Norman Duncan - Every Man for Himself

“Khalil!”

Khalil Khayyat was thrilled by the quality of this invocation.

“Khalil of the exalted mission, friend, poet, teacher of the aspiring,” Salim Awad whispered, leaning close to the ear of Khalil Khayyat, “a great thing has come to pass.”

Khayyat commanded his ecstatic perturbation.

“Hist!” Salim ejaculated. “Is there not one listening at the door?”

“There is no one, Salim; it is the feet of Nageeb the coffee-boy, passing to the table of Abosamara, the merchant.”

Salim hearkened.

“There is no one, Salim.”

“There is a breathing at the key-hole, Khalil,” Salim protested. “This great thing must not be known.”

“There is no one, Salim,” said Khalil Khayyat. “I have heard Abosamara call these seven times. Being rich, he is brutal to such as serve. The sound is of the feet of the little Intelligent One. He bears coffee to the impatient merchant. His feet are soft, by my training; they pass like a whisper… Salim, what is this great thing?”

“Nay, but, Khalil, I hesitate: the thing must not be heard.”

“Even so,” said Khalil Khayyat, contemptuously, being still a poet; “the people are of the muck of the world; they are common, they are not of our blood and learning. How shall they understand that which they hear?”

“Khalil,” Salim Awad answered, reassured, “I have known a great moment!”

“A great moment?” said Khalil Khayyat, being both old and wise. “Then it is because of agony. There has issued from this great pain,” said he, edging, in his artistic excitement, toward the victim of the muse, “a divine poem of love?”

Salim Awad sighed.

“Is it not so, Salim?”

Salim Awad flung himself upon the green baize table; and so great was his despair that the coffee-cup of Khalil Khayyat jumped in its saucer. “I have suffered: I have lost at love,” he answered. “I have been wounded; I bleed copiously. I lie alone in a desert. My passion is hunger and thirst and a gaping wound. From fever and the night I cry out. Whence is my healing and satisfaction? Nay, but, Khalil, devoted friend,” he groaned, looking up, “I have known the ultimate sorrow. Haleema!” cried he, rising, hands clasped and uplifted, eyes looking far beyond the alien, cobwebbed, blackened ceiling of the little back room of Nageeb Fiani, the pastry-cook and greatest player in all the world. “Haleema!” he cried, as it may meanly be translated. “Haleema – my sleep and waking, night and day of my desiring soul, my thought and heart-throb! Haleema – gone forever from me, the poet, the unworthy, fled to the arms of the strong, the knowing, the manager of horses, the one powerful and controlling! Haleema – beautiful one, fashioned of God, star of the night of the sons of men, glory of the universe, appealing, of the soft arms, of the bosom of sleep! Haleema – of the finger-tips of healing, of the warm touch of solace, of the bed of rest! Haleema, beautiful one, beloved, lost to me!.. Haleema!.. Haleema!..”

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