Chapter 19

One afternoon, returning to her house on lower Fifth Avenue, as she entered the hall paved with black and white tiles she saw a shabby little man trying to rise from a settee between two consoles, by aid of a pair of crutches. For an instant she had a hazy idea that he ought to be holding a breakfast tray in his hands. Then, with a sickening leap of her heart, she realized that this was Parr, who had been Lawrence Teck's valet.

He had thought she would want to receive from him, promptly on his return, a first-hand report on that African tragedy.

"But where have you been all this time?"

He had been a long while recovering from the wound that had crippled him, and from the black-water fever. Then he had found himself penniless, dependent on the charity of traders and petty government officials in the port town lying just above the equator. He had "drifted about," a reproach, perhaps, to a certain human callousness engendered by the tropics, till finally an old friend of Lawrence Teck's had appeared from Mozambique, found him sitting in tatters on the steps of a grogshop, and paid his passage home.

"You should have let me know," she said remorsefully.

He hung his head.

She led him into the drawing-room, and seated him in one of the mulberry chairs. He had become an old man. His honest, lantern-jawed face was gray and drawn.

And then there had always been the idea in his head that he ought to have fallen with his master.

"I couldn't help myself, ma'am," he said in a broken voice. "Before I hardly knew what was up he was done for, and I had this spear wound in me, and our gun boys was dragging me off amongst them, shooting to right and left. I didn't rightly know what was going on any more than if I'd got mauled by a pack of lions. Once when I kind of come to myself I tried to make them go back; but they told me they'd seen the Mambava finishing Mr. Teck as he lay on the ground----"

She gave a start and a moan. He recoiled in contrition.

At last, when she had bade him continue:

"Besides, they was after us all the way. Sometimes they even showed up in our path instead of behind us, waving their shields and shouting for a parley. But we'd had enough of their treachery; and our boys let them have it. Night and day it was dodge and run. Then we got out of the Mambava forests, and they carried me the rest of the way in a hammock made of vines and poles. Even then they never dared to light a fire, because we could always hear the Mambava behind us, telephoning from one village to another with their drums. But I couldn't hope to make you feel it, ma'am, even what I took in myself when I wasn't out of my head. It was just bad. Of course, the worst of it was that Mr. Teck was gone."

He began to cry weakly, exclaiming:

"I'd been with him everywheres!"

He was living with relatives. He hoped to get a job as a watchman. This idea was repugnant to her. The shattered, tremulous, little man was dignified by his grief, the intensity of which, after all this time, filled her with self-contempt. Then she thought, "But now, by his aid, I shall regain that dear grief!" She said:

"You must let me arrange to have your pay go on. That's what Mr. Teck would have wished."

She took his address, told a servant to call a taxicab, and went down the front steps with Parr, holding him by his bony arm as he lowered his crutches. Overwhelmed by this condescension, he stammered:

"I was afraid to come here, ma'am."

She replied:

"We need each other."

Next day she sought him out.

She found him near Stuyvesant Square, in a shabby room overlooking a back yard in which an ailanthus tree spread its limbs above some clothes lines. She leaned forward in a raveled chair, with her veil tucked up so that she could see him better, her gloved hands clasped tightly in her lap, her eyes intent. When he had recovered from her simplicity, Parr prepared to tell her what she had come to hear.

But there were so many tales about the hero to choose from!

"Anything," she exclaimed. "Make me hear what he used to say, know what he used to think. Make me see him there. Make him live!"

She meant, "Make him vivid again in my heart, where, against all my efforts, his face has faded away."

Parr held his crutches against his shoulder as if they were the harp of a minstrel who has come from afar to chant the epic of some already mythical character. His faded coat was wrinkled round the neck; his collar was split at the folds; and a faint smell of iodoform mingled with Lilla's perfume, which a Viennese artist in odors had concocted especially to "match her temperament."

"One time in Nyasaland----"

"Not the jungles!" she protested, flinching back.

"The desert, then?" he ventured.

