THERE was a great noise and racket, but no scandal, in Honolulu’s
Chinatown. Those within hearing distance merely shrugged their shoulders
and smiled tolerantly at the disturbance as an affair of accustomed
usualness. “What is it?” asked Chin Mo, down with a sharp pleurisy, of
his wife, who had paused for a second at the open window to listen.
“Only Ah Kim,” was her reply. “His mother is beating him again.”
The fracas was taking place in the garden, behind the living rooms that
were at the back of the store that fronted on the street with the proud
sign above: AH KIM COMPANY, GENERAL MERCHANDISE. The garden was a
miniature domain, twenty feet square, that somehow cunningly seduced the
eye into a sense and seeming of illimitable vastness. There were forests
of dwarf pines and oaks, centuries old yet two or three feet in height,
and imported at enormous care and expense. A tiny bridge, a pace across,
arched over a miniature river that flowed with rapids and cataracts from
a miniature lake stocked with myriad-finned, orange-miracled goldfish
that in proportion to the lake and landscape were whales. On every side
the many windows of the several-storied shack-buildings looked down. In
the centre of the garden, on the narrow gravelled walk close beside the
lake Ah Kim was noisily receiving his beating.
No Chinese lad of tender and beatable years was Ah Kim. His was the
store of Ah Kim Company, and his was the achievement of building it up
through the long years from the shoestring of savings of a contract
coolie labourer to a bank account in four figures and a credit that was
gilt edged. An even half-century of summers and winters had passed over
his head, and, in the passing, fattened him comfortably and snugly.
Short of stature, his full front was as rotund as a water-melon seed.
His face was moon-faced. His garb was dignified and silken, and his
black-silk skull-cap with the red button atop, now, alas! fallen on the
ground, was the skull-cap worn by the successful and dignified merchants
of his race.
But his appearance, in this moment of the present, was anything but
dignified. Dodging and ducking under a rain of blows from a bamboo cane,
he was crouched over in a half-doubled posture. When he was rapped on
the knuckles and elbows, with which he shielded his face and head, his
winces were genuine and involuntary. From the many surrounding windows
the neighbourhood looked down with placid enjoyment.
And she who wielded the stick so shrewdly from long practice!
Seventy-four years old, she looked every minute of her time. Her thin
legs were encased in straight-lined pants of linen stiff-textured and
shiny-black. Her scraggly grey hair was drawn unrelentingly and flatly
back from a narrow, unrelenting forehead. Eyebrows she had none, having
long since shed them. Her eyes, of pin-hole tininess, were blackest
black. She was shockingly cadaverous. Her shrivelled forearm, exposed
by the loose sleeve, possessed no more of muscle than several taut
bowstrings stretched across meagre bone under yellow, parchment-like
skin. Along this mummy arm jade bracelets shot up and down and clashed
with every blow.
“Ah!” she cried out, rhythmically accenting her blows in series of three
to each shrill observation. “I forbade you to talk to Li Faa. To-day
you stopped on the street with her. Not an hour ago. Half an hour by
the clock you talked.—What is that?”
“It was the thrice-accursed telephone,” Ah Kim muttered, while she
suspended the stick to catch what he said. “Mrs. Chang Lucy told you. I
know she did. I saw her see me. I shall have the telephone taken out.
It is of the devil.”
“It is a device of all the devils,” Mrs. Tai Fu agreed, taking a fresh
grip on the stick. “Yet shall the telephone remain. I like to talk with
Mrs. Chang Lucy over the telephone.”
“She has the eyes of ten thousand cats,” quoth Ah Kim, ducking and
receiving the stick stinging on his knuckles. “And the tongues of ten
thousand toads,” he supplemented ere his next duck.
“She is an impudent-faced and evil-mannered hussy,” Mrs. Tai Fu accented.
“Mrs. Chang Lucy was ever that,” Ah Kim murmured like the dutiful son he
was.
