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 gods,” he would say.... 155

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 tittering, questioning tattle as he is filling his jar. “I wish I were Najma,” says one, as he passes 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 naÏvely 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 156 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 Passport. 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 title 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 pass 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 naÏvete of her soul as 157 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 title 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 passed 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.

“No,” says Khalid; “we can not live here, O my Heart, after we are formally married. The curse in my breast I must not let you share, and only when I am rid of it am I actually your husband. By the life of this blessed night, by the light of these stars, I am inalterably resolved on this, and I shall abide by my 158 resolution. We must leave Baalbek as soon as the religious formalities are done. And I wish your father would have them performed under his roof. That is as good as going to Church to be the central figures of the mummery of priests. But be this as You will. Whether in Church or at home, whether by your father or by gibbering Levites the ceremony is performed, we must hie us to the desert after it is done. I shall hire the camels and prepare the necessary set-out for the wayfare a day or two ahead. No, I must not be a burden to you, my Heart. I must be able to work for you as for myself. And Allah alone, through the ministration of his great Handmaid Nature, can cure me and enable me to share with you the joys of life. No, not before I am cured, can I give you my whole self, can I call myself your husband. Into the desert, therefore, to some oasis in its very heart, we shall ride, and there crouch our camels and establish ourselves as husbandmen. I shall even build you a little home like your own. And you will be to me an aura of health, which I shall breathe with the desert air, and the evening breeze. Yes, our love shall dwell in a palace of health, not in a hovel of disease. Meanwhile, we shall buy with what money I have a little patch of ground which we shall cultivate together. And we shall own cattle and drink camel milk. And we shall doze in the afternoon in the cool shade of the palms, and in the evening, wrapt in our cloaks, we’ll sleep on the sands under the living stars. Yes, and Najma shall be the harbinger of dawn to Khalid.––Out on that little farm in the 159 oasis of our desert, far from the world and the sanctified abominations of the world, we shall live near to Allah a life of purest joy, of true happiness. We shall never worry about the hopes of to-morrow and the gone blessings of yesterday. We shall not, while labouring, dream of rest, nor shall we give a thought to our tasks while drinking of the cup of repose: each hour shall be to us an epitome of eternity. The trials and troubles of each day shall go with the setting sun, never to rise with him again. But I am unkind to speak of this. For your glances banish care, and we shall ever be together. Ay, my Heart, and when I take up the lute in the evening, you’ll sing mulayiah to me, and the stars above us shall dance, and the desert breeze shall house us in its whispers of love....”

And thus interminably, while Najma, understanding little of all this, sits beside him on a fallen column in the Temple and punctuates his words with assenting exclamations, with long eighs of joy and wonder. “But we are not going to live in the desert all the time, are we?” she asks.

“No, my Heart. When I am cured of my illness we shall return to Baalbek, if you like.”

“Eigh, good. Now, I want to say––no. I shame to speak about such matters.”

“Speak, ya Gazalty (O my Doe or Dawn or both); your words are like the scented breeze, like the ethereal moon rays, which enter into this Temple without permission. Speak, and light up this ruined Temple of thine.” 160

“How sweet are Your words, but really I can not understand them. They are like the sweetmeats my father brought with him once from Damascus. One eats and exclaims, ‘How delicious!’ But one never knows how they are made, and what they are made of. I wish I could speak like you, ya habibi. I would not shame to say then what I want.”

“Say what you wish. My heart is open, and your words are silvery moonbeams.”

“Do not blame me then. I am so simple, you know, so foolish. And I would like to know if you are going to Church on our wedding day in the clothes you have on now.”

“Not if you object to them, my Heart.”

“Eigh, good! And must I come in my ordinary Sunday dress? It is so plain; it has not a single ruffle to it.”

“And what are ruffles for?”

“I never saw a bride in a plain gown; they all have ruffles and flounces to them. And when I look at your lovely hair––O let people say what they like! A gown without ruffles is ugly.––So, you will buy me a sky-blue silk dress, ya habibi and a pink one, too, with plenty of ruffles on them? Will you not?”

