Part 9 (1/2)
”My mother and I can get along without the interference of our neighbours.”
”Yes, truly. But you will find great solace in going to Church and ceasing your doubts.”
Khalid rises indignant.
”I only doubt the Pharisees, O Reverend, and their Church I would destroy to-day if I could.”
”My child--”
”Here is your hat, O Reverend, and pardon me--you see, I can hardly speak, I can hardly breathe. Good day.”
And he walks out of the house, leaving Father Farouche to digest his ire at his ease, and to wonder, with his three-cornered hat in hand, at the savage demeanour of the son of their pious porter. ”Your son,”
addressing the mother as he stands under the door-lintel, ”is not only an infidel, but he is also crazy. And for such wretches there is an asylum here and a Juhannam hereafter.”
And the poor mother, her face suffused with tears, prostrates herself before the Virgin, praying, beating her breast, invoking with her tongue and hand and heart; while Farouche returns to his coop to hatch under his three-cornered hat, the famous Jesuit-egg of intrigue. That hat, which can outwit the monk's hood and the hundred fabled devils under it, that hat, with its many gargoyles, a visible symbol of the leaky conscience of the Jesuit, that hat, O Khalid, which you would have kicked out of your house, has eventually succeeded in ousting YOU, and will do its mighty best yet to send you to the Bosphorus.
Indeed, to serve their purpose, these honest servitors of Jesus will even act as spies to the criminal Government of Abd'ul-Hamid. Read Shakib's account.
”About a fortnight after Khalid's banishment from home,” he writes, ”a booklet was published in Beirut, setting forth the history of Ignatius Loyola and the purports and intents of Jesuitism. On the cover it was expressly declared that the booklet is translated from the English, and the Jesuits, who are noted for their scholarly attainments, could have discovered this for themselves without the explicit declaration.
But they did not deem it necessary to make such a discovery then. It seemed rather imperative to maintain the contrary and try to prove it. Now, Khalid having received a copy of this booklet from a friend in Beirut, reads it and writes back, saying that it is not a translation but a mutilation, rather, of one of Thomas Carlyle's Latter-Day Pamphlets ent.i.tled _Jesuitism_. This letter must have reached them together with Father Farouche's report on Khalid's infidelity, just about the time the booklet was circulating in Baalbek. For in the following Number of their _Weekly Journal_ an article, stuffed and padded with execrations and anathema, is published against the book and its anonymous author. From this I quote the following, which is by no means the most erring and most poisonous of their shafts.
”'Such a Pamphlet,' exclaims the scholarly Jesuit Editor, 'was never written by Thomas Carlyle, as some here, from ignorance or malice, a.s.sert. For that philosopher, of all the thinkers of his day, believed in G.o.d and in the divinity of Jesus His Son, and could never descend to these foul and filthy depths. He never soiled his pen in the putrescence of falsehood and incendiarism. The author of this blasphemous and pernicious Pamphlet, therefore, in trying to father his infidelity, his sedition, and his lies, on Carlyle, is doubly guilty of a most heinous crime. And we suspect, we know, and for the welfare of the community we hope to be able soon to point out openly, who and where this vile one is. Yes, only an atheist and anarchist is capable of such villainous mendacity, such unutterable wickedness and treachery. Now, we would especially call upon our readers in Baalbek to be watchful and vigilant, for among them is one, recently come back from America, who harbours under his bushy hair the atheism and anarchy of decadent Europe, etc, etc.'
”And this is followed by secret orders from their Head Office to the Superior of their Branch in Zahleh, to go on with the work hinted in the article aforesaid. Let it not be supposed that I make this statement in jaundice or malice. For the man who was instigated to do this foul work subsequently sold the secret. And the Kaimkam, my friend, when speaking to me of the matter, referred to the article in question, and told me that Khalid was denounced to the Government by the Jesuits as an anarchist. 'And lest I be compelled,' he continued, 'to execute such orders in his case as I might receive any day, I advise you to spirit him away at once.'”
But though the Jesuits have succeeded in kicking Khalid out of his home, they did not succeed, thanks to Shakib, in sending him to the Bosphorus. Meanwhile, they sit quiet, hatching another egg.
CHAPTER VI
FLOUNCES AND RUFFLES
Now, that there is a lull in the machinations of Jesuitry, we shall turn a page or two in Shakib's account of the courting of Khalid. And apparently everything is propitious. The fates, at least, in the beginning, are not unkind. For the feud between Khalid's father and uncle shall now help to forward Khalid's love-affair. Indeed, the father of Najma, to spite his brother, opens to the banished nephew his door and blinks at the spooning which follows. And such an interminable yarn our Scribe spins out about it, that Khalid and Najma do seem the silliest lackadaisical spoonies under the sun. But what we have evolved from the narration might have for our readers some curious alien phase of interest.
