The Book of Khalid (5 page)

And Shakib, directly after swearing that he saw a tear in his eye, writes the following: “Up to this time I observed in my friend only the dominating traits of a hard-headed, hard-hearted boy, stubborn, impetuous, intractable. But from the time he related to me his dream, a change in his character was become manifest. In fact a new phase was being gradually unfolded. Three things I must emphasise in this connection: namely, the first dream he dreamt in a foreign land, the first time he looked pensive and profound, and the first tear he shed before we entered New York. These are keys to the secret chamber of one’s soul.”

And now, that the doors, by virtue of our Scribe’s open-sesames, are thrown open, we enter,
bismillah
.

NOT IN OUR MAKE-UP, TO BE SURE,—NOT IN THE pose which is preceded by the tantaras of a trumpet,—do the essential traits in our character first reveal themselves. But truly in the little things the real self is exteriorised. Shakib observes closely the rapid changes in his co-adventurer’s humour, the shadowy traits which at that time he little understood. And now, by applying his palm to his front, he illumines those chambers of which he speaks, and also the niches therein. He helps us to understand the insignificant points which mark the rapid undercurrents of the seemingly sluggish soul of Khalid. Not in vain, therefore, does he crystallise for us that first tear he shed in the harbour of Manhattan. But his gush about the recondite beauty of this pearl of melancholy, shall not be intended upon the gustatory nerves of the Reader. This then we note—his description of New York harbour.

“And is this the gate of Paradise,” he asks, “or the port of some subterrestrial city guarded by the Jinn? What a marvel of enchantment is everything around us! What manifestations of industrial strength, what monstrosities of wealth and power, are here! These vessels proudly putting to sea; these tenders scurrying to meet the Atlantic greyhound which is
majestically moving up the bay; these barges loading and unloading schooners from every strand, distant and near; these huge lighters carrying even railroads over the water; these fire-boats scudding through the harbour shrilling their sirens; these careworn, grim, strenuous multitudes ferried across from one enchanted shore to another; these giant structures tickling heaven’s sides; these cable bridges, spanning rivers, uniting cities; and this superterrestrial goddess, torch in hand—wake up, Khalid, and behold these wonders. Salaam, this enchanted City! There is the Brooklyn Bridge, and here is the Statue of Liberty which people speak of, and which are as famous as the Cedars of Lebanon.”

But Khalid is as impassive as the bronze goddess herself. He leans over the rail, his hand supporting his cheek, and gazes into the ooze. The stolidity of his expression is appalling. With his mouth open as usual, his lips relaxed, his tongue sticking out through the set teeth,—he looks as if his head were in a noose. But suddenly he braces up, runs down for his lute, and begins to serenade—Greater New York?

No; not toward this City does his heart flap its wings of song. He is on another sea, in another harbour. Indeed, what are these wonders as compared with those of the City of Love? The Statue of Eros there is more imposing than the Statue of Liberty here. And the bridges are not of iron and concrete, but of rainbows and—moonshine! Indeed, both these lads are now on the wharf of enchantment; the one on the palpable, the sensuous, the other on the impalpable and unseen. But both, alas, are suddenly, but temporarily,
disenchanted as they are jostled out of the steamer into the barge which brings them to the Juhannam of Ellis Island. Here, the unhappy children of the steerage are dumped into the Bureau of Emigration as—such stuff! For even in the land of equal rights and freedom, we have a right to expect from others the courtesy and decency which we ourselves do not have to show, or do not know.

These are sturdy and adventurous foreigners whom the grumpy officers jostle and hustle about. For neither poverty, nor oppression, nor both together can drive a man out of his country, unless the soul within him awaken. Indeed, many a misventurous cowering peasant continues to live on bread and olives in his little village, chained in the fear of dying of hunger in a foreign land. Only the brave and daring spirits hearken to the voice of discontent within them. They give themselves up to the higher aspirations of the soul, no matter how limited such aspirations might be, regardless of the dangers and hardship of a long sea voyage, and the precariousness of their plans and hopes. There may be nothing noble in renouncing one’s country, in abandoning one’s home, in forsaking one’s people; but is there not something remarkable in this great move one makes? Whether for better or for worse, does not the emigrant place himself above his country, his people and his Government, when he turns away from them, when he goes forth propelled by that inner self which demands of him a new life?

