of her beautiful, strong black body.
Then she took off her soaked shoes and put on slippers, and came to my bedside, and with much shyness opened her modest bag and drew out something wrapped in one of those sheets of fine paper in which holiday gifts are wrapped.
She said in a low voice:
— Forgive me, Dona Salma. The feast is tomorrow, and I wanted to bring you a small present. I have heard you ask many times for a picture of Jesus — like the one that was in room 264. I went down to the market and searched a long while to find a gift that would please you and that my hand could reach. I found this wooden cross. There were crosses in the gift shop far more beautiful than this one, but I had only fifty piasters; so I have brought you this. Will you accept it from me?
And I took the cross — a piece of walnut wood bearing a crucified figure of lead. I took the cross from the hand of this black woman whose race and kin, and every black hand God ever created, I had been cursing a minute before; and before raising it to my lips I took that black head between my hands and kissed Aliya — kissed her hair, her brow, her cheeks — and poured out my soul before that black woman who had brought me the symbol of forgiveness for the white and the red and the yellow and the black...
And I fell into a fit of gasping sobs and throbbing — into a release of pent-up grief, into the leap of a grateful spirit toward that unknown inspiration which had moved a black servant woman, a stranger to me, to bring, under the pelting rains, the symbol of that love which no love equals, the symbol of the purity no purity approaches, the symbol of the Friend of the sorrowful and the sick, the forsaken and the strangers.
It entered Aliya's mind that I was under the influence of a fit — and how was she to understand that a small gift could have such an
effect? — so she ran off calling Sister Susanna, who came with the medicine needle, thinking in her turn that I was having an “attack.” I spoke to her in French of the cause of my emotion; and she made the sign of the cross and kissed
the crucifix hanging on her breast, then said to my black friend:
— There is nothing wrong with Dona Salma, “Alta.” She is weeping because she is happy. She is feeling now the only happiness that none but Jesus gives.
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