The Book of Khalid (33 page)

The multitudes behind us, both inside and outside the Mosque, are violently divided; for the real reactionists of Damascus, those who are hostile to the Constitution and the statochratic Government, are always watching for an opportunity to give the match to the dry sedges of sedition. And so, the liberals, who are also the friends of Khalid, and the fanatical mobs of the ulema, will have it out among themselves. They call each other reactionists, plotters, conspirators; and thereupon the bludgeons and poniards are brandished; the pistols here and there are fired; the Dragoons hasten to the scene of battle—but we are not writing now the History of the Ottoman Revolution. We leave them to have it out among themselves as best they can, and accompany our Khalid to the Hotel.

Here the good Mrs. Gotfry washes the blood from his face, and Shakib, after helping him to bed, hastens to call the surgeon, who, having come straightway, sews and dresses
the wounds and assures us that they are not dangerous. In the evening a number of Sheikhs of an enlightened and generous strain, come to inquire about him. They tell us that one of the assailants of Khalid, a noted brigand, and ten of the reactionists, are now in prison. The Society Deputies, however, do not seem much concerned about their wounded friend. Yes, they are concerned, but in another direction and on weightier matters. For the telegraph wires on the following day were kept busy. And in the afternoon of the second day after the event, the man who helped Shakib to save Khalid from the mob, comes to save Khalid’s life. The Superintendent of the Telegraph himself is here to inform us that Khalid was accused to the Military Tribunal as a reactionist, and a cablegram, in which he is summoned there, is just received.

“Had I delivered this to the Vali,” he continues, “you would have been now in the hands of the police, and tomorrow on your way to Constantinople. But I shall not deliver it until you are safe out of the City. And you must fly or abscond to-day, because I can not delay the message until to-morrow.”

Now Khalid and Shakib and Mrs. Gotfry take counsel together. The one train for Baalbek leaves in the morning; the carriage road is ruined from disuse; and only on horseback can we fly. So, Mrs. Gotfry orders her dragoman to hire horses for three,—nay, for four, since we must have an extra guide with us,—and a muleteer for the baggage.

And here Shakib interposes a suggestion: “They must not come to the Hotel. Be with them on the road, near the first bridge, about the first hour of night.”

At the office of the Hotel the dragoman leaves word that they are leaving for a friend’s house on account of their patient.

And after dinner Mrs. Gotfry and Khalid set forth afoot, accompanied by Shakib. In five minutes they reach the first bridge; the dragoman and the guide, with their horses and lanterns, are there waiting. Shakib helps Khalid to his horse and bids them farewell. He will leave for Baalbek by the first train, and be there ahead of them.

And now, Reader, were we really romancing, we should here dilate of the lovely ride in the lovely moonlight on the lovely road to Baalbek. But truth to tell, the road is damnable, the welkin starless, the night pitch-black, and our poor Dreamer is suffering from his wounds.

“AND WHENCE THE SUBTLE THRILL OF JOY IN suffering for the Truth,” asks Khalid. “Whence the light that flows from the wounds of martyrs? Whence the rapture that triumphs over their pain? In the thick of night, through the alcoves of the mountains, over their barren peaks, down through the wadi of oblivion, silently they pass. And they dream. They dream of appearance in disappearance; of triumph in surrender; of sunrises in the sunset.

“A mighty tidal wave leaves high upon the beach a mark which later on becomes the general level of the ocean. And so do the great thinkers of the world,—the poets and seers, the wise and strong and self-denying, the proclaimers of the Religion of Man. And I am but a scrub-oak in this forest of giants, my Brothers. A scrub-oak which you might cut down, but not uproot. Lop off my branches; apply the axe to my trunk; make of my timber charcoal for the censers of your temples of worship; but the roots of me are deep, deep in the soil, beyond the reach of mortal hands. They are even spreading under your tottering palaces and temples.…

“I dream of the awakening of the East; of puissant Orient nations rising to glorify the Idea, to build temples to the Universal Spirit—to Art, and Love, and Truth, and Faith. What
if I am lost in the alcoves of the hills, if I vanish forever in the night? The sun that sets must rise. It is rising and lighting up the dark and distant continents even when setting. Think of that, ye who gloat over the sinking of my mortal self.

