All of which from our Interpreter is as clear as God Save the King. And from which we hope our Reader will infer that those outbursts and tears and rhapsodies of Khalid did mean somewhat. They did mean, even when we first approached his cell, that something was going on in him—a revolution, a coup d’état, so to speak, of the spirit. For a Prince in Rags, but not in Debts and Dishonour, will throttle the Harpy which has hitherto ruled and degraded his soul.
But the dwelling, too, of that soul is sorely undermined. And so, his leal and loving friend Shakib takes him later to the best physician in the City, who after the tapping and auscultation, shakes his head, writes his prescriptions, and advises Khalid to keep in the open air as much as possible, or better still, to return to his native country. The last portion of the advice, however, Khalid can not follow at present. For he will either return home on his own account or die in New York. “If I can not in time save enough money for the Steamship Company,” he said to Shakib, “I can at least leave enough to settle the undertaker’s bill. And in either case, I shall have paid my own passage out of this New World. And I shall stand before my Maker in a shroud, at least, which I can call my own.”
To which Shakib replies by going to the druggist with the prescriptions. And when he returns to the cellar with a package of four or five medicine bottles for rubbing and smelling and drinking, he finds Khalid sitting near the stove—we are now in the last month of Winter—warming his hands on the flames of the two last books he read. Emile and Hero-Worship go the way of all the rest. And there he sits, meditating over Carlyle’s crepitating fire and Rousseau’s writhing, sibilating flame. And it may be he thought of neither. Perhaps he was brooding over the resolution he had made, and the ominous shaking of the doctor’s head. Ah, but his tutelar deities are better physicians, he thought. And having made his choice, he will pitch the medicine bottles into the street, and only follow the doctor’s advice by keeping in the open air.
Behold him, therefore, with a note in hand, applying to Shakib, in a formal and businesslike manner, for a loan; and see that noble benefactor and friend, after gladly giving the money, throw the note into the fire. And now, Khalid is neither dervish nor philosopher, but a man of business with a capital of twenty-five dollars in his pocket. And with one-fifth of this capital he buys a secondhand pushcart from his Greek neighbour, wends his way with it to the marketplace, makes a purchase there of a few boxes of oranges, sorts them in his cart into three classes—“there is no equality in nature,” he says, while doing this—sticks a price card at the head of each class, and starts, in the name of Allah, his business. That is how he will keep in the open air twelve hours a day.
But in the district where he is known he does not long remain. The sympathy of his compatriots is to him worse than the doctor’s medicines, and those who had often heard him speechifying exchanged significant looks when he passed. Moreover, the police would not let him set up his stand anywhere. “There comes the pushcart orator,” they would say to each other; and before our poor Syrian stops to breathe, one of them grumpishly cries out, “Move on there! Move on!” Once Khalid ventures to ask, “But why are others allowed to set up their stands here?” And the “copper” (we beg the Critic’s pardon again) coming forward twirling his club, lays his hand on Khalid’s shoulder and calmly this: “Don’t you think I know you? Move on, I say.” O Khalid, have you forgotten that these “coppers” are the minions of Tammany? Why tarry, therefore, and ask questions? Yes, make a big move at once—out of the district entirely.
Now, to the East Side, into the Jewish Quarter, Khalid directs his cart. And there, he falls in with Jewish fellow pushcart peddlers and puts up with them in a cellar similar to his in the Syrian Quarter. But only for a month could he suffer what the Jew has suffered for centuries. Why? There is this difference between the cellar of the Semite Syrian and that of the Semite Jew: in the first we eat mujaddara, in
