The Sheikh had an unlimited contempt for Persian politics. ‘It is all rotten!’ he would say--‘rotten! rotten! What would you have?’ (with a lifting of the eyebrows). ‘We are all corrupt, and the Shah is our lord. You would have to begin by sweeping away everything that exists.’ But his disbelief in the efficacy of European civilization was equally profound, and his pessimism struck me as being further sighted than the careless optimism of those who seek to pile one edifice upon another, a Western upon an Eastern world, and never pause to consider whether, if it stands at all, the newer will only stand by crushing the older out of all existence. Sheikh Hassan, at all events, was not very hopeful. ‘Triste pays!’ he would say at the end of such a conversation. ‘Ah, triste pays!’ and though I knew he had his own views as to the possible future of his country, he was far too discreet a man to confide them to frivolous ears.
Concerning his private life I never liked to question him, though I would have given much to know what his own household was like. He had a wife and children down in Tehran. The good lady looked with unmitigated disapproval upon infidel foreigners, and her husband was obliged to conceal from her how many hours of the day he spent with them. Judging by an anecdote I heard of her during the cholera time, she must have ruled the establishment with a hand of iron. The Sheikh, being much concerned over the risk his family was running in the plague-stricken town, had taken the precaution of laying in six bottles of brandy, the most convenient medicine he could obtain, and hearing at the same time that a good bargain offered itself in the matter of olive-oil, he, as a prudent man, had also purchased six bottles of oil and stored them too in his cellar. But on one luckless morning, when his wife happened to enter there, she espied the brandy lurking in a dark corner. Being a lady of marked religious convictions, she at once called to mind the words which the Prophet has pronounced against alcoholic liquors, and without more ado opened the bottles and poured out their contents upon the floor. On further search her eldest daughter discovered the oil in another corner. Having observed the conduct of her mother, she concluded that she could not do better than imitate it, and accordingly the innocent liquid also streamed out over the cellar floor, libation to an unheeding god. The unfortunate Sheikh found on his return that his foresight and his skill in bargaining had alike been brought to nought by the misguided fervour of the female members of his family. To none of them did the cholera prove fatal, though the wife suffered from a slight attack; but Sheikh Hassan spent anxious weeks until the danger was over. ‘For thirty-seven nights,’ he told me pathetically, ‘I lay awake and considered what could be done for my children’s safety.’ With true Oriental fatalism, he did not seem to have taken any active steps in the matter, and at the end of his thirty-seven nights of thought he was as far from any conclusion as ever. Happily, the extreme fury of the cholera had by that time abated.