“No; an idea is never too early annunciated. The good seed will grow among the rocks, and though the heavens withhold from it the sunshine and rain. It is because I will it, nay, because a higher Will than mine wills it, that the spirit of Khalid shall yet flow among your pilgrim caravans, through the fertile deserts of Arabia, down to the fountain-head of Faith, to Mecca and Medina,” et cetera.

This, perhaps the last of the rhapsodies of Khalid’s, the Reader considering the circumstances under which it was written, will no doubt condone. Further, however, in the K. L. MS. we can not now proceed. Certainly the Author is not wanting in the sort of courage which is loud-lunged behind the writing table; his sufficiency of spirit is remarkable, unutterable. But we would he knew that the strong do not exult in their strength, nor the wise in their wisdom. For to fly and philosophize were one thing, and to philosophize in prison were another. Khalid this time does not follow closely in the way of the Masters. But he would have done so, if we can believe Shakib in this, had not Mrs. Gotfry persuaded him to the contrary. He would have stood in the Turkish Areopagus at Constantinople, defended himself somewhat Socratic before his judges, and hung out his tung on a rickety gibbet in the neighborhood of St. Sophia. But Mrs. Gotfry spoiled his great chance. She cheated him of the glory of dying for a noble cause.

“The Turks are not worth the sacrifice,” Shakib heard her say, when Khalid ejaculated somewhat about martyrdom. And when she offered to accompany him, the flight did not
seem shameful in his eyes. Nay, it became necessary; and under the circumstances it was, indeed, cowardice not to fly. For is it not as noble to surrender one’s self to Love as to the Turks or any other earthly despotism? Gladly, heroically, he adventures forth, therefore, and philosophizes on the way about the light that flows from the wounds of persecution. But we regret that this celestial stream is not unmixed; it is accompanied by blood and pus; by distention and fever, and other inward and outward sores.

In this grievous state, somewhat like Don Quixote after the Battle of the Mill, our Khalid enters Baalbek. If the reader likes the comparison between the two Knights at this juncture, he must work it out for himself. We can not be so uncharitable as that; especially that our Knight is a compatriot, and is now, after our weary journeyings together, become our friend.—Our poor grievous friend who must submit again to the surgeon’s knife.

Mrs. Gotfry would not let him go to his mother, for she herself would nurse him. So, the doctor is called to the Hotel. And after opening, disinfecting, and dressing the wounds, he orders his patient to keep in bed for some days. They will then visit the ruins and resume their journeying to Egypt. Khalid no longer would live in Syria,—in a country forever doomed to be under the Turkish yoke, faring, nay, misfaring alike in the New Era as in the Old.

Now, his mother, tottering with age and sorrow, comes to the Hotel, and begs him in a flood of tears to come home; for his father is now with the Jesuits of Beirut and seldom comes to Baalbek. And his cousin Najma, with a babe on her arm and a tale of woe in her eyes, comes also to invite her cousin Khalid to her house.

She is alone; her father died some months ago; her
husband, after the dethronement of Abd’ul-Hamid, being implicated in the reaction-movement, fled the country; and his relatives, to add to her affliction, would deprive her of her child. She is alone; and sick in the lungs. She coughs, too, the same sharp, dry, malignant cough that once plagued Khalid. Ay, the same disease which he buried in the pine forest of Mt. Lebanon, he beholds the ghost of it now, more terrible and heart-rending than anything he has yet seen or experienced. The disease which he conquered is come back in the person of his cousin Najma to conquer him. And who can assure Khalid that it did not steal into her breast along with his kisses? And yet, he is not the only one in Baalbek who returned from America with phthisis. O, but that thought is horrifying. Impossible—he can not believe it.

But whether it be from you or from another, O Khalid, there is the ghost of it beckoning to you. Look at it. Are those the cheeks, those the eyes, this the body which a year ago was a model of rural charm and beauty and health? Is this the compensation of love? Is there anything like it dreamt of in your philosophy? There she is, who once in the ruined Temple of Venus mixed the pomegranate flower of her cheeks with the saffron of thy sickly lips. Wasted and dejected broken in body and spirit, she sits by your bedside nursing her baby and coughing all the while. And that fixed expression of sadness, so habitual among the Arab women who carry their punks and their children on their backs and go a-begging, it seems as if it were an hundred autumns old, this sadness. But right there, only a year ago, the crimson poppies dallied with the laughing breeze; the melting rubies dilated of health and joy.

