The Book of Khalid (22 page)

We then venture a question about the sack-cloth, a trace of which was seen under his tunic sleeve. And fetching a deep sigh, he gazes on the drooping sweet basils in silence. No, he likes not to speak of these mortifications of the flesh. After some meditation he tells us, however, that the sack-cloth on the first month is annoying, torturing. “But the flesh,” he continues naïvely, “is inured to it, as the pile, in the course of time, is broken and softened down.” And with an honest look in his eyes, he smiled and sighs his assurance. For his Reverence always punctuates his speech with these sweet sighs of joy. The serving-monk now comes to whisper a word in his ear, and we are asked to “scent the air” a while in the vineyard.

This lovely patch of terrace-ground the Hermit tills and cultivates alone. And so thoroughly the work is done that hardly a stone can be seen in the soil. And so even and regular are the terrace walls that one would think they were built with line and plummet. The vines are handsomely trimmed and trellised, and here and there, to break the monotony of the rows, a fig, an apricot, an almond, or an olive, spreads its umbrageous boughs. Indeed, it is most cheering in the wilderness, most refreshing to the senses, this lovely vineyard, the loveliest we have seen.

Father Abd’ul-Messiah might be a descendant of Simeon of the Pillar for all we know; but instead of perching on the top of it, he breaks it down and builds with its stones a wall of his vineyard. Here he comes with his serving-monk, and we resume the conversation under the almond tree.

“You should come in the grape season to taste of my fruits,” says he.

“And do you like the grape?” we ask.

“Yes, but I prefer to cultivate it.”

“Throughout the season,” the serving-monk puts in, “and though the grapes be so plentiful, he tastes them not.”

“No?”

The Hermit is silent; for, as we have said, he is reluctant in making such confessions. Virtue, once bragged about, once you pride yourself upon it, ceases to be such.

In his vineyard the Hermit is most thorough, even scientific. One would think that he believed only in work. No; he does not sprinkle the vines with holy water to keep the grubs away. Herein he has sense enough to know that only in
kabrit
(sulphur) is the phylactery which destroys the phylloxera.

“And what do you do when you are not working in your vineyard or praying?”

“I have always somewhat to do, always. For to be idle is to open the door for Iblis. I might walk up and down this corridor, counting the slabs therein, and consider my time well spent.” Saying which he rises and points to the sky. The purple fringes of the clouds are gone to sable; the lilac tints on the mountains are waxing grey; and the sombre twilight with his torch—the evening star had risen—is following in the wake of day; ’tis the hour of prayer.

But before we leave him to his devotion, we ask to be permitted to see his cell. Ah, that is against the monastic rules. We insist. And with a h’m, h’m, and a shake of the head, he rubs his hands caressingly and opens the door. Yes, the Reader shall peep into this eight by six cell, which is littered all around with rubbish, sacred and profane. In the corner is a broken stove with a broken pipe attached,—broken to let some of the smoke into the room, we are told. “For smoke,”
quoth the Hermit, quoting the Doctor, “destroys the microbes—and keeps the room warm after the fire goes out.”

In the corner opposite the stove is a little altar with the conventional icons and gewgaws and a number of prayer books lying pell-mell around. Nearby is an old pair of shoes, in which are stuck a few candles and St. Anthony’s Book of Contemplations. In the corner behind the door is a large cage, a pantry, suspended middleway between the floor and ceiling, containing a few earthen pots, an oil lamp, and a jar, covered with a cloth. Between the pantry and the altar, on a hair-mat spread on the floor, sleeps his Reverence. And his bed is not so hard as you might suppose, Reader; for, to serve your curiosity, we have been rude enough to lift up a corner of the cloth, and we found underneath a substantial mattress! On the bed is his book of accounts, which, being opened, when we entered, he hastened to close.

“You keep accounts, too, Reverence?”

“Indeed, so. That is a duty devolved on every one with mortal memory.”

Let it not be supposed, however, that he has charge of the crops. In his journal he keeps the accounts of his masses? And here be evil sufficient for the day.

This, then, is the inventory of Abd’ul-Messiah’s cell. And we do not think we have omitted much of importance. Yes; in the fourth corner, which we have not mentioned, are three or four petroleum cans containing provisions. From one of these he brings out a handful of dried figs, from another a pinch of incense, which he gives us as a token of his love and blessing. One thing we fain would emphasise, before we conclude our account. The money part of this eremitic business need not be harshly judged; for we must bear in mind that this honest Servitor of Christ is strong enough not to have
his will in the matter. And remember, too, that the abbey’s bills of expenses run high. If one of the monks, therefore, is blessed with a talent for solitude and seclusion, his brother monks shall profit by it. Indeed, we were told, that the income of the Hermitage, that is, the sum total in gold of the occult and the agricultural endeavours of Abd’ul-Messiah, is enough to defray the yearly expenditures of the monkery. Further, we have nothing to say on the subject. But Khalid has. And of his lengthy lucubration on
The Uses of Solitude
, we cull the following:

“Every one’s life at certain times,” writes he, “is either a Temple, a Hermitage, or a Vineyard: every one, in order to flee the momentary afflictions of Destiny, takes refuge either in God, or in Solitude, or in Work. And of a truth, work is the balm of the sore mind of the world. God and Solitude are luxuries which only a few among us nowadays can afford. But he who lives in the three, though his life be that of a silk larva in its cocoon, is he not individually considered a good man? Is he not a mystic, though uncreative, centre of goodness? Surely, his influence, his Me alone considered, is living and benign, and though it is not life-giving. He is a flickering taper under a bushel; and this,
billah
, were better than the pissasphaltum-souls which bushels of quackery and pretence can not hide. But alas, that a good man by nature should be so weak as to surrender himself entirely to a lot of bad men. For the monks, my brother Hermit, being a silk worm in its cocoon, will asphyxiate the larva after its work is done, and utilise the silk. Ay, after the Larva dies, they pickle and preserve it in their chapel for the benefit of those who sought its oracles in life. Let the beef-packers of America take notice; the monks of my country are in the market with ‘canned hermits!’

