The assertion seemed scarcely credible, as she was decidedly Syrian, both in dress and features.
“Yes, my God!” she went on, “I live six years in America, me! I go back to America next month! I not see America for one year. Come in house!”
I followed her into the cottage. It was the usual dwelling of the peasant class—dirt floor, a kettle hanging over an open fire in one corner, a few ears of corn and bunches of dried grapes suspended from the ceiling. On one of the rough stone walls, looking strangely out of place amid this Oriental squalor, was pinned a newspaper portrait of McKinley.
“Oh, my God!” cried the woman, as I glanced towards the distortion, “Me Republican, me. One time I see McKinley when I peddle by Cleveland, Ohio. You know Cleveland? My man over there”—she pointed away to the fertile slopes of the Lebanon—“My man go back with me next month, vote one more time for Roosevelt.”
The patch-work youth poked his head in at the door.
“Taala hena, Maghmoód,” bawled the boisterous Republican. “This American man! He no have to go for soldier fight long time for greasy old Sultan. Not work all day to get bishleek, him! Get ten, fifteen, twenty bishleek day! Bah! You no good, you! Why for you not run away to America?”
The soldier listened to this more or less English with a silly smirk on his face and shifted from one foot to the other with every fourth word. The woman repeated the oration in her native tongue. The youth continued to grin until the words “ashara, gkamsashar, ashreen” turned his smirk to wide-eyed astonishment, and he dropped on his haunches in the dirt, as if his legs had given way under the weight of such untold wealth.
The woman ran a sort of lodging house in an adjoining stone hut and insisted that I spend the night there. Her vociferous affection for Americans would, no doubt, have forced her to cling to my coat-tails had I attempted to escape. Chattering disconnectedly, she prepared a supper of lentils, bread-sheets, olives, and crushed sugar cane, and set out—to the horror of the Mohammedan youth—a bottle of beet (native wine). The meal over, she lighted a narghileh, leaned back in a home-made chair, and blew smoke at the ceiling with a far-away look in her eyes.
“Oh, my God!” she cried suddenly, “You sing American song! I like this no-good soldier hear good song. Then he sing Arab song for you.”
I essayed the rôle of wandering minstrel with misgiving. At the first lines of “The Swanee River” the conscript burst forth in a roar of laughter that doubled him up in a paroxysm of mirth.