Part 5

Jaafar addressed him in these terms: "You pretend that the khalif is to die in the space of so many days?"

"Yes," said the Jew.

"And how long are you yourself to live?" said Jaafar.

"So many years," replied the other, mentioning a great number.

Jaafar then said to the khalif: "Put him to death, and you will be thus assured that he is equally mistaken respecting the length of your life and that of his own."

This advice was followed by the khalif, who then thanked Jaafar for having dispelled his sadness.

At the other extreme--though akin in sardonic humour--is this incident. It is related that one day, at Jaafar's, a beetle flew towards Abu Obaid the Thakefite, and that Jaafar ordered it to be driven away, when Abu Obaid said: "Let it alone; it may perhaps bring me good luck; such is at least the vulgar opinion."

Jaafar on this ordered one thousand dinars to be given him, saying: "The vulgar opinion is confirmed."

The beetle was then set at liberty, but it flew towards Abu Obaid a second time, and Jaafar ordered him another present of the same amount.

Such was the affection the khalif felt for Jaafar that he caused a robe with two collars to be made which they could wear at the same time.

Fickle, however, are princes, and Jaafar's end came in the usual way, through treachery. He was killed, by the khalif's orders, by Yasir. Yasir having put Jaafar to death, carried in his head and placed it before the khalif.

The khalif looked at the head for some time, and then ordered Yasir to bring in two persons whom he named. When they came, he said to them: "Strike off Yasir's head, for I cannot bear the sight of Jaafar's murderer."

XVIII.--LOVE AND LOVERS

As I have said, these four great volumes are a mine from which many different metals may be extracted. My own researches having tended rather to a certain ironic quality, I have passed many lovers by; but let me make an exception or so. There is, for example, Kuthaiyr. In the account of this celebrated Arabian amorist, we come upon a very pretty story. Being once in the presence of Abd Al-Malik, this prince said to Kuthaiyr: "I conjure thee by the rights of Ali Abi Ibn Talib to inform me if thou ever sawest a truer lover than thyself."

To this Kuthaiyr replied: "Commander of the Faithful! conjure me by your own rights, and I shall answer you."

"Well," said the prince, "I conjure thee by my own rights; wilt thou not tell it to me now?"

"Certainly," said Kuthaiyr; "I will. As I was travelling in a certain desert, I beheld a man who had just pitched his toils to catch game, and I said to him: 'Why art thou sitting here?' And he replied: 'I and my people are dying with hunger, and I have pitched these toils that I may catch something which may sustain our lives till to morrow.' 'Tell me,' said I, 'if I remain with thee and thou takest any game, wilt thou give me a share?' He answered that he would; and whilst we were waiting, behold, a gazelle got into the net. We both rushed forward; but he outran me, and having disentangled the animal, he let it go. 'What,' said I, 'could have induced thee to do so?' He replied: 'On seeing her so like my beloved Laila in the eyes, I was touched with pity.'"

Little men who are disposed to envy the big on account of fair ladies may take comfort from Kuthaiyr, for although so ardent and successful, he was absurdly small: so short indeed that, when he went to visit Abd Al-Aziz Ibn Marwan, that prince used to banter him and say: "Stoop your head, lest you hurt it against the ceiling."

He was called Rabb Ad-Dubab (the king of the flies) for the same reason. One of his contemporaries said: "I saw him making the circuits round the Kaaba; and if anyone tell you that his stature exceeded three spans, that person is a liar."

Abu Omar Az-Zahid Al-Mutarriz, although he "ranked among the most eminent and the most learned of the philologers," and was famous for his "mortified life," could write love poems too. Here is one: _Overcome with grief, we stopped at As-Sarat one evening, to exchange adieus; and, despite of envious foes, we stood unsealing the packets of every passionate desire. On saying farewell, she saw me borne down by the pains of love, and consented to grant me a kiss; but, impelled by startled modesty, she drew her veil across her face. On this I said: "The full moon has now become a crescent." I then kissed her through the veil, and she observed: "My kisses are wine: to be tasted, they must be passed through the strainer."_ (It seems, however, from Ibn Khallikan's anxious dubiety on the matter, that this poem, after all, may have been written, like the Iliad, by another poet of the same name. God only knows.)

