel's lot to stand helplessly by and watch it settle on a flower that grew half-way down a precipice. To abandon metaphor, he fell in love with the office beauty.

This was a vivacious girl from the Rayner's Lane district named Minnie Stroney. She had red hair and looked agreeably healthy, and she worked in the accounting department. Whether the nature of her work had some kind of spiritual effect on Minnie it is impossible to establish, but true it is that she saw life in a very accounting sort of way. Everything, to her, was profit and loss. Her red hair was profit, since it was not carroty but red-gold; her good (though rather spreading) physique was profit; the solid social background of Rayner's Lane was profit. As for Samuel Deronda, he was loss. She made him feel it, and in case this was not sufficient she stated it explicitly. 'You're a dead loss,' she told him.

Samuel's philosophic temperament might have carried him over this handicap, and enabled him to settle down patiently to a long and uphill courtship, save for one very unfortunate factor. This was the existence of Dennis, who was profit. Dennis was a well-muscled young man who worked in the packing depart- ment, or the canning department, or something of the kind, but whose work took him frequently into Accounting. No one knew whether Dennis was Dennis's Christian name or his surname, but this peculiarity only served to increase his prestige; it was as if, like Aragon, he was so important that he could get along with only one name. If he had spelt his name 'Denis,' or even 'Denys,' this would have failed of the proper effect; but 'Dennis' was exactly right; and even Samuel, who still had a certain amount of difficulty in reading, knew that this was how he spelt it, for he had come across a note that Dennis had written to Minnie Stroney, and found it signed, in a bold and masculine hand, 'Dennis.'

The situation seemed hopeless: But love makes heroes of the least heroic of men, and this, be it marked, is a success story. Dennis, muscles and all, surname-like Christian name and all, bold handwriting and all, must be ousted. Minnie Stroney should be Samuel's, and his alone. This burning resolve occupied all the available space in Samuel's mind as he walked homeward one evening, and paused, from force of habit, before his favourite news-stand.

(1'o be continued)