The Book of Khalid Part 3

We only knew that peddling is a pleasure, that a bank account is a supreme joy, that a dish of _mojadderah_ cooked by Im-Hanna is a royal delight, that our dour dark cellar is a palace of its kind, and that happiness, like a bride, issues from all these, and, touching the strings of Khalid's lute, mantles us with song."

CHAPTER V

THE CELLAR OF THE SOUL

Heretofore, Khalid and Shakib have been inseparable as the Pointers.

They always appeared together, went the rounds of their peddling orbit together, and together were subject to the same conditions and restraints. Which restraints are a sort of sacrifice they make on the altar of friends.h.i.+p. One, for instance, would never permit himself an advantage which the other could not enjoy, or a pleasure in which the other could not share. They even slept under the same blanket, we learn, ate from the same plate, puffed at the same narghilah, which Shakib brought with him from Baalbek, and collaborated in writing to one lady-love! A condition of unexampled friends.h.i.+p this, of complete oneness. They had both cut themselves garments from the same cloth, as the Arabic saying goes. And on Sunday afternoon, in garments spick and span, they would take the air in Battery Park, where the one would invoke the Statue of Liberty for a thought, or the gilded domes of Broadway for a metaphor, while the other would be scouring the horizon for the Nothingness, which is called, in the recondite cant of the sophisticated, a vague something.

In the Khedivial Library MS. we find nothing which this Battery Park might have inspired. And yet, we can not believe that Khalid here was only attracted by that vague something which, in his spiritual enceintes.h.i.+p, he seemed to relish. Nothing? Not even the does and kangaroos that adorn the Park distracted or detained him? We doubt it; and Khalid's lute sustains us in our doubt. Ay, and so does our Scribe; for in his _Histoire Intime_ we read the following, which we faithfully transcribe.

"Of the many attractions of Battery Park, the girls and the sea were my favourite. For the girls in a crowd have for me a fascination which only the girls at the bath can surpa.s.s. I love to lose myself in a crowd, to buffet, so to speak, its waves, to nestle under their feathery crests. For the rolling waves of life, the tumbling waves of the sea, and the fiery waves of Al-Mutanabbi's poetry have always been my delight. In Battery Park I took especial pleasure in reading aloud my verses to Khalid, or in fact to the sea, for Khalid never would listen.

"Once I composed a few stanzas to the Milkmaid who stood in her wagon near the lawn, rattling out milk-punches to the boys. A winsome la.s.s she was, fresh in her sororiation, with fair blue eyes, a celestial flow of auburn hair, and cheeks that suggested the milk and cherry in the gla.s.s she rattled out to me. I was reading aloud the stanzas which she inspired, when Khalid, who was not listening, pointed out to me a woman whose figure and the curves thereof were remarkable. 'Is it not strange,' said he, 'how the women here indraw their stomachs and outdraw their hips? And is not this the opposite of the shape which our women cultivate?'

"Yes, with the Lebanon women, the convex curve beneath the waist is frontward, not hindward. But that is a matter of taste, I thought, and man is partly responsible for either convexity. I have often wondered, however, why the women of my country cultivate that shape. And why do they in America cultivate the reverse of it? Needless to say that both are pruriently t.i.tillating,--both distentions are d.a.m.nably suggestive, quite killing. The American woman, from a fine sense of modesty, I am told, never or seldom ventures abroad, when big with child. But in the kangaroo figure, the burden is slightly s.h.i.+fted and naught is amiss.

Ah, such haunches as are here exhibited suggest the _aliats_ of our Asiatic sheep."

And what he says about the pruriently t.i.tillating convexities, whether frontward or hindward, suggests a little prudery. For in his rhymes he betrays both his comrade and himself. Battery Park and the attractions thereof prove fatal. Elsewhere, therefore, they must go, and begin to draw on their bank accounts. Which does not mean, however, that they are far from the snare. No; for when a young man begins to suffer from what the doctors call hebephrenia, the farther he draws away from such snares the nearer he gets to them. And these l.u.s.ty Syrians could not repel the magnetic attraction of the polypiosis of what Shakib likens to the _aliat_ (fattail) of our Asiatic sheep. Surely, there be more devils under such an _aliat_ than under the hat of a Jesuit. And Khalid is the first to discover this. Both have been ensnared, however, and both, when in the snare, have been infernally inspired.

What Khalid wrote, when he was under the influence of feminine curves, was preserved by Shakib, who remarks that one evening, after returning from the Park, Khalid said to him, 'I am going to write a poem.' A fortnight later, he hands him the following, which he jealously kept among his papers.

I dreamt I was a donkey-boy again.

Out on the sun-swept roads of Baalbek, I tramp behind my burro, trolling my _mulayiah_.