And might it not be a better, a cleaner, a higher life? What say our Masters of the Island of Ellis? Are not these straggling, smelling, downcast emigrants almost as clean inwardly, and as pure, as the grumpy officers who harass and humiliate them? Is not that spirit of discontent which they cherish, and for which they carry the cross, so to speak,
across the sea, deserving of a little consideration, a little civility, a little kindness?

Even louder than this Shakib cries out, while Khalid open-mouthed sucks his tongue. Here at the last station, where the odours of disinfectants are worse than the stench of the steerage, they await behind the bars their turn; stived with Italian and Hungarian fellow sufferers, uttering such whimpers of expectancy, exchanging such gestures of hope. Soon they shall be brought forward to be examined by the doctor and the interpreting officer; the one shall pry their purses, the other their eyes. For in this United States of America we want clear-sighted citizens at least. And no cold-purses, if the matter can be helped. But neither the eyes, alas, nor the purses of our two emigrants are conformable to the Law; the former are filled with granulations of trachoma, the latter have been emptied by the sharpers of Marseilles. Which means that they shall be detained for the present; and if within a fortnight nothing turns up in their favour, they shall certainly be deported.

Trachoma! a little granulation on the inner surface of the eyelids, what additional misery does it bring upon the poor deported emigrant? We are asked to shed a tear for him, to weep with him over his blasted hopes, his strangled aspirations, his estate in the mother country sold or mortgaged,—in either case lost,—and his seed of a new life crushed in its cotyledon by the physician who might be short-sighted himself, or even blind. But the law must be enforced for the sake of the clear-sighted citizens of the Republic. We will have nothing to do with these poor blear-eyed foreigners.

And thus our grievous Scribe would continue, if we did not exercise the prerogative of our Editorial Divan. Rather let us pursue our narration. Khalid is now in the hospital,
awaiting further development in his case. But in Shakib’s, whose eyes are far gone in trachoma, the decision of the Board of Emigration is final, irrevokable. And so, after being detained a week in the Emigration pen, the unfortunate Syrian must turn his face again toward the East. Not out into the City, but out upon the sea, he shall be turned adrift. The grumpy officer shall grumpishly enforce the decision of the Board by handing our Scribe to the Captain of the first steamer returning to Europe—if our Scribe can be found! For this flyaway son of a Phoenician did not seem to wait for the decision of the polyglot Judges of the Emigration Board.

And that he did escape, we are assured. For one morning he eludes the grumpy officer, and sidles out among his Italian neighbours who were permitted to land. See him genuflecting now, to kiss the curbstone and thank Allah that he is free. But before he can enjoy his freedom, before he can sit down and chuckle over the success of his escapade, he must bethink him of Khalid. He will not leave him to the mercy of the honourable Agents of the Law, if he can help it. Trachoma, he knows, is a hard case to cure. And in ten days, under the care of the doctors, it might become worse. Straightway, therefore, he puts himself to the dark task. A few visits to the Hospital where Khalid is detained—the patients in those days were not held at Ellis Island—and the intrigue is afoot. On the third or fourth visit, we can not make out which, a note in Arabic is slipt into Khalid’s pocket, and with a significant Arabic sign, Shakib takes himself off.

The evening of that very day, the trachoma-afflicted Syrian was absent from the ward. He was carried off by Iblis,—the porter and a few Greenbacks assisting. Yes, even Shakib, who knew only a few English monosyllables, could here make himself understood. For money is one of the two
universal languages of the world, the other being love. Indeed, money and love are as eloquent in Turkey and Dahomey as they are in Paris or New York.

And here we reach one of those hedges in the
Histoire Intime
which we must go through in spite of the warning-signs. Between two paragraphs, to be plain, in the one of which we are told how the two Syrians established themselves as merchants in New York, in the other, how and wherefor they shouldered the peddling-box and took to the road, there is a crossed paragraph containing a most significant revelation. It seems that after giving the matter some serious thought, our Scribe came to the conclusion that it is not proper to incriminate his illustrious Master. But here is a confession which a hundred crosses can not efface. And if he did not want to bring the matter to our immediate cognisance, why, we ask, did he not re-write the page? Why did he not cover well that said paragraph with crosses and arabesques? We do suspect him here of chicanery; for by this plausible recantation he would shift the responsibility to the shoulders of the Editor, if the secret is divulged. Be this as it may, no red crosses can conceal from us the astounding confession, which we now give out. For the two young Syrians, who were smuggled out of their country by the boatmen of Beirut, and who smuggled themselves into the city of New York (we beg the critic’s pardon; for, being foreigners ourselves, we ought to be permitted to stretch this term, smuggle, to cover an Arabic metaphor, or to smuggle into it a foreign meaning), these two Syrians, we say, became, in their capacity of merchants, smugglers of the most ingenious and most evasive type.

