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."