Another Anacreontic, this time by Ibn Zuhr: _Whilst the fair ones lay reclining, their cheek pillowed on the arm, a hostile inroad of the dawn took us by surprise. I had passed the night in filling up their cups and drinking what they had left; till inebriation overcame me, and my lot was theirs also. The wine well knows how to avenge a wrong; I turned the goblet up, and that liquor turned me down._

The poetry of love comprises, alas! also the poetry of despair. Here is an example by Ibn As-Sarraj, the grammarian: _I compared her beauty with her conduct, and found that her charms did not counterbalance her perfidy. She swore to me never to be false, but 'twas as if she had sworn never to be true. By Allah! I shall never speak to her again, even though she resembled in beauty the full moon, or the sun, or Al-Muktafi!_

The inclusion of the khalif Al-Muktafi seems to have been an afterthought, added when the poet first saw him. Struck by his comeliness, he recited the poem to some companions and inserted his name at the end. The sequel is amusing and very characteristic. "Some time after, the katib Abu Abd Allah Muhammad Ibn Ismail Ibn Zenji repeated the verses to Abu 'l-Abbas Ibn Al-Furat, saying that they were composed by Ibn Al-Motazz, and Abu 'l-Abbas communicated them to the vizier Al-Kasim Ibn Obaid Allah. The latter then went to the khalif and recited the verses to him, adding that they were by Obaid Allah Ibn Abd Allah Ibn Tahir, to whom Al-Muktafi immediately ordered a present of one thousand dinars.

"'How very strange,' said Ibi Zenji, 'that Ibn As-Sarraj should compose verses which were to procure a donation to Obaid Allah Ibn Abd Allah Ibn Tahir!'"

Abu Bakr Ibn Aiyash, the Traditionist and scholar, discovered a remedy for lovers which is too simple, I fear, to commend itself to less philosophic Occidentals affected by the pains of longing. "I was suffering," he says, "from an anxious desire of meeting one whom I loved, when I called to mind the verse of Zu 'r-Rumma's: _Perhaps a flow of tears will give me ease from pain; perhaps it may cure a heart whose sole companion is sad thoughts._ On this I withdrew to a private place and wept, by which means my sufferings were calmed."

XIX.--TO DISARM CRITICS

And so we come to an end. And how can an author do better than to quote Ibn Khallikan's own concluding words, which, though written so long ago about a biographical dictionary, may be borrowed by all literary hands as palliation for whatever shortcomings their work may have?--"If any well-informed person remark, in examining this book, that it contains faults, he should not hasten to blame me, for I always aimed at being exact, as far as I could judge; and, besides, God has allowed no book to be faultless except His noble _Koran_."

=DIVERSIONS=

DIVERSIONS

Nurses

The conversation turning, as, round English fires, it often does, on the peculiarities of an old nurse of the family, I was struck again by the tenderness and kindness, shot through with humour, that are always evoked by this particular retrospective mood. I would even say that people are at their best when they are remembering their nurses. To recall one's parents is often to touch chords that vibrate too disturbingly; but these foster parents, chosen usually with such strange carelessness but developing often into true guardian angels, with good influences persisting through life--when, in reminiscent vein, we set them up, one against the other, can call from the speakers qualities that they normally may conspicuously lack. Quite dull people can become interesting and whimsical as their thoughts wander back through the years to the day when old Martha or old Jane, or whoever it was, moulded them and scolded them and broke the laws of grammar. Quite hard people can then melt a little. Quite stern people can smile.

And quite funny people can become intensely funny, as I have melancholy reason to know, for, listening to these new anecdotes, I recalled the last occasion on which the fruitful theme of a Nanna's oddities had been developed; when the speaker was that fascinating athlete and gentleman, E. B., a gallant officer with a gift of mimicry as notable as his sense of fun and his depth of feeling, who, chiefly for the amusement of two children, but equally--or even more--to the delight of us older ones, not only gave us certain of his old nurse's favourite sayings, in her own voice, but reconstructed her features as he did so. All good mimicry astonishes and entertains me, and this was especially good, for it triumphed over the disabilities of a captain's uniform. Something very curious and pretty, and, through all our laughter, affecting, in the spectacle of this tall, commanding soldier painting with little loving comic touches the portrait of the old Malapropian lady with her heart of gold. That was a few short months ago, and to-day E. B. lies in a French grave.

Malapropisms and old nurses are, of course, inseparable. Indeed, they formed again the basis of our talk the other evening, each of us having a new example to give, all drawn from memories of childhood. Wonderful how these quaint phrases stick--due, I suppose, to the fact that the child does not hear too much to confuse it, and when in this tenacious stage notices the sharp differences between the conversation of the literate, as encountered in the dining-room and drawing-room, and the much more amusing illiteracy below stairs. It will be a bad day for England when education is so prevalent that nursemaids have it too. Much less interesting will the backward look then become.