At noon, I pa.s.s by a garden redolent of mystic scents and tarry awhile.

Under an orange tree, on the soft green gra.s.s, I stretch my limbs.

The daisies, the anemones, and the cyclamens are round me pressing: The anemone buds hold out to me their precious rubies; the daisies kiss me in the eyes and lips; and the cyclamens shake their powder in my hair.

On the wall, the roses are nodding, smiling; above me the orange blossoms surrender themselves to the wooing breeze; and on yonder rock the salamander sits, complacent and serene.

I take a daisy, and, boy as boys go, question its petals: Married man or monk, I ask, plucking them off one by one, And the last petal says, Monk.

I perfume my fingers with crumpled cyclamens, cover my face with the dark-eyed anemones, and fall asleep.

And my burro sleeps beneath the wall, in the shadow of nodding roses.

And the black-birds too are dozing, and the bulbuls flitting by whisper with their wings, 'salaam.'

Peace and salaam!

The bulbul, the black-bird, the salamander, the burro, and the burro-boy, are to each other shades of noon-day sun: Happy, loving, generous, and free;-- As happy as each other, and as free.

We do what we please in Nature's realm, go where we please; No one's offended, no one ever wronged.

No sentinels hath Nature, no police.

But lo, a goblin as I sleep comes forth;-- A goblin taller than the tallest poplar, who carries me upon his neck to the Park in far New York.

Here women, light-heeled, heavy-haunched, pace up and down the flags in graceful gait.

My roses these, I cry, and my orange blossoms.

But the goblin placed his hand upon my mouth, and I was dumb.

The cyclamens, the anemones, the daisies, I saw them, but I could not speak to them.

The goblin placed his hand upon my mouth, and I was dumb.

O take me back to my own groves, I cried, or let me speak.

But he threw me off his shoulders in a huff, among the daisies and the cyclamens.

Alone among them, but I could not speak.

He had tied my tongue, the goblin, and left me there alone.

And in front of me, and towards me, and beside me, Walked Allah's fairest cyclamens and anemones.

I smell them, and the tears flow down my cheeks; I can not even like the noon-day bulbul Whisper with my wings, salaam!

I sit me on a bench and weep.

And in my heart I sing O, let me be a burro-boy again; O, let me sleep among the cyclamens Of my own land.

Shades of Whitman! But Whitman, thou Donkey, never weeps. Whitman, if that goblin tried to silence him, would have wrung his neck, after he had ridden upon it. The above, nevertheless, deserves the s.p.a.ce we give it here, as it shadows forth one of the essential elements of Khalid's spiritual make-up. But this slight symptom of that disease we named, this morbidness incident to adolescence, is eventually overcome by a dictionary and a grammar. Ay, Khalid henceforth shall cease to scour the horizon for that vague something of his dreams; he has become far-sighted enough by the process to see the necessity of pursuing in America something more spiritual than peddling crosses and scapulars. Especially in this America, where the alphabet is spread broadcast, and free of charge. And so, he sets himself to the task of self-education. He feels the embryo stir within him, and in the squeamishness of enceintes.h.i.+p, he asks but for a few of the fruits of knowledge. Ah, but he becomes voracious of a sudden, and the little pocket dictionary is devoured entirely in three sittings. Hence his folly of treating his thoughts and fancies, as he was treated by the goblin. For do not words often rob a fancy of its tongue, or a thought of its soul? Many of the pieces Khalid wrote when he was devouring dictionaries were finally disposed of in a most picturesque manner, as we shall relate. And a few were given to Shakib, of which that Dream of Cyclamens was preserved.

And Khalid's motto was, "One book at a time." He would not enc.u.mber himself with books any more than he would with shoes. But that the mind might not go barefoot, he always bought a new book before destroying the one in hand. Destroying? Yes; for after reading or studying a book, he warms his hands upon its flames, this Khalid, or makes it serve to cook a pot of _mojadderah_. In this extraordinary and outrageous manner, barbarously capricious, he would baptise the ideal in the fire of the real. And thus, glowing with health and confidence and conceit, he enters another Park from which he escapes in the end, sad and wan and bankrupt. Of a truth, many attractions and distractions are here; else he could not forget the peddling-box and the light-heeled, heavy-haunched women of Battery Park. Here are swings for the mind; toboggan-chutes for the soul; merry-go-rounds for the fancy; and many devious and alluring paths where one can lose himself for years. A sanitarium this for the hebephreniac. And like all sanitariums, you go into it with one disease and come out of it with ten. Had Shakib been forewarned of Khalid's mind, had he even seen him at the gate before he entered, he would have given him a few hints about the cross-signs and barbed-cordons therein. But should he not have divined that Khalid soon or late was coming? Did _he_ not call enough to him, and aloud? "Get thee behind me on this dromedary,"

our Scribe, reading his Al-Mutanabbi, would often say to his comrade, "and come from this desert of barren gold, if but for a day,--come out with me to the oasis of poesy."

