The Shaving of Shagpat (1856)/The Recital of the Vizier Feshnavat

by George Meredith

 

THE RECITAL OF THE VIZIER FESHNAVAT.

Surely as a river swelleth with the rains the breath of applause puffed Shagpat, and his arrogance increased, and he was a very Nile-flood of presumption, swamping the city, so that my Viziership made me a mark for his followers and supporters, and the King regarded him with the eye of preference. So I shivered in the shadow of neglect, waiting till thy work was done and the Sword reached, to taste the sweetness of revenge on Shagpat; patience with the plotter! Now there came on a certain day, and it was the day of the New Year, one, a merchant, into the market-place of the City where we were assembled, proclaiming a marvel, and it was a lamp, the light of which none of the people could extinguish. The merchant handed it to me, and I blew upon it, but still it burned steadfast; then the merchant held the lamp to the mouth of Shagpat, and he blew, and lo, the flame vanished! So the people extolled Shagpat, and the merchant prostrated himself, and said, "I know by this there is holiness in thee!"

Now the merchant handed it to us again to bring back the light, and none of us could bring it back save Shagpat, and the merchant said, "How is it I marked not at a glance that this man of the thick and lengthy growth was he that had holiness in him?" Then said he to the people, "Honour him ye!" And he said to the King, "O King, high in majesty, potent! if the blaze of thy throne over kingdoms and countries be now such as we see it, what would it be were Shagpat at thy right hand, advising thee in the chair of the Vizier?"

Upon that I was wroth, and sought the countenance of the King, but he betrayed no discontent; so I saw that the star of Shagpat was in the ascendant,—mine darkened by it. Now in this merchant I discovered the Genie Karaz, and daily he did things in this wise to honour Shagpat in the eyes of the people and abase me; yet was I patient and awaited thy coming, O Master of the Event, to confound him. Things were in that state when tidings were brought of a barber that had been in Oolb, and had shaved the King and his officers with a terrible tackle that talked and prophesied shame to Shagpat, dishonour to him, and downfall, disgrace, and vindictive shearing. Then I knew thou wert in part triumphant by the aids of Noorna, my daughter, and that Paravid and Garraveen would lead to the Lily, the Lily to Aklis, Aklis to the consummation of vengeance and crowning of Events on the head of Shagpat. Surely the thought was comfort, and the news intoxicated me, and I went forth disguised and without companion, when the day had sunk, to watch the effect of it on the people that stood in groups by the doorways and met on the housetops, and collected on the ways leading to the wells, discussing in alarm the case of Oolb, and the Barber, and Shagpat.

Now I was standing by the tall palm near the well eastward of the city, when I heard a sound of one that approached in the dusk, mumbling sentences in the dialect of Shiraz, grumbling as it seemed; and I heard him say, "A curse on this capricious King of Oolb! Shaved is he? By the tomb of my fathers, I'll offer my skill nowhere save in Shiraz after that, and they may languish for it the length of the earth, and make offers for my service, yea, offers of pearls and precious stones and dresses and slaves, elegant damsels, instructed, sensible to eloquence. All these they may offer for an essay of my science and an exposition of my cunning on their frontispieces; yea and more, steeds they may offer and golden tackle, yea and princes shall woo me vainly, proffering estates and mansions, with gardens and established harems for but one operation of my hand upon them, and I'll refuse, scorning them contumaciously—I—"

While the Vizier Feshnavat was reciting this soliloquy Shibli Bagarag burst in on his recital, crying, "'Twas — and I guess it, and wager on the guess, O Feshnavat!—Baba Mustapha!"

Said Feshnavat, "Even he! how recognized ye him?"

And Shibli Bagarag answered, "By his loquacity, his lengthiness of tongue, his esteem of his science over all other created things."

Then the Vizier Feshnavat said, "O Master of the Event, truly I could have laughed while this fellow mumbled, and I should have roared with laughter, but that a thought illumined my brain and lighted a path up the intricacies of action, solving perplexity; and I rushed upon him, and seized him, exclaiming, "In the name of Shagpat!"

So he fell on the knees of remonstrance, and lifted the hands up imploring; and I said, "Thou art a barber! confess that thing!"

Then he stammered with what speech was his, and I commanded him imperiously to follow me, and took him before the King, and accused him in the King's chamber of audience of the crime of barbercraft, and of being the barber that had shaved the King of Oolb and the officers of his Court, and the viziers and emirs, and grave magistrates and cadis and shahids, and lesser personages of the Court and City of Oolb. So he denied this, and I continued to accuse him, the poor wretch! And his journeys were traced by Arabs from the gates of Oolb, his case a clear case of barbercraft proved upon him; and I was extolled for my zeal, praised, and in favour again, as is said by the poet:

"Nature's ordinance is sad!
Each preys on each, as 't would appear:
Thy saneness driveth neighbours mad,
Their smiles cause thee a tear."

This is so, and he says:

"Thro' thy good fortune will a store
That once was full decrease;
In smiles, tears, sighs, jests, evermore
We see-saw till we cease."