“I speak of Li Faa,” his mother corrected with stick emphasis. “She is
only half Chinese, as you know. Her mother was a shameless _kanaka_.
She wears skirts like the degraded _haole_ women—also corsets, as I have
seen for myself. Where are her children? Yet has she buried two
husbands.”
“The one was drowned, the other kicked by a horse,” Ah Kim qualified.
“A year of her, unworthy son of a noble father, and you would gladly be
going out to get drowned or be kicked by a horse.”
Subdued chucklings and laughter from the window audience applauded her
point.
“You buried two husbands yourself, revered mother,” Ah Kim was stung to
retort.
“I had the good taste not to marry a third. Besides, my two husbands
died honourably in their beds. They were not kicked by horses nor
drowned at sea. What business is it of our neighbours that you should
inform them I have had two husbands, or ten, or none? You have made a
scandal of me, before all our neighbours, and for that I shall now give
you a real beating.”
Ah Kim endured the staccato rain of blows, and said when his mother
paused, breathless and weary:
“Always have I insisted and pleaded, honourable mother, that you beat me
in the house, with the windows and doors closed tight, and not in the
open street or the garden open behind the house.
“You have called this unthinkable Li Faa the Silvery Moon Blossom,” Mrs.
Tai Fu rejoined, quite illogically and femininely, but with utmost
success in so far as she deflected her son from continuance of the thrust
he had so swiftly driven home.
“Mrs. Chang Lucy told you,” he charged.
“I was told over the telephone,” his mother evaded. “I do not know all
voices that speak to me over that contrivance of all the devils.”
Strangely, Ah Kim made no effort to run away from his mother, which he
could easily have done. She, on the other hand, found fresh cause for
more stick blows.
“Ah! Stubborn one! Why do you not cry? Mule that shameth its
ancestors! Never have I made you cry. From the time you were a little
boy I have never made you cry. Answer me! Why do you not cry?”
Weak and breathless from her exertions, she dropped the stick and panted
and shook as if with a nervous palsy.
“I do not know, except that it is my way,” Ah Kim replied, gazing
solicitously at his mother. “I shall bring you a chair now, and you will
sit down and rest and feel better.”
But she flung away from him with a snort and tottered agedly across the
garden into the house. Meanwhile recovering his skull-cap and smoothing
his disordered attire, Ah Kim rubbed his hurts and gazed after her with
eyes of devotion. He even smiled, and almost might it appear that he had
enjoyed the beating.
* * * * *
Ah Kim had been so beaten ever since he was a boy, when he lived on the
high banks of the eleventh cataract of the Yangtse river. Here his
father had been born and toiled all his days from young manhood as a
towing coolie. When he died, Ah Kim, in his own young manhood, took up
the same honourable profession. Farther back than all remembered annals
of the family, had the males of it been towing coolies. At the time of
Christ his direct ancestors had been doing the same thing, meeting the
precisely similarly modelled junks below the white water at the foot of
the canyon, bending the half-mile of rope to each junk, and, according to
size, tailing on from a hundred to two hundred coolies of them and by
sheer, two-legged man-power, bowed forward and down till their hands
touched the ground and their faces were sometimes within a foot of it,
dragging the junk up through the white water to the head of the canyon.
Apparently, down all the intervening centuries, the payment of the trade
had not picked up. His father, his father’s father, and himself, Ah Kim,
had received the same invariable remuneration—per junk one-fourteenth of
a cent, at the rate he had since learned money was valued in Hawaii. On
long lucky summer days when the waters were easy, the junks many, the
hours of daylight sixteen, sixteen hours of such heroic toil would earn
over a cent. But in a whole year a towing coolie did not earn more than
a dollar and a half. People could and did live on such an income. There
were women servants who received a yearly wage of a dollar. The
net-makers of Ti Wi earned between a dollar and two dollars a year. They
lived on such wages, or, at least, they did not die on them. But for the
towing coolies there were pickings, which were what made the profession
honourable and the guild a close and hereditary corporation or labour
union. One junk in five that was dragged up through the rapids or
lowered down was wrecked. One junk in every ten was a total loss. The
coolies of the towing guild knew the freaks and whims of the currents,
and grappled, and raked, and netted a wet harvest from the river. They
of the guild were looked up to by lesser coolies, for they could afford
to drink brick tea and eat number four rice every day.