He showed Lawrence to her in the desert that is called Erg, the waste of shifting sand; and in the desert called Chebka, a wilderness of boulders; and in the desert called Hamedan, the bleak plateaux where there are no springs of water; and in the desert called Gaci, the oases, rich with date palms, pomegranates, and oleanders. The caravan routes unrolled before her, at sunset. The hills turned to ashes of rose; the sand dunes to heliotrope; and against the sky appeared a caravan of many thousands of camels, bearing on their humps, impoverished from hard travel, the traffic that passes between the great oases--the rugs and the oil, the sacks of dates and boiled locusts, and, in the closed palanquins, the women destined to new slaveries. A great calm descended at dusk; the tents of dingy brown hair surrounded the sheik's pavilion, which was topped with a plume. The air was filled with odors of camels, of cous-cous, of sagebrush. The camp fires of desert grass flared in the night wind.

He was always well received by the caravan chiefs, the sheiks of the oases, the heads of the desert monasteries--drowsy towns with arcaded streets and tunnels of mud, into whose holy precincts came no echoes of war. He had the knack of endearing himself to fierce men, by something in his character at the same time inflexible and kindly, by a sympathy that embraced that other religion, or at least its intrinsic spirit, so that he could repeat the Fatihah with good grace before the tombs of saints. Even the Tuaregs, the untamed bandits whose faces were always muffled in black, received him into their tents of red dyed leather, where he joked with their wives and daughters, the "little queens," who were accustomed to ride alone, fifty miles on their trotting camels, to visit a sweetheart.

"But my picture was with him," thought Lilla. "I was with him there, just as he, through his picture, though I had never seen him, was with me. In our longings, that crossed in space, we were already united. Even then our actual meeting was predestined--like our parting."

Once he had encountered a band of Shaambah Arabs, out, like knights-errant, in quest of any adventure. They had fought him all afternoon in a desert spotted with gold and purple lilies, the burnooses flitting in a wide ring as the horses raced through the heat. Then suddenly they had vanished. The lukewarm water flavored with goatskin and tar, the draughts of sour camel's milk, had tasted good after that scrimmage, like a combat in chivalry.

What was it that had driven him into such places, when there had been a great, rich world of safety? Some fatal desire for regions where beauty sported more obviously than here the signs of its origins, or death the mask of beauty?

"Yes, there is a fatality in all our preferences. Is that what the Arabs mean when they say that our destinies are written on our foreheads?"

"What is their word for fate?" she inquired of Parr.

"Mektoub."

"Mektoub!" And presently, "Do you speak Arabic?"

"Oh, no, ma'am; but Mr. Teck did, as well as any of 'em."

"Tell me more," she said.

So he took her to the oases. As one drew near, there floated from the minaret a thin cry, "Allah is great! Allah is great! Allah is great!" In the house of the sheik, sitting among the hawk-nosed horsemen, they dipped their right hands into couscous flavored with cinnamon, ate honey cakes and nougat. In the doorways, beyond the range of the lamp, there was a soft clashing of bangles, a craning of veiled heads. Then in the cool of the night they walked to the café, where cobwebs hung from the palmwood rafters, and the raised hearth glowed. Here were the men drinking coffee infused with rose water, pepper, or mint, smoking tobacco and hasheesh. And here were the dancing women--"The Pearl," "Lips of Pomegranate," "The Star"--their foreheads bearing the tattoo marks of their tribes, their cheeks and chins smeared with saffron, their fingernails tinted with henna, their bodies moving convulsively under rose-colored satin dresses.

But Lilla was no longer listening.

Dusk had covered the windowpanes; the shabby furniture had turned nebulous. In these shadows Parr heard the words, meditatively pronounced:

"I think I should like to learn Arabic."

"You, ma'am!"

He gaped at her vague, pearly face, as if she had suggested some enormity. It was an ugly language, all bubbling and snorting. And a very hard one to learn!

"A hard one? Good. Can you find me a teacher somewhere?"

The door opened to frame a careworn woman in a gingham dress, who said shyly to Lilla:

"Oh, excuse me, ma'am. I thought----" And to Parr, "I'll keep your supper warm."

With her sleek bandeaux of lusterless brown hair, and her thick, straight eyebrows meeting above her nose, she looked like some model for a fifteenth century Italian painter, who had suddenly faded and now was exiled from the studio to the region of pots and pans. She was Parr's niece.

As Lilla departed down the black staircase redolent of boiled cabbage, she reflected that these surroundings were going to contaminate the sad pleasure that she planned to obtain through Parr. Her instinctive epicureanism demanded that the scene of these evocations should not be sordid.