We now note the following, which pertains to their business. We learn that they settled in the Syrian Quarter
directly after clearing their merchandise. And before they entered their cellar, we are assured, they washed their hands of all intrigues and were shrived of their sins by the Maronite priest of the Colony. For they were pious in those days, and right Catholics. ’Tis further set down in the
Histoire Intime
:

“We rented a cellar, as deep and dark and damp as could be found. And our landlord was a Teague, nay, a kind-hearted old Irishman, who helped us put up the shelves, and never called for the rent in the dawn of the first day of the month. In the front part of this cellar we had our shop; in the rear, our home. On the floor we laid our mattresses, on the shelves, our goods. And never did we stop to think who in this case was better off. The safety of our merchandise before our own. But ten days after we had settled down, the water issued forth from the floor and inundated our shop and home. It rose so high that it destroyed half of our capital stock and almost all our furniture. And yet, we continued to live in the cellar, because, perhaps, every one of our compatriot-merchants did so. We were all alike subject to these inundations in the winter season. I remember when the water first rose in our store, Khalid was so hard set and in such a pucker that he ran out capless and in his shirt sleeves to discover in the next street the source of the flood. And one day, when we were pumping out the water he asked me if I thought this was easier than rolling our roofs in Baalbek. For truly, the paving-roller is child’s play to this pump. And a leaky roof is better than an inundated cellar.”

However, this is not the time for brooding. They have to pump ahead to save what remained of their capital stock. But Khalid, nevertheless, would brood and jabber. And what an inundation of ideas, and what questions!

“Think you,” he asks, “that the inhabitants of this New
World are better off than those of the Old?—Can you imagine mankind living in a huge cellar of a world and you and I pumping the water out of its bottom?—I can see the palaces on which you waste your rhymes, but mankind live in them only in the flesh. The soul I tell you, still occupies the basement, even the sub-cellar. And an inundated cellar at that. The soul, Shakib, is kept below, although the high places are vacant.”

And his partner sputters out his despair; for instead of helping to pump out the water, Khalid stands there gazing into it, as if by some miracle he would draw it out with his eyes or with his breath. And the poor Poet cries out, “Pump! the water is gaining on us, and our shop is going to ruin. Pump!” Whereupon the lazy, absent-minded one resumes pumping, while yearning all the while for the plashing stone-rollers and the purling eaves of his home in Baalbek. And once in a pinch,—they are labouring under a peltering rain,—he stops as is his wont to remind Shakib of the Arabic saying, “From the dripping ceiling to the running gargoyle.” He is labouring again under a hurricane of ideas. And again he asks, “Are you sure we are better off here?”

And our poor Scribe, knee-deep in the water below, blusters out curses, which Khalid heeds not. “I am tired of this job,” he growls; “the stone-roller never drew so much on my strength, nor did muleteering. Ah, for my dripping ceiling again, for are we not now under the running gargoyle?” And he reverts into a stupor, leaving the world to the poet and the pump.

For five years and more they lead such a life in the cellar. And they do not move out of it, lest they excite the envy of their compatriots. But instead of sleeping on the floor, they stretch themselves on the counters. The rising tide teaches
them this little wisdom, which keeps the doctor and Izräil away. Their merchandise, however,—their crosses, and scapulars and prayer-beads,—are beyond hope of recovery. For what the rising tide spares, the rascally flyaway peddlers carry away. That is why they themselves shoulder the box and take to the road. And the pious old dames of the suburbs, we are told, receive them with such exclamations of joy and wonder, and almost tear their coats to get from them a sacred token. For you must remember, they are from the Holy Land. Unlike their goods, they at least are genuine. And every Saturday night, after beating the hoof in the country and making such fabulous profits on their false Holy-Land gewgaws, they return to their cellar happy and content.