“And this Larva, be it remembered, is not subject to decay; a saint does not decompose in the flesh like mortal sinners. One of these, I have been told, dead fifty years ago and now canonised, can be seen yet in one of the monasteries of North Lebanon, keeping well his flesh and bones together—divinely embalmed. It has been truly said that the work of a good man never dies; and these leathery hermits continue in death as in life to counsel and console the Faithful.

“In the past, these Larvæ, not being cultivated for the market, continued their natural course of development and issued out of their silk prisons full fledged moths. But those who cultivate them to-day are in sore need. They have masses and indulgences to sell; they have big bills to pay. But whether left to grow their wings or not, their solitude is that of a cocoon larva, narrow, stale, unprofitable to the world. While that of a philosopher, a Thoreau, for instance, might be called Nature’s filter; and one, issuing therefrom benefited in every sense, morally, physically, spiritually, can be said to have been filtered through Solitude.”

“The study of life at a distance is inutile; the study of it at close range is defective. The only method left, therefore, and perhaps the true one, is that of the artist at his canvas. He works at his picture an hour or two, and retires a little to study and criticise it from a distance. It is impossible to withdraw entirely from life and pretend to take an interest in it. Either like my brother Hermit in these parts, a spiritual larva in its cocoon, or like a Thoreau, who during his period of seclusion, peeped every fortnight into the village to keep up at least his practice of human speech. Else what is the use of solitude? A life of fantasy, I muse, is nearer to the heart of Nature and Truth than a life in sack-cloth and ashes.…

“And yet, deeply considered, this eremitic business
presents another aspect. For does not the eremite through his art of prayer and devotion, seek an ideal? Is he not a transcendentalist, at least in the German sense of the word? Is not his philosophy above all the senses, as the term implies, and common sense included? For through Mother Church, and with closed eyes, he will attain the ideal, of which my German philosopher, through the logic-mill, and with eyes open, hardly gets a glimpse.

“The devout and poetic souls, and though they walk among the crowd, live most of their lives in solitude. Through Mother Sorrow, or Mother Fancy, or Mother Church, they are ever seeking the ideal, which to them is otherwise unattainable. And whether a howler of Turabu or a member of the French Academy, man, in this penumbra of faith and doubt, of superstition and imagination, is much the same. ‘The higher powers in us,’ says Novalis, ‘which one day, as Genii, shall fulfil our will, are for the present, Muses, which refresh us on our toilsome course with sweet remembrances.’ And the jinn, the fairies, the angels, the muses, are as young and vivacious to-day as they were in the Arabian and Gaelic Ages of Romance.

“But whether Mother Church or Poetry or Philosophy or Music be the magic-medium, the result is much the same if the motive be not religiously sincere, sincerely religious, piously pure, lofty, and humane. Ay, my Larva-Hermit, with all his bigotry and straitness of soul, stands higher than most of your artists and poets and musicians of the present day. For a life sincerely spent between the Temple and the Vineyard, between devotion and honest labour, producing to one man of all mankind some positive good, is not to be compared with the life which oscillates continuously between egoism and vanity, quackery and cowardice,
selfishness and pretence, and which never rises, do what it may, above the larva state.…

“Let every one cultivate with pious sincerity some such vineyard as my Hermit’s and the world will not further need reform. For through all the vapour and mist of his ascetic theology, through the tortuous chasm of his eremitic logic, through the bigotry and crass superstition of his soul, I can always see the Vineyard on the one side of his cell, and the Church on the other, and say to myself: Here be a man who is never idle; here be one who loves the leisure praised by Socrates, and hates the sluggishness which Iblis decks and titivates. And if he crawls between his Church and his Vineyard, and burrows in both for a solution of life, nay, spins in both the cocoon of his ideal, he ought not to be judged from on high. Come thou near him; descend; descend a little and see: has he not a task, and though it be of the taper-under-the-bushel kind? Has he not a faith and a sincerity which in a Worm of the Earth ought to be reckoned sublime? ‘If there were sorrow in heaven,’ he once said to me, ‘how many there would continuously lament the time they wasted in this world?’

“O my Brothers, build your Temples and have your Vineyards, even though it be in the rocky wilderness.”

TO GOD
^*

In the religious systems of mankind, I sought thee, O God, in vain; in their machine-made dogmas and theologies, I sought thee in vain; in their churches and temples and mosques, I sought thee long, and long in vain; but in the Sacred Books of the World, what have I found? A letter of thy name, O God, I have deciphered in the Vedas, another in the Zend-Avesta, another in the Bible, another in the Korân. Ay, even in the Book of the Royal Society and in the Records of the Society for Psychical Research, have I found the diacritical signs which the infant races of this Planet Earth have not yet learned to apply
to the consonants of thy name. The lisping infant races of this Earth, when will they learn to pronounce thy name entire? Who shall supply the Vowels which shall unite the Gutturals of the Sacred Books? Who shall point out the dashes which compound the opposite loadstars in the various regions of thy Heaven? On the veil of the eternal mystery are palimpsests of which every race has deciphered a consonant. And through the diacritical marks which the seers and paleologists of the future shall furnish, the various dissonances in thy name shall be reduced, for the sake of the infant races of the Earth, to perfect harmony
. —K
HALID
.

*
Arabic Symbol.