"Oh, he'll help himself all right!" observed Charlie Sands. "But, since his people are Christians, I wish you'd tell me how he knows so much about the inside of a harem!"
Seeing that comment annoyed us, he ceased, and we fell to our bridge game; but more than once his eye fell on Aggie's doily, and he muttered something about the Assyrian coming down like a wolf on the fold.
II
The problem of Tufik's future was a pressing one. Tish called a meeting of the three of us next morning, and we met at her house. We found her reading about Syria in the encyclopædia, while spread round her on chairs and tables were numbers of silk kimonos, rolls of crocheted lace, shirt-waist patterns, and embroidered linens.
Hannah let us in. She looked surly and had a bandage round her head, a sure sign of trouble—Hannah always referring a pain in her temper to her ear or her head or her teeth. She clutched my arm in the hall and held me back.
"I'm going to poison him!" she said. "Miss Lizzie, that little snake goes or I go!"
"I'm ashamed of you, Hannah!" I replied sternly. "If out of the breadth of her charity Miss Tish wishes to assist a fellow man—"
Hannah reeled back and freed my arm.
"My God!" she whispered. "You too!"
I am very fond of Hannah, who has lived with Tish for many years; but I had small patience with her that morning.
"I cannot see how it concerns you, anyhow, Hannah," I observed severely.
Hannah put her apron to her eyes and sniffled into it.
"Oh, you can't, can't you!" she wailed. "Don't I give him half his meals, with him soft-soapin' Miss Tish till she can't see for suds? Ain't I fallin' over him mornin', noon, and night, and the postman telling all over the block he's my steady company—that snip that's not eighteen yet? And don't I do the washin'? And will you look round the place and count the things I've got to do up every week? And don't he talk to me in that lingo of his, so I don't know whether he's askin' for a cup of coffee or insultin' me?"
I patted Hannah on the arm. After all, none of the exaltation of a good deed upheld Hannah as it sustained us.
"We are going to help him help himself, Hannah," I said kindly. "He hasn't found himself. Be gentle with him. Remember he comes from the land of the Bible."
"Humph!" said Hannah, who reads the newspapers. "So does the plague!"
The problem we had set ourselves we worked out that morning. As Tish said, the boy ought to have light work, for the Syrians are not a laboring people.
"Their occupation is—er—mainly pastoral," she said, with the authority of the encyclopædia. "Grazing their herds and gathering figs and olives. If we knew some one who needed a shepherd—"
Aggie opposed the shepherd idea, however. As she said, and with reason, the climate is too rigorous. "It's all well enough in Syria," she said, "where they have no cold weather; but he'd take his death of pneumonia here."
We put the shepherd idea reluctantly aside. My own notion of finding a camel for him to look after was negatived by Tish at once, and properly enough I realized.
"The only camels are in circuses," she said, "and our duty to the boy is moral as well as physical. Circuses are dens of immorality. Of course the Syrians are merchants, and we might get him work in a store. But then again—what chance has he of rising? Once a clerk, always a clerk." She looked round at the chairs and tables, littered with the contents of Tufik's pasteboard suitcase, which lay empty at her feet. "And there is nothing to canvassing from door to door. Look at these exquisite things!—and he cannot sell them. Nobody buys. He says he never gets inside a house door. If you had seen his face when I bought a kimono from him!"
At eleven o'clock, having found nothing in the "Help Wanted" column to fit Tufik's case, Tish called up Charlie Sands and offered Tufik as a reporter, provided he was given no nightwork. But Charlie Sands said it was impossible—that the editors and owners of the paper were always putting on their sons and relatives, and that when there was a vacancy the big advertisers got it. Tish insisted—she suggested that Tufik could run an Arabian column, like the German one, and bring in a lot of new subscribers. But Charlie Sands stood firm.
At noon Tufik came. We heard a skirmish at the door and Hannah talking between her teeth.
"She's out," she said.
"Well, I think she is not out," in Tufik's soft tones.
"You'll not get in."
"Ah, but my toes are in. See, my foot wishes to enter!" Then something soft, coaxing, infinitely wistful, in Arabian followed by a slap. The next moment Hannah, in tears, rushed back to the kitchen. There was no sound from the hallway. No smiling Tufik presented himself in the doorway.
Tish rose in the majesty of wrath. "I could strangle that woman!" she said, and we followed her into the hall.
Tufik was standing inside the door with his arms folded, staring ahead. He took no notice of us.
"Tufik!" Aggie cried, running to him. "Did she—did she dare—Tish, look at his cheek!"
"She is a bad woman!" Tufik said somberly. "I make my little prayer to see Miss Tish, my mother, and she—I kill her!"
We had a hard time apologizing to him for Hanna. Tish got a basin of cold water so he might bathe his face; and Aggie brought a tablespoonful of blackberry cordial, which is soothing. When the poor boy was calmer we met in Tish's bedroom and Tish was quite firm on one point—Hannah must leave!
Now, this I must say in my own defense—I was sorry for Tufik; and it is quite true I bought him a suit and winter flannels and a pair of yellow shoes—he asked for yellow. He said he was homesick for a bit of sunshine, and our so somber garb made him heart-sad. But I would never have dismissed a cook like Hannah for him.
"I shall have to let her go," Tish said. "He is Oriental and passionate. He has said he will kill her—and he'll do it. They hold life very lightly."
"Humph!" I said. "Very well, Tish, that holding life lightly isn't a Christian trait. It's Mohammedan—every Mohammedan wants to die and go to his heaven, which is a sort of sublimated harem. The boy's probably a Christian by training, but he's a Mohammedan by blood."
Aggie thought my remark immoral and said so. And just then Hannah solved her own problem by stalking into the room with her things on and a suitcase in her hand.
"I'm leaving, Miss Tish!" she said with her eye-rims red. "God knows I never expected to be put out of this place by a dirty dago! You'll find your woolen stockings on the stretchers, and you've got an appointment with the dentist tomorrow morning at ten. And when that little blackguard has sucked you dry, and you want him killed to get rid of him, you'll find me at my sister's."
She picked up her suitcase and Tish flung open the door. "You're a hard-hearted woman, Hannah Mackintyre!" Tish snapped. "Your sister can't keep you. You'll have to work."
Hannah turned in the doorway and sneered at the three of us.
"Oh, no!" she said. "I'm going to hunt up three soft-headed old maids and learn to kiss their hands and tell 'em I have nobody but them and God!"
She slammed out at that, leaving us in a state of natural irritation. But our rage soon faded. Tufik was not in the parlor; and Tish, tiptoeing back, reported that he was in the kitchen and was mixing up something in a bowl.
"He's a dear boy!" she said. "He feels responsible for Hannah's leaving and he's getting luncheon! Hannah is a wicked and uncharitable woman!"
"Man's inhumanity to man,