And now, deploring, imploring, she asks: “Will you not come to me, O Khalid? Will you not let me nurse you?
Come; and your mother, too, will live with us. I am so lonesome, so miserable. And at night the boys cast stones at my door. My husband’s relatives put them to it because I would not give them the child. And they circulate all kinds of calumnies about me too.”

Khalid promises to come, and assures her that she will not long remain alone. “And Allah willing,” he adds, “you will recover and be happy again.”

She rises to go, when Mrs. Gotfry enters the room. Khalid introduces his cousin as his dead bride. “What do you mean?” she inquires. He promises to explain. Meanwhile, she goes to her room, brings some sweetmeats in a round box inlaid with mother-of-pearl for Khalid’s guests. And taking the babe in her arms, she fondles and kisses it, and gives its mother some advice about suckling. “Not whenever the child cries, but only at stated times,” she repeats.

So much about Khalid’s mother and cousin. A few days after, when he is able to leave his room, he goes to see them. His cousin Najma he would take with him to Cairo. He would not leave her behind, a prey to the cruelty of loneliness and disease. He tells her this. She is overjoyed. She is ready to go whenever he says. To-morrow? Please Allah, yes. But—

Please Allah, ill-luck is following. For on his way back to the Hotel, a knot of boys, lying in wait in one of the side streets, cast stones at him. He looks back, and a missile whizzes above his head, another hits him in the forehead almost undoing the doctor’s work. Alas, that wound! Will it ever heal? Khalid takes shelter in one of the shops; a cameleer rates the boys and chases them away. The stoning was repeated the following day, and the cause of it, Shakib tells us, is patent. For when it became known in Baalbek that Khalid,
the excommunicated one, is living in the Hotel, and with an American woman! the old prejudices against him were aroused, the old enemies were astirring. The priests held up their hands in horror; the women wagged their long tongues in the puddle of scandal; and the most fanatical shrieked out, execrating, vituperating, threatening even the respectable Shakib, who persists in befriending this muleteer’s son. Excommunicated, he now comes with this Americaniyah (American woman) to corrupt the community. Horrible! We will even go farther than this boy’s play of stoning. We present petitions to the kaiemkam demanding the expulsion of this Khalid from the Hotel, from the City.

From other quarters, however, come heavier charges against Khalid. The Government of Damascus has not been idle ever since the seditious lack-beard Sheikh disappeared. The telegraph wires, in all the principal cities of Syria, are vibrating with inquiries about him, with orders for his arrest. One such the kaiemkam of Baalbek had just received when the petition of the “Guardians of the Morals of the Community” was presented to him. To this, the kaiemkam, in a perfunctory manner, applies his seal, and assures his petitioners that it will promptly be turned over to the proper official. But Turk as Turks go, he “places it under the cushion,” when they leave. Which expression, translated into English means, he quashes it.

Now, by good chance, this is the same kaiemkam who sent Khalid a year ago to prison, maugre the efforts and importunities and other inducements of Shakib. And this time, he will do him and his friend a good turn. He was thinking of the many misfortunes of this Khalid, and nursing a little pity for him, when Shakib entered to offer a written complaint against a few of the more noted instigators of the
assailants of his friend. His Excellency puts this in his pocket and withdraws with Shakib into another room. A few minutes after, Shakib was hurrying to the Hotel to confer with his brother Khalid and Mrs. Gotfry.

“I saw the Order with these very eyes,” said Shakib, almost poking his two forefingers into them. “The kaiemkam showed it to me.”

Hence, the secret preparations inside the Hotel and out of it for a second remove, for a final flight. Shakib packs up; Najma is all ready. And Khalid cuts his hair, doffs his jubbah, and appears again in the ordinary attire of civilised mortals. For how else can he get out of Beirut and the telegraph wires throughout Syria are flowing with orders for his arrest? In a hat and frock-coat, therefore (furnished by Shakib), he enters into the carriage with Mrs. Gotfry about two hours after midnight; and, with their whole retinue, make for Riak, and thence by train for Beirut. Here Shakib obtains passports for himself and Najma, and together with Mrs. Gotfry and her dragoman, they board in the afternoon the Austrian Liner for Port-Said; while, in the evening, walking at the side of one of the boatmen, Khalid, passportless, stealthily passes through the port, and rejoins his friends.