CHAPTER III
VIA DOLOROSA
In their baggy, lapping trousers and crimson caps, each carrying a bundle and a rug under his arm, Shakib and Khalid are smuggled through the port of Beirut at night, and safely rowed to the steamer. Indeed, we are in a country where one can not travel without a passport, or a password, or a little pass-money. And the boatmen and officials of the Ottoman Empire can better read a gold piece than a passport. So, Shakib and Khalid, not having the latter, slip in a few of the former, and are smuggled through. One more longing, lingering glance behind, and the dusky peaks of the Lebanons, beyond which their native City of Baal is sleeping in peace, recede from view. On the high sea of hope and joy they sail; “under the Favonian wind of enthusiasm, on the friendly billows of boyish dreams,” they roll. Ay, and they sing for joy. On and on, to the gold-swept shores of distant lands, to the generous cities and the bounteous fields of the West, to the Paradise of the World––to America.
We need not dwell too much with our Scribe, on the repulsive details of the story of the voyage. We ourselves have known a little of the suffering and misery which emigrants must undergo, before they reach that Western Paradise of the Oriental imagination. 26 How they are huddled like sheep on deck from Beirut to Marseilles; and like cattle transported under hatches across the Atlantic; and bullied and browbeaten by rough disdainful stewards; and made to pay for a leathery gobbet of beef and a slice of black flint-like bread: all this we know. But that New World paradise is well worth these passing privations.
The second day at sea, when the two Baalbekian lads are snug on deck, their rugs spread out not far from the stalls in which Syrian cattle are shipped to Egypt and Arab horses to Europe or America, they rummage in their bags––and behold, a treat! Shakib takes out his favourite poet Al-Mutanabbi, and Khalid, his favourite bottle, the choicest of the Ksarah distillery of the Jesuits. For this whilom donkey-boy will begin by drinking the wine of these good Fathers and then their––blood! His lute is also with him; and he will continue to practise the few lessons which the bulbuls of the poplar groves have taught him. No, he cares not for books. And so, he uncorks the bottle, hands it to Shakib his senior, then takes a nip himself, and, thrumming his lute strings, trolls a few doleful pieces of Arabic song. “In these,” he would say to Shakib, pointing to the bottle and the lute, “is real poetry, and not in that book with which you would kill me.” And Shakib, in stingless sarcasm, would insist that the music in Al-Mutanabbi’s lines is just a little more musical than Khalid’s thrumming. They quarrel about this. And in justice to both, we give the following from the Histoire Intime. 27
“When we left our native land,” Shakib writes, “my literary bent was not shared in the least by Khalid. I had gone through the higher studies which, in our hedge-schools and clerical institutions, do not reach a very remarkable height. Enough of French to understand the authors tabooed by our Jesuit professors,––the Voltaires, the Rousseaus, the Diderots; enough of Arabic to enable one to parse and analyse the verse of Al-Mutanabbi; enough of Church History to show us, not how the Church wielded the sword of persecution, but how she was persecuted herself by the pagans and barbarians of the earth;––of these and such like consists the edifying curriculum. Now, of this high phase of education, Khalid was thoroughly immune. But his intuitive sagacity was often remarkable, and his humour, sweet and pathetic. Once when I was reading aloud some of the Homeric effusions of Al-Mutanabbi, he said to me, as he was playing his lute, ‘In the heart of this,’ pointing to the lute, ‘and in the heart of me, there be more poetry than in that book with which you would kill me.’ And one day, after wandering clandestinely through the steamer, he comes to me with a gesture of surprise and this: ‘Do you know, there are passengers who sleep in bunks below, over and across each other? I saw them, billah! And I was told they pay more than we do for such a low passage––the fools! Think on it. I peeped into a little room, a dingy, smelling box, which had in it six berths placed across and above each other like the shelves of the reed manchons we build for our silk-worms at home. I wouldn’t sleep in one of them, 28 billah! even though they bribe me. This bovine fragrance, the sight of these fine horses, the rioting of the wind above us, should make us forget the brutality of the stewards. Indeed, I am as content, as comfortable here, as are their Excellencies in what is called the Salon. Surely, we are above them––at least, in the night. What matters it, then, if ours is called the Fourth Class and theirs the Primo. Wherever one is happy, Shakib, there is the Primo.’”
But this happy humour is assailed at Marseilles. His placidity and stolid indifference are rudely shaken by the sharpers, who differ only from the boatmen of Beirut in that they wear pantaloons and intersperse their Arabic with a jargon of French. These brokers, like rapacious bats, hover around the emigrant and before his purse is opened for the fourth time, the trick is done. And with what ceremony, you shall see. From the steamer the emigrant is led to a dealer in frippery, where he is required to doff his baggy trousers and crimson cap, and put on a suit of linsey-woolsey and a hat of hispid felt: end of First Act; open the purse. From the dealer of frippery, spick and span from top to toe, he is taken to the hostelry, where he is detained a fortnight, sometimes a month, on the pretext of having to wait for the best steamer: end of Second Act; open the purse. From the hostelry at last to the steamship agent, where they secure for him a third-class passage on a fourth-class ship across the Atlantic: end of Third Act; open the purse. And now that the purse is almost empty, the poor emigrant is permitted to leave. They 29 send him to New York with much gratitude in his heart and a little trachoma in his eyes. The result being that a month later they have to look into such eyes again. But the purse of the distressed emigrant now being empty,––empty as his hopes and dreams,––the rapacious bats hover not around him, and the door of the verminous hostelry is shut in his face. He is left to starve on the western shore of the Mediterranean.
Ay, even the droll humour and stolidity of Khalid, are shaken, aroused, by the ghoulish greed, the fell inhumanity of these sharpers. And Shakib from his cage of fancy lets loose upon them his hyenas of satire. In a squib describing the bats and the voyage he says: “The voyage to America is the Via Dolorosa of the emigrant; and the Port of Beirut, the verminous hostelries of Marseilles, the Island of Ellis in New York, are the three stations thereof. And if your hopes are not crucified at the third and last station, you pass into the Paradise of your dreams. If they are crucified, alas! The gates of the said Paradise will be shut against you; the doors of the hostelries will be slammed in your face; and with a consolation and a vengeance you will throw yourself at the feet of the sea in whose bosom some charitable Jonah will carry you to your native strands.”
And when the emigrant has a surplus of gold, when his capital is such as can not be dissipated on a suit of shoddy, a fortnight’s lodging, and a passage across the Atlantic, the ingenious ones proceed with the Fourth Act of Open Thy Purse. “Instead of starting in New York as a peddler,” they say, unfolding before 30 him one of their alluring schemes, “why not do so as a merchant?” And the emigrant opens his purse for the fourth time in the office of some French manufacturer, where he purchases a few boxes of trinketry,––scapulars, prayer-beads, crosses, jewelry, gewgaws, and such like,––all said to be made in the Holy Land. These he brings over with him as his stock in trade.