Khalid nicknames him secondhand Jerry, makes to him professions of friendship, and for many months comes every day to see him. He comes with his bucket, as he would say, to Jerry’s well. For the two, the young man and the old man of the cellar, the neophite and the master, would chat about literature and the makers of it for hours. And what a sea of information is therein under that frowsy dome.
Withal, secondhand Jerry is a man of ideals and abstractions, exhibiting now and then an heretical twist which is as agreeable as the vermiculations in a mahogany.
“We moderns,” said he once to Khalid, “are absolutely one-sided. Here, for instance, is my bookshop, there is the Church, and yonder is the Stock Exchange. Now, the men who frequent them, and though their elbows touch, are as foreign to each other as is a jerboa to a polar bear. Those who go to Church do not go to the Stock Exchange; those who spend their days on the Stock Exchange seldom go to Church; and those who frequent my cellar go neither to the one nor the other. That is why our civilisation produces so many bigots, so many philistines, so many pedants and prigs. The Stock Exchange is as necessary to Society as the Church, and the Church is as vital, as essential to its spiritual well-being as my bookshop. And not until man develops his mental, spiritual and physical faculties to what Matthew Arnold calls ‘a harmonious perfection,’ will he be able to reach the heights from which Idealism is waving to him.”
Thus would the master discourse, and the neophite, sitting on the steps of the cellar, smoking his cigarette, listens, admiring, pondering.
And every time he comes with his bucket, Jerry would be standing there, between his little pyramids of books, pipe in mouth, hands in pockets, ready for the discourse.
He would also conduct through his underworld anyone who had the leisure and inclination. But fortunately for Khalid, the people of this