It was in 1945, when I was directress of the kindergarten of the Lebanese Women's League, in Julia Dimashqiyah's neighborhood. From her window overlooking the garden, "something" in the tone of my voice caught her ear, and she sent to summon me to visit her, since her coming to "the owner of the wounded voice" — as she put it — was out of the question, seeing that she was confined to her bed!
My heart opened at once, clasping to itself, with an abundance of tenderness, the woman who had been in my head, since the dawn of my childhood, a legendary dream. And I set about digging out of memory's deposits scraps from here and there that the years had scattered: a "New Woman," a "Little Ones' Companion"... an uproar over a marriage that flouted custom and tradition.
...I came at the appointed time, and in her room I sensed at once that there was an unusual freshness in the air, and that before me was an extraordinary lady... — How? — That is what I was unable, at first, to define... An overwhelming eagerness, and a gushing love... so she appeared to me.
Briefly I told my story, and in vain did I try to hide tears that welled up and trembled on the thin cheeks... And I felt, the hour I shook her hand in farewell, while her penetrating glances stirred my inmost being, that my bleeding, unyielding wounds had known their first mending under the touch of her hand; and I knew that I had found in this lady a broad open country into which my sorrows and forebodings would flee defeated, and that through her I would recover my confidence and my faith in the justice of life!
From that day, that soft hand, unique among hands, became my guide to victory. Step by step she followed the stages of my struggle and my striving, and she did not fail, in the cruelest crises of her pains, to send a word of encouragement whenever something came from me that she believed had literary worth. As for the effect of her words upon me, it was astonishing to the point of wonder: I would come away from reading them with the resolve of heroes and the feeling that I could move mountains. And I confess that the best of what I have written came while I was under this influence... Is that not a miracle?
...And when misfortunes and cares kept me from going about in society, whenever the crowding worries of my life sank me into a pit of utter despair, I would feel my way to her house as to a temple; I would enter reverent, with dragging feet and a black
scowl, and come out a light wing, and smiles! Is that not a miracle?
A great revolution she wrought in my life, and she willed, through me, an extension and a completion for her mission... Is that not a great pride for me? With what selflessness and self-denial she would rise to the defense when her visitors judged unjustly the women writers of today and charged them with incapacity and leanness of production! And how she would sit upright in her bed with fiery zeal, bringing a merit into the light and shutting her eyes to a shortcoming, finding excuses to justify it — is not all this devotion strange, coming from a woman toward the daughters of her own sex?
With a will of iron she lived a quarter century of her life in constant struggle between her mighty, soaring spirit and her tormented, surrendered body... In kind after kind the pains enlisted against her, yet abasing weakness never found a way to her heart, and so it was that she triumphed in every one of life's battles —
I do not know whether I acquired my positive spirit from my companionship with her, or whether the roots of that positiveness were native in my soul from the first; but I know for certain that we two understood each other completely in this, as witness what she wrote me in the last of her letters, dated the first of July, after she had heard my address on "The Positive Character." She said: "I see no other lady but you who joins word to deed, and I see no one but myself who, while suffering the agonies of death, enjoys a share of this positiveness which you seek for the daughters of your country. Were it not so, these words would not have leapt from my spirit to my fingers, for the first time after three months of wasting away, to congratulate you on what you have attained! —"
...At this I flew to her, asking leave to sit with her — the most delightful of all the sittings I have known — and in the flood of her talk I forgot myself: gazing at the two blue eyes in the pale face, and listening to the faint, tender voice, as if a herald from the unseen whispered into my heart an omen of ill, which I denied it!...
...That was, in truth, my last time with her.
How painful to believe that when I visit her after today, in the shaded corner of her green room — the only place I ever knew her — how painful to believe that I shall not find her there, a phantom among the pillows, that was to my eyes the symbol of sanctity and radiance!
•
Yesterday, "August" clasped to its heart our precious Julia Dimashqiyah; and tomorrow, with the spring, when the hillsides break open with their precious pearls, in colors and perfumes, "our Julia" will rise again as roses and jasmine, and her fragrance will drift over every land.