It was frightful--flour and burned grease over everything, every pan dirty, dishes all over the place and a half-burned cigarette in the sugar bin. But--it touched us all deeply--he had found an old photograph of the three of us and had made a sort of shrine of the clock-shelf--the picture in front of the clock and in front of the picture a bunch of red geraniums.
While we were looking at the picture and Aggie was at the sink putting water in the gla.s.s that held the geraniums, Tufik having forgotten to do so, Tish"s neighbor from the apartment below, an elderly bachelor, came up the service staircase and knocked at the door. Tish opened it.
"Humph!" said the gentleman from below. "Gone is he?"
"Is who gone?"
"Your thieving Syrian, madam!"
Tish stiffened.
"Perhaps," she said, "if you will explain--"
"Perhaps," snarled the visitor, "you will explain what you have done with my geraniums! Why don"t you raise your own flowers?"
Tish was quite stunned and so was I. After all, it was Aggie who came to the rescue. She slammed the lid on to the teakettle and set it on the stove with a bang.
"If you mean," she said indignantly, "that you think we have any geraniums of yours--"
"Think! Didn"t my cook see your thieving servant steal "em off the box on the fire-escape?"
"Then, perhaps," Aggie suggested, "you will look through the apartment and see if they are here. You will please look everywhere!"
Tish and I gasped. It was not until the visitor had made the rounds of the apartment, and had taken an apologetic departure, that Tish and I understood. The teakettle was boiling and from its spout coming a spicy and familiar odor. Aggie took it off the stove and removed the lid. The geraniums, boiled to a pulp, were inside.
"Back to Syria that boy goes!" said Tish, viewing the floral remains.
"He did it out of love and we must not chide him. But we have our own immortal souls to think of."
The next morning two things happened. We gave Tufik one hundred and twenty dollars to buy a ticket back to Syria and to keep him in funds on the way. And Tish got a note from Hannah:--
_Dear Miss Tish_: I here you still have the dago--or, as my sister"s husband says, he still has you. I am redy to live up to my bargen if you are.
HANNAH.
P.S. I have lerned a new salud--very rich, but delissious.
H.
In spite of herself, Tish looked haunted. It was the salad, no doubt.
She said nothing, but she looked round the untidy rooms, where everything that would hold it had a linen cover with a Cluny-lace edge--all of them soiled and wrinkled. She watched Tufik, chanting about the plains of Lebanon and shoving the carpet-sweeper with a bang against her best furniture; and, with Hannah"s salad in mind, she sniffed a warning odor from the kitchen that told of more Syrian experiments with her digestion. Tish surrendered: that morning she wrote to Hannah that Tufik was going back to Syria, and to come and bring the salad recipe with her.
That was, I think, on a Monday. Tufik"s steamer sailed on Thursday. On Tuesday Aggie and I went shopping; and in a spirit of repentance--for we felt we were not solving Tufik"s question but getting rid of him--we bought him a complete new outfit. He almost disgraced us by kissing our hands in the store, and while we were buying him some ties he disappeared--to come back later with the rims of his eyes red from weeping. His gentle soul was touched with grat.i.tude. Aggie had to tell him firmly that if he kissed any more hands he would get his ears boxed.
The clerks in the store were all interested, and two or three cash-boys followed us round and stood, open-mouthed, staring at us. Neither Aggie nor I knew anything about masculine attire, and Tufik"s idea was a suit, with nothing underneath, a shirt-front and collar of celluloid, and a green necktie already tied and hooking on to his collar-b.u.t.ton. He was dazed when we bought him a steamer trunk and a rug, and disappeared again, returning in a few moments with a small paper bag full of gumdrops. We were quite touched.
That, as I say, was on Tuesday. Tufik had been sleeping in Tish"s guest-room since his desperate attempt at suicide, and we sent his things to Tish"s apartment. That evening Tufik asked permission to spend the night with a friend in the restaurant business--a Damascan. Tish let him go against my advice.
"He"ll eat a lot of that Syrian food," I objected, "and get sick and miss his boat, and we"ll have the whole thing over again!"
But Tish was adamant. "It"s his last night," she said, "and he has promised not to smoke any cigarettes and I"ve given him two pepsin tablets. This is the land of the free, Lizzie."
We were to meet Tufik at the station next morning and we arranged a lunch for him to eat on the train, Aggie bringing fried chicken and I sandwiches and cake. Tish"s domestic arrangements being upset, she supplied fruit, figs and dates mostly, to make him think of home.
The train left early, and none of us felt very cheerful at having to be about. Aggie sat in the station and sneezed; Tish had a pain above her eye and sat by a heater. We had the luncheon in a large s...o...b..x, wrapped in oiled paper to keep it moist.