But Khalid would only ride alone. And so, he begins his course of self-education. But how he shall manage it, in this cart-before-the-horse fas.h.i.+on, the reader shall know. Words before rules, ideas before systems, epigrams before texts,--that is Khalid's fancy. And that seems feasible, though not logical; it will prove effectual, too, if one finally brushed the text and glanced at the rules. For an epigram, when it takes possession of one, goes farther in influencing his thoughts and actions than whole tomes of ethical culture science. You know perhaps how the Arabs conquered the best half of the world with an epigram, a word. And Khalid loves a fine-sounding, easy-flowing word; a word of supple joints, so to speak; a word that you can twist and roll out, flexible as a bamboo switch, resilient as a fine steel rapier.

But once Shakib, after reading one of Khalid's first attempts, gets up in the night when his friend is asleep, takes from the bottom drawer of the peddling-box the evil-working dictionary, and places therein a grammar.

This touch of delicacy, this fine piece of criticism, brief and neat, without words withal, Khalid this time is not slow to grasp and appreciate. He plunges, therefore, headlong into the grammar, turns a few somersaults in the mazes of Sibawai and Naftawai, and coming out with a broken noddle, writes on the door the following: "What do I care about your theories of nouns and verbs? Whether the one be derived from the other, concerns not me. But this I know, after stumbling once or twice in your labyrinths, one comes out parsing the verb, to run.

Indeed, verbs are more essential than nouns and adjectives. A noun can be represented pictorially; but how, pictorially, can you represent a noun in motion,--Khalid, for instance, running out of your labyrinths? Even an abstract state can be represented in a picture, but a transitive state never. The richest language, therefore, is not the one which can boast of a thousand names for the lion or two thousand for the camel, but the one whose verbs have a complete and perfect gamut of moods and tenses."

That is why, although writing in Arabic, Khalid prefers English. For the Arabic verb is confined to three tenses, the primary ones only; and to break through any of these in any degree, requires such crowbars as only auxiliaries and other verbs can furnish. For this and many other reasons Khalid stops short in the mazes of Sibawai, runs out of them exasperated, depressed, and never for a long time after looks in that direction. He is now curious to know if the English language have its Sibawais and Naftawais. And so, he buys him a grammar, and there finds the way somewhat devious, too, but not enough to const.i.tute a maze. The men who wrote these grammars must have had plenty of time to do a little useful work. They do not seem to have walked leisurely in flowing robes disserting a life-long dissertation on the origin and descent of a preposition. One day Shakib is amazed by finding the grammars page by page tacked on the walls of the cellar and Khalid pacing around leisurely lingering a moment before each page, as if he were in an art gallery. That is how he tackled his subject. And that is why he and Shakib begin to quarrel. The idea!

That a fledgling should presume to pick flaws. To Shakib, who is textual to a hair, this is intolerable. And that state of oneness between them shall be subject hereafter to "the corrosive action of various unfriendly agents." For Khalid, who has never yet been snaffled, turns restively from the bit which his friend, for his own sake, would put in his mouth. The rupture follows. The two for a while wend their way in opposite directions. Shakib still cheris.h.i.+ng and cultivating his bank account, shoulders his peddling-box and jogs along with his inspiring demon, under whose auspices, he tells us, he continues to write verse and gull with his brummagems the pious dames of the suburbs. And Khalid sits on his peddling-box for hours pondering on the necessity of disposing of it somehow. For now he scarcely makes more than a few peddling-trips each month, and when he returns, he does not go to the bank to add to his balance, but to draw from it. That is why the accounts of the two Syrians do not fare alike; Shakib's is gaining in weight, Khalid's is wasting away.

Yes, the strenuous spirit is a long time dead in Khalid. He is gradually reverting to the Oriental instinct. And when he is not loafing in Battery Park, carving his name on the bench, he is burrowing in the shelves of some second-hand book-shop or dreaming in the dome of some Broadway skysc.r.a.per. Does not this seem inevitable, however, considering the palingenetic burden within him? And is not loafing a necessary prelude to the travail? Khalid, of course, felt the necessity of this, not knowing the why and wherefor. And from the vast world of paper-bound souls, for he relished but pamphlets at the start--they do not make much smoke in the fire, he would say--from that vast world he could command the greatest of the great to help him support the loafing while. And as by a miracle, he came out of that chaos of contending spirits without a scratch. He enjoyed the belligerency of pamphleteers as an American would enjoy a prize fight. But he sided with no one; he took from every one his best and consigned him to Im-Hanna's kitchen. Torquemada could not have done better; but Khalid, it is hoped, will yet atone for his crimes.