How far forward we have moved in general social decency one realizes after listening to such conversations as I have hinted at, where respect and affection dominate, and then turning to some of the children's books of a century ago--the kind of book in which the parents are always right and made in God's image, and the children full of faults. In one of these I found recently a story of a little girl who, being rude and wilful with her maid, was rebuked by her kind and wise mamma in some such phrase as, "Although it has pleased the Almighty to set you and Sarah in such different positions, you have no right to be unjust to her."

Reflecting upon how great a change has come upon the relation of employers and employed, and how much greater a change is in store, it seems to me that one of the good human kinds of book that does not at present exist, and ought to be made, would bring together between two covers some of the best servants in history, public and private, and possibly in literature too. Nurses first, because the nurse is so much more important a factor in family life, and because, to my mind, she has never had honour enough. I doubt if enough honour could be paid to her, but the attempt has not been sufficiently made. And to-day, of course, the very word as I am using it has only a secondary meaning. By "nurse" to-day we mean first a cool, smiling woman, with a white cap and possibly a red cross, ministering to the wounded and the sick. We have to think twice in order to evoke the guardian angel of our childhood, the mother's right hand, and often so much more real than the mother herself. I would lay special emphasis on the nurse who, beginning as a young retainer, develops into a friend and to the end of her days moves on parallel lines with the family, even if she is not still of it. These old nurses, the nurses of whom the older we grow the more tenderly and gratefully we think--will no one give them a book of praise? I should love to read it. And there should not be any lack of material--with Stevenson's Alison Cunningham by no means last on the list.

But if on examination the material proved too scanty, then the other devoted servants might come in too, such as Sir Walter Scott's Tom Purdie, who should have a proud place, and that wonderful gardener of the great Dumas, whose devotion extended to confederacy.

Without Dumas' gardener, indeed, no book in honour of the fidelity of man to man could be complete. For just think of it! The only approach to the house of the divine Alexandre being by way of a wooden bridge, this immortal tender of flowers and vegetables so arranged the planks that any undesired caller bearing a writ or long-overdue account would fall, all naturally and probably through his own confused carelessness, into the river; and, on being pulled out and restored to happy life, would not only abandon the horrid purpose of his visit, but, gratitude prompting, be generous enough to go at least part of the way towards paying the gardener's wages, which otherwise that resourceful benefactor might never obtain.

On a place in the volume for this exemplary character, I insist. But, as I say, nurses first.

No. 344260

Coming, the other day, after every kind of struggle, at last into possession of one of the new pound notes, I was interested in placing it quickly under the microscope, so to speak, in order that, in case I never saw another, I should be able to describe it to my grandchildren. How indigent I have been may be gathered from the circumstance that this note, being numbered 344260, had three hundred and forty-four thousand two hundred and fifty-nine predecessors which had eluded me.

As a work of art it is remarkable--almost, indeed, a gallery in itself, comprising as it does portraiture, design, topography, and the delineation of one of the most spirited episodes in religious history. After the magic words "One Pound," it is, of course, to St. George and the Dragon that the eye first turns. What Mr. Ruskin would say of the latest version of the encounter between England's tutelary genius and his fearsome foe, one can only guess; but I feel sure that he would be caustic about the Saint's grip on his spear. To get its head right through the dragon's chest--taking, as it has done, the longest possible route--and out so far on the other side, would require more vigour and tension than is suggested by the casual way in which the thumb rests on the handle. Dragons' necks and bosoms are, I take it, not only scaly without but of a sinewy consistency within that is by no means easy to penetrate, and in this particular case the difficulty must have been increased by the creature's struggles, which, the artist admits, bent the spear very noticeably. None the less, the Saint's hold is most delicate, and his features are marked by the utmost placidity.

As a matter of fact, the Saint is not sufficiently armed on our £1 notes; for in real life, and particularly when he rode out on the Libyan plain to do battle with the dragon, he had a sword as well as a spear. But he could not have had both if he were dressed as the Treasury artist dresses him, unless he carried the sword between his teeth; which he is not doing. There is no better authority than _The Golden Legend_, and _The Golden Legend_ (in the translation of Master William Caxton) testifieth thus: "Then as they [St. George and the King's daughter, whom the dragon desired,] spake together, the dragon appeared and came running to them, and St. George was upon his horse, and drew out his sword and garnished him with the sign of the cross, and rode hardily against the dragon which came towards him, and smote him with his spear [spear, now, take notice], and hurt him sore and threw him to the ground." The absence of the sword is one error that never ought to have gained currency. Another is the grievousness of the wound which is depicted; for in real life the wound was so slight, although sufficient, that the King's daughter--but let Master Caxton continue, for he writeth better than I ever shall. Having conquered the foe, St. George, according to _The Golden Legend_, "said to the maid: 'Deliver to me your girdle, and bind it about the neck of the dragon, and be not afeard.' When she had done so, the dragon followed her as it had been a meek beast and debonair." It was later, and not until St. George had baptized the King and all his people (which was his reward), that he smote off the dragon's head.