And he adds:

"When one is down, the other's up;
We're brothers only in the cup."

'Wherefore,' he says, 'drink ye, and fatten in merriment, O ye of humankind!' and this I said to Baba Mustapha when he had received plenteous thwackings, touched with pity for his state; but he refused consolation, dwelling in verse on the delights of Shiraz, the honours awarded to barbercraft there. Now on a day, as he paced the felons' prison in a moment of dejection, I was by, and heard him call on the name of Shibli Bagarag as one absent, missing, and to whom he was indebted for divers thwackings, ignominies, and maltreatments: so I said to him, "What of the youth Shibli Bagarag?"

And he answered, "This of him, O Vizier: that but for him and my search after him I were now in the centre of the adulations of Shiraz; the good-for-nothing fellow! he whom the Evil One possessed with the idea of arriving at great things,—and the readers of planets! And but for him and his wilfulness, and his wandering and his accursed ambition and dissatisfaction with his born state, the head of the Shah, the high potentate, sovereign of the earth, that head which blindeth men, were even now a familiar thing beneath my hands, I operating on him, pouring honeyed gossip in his ear, sweet scandal, laughable anecdotes, recitations."

Then he began to hint at what would be the wrath of the King of Persia when he came to hear of the treatment received by his chief barber at the hands of them of our city. Surely his tongue was a watermill, and wagged on all themes and subjects; and I let him relieve his soul with this prate, till he told of the relationship between ye. Thereat my conscience smote me on the rib with compassion for him, and I had him released, and conveyed to me secretly, and fed him, clothed him, filled him with comfort; relating to him that portion of thy adventures known to me, O Master of the Event; and of thy betrothal to my daughter Noorna, and of thy destiny that led thee through dangers, enchantments, privations, amazing marvels, to the Shaving of Shagpat. So hearing this he gave praise to the readers of planets, and cried extemporaneously and in seemly verse:

"We mortals, that know not the stars and their doings,
Complain when annoy'd in our warrings and wooings;
But oh could we read them, their mysteries tracking,
Like birds in a storm we should sing through each thwacking."

Wullahy! scarce could I restrain him from flying at Shagpat that instant; and it required abundance of quotation from what the sages have bequeathed to us in matters of experience and wisdom, and lively illustrations, forcible appeals, to hold him back. Now till his excitement abated I kept him by me. Then I gave him porter's work, and he did me commissions, faithfully, with zeal, and a tongue that ceased not to rattle on all but the forbidden business. So it was that, after Time, the father of changes, had flown some while without seed of circumstance, one night Baba Mustapha failed to return, and the next and that following; and I was in fear lest aught had befallen him. It was on the fourth morning that I descended early to the silver hall of my palace, and lo! suddenly one that rushed into it like a quarry seeking shelter, pale of face, and turban awry; and he rushed to the fountain and dipped his head therein, and was clearly a man that wished to certify to himself the fact of his existence in this world. Now when he looked up I saw that it was Baba Mustapha, and that in his absence he had mixed with terrors and drunk of the waters of tribulation. So I cried to him, "Ho! Baba Mustapha!" but he took no heed of me, and looked with the eye of a sheep. I examined him, and there were marks upon him of fresh castigation. Then I perceived that he had fallen into the hands of the inimical, who had chased his wits from their habitations: so to revive his spirit and bring speech to his lips, I sent to the meat-market and bought a sheep whole and unsheared, remembering what is said, 'The habitations of the wits are habits;' and I had the sheep placed before Baba Mustapha, beside him tackle and soap for soaping preparatory to the shave, to tempt him to action; praise be to thy craft, O Master of the Event! For awhile he recognized not this; but presently the uses of the barber warmed in him and thawed forgetfulness; and my conception of his case and the remedy was perfect, for he seized the tackle, and commenced soaping the sheep dreamily; then with a livelier hand; then with a hand of vigour; then fiercely, fiercely; then so that his hand was like a wind, wild as a fly, swift as a wheel, invisible in motion; he crying, "I have thee, Shagpat! I have thee!" crying, "What! thou and thy creatures deluded me! Wullahy! this is vengeance, this!" crying, "Even without the aid of the Sword my nephew seeketh at such a risk, trouble, labour!" Then he began to shave the sheep, putting forth all his science and dexterity, vainly turning his wrist, coxcombically elevating the bend of his elbow, tenderly handling the animal while his blade swept over it. Never I wot was sheep-shearing performed with that extreme of care and skill! So when 'twas done, I watched him, and he collected the wool under one arm, and breathed a deep inflation; and he was as if too light on his feet for the earth he trod, his head menacingly challenging the remoteness of the four quarters of the universe for one equal to him in the thing he had achieved. Wah! 'twas a madness of laughter to look upon him. Then on a sudden he cried, addressing himself proudly, "Proclaim Shagpat shaved!" and lo! ere I could divine his purpose and arrest him, he slanted swiftly from the hall, and his heels were twinkling beyond the portals of the palace, and up the street towards the market-place. Awahy! then was I in the abysms of despair, and saw myself no match for the ills that threatened, for he was shouting of Shagpat publicly, proclaiming Shagpat shaved, and by his hand, the hand of Baba Mustapha, in the house of Feshnavat the Vizier; and that 'twas the fallen crop of Shagpat he held beneath his arm, even that, a glory of barbercraft! Truly his wits were traitors to the tender parts of him, and he was confounded ere the setting of that day's sun, confronted with Shagpat in his splendour and his gravity, and his enveloping hairiness and his umbrageous growths! Then was he thwacked by order of the King till the flesh of his back was hillocky with purple weals, and he, a moving mass of aches and stings and shooting pains and throbs of unpleasantness, thrust from the gates of the City. The matter was so with Baba Mustapha; but as for how the matter went with me, 'tis certain I was haled to the presence of the King, and denials, protestations, assertions went for nothing; the barber was tracked from my palace, and the wife of Shagpat, she that adoreth him, Kadza, this woman and another, an old woman, a veritable hag, thrice hideous, a mockery of the putting together of flesh and bones, with skin like a frog, throat like a pelican, legs like a peacock, back like a camel——