Monsieur Pascal, with whom he quarrels before he burns, had a particular influence upon him. He could not rest after reading his "Thoughts" until he read the Bible. And of the Prophets of the Old Testament he had an especial liking for Jeremiah and Isaiah. And once he bought a cheap print of Jeremiah which he tacked on the wall of his cellar. From the Khedivial Library MS. we give two excerpts relating to Pascal and this Prophet.

"O Monsieur Pascal,

"I tried hard to hate and detest myself, as you advise, and I found that I could not by so doing love G.o.d. 'Tis in loving the divine in Man, in me, in you, that we rise to the love of our Maker. And in giving your proofs of the true religion, you speak of the surprising measures of the Christian Faith, enjoining man to acknowledge himself vile, base, abominable, and obliging him at the same time to aspire towards a resemblance of his Maker.

Now, I see in this a foreshadowing of the theory of evolution, nay a divine warrant for it. Nor is it the Christian religion alone which unfolds to man the twofold mystery of his nature; others are as dark and as bright on either side of the pole. And Philosophy conspiring with Biology will not consent to the apotheosis of Man, unless he wear on his breast a symbol of his tail.... _Au-revoir_, Monsieur Pascal, Remember me to St.

Augustine."

"O Jeremiah,

"Thy picture, sitting among the ruins of the City of Zion, appeals to my soul. Why, I know not. It may be because I myself once sat in that posture among the ruins of my native City of Baal. But the ruins did not grieve me as did the uncle who slammed the door in my face that night. True, I wept in the ruins, but not over them. Something else had punctured the bladderets of my tears. And who knows who punctured thine, O Jeremiah? Perhaps a daughter of Tamar had stuck a bodkin in thine eye, and in lamenting thine own fate--Pardon me, O Jeremiah. Melikes not all these tears of thine. Nor did Zion and her children in Juhannam, I am sure.... Instead of a scroll in thy hand, I would have thee hold a harp. Since King David, Allah has not thought of endowing his prophets with musical talent.

Why, think what an honest prophet could accomplish if his message were put into music. And withal, if he himself could sing it. Yes, our modern Jeremiahs should all take music lessons; for no matter how deep and poignant our sorrows, we can always rise from them, harp in hand, to an ecstasy, joyous and divine."

Now, connect with this the following from the _Histoire Intime_, and you have the complete history of this Prophet in Khalid's cellar. For Khalid himself never gives us the facts in the case. Our Scribe, however, comes not short in this.

"The picture of the Prophet Jeremiah," writes he, "Khalid hung on the wall, above his bed. And every night he would look up to it invokingly, muttering I know not what. One evening, while in this posture, he took up his lute and trolled a favourite ditty. For three days and three nights that picture hung on the wall. And on the morning of the fourth day--it was a cold December morning, I remember--he took it down and lighted the fire with it. The Pamphlet he had read a few days since, he also threw into the fire, and thereupon called to me saying, 'Come, Shakib, and warm yourself.'"

And the Pamphlet, we learn, which was thus baptised in the same fire with the Prophet's picture, was Tom Paine's _Age of Reason_.

CHAPTER VI

THE SUMMER AFTERNOON OF A SHAM

For two years and more Khalid's young mind went leaping from one swing to another, from one carousel or toboggan-chute to the next, without having any special object in view, without knowing why and wherefor.

He even entered such mazes of philosophy, such labyrinths of mysticism as put those of the Arabian grammaticasters in the shade. To him, education was a sport, pursued in a free spirit after his own fancy, without method or discipline. For two years and more he did little but ramble thus, drawing meanwhile on his account in the bank, and burning pamphlets.

One day he pa.s.ses by a second-hand book-shop, which is in the financial hive of the city, hard by a church and within a stone's throw from the Stock Exchange. The owner, a shabby venerable, standing there, pipe in mouth, between piles of pamphlets and little pyramids of books, attracts Khalid. He too occupies a cellar. And withal he resembles the Prophet in the picture which was burned with Tom Paine's _Age of Reason_. Nothing in the face at least is amiss. A flowing, serrated, milky beard, with a touch of gold around the mouth; an aquiline nose; deep set blue eyes canopied with s.h.a.ggy brows; a forehead broad and high; a dome a little frowsy but not guilty of a hair--the Prophet Jeremiah! Only one thing, a clay pipe which he seldom took out of his mouth except to empty and refill, seemed to take from the prophetic solemnity of the face.