“O Success,” the infuriated failure exclaims, “how like the Gorgon of the Arabian Nights thou art! For does not everyone whom thou favorest undergo a pitiful transformation even from the first bedding with thee? Does not everything suffer from thy look, thy touch, thy breath? The rose loses its perfume, the grapevine its clusters, the bulbul its wings, the dawn its light and glamour. O Success, our lords of power today are thy slaves, thy helots, our kings of wealth. Everyone grinds for thee, everyone for thee lives and dies. … Thy palaces of silver and gold are reared on the souls of men. Thy throne is mortised with their bones, cemented with their blood. Thou ravenous Gorgon, on what bankruptcies thou art fed, on what failures, on what sorrows! The railroads sweeping across the continents and the steamers ploughing through the seas, are laden with sacrifices to thee. Ay, and millions of innocent children are torn from their homes and from their schools to be offered to thee at the sacrificial-stone of the Factories and Mills. The cultured, too, and the wise, are counted among thy slaves. Even the righteous surrender themselves to thee and are willing to undergo that hideous transformation. O Success, what an infernal litany thy votaries and high-priests are chanting to thee. … Thou ruthless Gorgon, what crimes thou art committing, and what crimes are being committed in thy name!”
From which it is evident that Khalid does not wish for success. Khalid is satisfied if he can maintain his hold on the few spare feet he has in the cellar, and continue to replenish his little store of lentils and olive oil. For he would as lief be a victim of success, he assures us, as to forego his mujaddara. And still having this, which he considers a luxury, he is willing to turn his hand at anything, if he can but preserve inviolate the integrity of his soul and the freedom of his mind. These are a few of the pet terms of Khalid. And in as much as he can continue to repeat them to himself, he is supremely content. He can be a menial, if while cringing before his superiors, he were permitted to chew on his pet illusions. A few days before he burned his peddling-box, he had read Epictetus. And the thought that such a great soul maintained its purity, its integrity, even in bonds, encouraged and consoled him. “How can they hurt me,” he asks, “if spiritually I am far from them, far above them? They can do no more than place gilt buttons on my coat and give me a cap to replace this slouch. Therefore, I will serve. I will be a slave, even like Epictetus.”
And here we must interpose a little of our skepticism, if but to gratify an habitual craving in us. We do not doubt that Khalid’s self-sufficiency is remarkable; that his courage—on paper—is quite above the common; that the grit and stay he shows are wonderful; that his lofty aspirations, so indomitable in their onwardness, are great: but we only ask, having thus fortified his soul, how is he to fortify his stomach? He is going to work, to be a menial, to earn a living by honest means? Ah, Khalid, Khalid! Did you not often bestow a furtive glance on someone else’s checkbook? Did you not even exercise therein your skill in calculation? If the bank, where Shakib deposits his little saving, failed, would you be so indomitable, so dogged in your resolution? Would you not soften a trifle, loosen a whit, if only for the sake of your blood-circulation?
Indeed, Shakib has become a patron to Khalid. Shakib the poet, who himself should have a patron, is always ready to share his last dollar with his loving, though cantankerous friend. And this, in spite of all the disagreeable features of a friendship which in the Syrian Colony was become proverbial. But Khalid now takes up the newspapers and scans the Want Columns for hours. The result being a clerkship in a lawyer’s office. Nay, an apprenticeship; for the legal profession, it seems, had for a while engaged his serious thoughts.
And this of all the professions is the one on which he would graft his scion of lofty morality? Surely, there be plenty of fuel for a conflagration in a lawyer’s office. Such rows of half-calf tomes, such piles of legal documents, all designed to combat dishonesty and fraud, “and all immersed in them, and nourished and maintained by them.” In what a sorry condition will your Morality issue out of these bogs! A lawyer’s clerk, we are informed, can not maintain his hold on his clerkship, if he does not learn to blink. That is why Khalid is not long in serving papers, copying summonses, and searching title-deeds. In this lawyer’s office he develops traits altogether foreign to his nature. He even becomes a quidnunc, prying now and then into the personal affairs of his superiors. Ay, and he dares once to suggest to his employer a new method of dealing with the criminals among his clients. Withal, Khalid is slow, slower than the law itself. If he goes out to serve a summons he does not return for a day. If he is sent to search title-deeds, he does not show up in the office for a week. And often he would lose himself in the Park surrounding the Register’s Office, pondering on his theory of immanent morality. He would sit down on one of those benches, which are the anchors of loafers of another type, his batch of papers beside him, and watch
