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