He never appeared! The train was called, filled up, and left. People took to staring at us as we sat there. Aggie sneezed and Tish held her eye. And no Tufik! In a sort of helpless, breakfastless rage we called a taxicab and went to Tish"s. No one said much. We were all thinking.
We were hungry; so we spread out the s...o...b..x lunch on one of the Cluny-lace covers and ate it, mostly in silence. The steamer trunk and the rug had gone. We let them go. They might go to Jerusalem, as far as we were concerned! After we had eaten,--about eleven o"clock, I think,--Tish got up and surveyed the apartment. Then, with a savage gleam in her eye, she whisked off all the fancy linens, the Cluny laces, the hemst.i.tched bedspreads, and piled them in a heap on the floor. Aggie and I watched her in silence. She said nothing, but kicked the whole lot into the bottom of a cupboard. When she had slammed the door, she turned and faced us grimly.
"That roll of fiddle-de-dees has cost me about five hundred dollars,"
she said. "It"s been worth it if it teaches me that I"m an old fool and that you are two others! If that boy shows his face here again, I"ll hand him over to the police."
However, as it happened, she did nothing of the sort. At four o"clock that afternoon there was a timid ring at the doorbell and I answered it.
Outside was Tufik, forlorn and drooping, and held up by main force by a tall, dark-skinned man with a heavy mustache.
"I bring your boy!" said the mustached person, smiling. "He has great trouble--sorrow; he faint with grief."
I took a good look at Tufik then. He was pale and shaky, and his new suit looked as if he had slept in it. His collar was bent and wilted, and the green necktie had been taken off and exchanged for a ragged black one.
"Miss Liz!" he said huskily. "I die; the heart is gone! My parent--"
He broke down again; and leaning against the door jamb he buried his face in a handkerchief that I could not believe was one of the lot we had bought only yesterday. I hardly knew what to do. Tish had said she was through with the boy. I decided to close them out in the hallway until we had held a council; but Tufik"s foot was on the sill, and the more I asked him to move it, the harder he wept.
The mustached person said it was quite true. Tufik"s father had died of the plague; the letter had come early that morning. Beirut was full of the plague. He waved the letter at me; but I ordered him to burn it immediately--on account of germs. I brought him a shovel to burn it on; and when that was over Tufik had worked out his own salvation. He was at the door of Tish"s room, pouring out to Aggie and Tish his grief, and offering the black necktie as proof.
We were just where we had started, but minus one hundred and twenty dollars; for, the black-mustached gentleman having gone after trying to sell Tish another silk kimono, I demanded Tufik"s ticket--to be redeemed--and was met with two empty hands, outstretched.
"Oh, my friends,--my Miss Tish, my Miss Liz, my Miss Ag,--what must I say? I have not the ticket! I have been wikkid--but for my sister--only for my sister! She must not die--she so young, so little girl!"
"Tufik," said Tish sternly, "I want you to tell us everything this minute, and get it over."
"She ees so little!" he said wistfully. "And the body of my parent--could I let it lie and rot in the so hot sun? Ah, no; Miss Tish, Miss Liz, Miss Ag,--not so. To-day I take back my ticket, get the money, and send it to my sister. She will bury my parent, and then--she comes to this so great America, the land of my good friends!"
There was a moment"s silence. Then Aggie sneezed!
IV
I shall pa.s.s over the next month, with its unpleasantnesses; over Charlie Sands"s coming one evening with a black tie and, on the strength of having killed a dog with his machine, asking for money to bury it, and bring another one from Syria! I shall not more than mention Hannah, who kept Tish physically comfortable and well fed and mentally wretched, having a teakettle of boiling water always ready if Tufik came to the apartment; I shall say nothing of our success in getting him employment in the foreign department of a bank, and his ending up by washing its windows; or of the position Tish got him as elevator boy in her hospital, where he jammed the car in some way and held up four surgeons and three nurses and a patient on his way to the operating-room--until the patient changed his mind and refused to be operated on.
Aggie had a brilliant idea about the census--that he could make the census reports in the Syrian district. To this end she worked for some time, coaching Tufik for the examination, only to have him fail--fail absolutely and without hope. He was staying in the Syrian quarter at that time, on account of Hannah; and he brought us various tempting offers now and then--a fruit stand that could be bought for a hundred dollars; a restaurant for fifty; a tailor"s shop for twenty-five. But, as he knew nothing of fruits or restaurants or tailoring, we refused to invest. Tish said that we had been a good while getting to it, but that we were being businesslike at last. We gave the boy nine dollars a week and not a penny more; and we refused to buy any more of his silly linens and crocheted laces. We were quite firm with him.
And now I come to the arriving of Tufik"s little sister--not that she was really little. But that comes later.
Tufik had decided at last on what he would be in our so great America.