“Yes, my Heart, you shall have what you desire. But in the desert you can not wear these dresses. The Arabs will laugh at you. For the women there wear only plain muslin dipped in indigo.”

“Then, I will have but one dress of sky-blue silk for the wedding.” 161

“Certainly, my Heart. And the ruffles shall be as many and as long as you desire them.”

And while the many-ruffled sky-blue dress is being made, Khalid, inspired by Najma’s remarks on his hair, rhapsodises on flounces and ruffles. Of this striking piece of fantasy, in which are scintillations of the great Truth, we note the following:

“What can you do without your flounces? How can you live without your ruffles? Ay, how can you, without them, think, speak, or work? How can you eat, drink, walk, sleep, pray, worship, moralise, sentimentalise, or love, without them? Are you not ruffled and flounced when you first see the light, ruffled and flounced when you last see the darkness? The cradle and the tomb, are they not the first and last ruffles of Man? And between them what a panoramic display of flounces! What clean and attractive visible Edges of unclean invisible common Skirts! Look at your huge elaborate monuments, your fancy sepulchers, what are they but the ruffles of your triumphs and defeats? The marble flounces, these, of your cemeteries, your Pantheons and Westminster Abbeys. And what are your belfries and spires and chimes, your altars and reredoses and such like, but the sanctified flounces of your churches. No, these are not wholly adventitious sanctities; not empty, superfluous growths. They are incorporated into Life by Time, and they grow in importance as our Æsthetics become more inutile, as our Religions begin to exude gum and pitch for commerce, instead of bearing fruits of Faith and Love and Magnanimity. 162

“The first church was the forest; the first dome, the welkin; the first altar, the sun. But that was, when man went forth in native buff, brother to the lion, not the ox, without ruffles and without faith. His spirit, in the course of time, was born; it grew and developed zenithward and nadirward, as the cycles rolled on. And in spiritual pride, and pride of power and wealth as well, it took to ruffling and flouncing to such an extent that at certain epochs it disappeared, dwindled into nothingness, and only the appendages remained. These were significant appendages, to be sure; not altogether adscititious. Ruffles these, indeed, endowed, as it were, with life, and growing on the dead Spirit, as the grass on the grave.

“And is it not noteworthy that our life terrene at certain epochs seems to be made up wholly of these? That as the great Pine falls, the noxious weeds, the brambles and thorny bushes around it, grow quicker, lustier, luxuriating on the vital stores in the earth that were its own––is not this striking and perplexing, my rational friends? Surely, Man is neither the featherless biped of the Greek Philosopher, nor the tool-using animal of the Sage of Chelsea. For animals, too, have their tools, and man, in his visible flounces, has feathers enough to make even a peacock gape. Both my Philosophers have hit wide of the mark this time. And Man, to my way of thinking, is a flounce-wearing Spirit. Indeed, flounces alone, the invisible ones in particular, distinguish us from the beasts. For like ourselves they have their fashions in clothes; their peculiar speech; their own hidden 163 means of intellection, and, to some extent, of imagination: but flounces they have not, they know not. These are luxuries, which Man alone enjoys.

“Ah, Man,––thou son and slave of Allah, according to my Oriental Prophets of Heaven; thou exalted, apotheosised ape, according to my Occidental Prophets of Science;––how much thou canst suffer, how much thou canst endure, under what pressure and in what Juhannam depths thou canst live; but thy flounces thou canst not dispense with for a day, nor for a single one-twelfth part of a day. Even in thy suffering and pain, the agonised spirit is wrapped, bandaged, swathed in ruffles. It is assuaged with the flounces of thy lady’s caresses, and the scalloped intonations of her soft and soothing voice. It is humbugged into health by the malodorous flounces of the apothecary and the medicinal ruffles of the doctor.