To my mind _The Golden Legend_ is too gentle with this contest. I like a real fight, and here one is almost as much defrauded as in the story of David and Goliath. In treating the victory over the dragon with equal lightness, perhaps the Treasury artist, even though he has not followed the authority closely enough in other ways, is justified; but he should have read the text more carefully, for no one can pretend that a dragon so drastically perforated as this one could follow a princess into the city. Indeed, it is such a _coup de grâce_ as no self-respecting and determined dragon, furnished with wings, inflammable breath, and all the usual fittings, would have submitted itself to. Because, given wings, neither of which is broken, how would it have allowed itself to come into that posture at all?

Saints, however, must be saints; and their adversaries know this.

It was only, as I have said, with incredible difficulties that I could get this pound note to study; imagine, then, what pains and subterfuges were, in 1917, necessary in order to obtain the loan of a sovereign with which to compare the golden rendering of the same conflict. Eventually, however, I was successful, and one of the precious discs passed temporarily into my keeping. It lies beside No. 344260 on the table as I write. In this treatment--Mr. Ruskin's strictures upon which are familiar--one is first struck by the absurdity of the Saint's weapon: a short dagger with which he could never do any damage at all, unless either he fell off his horse or the dragon obligingly rose up to meet the blow. Fortunately, however, the horse has powerful hoofs, and one of these is inflicting infinite mischief. Other noticeable peculiarities of the sovereign's rendering are the smallness of the horse's head and the length of St. George's leg. The total effect, in spite of blemishes, is more spirited than that of No. 344260, but both would equally fill a Renaissance Florentine medallist with gloom.

So much for the St. Georges and the Dragons of Treasury artists. But when it comes to No. 344260's portrait of Mr. John Bradbury, Secretary to the Treasury, over his facsimile autograph, in green ink, I have no fault to find. This is a strong profile treatment, not a little like the King, and I am glad to have seen it. One likes to think of regal features and tonsorial habits setting a fashion. Mr. John Bradbury does well and loyally to resemble as closely as he can his royal master.

Having reached this point, I turned No. 344260 over and examined the back, which represents the Houses of Parliament as seen from Lambeth. There are three peculiarities about this picture. One is that all the emphasis is laid--where of late we have not been in the habit of looking for it--on the House of Lords; another is that Parliament is not sitting, for the Victoria Tower is without its flag; and the third is that Broad Sanctuary has been completely eliminated, so that the Abbey and the Victoria Tower form one building. No doubt to the fortunate persons through whose hands one pound notes pass, such awful symbolism conveys a sense of England's greatness and power; but I think it would be far more amusing if the back had been left blank, in case some later Robbie Burns (could this decadent world ever know so fine a thing again) wished to write another lament on it:

For lack o' thee I've lost my lass, For lack o' thee I scrimp my glass.

Or, if not blank, thirty (say) spaces might be ruled on it, in which the names of its first thirty owners could be written. By the time the spaces were filled it would be a document historically valuable now and then to autograph collectors. It would also be dirty enough to call in.

The Two Perkinses

Walking in the garden in the cool of the July evening, I was struck afresh by the beauty of that climbing rose we call Dorothy Perkins, and by her absolute inability to make a mistake. There are in this garden several of these ramblers, all heritages from an earlier tenant and all very skilfully placed: one over an arch, one around a window, and three or four clambering up fir posts on which the stumps of boughs remain; and in every case the rose is flowering more freely than ever before, and has arranged its blossoms, leaves, and branches with an exquisite and impeccable taste. Always lovely, Dorothy Perkins is never so lovely as in the evening, just after the sun has gone, when the green takes on a new sobriety against which her gay and tender pink is gayer and more tender. "Pretty little Dolly Perkins!" I said to myself involuntarily, and instantly, by the law of association--which, I sometimes fondly suppose, is more powerful with me than with many people--I began to think of another evening, twenty and more years ago, when for the first time I heard the most dainty of English comic songs sung as it should be, with the first words of the chorus accentuated like hammer blows in unison:

For--she--was--as--

and then tripping merrily into the rest of it:

--beautiful as a butterfly, As fair as a queen, Was pretty little Polly Perkins Of Paddington Green.