Here then are a few beads from Shakib's romantic string. When Najma cooks _mojadderah_ for her father, he tells us, she never fails to come to the booth of pine boughs with a platter of it. And this to Khalid was very manna. For never, while supping on this single dish, would he dream of the mensal and kitchen luxuries of the Hermitage in Bronx Park. In fact, he never envied the pork-eating Americans, the beef-eating English, or the polyphagic French. ”Here is a dish of lentils fit for the G.o.ds,” he would say....
When Najma goes to the spring for water, Khalid chancing to meet her, takes the jar from her shoulder, saying, ”Return thou home; I will bring thee water.” And straightway to the spring hies he, where the women there gathered fill his ears with t.i.ttering, questioning tattle as he is filling his jar. ”I wish I were Najma,” says one, as he pa.s.ses by, the jar of water on his shoulder. ”Would you cement his brain, if you were?” puts in another. And thus would they gibe and joke every time Khalid came to the spring with Najma's jar....
One day he comes to his uncle's house and finds his betrothed ribboning and beading some new lingerie for her rich neighbour's daughter. He sits down and helps her in the work, writing meanwhile, between the acts, an alphabetic ideology on Art and Life. But as they are beading the vests and skirts and other articles of richly laced linen underwear, Najma holds up one of these and navely asks, ”Am I not to have some such, _ya habibi_ (O my Love)?” And Khalid, affecting like bucolic innocence, replies, ”What do we need them for, my heart?”
With which counter-question Najma is silenced, convinced.
Finally, to show to what degree of ecstasy they had soared without searing their wings or losing a single feather thereof, the following deserves mention. In the dusk one day, Khalid visits Najma and finds her oiling and lighting the lamp. As she beholds him under the door-lintel, the lamp falls from her hands, the kerosene blazes on the floor, and the straw mat takes fire. They do not heed this--they do not see it--they are on the wings of an ecstatic embrace. And the father, chancing to arrive in the nick of time, with a curse and a cuff, saves them and his house from the conflagration.
Aside from these curious and not insignificant instances, these radiations of a giddy hidden flame of heart-fire, this melting gum of spooning on the bark of the tree of love, we turn to a scene in the Temple of Venus which unfolds our future plans--our hopes and dreams.
But we feel that the Reader is beginning to hanker for a few pieces of description of Najma's charms. Gentle Reader, this Work is neither a Novel, nor a Pa.s.sport. And we are exceeding sorry we can not tell you anything about the colour and size of Najma's eyes; the shape and curves of her brows and lips; the tints and shades in her cheeks; and the exact length of her figure and hair. Shakib leaves us in the dark about these essentials, and we must needs likewise leave you. Our Scribe thinks he has said everything when he speaks of her as a huri.
But this paradisal t.i.tle among our Arabic writers and verse-makers is become worse than the Sultan's Medjidi decorations. It is bestowed alike on every drab and trollop as on the very few who really deserve it. Let us rank it, therefore, with the Medjidi decorations and pa.s.s on.
But Khalid, who has seen enough of the fair, would not be attracted to Najma, enchanted by her, if she were not endowed with such of the celestial treasures as rank above the visible lines of beauty. Our Scribe speaks of the ”purity and navete of her soul as purest sources of felicity and inspiration.” Indeed, if she were not constant in love, she would not have spurned the many opportunities in the absence of Khalid; and had she not a fine discerning sense of real worth, she would not have surrendered herself to her poor ostracised cousin; and if she were not intuitively, preternaturally wise, she would not marry an enemy of the Jesuits, a bearer withal of infiltrated lungs and a shrunken windpipe. ”There is a great advantage in having a sickly husband,” she once said to Shakib, ”it lessons a woman in the heavenly virtues of our Virgin Mother, in patient endurance and pity, in charity, magnanimity, and pure love.” What, with these sublimities of character, need we know of her visible charms, or lack of them? She might deserve the t.i.tle Shakib bestows upon her; she might be a real huri, for all we know? In that event, the outward charms correspond, and Khalid is a lucky dog--if some one can keep the Jesuits away.
This, then, is our picture of Najma, to whom he is now relating, in the Temple of Venus, of the dangers he had pa.s.sed and the felicities of the beduin life he has in view. It is evening. The moon struggles through the poplars to light the Temple for them, and the ambrosial breeze caresses their cheeks.