“Ay, we live in a phantasmagoric, cycloramic economy of flounces and ruffles. The human Spirit shirks nudity as it shirks pain. Even your modern preacher of the Simple Life is at best suggesting the moderate use of ruffles.... Indeed, we can suffer anything, everything, but the naked and ugly reality. Alas, have I not listened for years to what I mistook to be the strong, pure voice of the naked Truth? And have I not discovered, to my astonishment, that the supposed scientific Nudity is but an indurated thick Crust under which the Lie lies hidden. Why strip Man of his fancy appendages, his adventitious sanctities, if you are going to give him instead only a few yards of shoddy? No, I tell you; this can not be done. 164 Your brambles and thorn hedges will continue to grow and luxuriate, will even shut from your view the Temple in the Grove, until the great Pine rises again to stunt, and ultimately extirpate, them.

“Behold, meanwhile, how the world parades in ruffles before us. What a bewildering phantasmagoria this: a very Dress Ball of the human race. See them pass: the Pope of Christendom, in his three hats and heavy trailing gowns, blessing the air of heaven; the priest, in his alb and chasuble, dispensing of the blessings of the Pope; the judge, in his wig and bombazine, endeavouring to reconcile divine justice with the law’s mundane majesty; the college doctor, in cap and gown, anointing the young princes of knowledge; the buffoon, in his cap and bells, dancing to the god of laughter; mylady of the pink-tea circle, in her huffing, puffing gasoline-car, fleeing the monster of ennui; the bride and bridegroom at the altar or before the mayor putting on their already heavy-ruffled garments the sacred ruffle of law or religion; the babe brought to church by his mother and kindred to have the priest-tailor sew on his new garment the ruffle of baptism; the soldier in his gaudy uniform; the king in his ermine with a crown and sceptre appended; the Nabob of Ind in his gorgeous and multi-colored robes; and the Papuan with horns in his nostrils and rings in his ears: see them all pass.

“And wilt thou still add to the bewildering variety of the pageant? Or wilt have another of the higher things of the mind? Lo, the artist this, wearing his ruffles of hair over his shoulders; and here, too, is the 165 man of the sombrero and red flannel, which are the latest flounces of a certain set of New World poets. Directly behind them is Dame Religion with her heavy ruffled robes, her beribboned and belaced bodices, her ornaments and sacred gewgaws. And billah, she has stuffings and paddings, too. And false teeth and foul breath! Never mind. Pass on, and let her pass. But tarry thou a moment here. Behold this pyrotechnic display, these buntings and flags; hear thou this music and these shouts and cheers; on yonder stump is an orator dispensing to his fellow citizens spread-eagle rhetoric as empty as yonder drum: these are the elaborate and attractive ruffles of politics. And among the crowd are genial and honest citizens who have their own way of ruffling your temper with their coarse flounces of linsey-woolsey freedom. Wilt thou have more?”

Decidedly not, we reply. For how can we even keep company with Khalid, who has become such a maniac on flounces? And was this fantastic, phantasmagoric rhapsody all inspired by Najma’s simple remark on his hair? Fruitful is thy word, O woman!

But being so far away now from the Hermitage in the Bronx, what has the “cherry in the cocktail” and “the olive in the oyster patty” to do with all this? Howbeit, the following deserves a place as the tail-flounce of his Fantasy.

“Your superman and superwoman,” says he, with philosophic calm, “may go Adam-and-Eve like if they choose. But can they, even in that chaste and 166 splendid nudity, dispense with ruffles and flounces? Pray, tell me, did not our first parents spoon and sentimentalise in the Paradise, before the Serpent appeared? And would they not often whisper unto each other, ‘Ah, Adam, ah, Eve!’ sighing likewise for sweeter things? And what about those fatal Apples, those two sour fruits of their Love?––I tell thee every new-born babe is the magnificent flesh-flounce of a shivering, trembling, nudity. And I Khalid, what am I but the visible ruffle of an invisible skirt? Verily, I am; and thou, too, my Brother. Yea, and this aquaterrestrial globe and these sidereal heavens are the divine flounces of the Vesture of Allah.”