Cried Noorna bin Noorka, "Goorelka of Oolb!"

So the Vizier Feshnavat continued: 'Tis the thing that might be! She then, this crone, swore to my plotting with Baba Mustapha, made oath to my conspiracies against Shagpat, and that I, my emissaries and I, had many times assaulted the holy man of late, tugged at him by the beard and back-hair, offended his vision with insolent flourishings of the apparatus of barbercraft,—all this; and that upon one occasion I had forced an entrance to him in his shop-front after dusk, when the people were retiring from their observation of Shagpat, and compelled him to submit to the lather, purposing to have him shaved. They said, "Thereat mark a wonder of special grace and protection accorded to Shagpat, and the care of him exercised by Genii, O King of this City; for the blade of the barber in its contact with the first hair broke, fell in twain, and the edge of it became blunter than a date-stone!"

The King exclaimed, "'T is wondrous! Wullahy! We will have it announced to them of Oolb, the shorn, the self-abased, the tackle-contaminated ones; and I will have it written on tablets of virgin silver in gold letters, that time hereafter may read of Shagpat, the unparalleled, and the care of him exercised by Genii. Wullahy! he reflecteth honour on the throne itself. My Vizier is he!"

Now this false-speaking prevailed, and a day was fixed for my degradation before the people, and 'twas to be a day of exaltation for Shagpat. Dust was in the eyes of the King, wool in his ears, oblivion of long services in his heart! Methinketh likewise, O Master of the Event, that his conduct to me was seasoned with folly and small reading of that which futurity bringeth forth. I was disgraced, thwacked with the thong; Shagpat exalted, enjoying my viziership taken from me, and men made foolish—ruined by him. I was left not even in possession of the palace in which I abode. What a day was that!"

Cried Shibli Bagarag, "O Feshnavat, 'twas not a day veiled from me, and I saw it, thee, and him."

So Feshnavat said, "How? From what point of view, O Master of the Event?"

He answered, "From Aklis, through the eye of Aklis."

So Feshnavat said, "Wondrous must be that eye!"

He replied, "All things be wondrous in Aklis."^[1] Then said he, turning quickly, "Yonder is the light from Aklis striking on the city, and I mark Shagpat, even he, illumined by it, singled out, where he sitteth on the roof of the palace by the market-place."

So they looked, and it was as he had spoken, that Shagpat was singled out in the midst of the city by the wondrous beams of the eye of Aklis, and made prominent in effulgence.

Said Abarak, climbing to the level of observation, "He hath a redness like the inside of a halved pomegranate."

Feshnavat stroked his meditative chin, exclaiming, "He may be likened to a mountain goat in the midst of a forest roaring with conflagration."

Said Shibli Bagarag, "Now is he the red-maned lion, the bristling boar, the uncombed buffalo, the plumaged cock, but soon will he be like nothing else save the wrinkled kernel of a shaggy fruit, diminished, weazen, bitter. Lo, now, the Sword! mark ye? it leapeth to be at him, and 'twill be as the keen icicle of winter to that perishing foliage, that doomed crop! So doth the destined minute destroy with a flash the hoarded arrogance of ages; and the destined hand doeth what creation failed to perform; and 'tis by order, destiny, and preordainment, that the works of this world come to pass. This know I, and I witness thereto, that am of a surety ordained to the Shaving of Shagpat!"

Then he stood apart and gazed from Shagpat to the city that now began to move with the morning; elephants and coursers saddled by the gates of the King's palace were visible, and camels blocking the narrow streets, and the markets bustling. Surely though the sun illumined that city, it was as a darkness behind Shagpat singled by the beams of Aklis!

 

1. This marks the end of the text missing in many later editions. The rest of this chapter continues at the end of the chapter "The Revival" of the 1909 edition (Wikisource contributor note)