Henceforth, the situation shall be trying even to the Dervish who can eat live coals. He oscillates for some while between the Medium and the Enchantress, but finds the effort rather straining. The first climax, however, is reached, and our Scribe thinks it too sad for words. He himself sheds a few rheums with the fair-looking, fair-spoken Dame, and dedicates to her a few rhymes. Her magnanimity, he tells us, is unexampled, and her fatalism pathetic. For when Khalid severs himself from the Spiritual Household, she kisses him thrice, saying, “Go, Child; Allah brought you to me, and Allah will bring you again.” Khalid refers, as usual, to the infinite wisdom of the Almighty, and, taking his handkerchief from his pocket, wipes the tears that fell––from her eyes over his. He passes out of the vestibule, silent and sad, musing on the time he first stood there as a beggar.
Now, the horizon of the Enchantress is unobstructed. Khalid is there alone; and her free love can freely pass on from him to another. And such messages they exchange! Such evaporations of the insipidities of free love! Khalid again takes up with Shakib, from whom he does not conceal anything. The epistles are read by both, and sometimes replied to by both! And she, in an effort to seem Oriental, calls 89 the Dervish, “My Syrian Rose,” “My Desert Flower,” “My Beduin Boy,” et cetera, always closing her message with either a strip of Syrian sky or a camel load of the narcissus. Ah, but not thus will the play close. True, Khalid alone adorns her studio for a time, or rather adores in it; he alone accompanies her to Bohemia. But the Dervish, who was always going wrong in Bohemia,––always at the door of the Devil,––ventures one night to escort another woman to her studio. Ah, those studios! The Enchantress on hearing of the crime lights the fire under her cauldron. “Double, double, toil and trouble!” She then goes to the telephone––g-r-r-r-r you swine––you Phœnician murex––she hangs up the receiver, and stirs the cauldron. “Double, double, toil and trouble!” But the Dervish writes her an extraordinary letter, in which we suspect the pen of our Scribe, and from which we can but transcribe the following:
“You found in me a vacant heart,” he pleads, “and you occupied it. The divan therein is yours, yours alone. Nor shall I ever permit a chance caller, an intruder, to exasperate you.... My breast is a stronghold in which you are well fortified. How then can any one disturb you?... How can I turn from myself against myself? Somewhat of you, the best of you, circulates with my blood; you are my breath of life. How can I then overcome you? How can I turn to another for the sustenance which you alone can give?... If I be thirst personified, you are the living, flowing brook, the everlasting fountain. O for a drink––”
And here follows a hectic uprush about pearly 90 breasts, and honey-sources, and musk-scented arbours, closing with “Your Beduin Boy shall come to-night.”
Notwithstanding which, the Enchantress abandons the Syrian Dwelling: she no longer fancies the vacant Divan of which Khalid speaks. Fortress or no fortress, she gives up occupation and withdraws from the foreigner her favour. Not only that; but the fire is crackling under the cauldron, and the typewriter begins to click. Ay, these modern witches can make even a typewriter dance around the fire and join in the chorus. “Double, double, toil and trouble, Fire burn, and cauldron bubble!” and the performance was transformed from the studio to the magazine supplement of one of the Sunday newspapers. There, the Dervish is thrown into the cauldron along with the magic herbs. Bubble––bubble. The fire-eating Dervish, how can he now swallow this double-tongued flame of hate and love? The Enchantress had wrought her spell, had ministered her poison. Now, where can he find an antidote, who can teach him a healing formula? Bruno D’Ast was once bewitched by a sorceress, and by causing her to be burned he was immediately cured. Ah, that Khalid could do this! Like an ordinary pamphlet he would consign the Enchantress to the flames, and her scrap-books and novels to boot. He does well, however, to return to his benevolent friend, the Medium. The spell can be counteracted by another, though less potent. Ay, even witchcraft has its homeopathic remedies.
And the Medium, Shakib tells us, is delighted to welcome back her prodigal child. She opens to him 91 her arms, and her heart; she slays the fatted calf. “I knew that Allah will bring you back to me,” she ejaculates; “my prevision is seldom wrong.” And kissing her hand, Khalid falters, “Forgiveness is for the sinner, and the good are for forgiveness.” Whereupon, they plunge again into the Unseen, and thence to Bohemia. The aftermath, however, does not come up to the expectations of the good Medium. For the rigmarole of the Enchantress about the Dervish in New York had already done its evil work. And––double––double––wherever the Dervish goes. Especially in Bohemia, where many of its daughters set their caps for him.
And here, he is neither shy nor slow nor visionary. Nor shall his theory of immanent morality trouble him for the while. Reality is met with reality on solid, though sometimes slippery, ground. His animalism, long leashed and starved, is eager for prey. His Phœnician passion is awake. And fortunately, Khalid finds himself in Bohemia where the poison and the antidote are frequently offered together. Here the spell of one sorceress can straightway be offset by that of her sister. And we have our Scribe’s word for it, that the Dervish went as far and as deep with the huris, as the doctors eventually would permit him. That is why, we believe, in commenting upon his adventures there, he often quotes the couplet,
“In my sublunar paradise
There’s plenty of honey––and plenty of flies.”
The flies in his cup, however, can not be detected 92 with the naked eye. They are microbes rather––microbes which even the physicians can not manage with satisfaction. For it must be acknowledged that Khalid’s immanent morality and intellectualism suffered an interregnum with the huris. Reckless, thoughtless, heartless, he plunges headlong again. It is said in Al-Hadith that he who guards himself against the three cardinal evils, namely, of the tongue (laklaka), of the stomach (kabkaba), and of the sex (zabzaba), will have guarded himself against all evil. But Khalid reads not in the Hadith of the Prophet. And that he became audacious, edacious, and loquacious, is evident from such wit and flippancy as he here likes to display. “Some women,” says he, “might be likened to whiskey, others to seltzer water; and many are those who, like myself, care neither for the soda or the whiskey straight. A ‘high-ball’ I will have.”
Nay, he even takes to punch; for in his cup of amour there is a subtle and multifarious mixture. With him, he himself avows, one woman complemented another. What the svelte brunette, for instance, lacked, the steatopygous blonde amply supplied. Delicacy and intensity, effervescence and depth, these he would have in a woman, or a hareem, as in anything else. But these excellences, though found in a hareem, will not fuse, as in a poem or a picture. Even thy bones, thou scented high-lacquered Dervish, are likely to melt away before they melt into one.