The Book of Khalid

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by Ameen Rihani


  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 pass by a garden redolent of mystic scents and tarry awhile.

  Under an orange tree, on the soft green grass, 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 space we give it here, as it shadows forth one of the essential elements of Khalid’s spiritual makeup. 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 enceinteship, 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 encumber 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 fashion, 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 k
now 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 constitute 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 cherishing 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 skyscraper. 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 God. ’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 passes 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 shaggy 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. Otherwise, he is as grim and sullen as the Prophet. In his voice, however, there is a supple sweetness which the hard lines in his face do not express. Khalid nicknames him second-hand Jerry, makes to him professions of friendship, and for many months comes every day to see him. He comes with his bucket, as he would say, to Jerry’s well. For the two, the young man and the old man of the cellar, the neophite and the master, would chat about literature and the makers of it for hours. And what a sea of information is therein under that frowsy dome. Withal, second-hand Jerry is a man of ideals and abstractions, exhibiting now and then an heretical twist which is as agreeable as the vermiculations in a mahogany. “We moderns,” said he once to Khalid, “are absolutely one-sided. Here, for instance, is my book-shop, there is the Church, and yonder is the Stock Exchange. Now, the men who frequent
them, and though their elbows touch, are as foreign to each other as is a jerboa to a polar bear. Those who go to Church do not go to the Stock Exchange; those who spend their days on the Stock Exchange seldom go to Church; and those who frequent my cellar go neither to the one nor the other. That is why our civilisation produces so many bigots, so many philistines, so many pedants and prigs. The Stock Exchange is as necessary to Society as the Church, and the Church is as vital, as essential to its spiritual well-being as my book-shop. And not until man develops his mental, spiritual and physical faculties to what Matthew Arnold calls ‘a harmonious perfection,’ will he be able to reach the heights from which Idealism is waving to him.”

  Thus would the master discourse, and the neophite, sitting on the steps of the cellar, smoking his cigarette, listens, admiring, pondering. And every time he comes with his bucket, Jerry would be standing there, between his little pyramids of books, pipe in mouth, hands in pockets, ready for the discourse. He would also conduct through his underworld any one who had the leisure and inclination. But fortunately for Khalid, the people of this district are either too rich to buy second-hand books, or too snobbish to stop before this curiosity shop of literature. Hence the master is never too busy; he is always ready to deliver the discourse.

 

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