Besides, it was intolerable that Parr, of whom Lawrence had been fond, should not be better housed.

So Lilla moved Parr and his astounded relatives to a pretty little dwelling in Greenwich Village, with waxed floors, chintz hangings at the windows, and Delia Robbia plaques in the sitting room. After seeing them installed, she said to herself:

"Poor things! How abominable I am!"

At any rate, there was nothing abominable in her having sent Parr to a surgeon who, though he doubted that the patient would ever be quite well again, guaranteed to abolish the crutches.

On the day that Parr was to go to the hospital, Lilla entered the Greenwich Village house to find a stranger sitting under the Delia Robbia plaques, He rose with a graceful dignity, bowed, and stood gazing down at her out of dark, lustrous eyes.

Parr explained that this stranger was prepared to give lessons in Arabic.

He was in his early twenties, though one did not immediately appreciate his youth because of a very delicate black beard that softened, without concealing, the lines of his chin. His features appeared to have been chiseled with great precision out of some pale, tan-colored marble; his nose was long and straight; his full eyelids gave him a slightly languorous look; but his lips, as sharply defined as a gem of carnelian, seemed somehow to be ascetic as well as sensual--virile as well as effete. Tall and spare, with small hands, he wore an outrageously inappropriate, ill-fitting sack suit. To Lilla it was as if some romantic young character from the tales of Scheherazade had been degraded for his gallantries in this hideous attire.

His name was Hamoud-bin-Said. He was an Omân Arab from Zanzibar.

Parr had found him in a Turkish café in Washington Street, oppressed by the weight of successive misfortunes, and by that sense of fatality which benumbs the Arab of vitiated stock. For little by little the soft, moist airs of Zanzibar had corroded the spirit of the Omân Arabs, who had sailed thither, in the old days, from their own rugged land, in great fierceness and ruthlessness, unconquered by men, and incapable of foreseeing that some day they would be vanquished by perfumed breezes. As for Hamoud-bin-Said, he was typical of his kind to-day in that humid paradise, where want of energy, and lack of discipline or any well-defined purpose, affected even the young.

"As you see him, ma'am, he's down on his luck. But I think he has seen----"

The young Arab remained impassive, erect, as handsome as a faintly tinted statue of Pride, yet pathetic in his salt-and-pepper suit. And Lilla, despite his costume and his errand, divined in him a certain subtle relationship to herself, received an impression of "aristocratic" feeling perhaps derived from a consciousness of superior birth and fortune. Parr need not have told her--especially in so audible a stage whisper--that the stranger had "seen better days."

"You speak English?" she inquired.

The Arab's limpid eyes were slowly infused with light. His clear-cut carnelian lips started apart; but he did not answer until the last vibrations of her voice had died away, like the echo of a silver bell in a landscape that one had believed to be empty of human life. In a low, grave, muffled tone, he said:

"A little. Enough, perhaps, madam, I hope."

And after a moment, though his face did not change, he gave a sharp sigh, somehow the last thing that one had expected from him.

All at once as she stared at him she had a feeling of unreality. Why were they three standing here? A whim, transformed into a command by a vision of a Saharan coffee house, had materialized this abjectly clothed young human exotic in the midst of the blue-and-white Delia Robbias! But she had a feeling that she had stood here before with him, or else had dreamed of this, perhaps, in one of those psychopathological moments that have a prophetic quality. This sensation of recurrence--or else, this impression of the unavoidable--gave her a twinge of awe. Was everything, even a baggy young teacher of Arabic, foreordained? "Am I," she thought, with a sort of comic despair, "doomed by fate, as well as by my own foolishness, to learn a language like the snarling of camels? Or is it that his old Allah has picked me out to tide him along for a while?" She wanted to laugh aloud, at the restlessness, superstition, weakness, and folly that had composed her life, and had now produced this egregious interview. And in the midst of this emotion she was touched by his statuesque face, with its glimmering suggestion of gentility cast down, of pride lost in a dread that she might not find him worth her charity.

"I shall expect you on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays at eleven o'clock."

He bowed in silence. She felt his relief that was mingled with a sense of abasement; and she wondered what he had been, that he should suffer from the prospect of turning an honest penny.