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Updated: June 10, 2025
"If you are good we will be your friends." He flashed a boyish smile at me. "I am good," he said calmly "as the angels I am good. I have here a letter from a priest. I give it to you. Read!" He got a very dirty envelope from his pocket and brought it round the table to me. "See!" he said. "The priest says: 'Of all my children Tufik lies next my heart."
"Ask her if I have time to go home and put on my broadcloth," she said. "I'm not fixed for a wedding." Tish said there was no time. She would come round with the machine and we were to be ready in fifteen minutes. Aggie hesitated on account of intending to wash her hair that night and so not having put up her crimps; but she finally agreed to go and Tish came for us. Tufik was in the machine.
"He doesn't belong here; he isn't accustomed to anything faster than a camel. He doesn't know how to work none of them do. He comes from a country where they can eat food like this because digestion is one of their occupations." I was right and Tish knew it. Even Tufik was satisfied when we put it up to him. He spread his hands in his Oriental way and shrugged his shoulders.
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.
Tufik grew reconciled to our going, but he was never cheerful about it; and finding that it pained him we never spoke about it in his presence. He was with us a great deal. In the morning he would go to Tish, who would give him a list of her friends to see. Then Tish would telephone and make appointments for him, and he would start off hopefully, with his pasteboard suitcase.
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."
He himself wore a long black robe and a beard, and looked, as Tish observed, for all the world as if he had stepped from an Egyptian painting. Before him stood Tufik's sister, the maid of honor with her baby, the black-mustached friend who had brought Tufik to us after his tragic attempt at suicide, and Tufik himself. Everybody held lighted candles, and the heat was frightful.
"The Bible says: 'To him that overcometh I will give the morning star! I have overcometh ah, so much! the sea; the cold, wet England; the Ellis Island; the hunger; the aching of one who has no love, no money! And now I have the morning star!" He looked at us all three at once Charlie Sands said this was impossible, until he met Tufik. Aggie was fairly palpitant and Tish was smug, positively smug.
"If my mothers think best," he said softly. "In my own land Tufik is known I sell in the bazaar the so fine lace my sister make. I drink wine, not water. My stomach I cannot eat in this America. But I have no money." "We will furnish the money," Tish said gently. "But you must promise one thing, Tufik. You must not become a Mohammedan." "Before that I die!" he said proudly.
She was quite disagreeable. "This is your burden as well as mine," she snapped. "Come over and talk to that wretched boy while I pack my trunk. He stands and watches everything I put in, and I haven't been able to pack a lot of things I need." I went over that afternoon and found Tufik huddled on the top step of the stairs outside Tish's apartment, with his head in his hands.
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