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;
And now that the purse is almost empty, the poor emigrant is permitted to leave. They 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.”