Here then are a few beads from Shakib’s romantic string. When Najma cooks mujaddara 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. …
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 naively 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 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 houri. 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 naivete of her soul as 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 houri, for all we know? In that event, the outward charms correspond, and Khalid is a lucky dog—if someone 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 bedouin 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