And Ah Kim had been contented and proud, until, one bitter spring day of
driving sleet and hail, he dragged ashore a drowning Cantonese sailor.
It was this wanderer, thawing out by his fire, who first named the magic
name Hawaii to him. He had himself never been to that labourer’s
paradise, said the sailor; but many Chinese had gone there from Canton,
and he had heard the talk of their letters written back. In Hawaii was
never frost nor famine. The very pigs, never fed, were ever fat of the
generous offal disdained by man. A Cantonese or Yangtse family could
live on the waste of an Hawaii coolie. And wages! In gold dollars, ten
a month, or, in trade dollars, two a month, was what the contract Chinese
coolie received from the white-devil sugar kings. In a year the coolie
received the prodigious sum of two hundred and forty trade dollars—more
than a hundred times what a coolie, toiling ten times as hard, received
on the eleventh cataract of the Yangtse. In short, all things
considered, an Hawaii coolie was one hundred times better off, and, when
the amount of labour was estimated, a thousand times better off. In
addition was the wonderful climate.
When Ah Kim was twenty-four, despite his mother’s pleadings and beatings,
he resigned from the ancient and honourable guild of the eleventh
cataract towing coolies, left his mother to go into a boss coolie’s
household as a servant for a dollar a year, and an annual dress to cost
not less than thirty cents, and himself departed down the Yangtse to the
great sea. Many were his adventures and severe his toils and hardships
ere, as a salt-sea junk-sailor, he won to Canton. When he was twenty-six
he signed five years of his life and labour away to the Hawaii sugar
kings and departed, one of eight hundred contract coolies, for that far
island land, on a festering steamer run by a crazy captain and drunken
officers and rejected of Lloyds.
Honourable, among labourers, had Ah Kim’s rating been as a towing coolie.
In Hawaii, receiving a hundred times more pay, he found himself looked
down upon as the lowest of the low—a plantation coolie, than which could
be nothing lower. But a coolie whose ancestors had towed junks up the
eleventh cataract of the Yangtse since before the birth of Christ
inevitably inherits one character in large degree, namely, the character
of patience. This patience was Ah Kim’s. At the end of five years, his
compulsory servitude over, thin as ever in body, in bank account he
lacked just ten trade dollars of possessing a thousand trade dollars.
On this sum he could have gone back to the Yangtse and retired for life a
really wealthy man. He would have possessed a larger sum, had he not, on
occasion, conservatively played _che fa_ and _fan tan_, and had he not,
for a twelve-month, toiled among the centipedes and scorpions of the
stifling cane-fields in the semi-dream of a continuous opium debauch.
Why he had not toiled the whole five years under the spell of opium was
the expensiveness of the habit. He had had no moral scruples. The drug
had cost too much.
But Ah Kim did not return to China. He had observed the business life of
Hawaii and developed a vaulting ambition. For six months, in order to
learn business and English at the bottom, he clerked in the plantation
store. At the end of this time he knew more about that particular store
than did ever plantation manager know about any plantation store. When
he resigned his position he was receiving forty gold a month, or eighty
trade, and he was beginning to put on flesh. Also, his attitude toward
mere contract coolies had become distinctively aristocratic. The manager
offered to raise him to sixty fold, which, by the year, would constitute
a fabulous fourteen hundred and forty trade, or seven hundred times his
annual earning on the Yangtse as a two-legged horse at one-fourteenth of
a gold cent per junk.
Instead of accepting, Ah Kim departed to Honolulu, and in the big general
merchandise store of Fong & Chow Fong began at the bottom for fifteen
gold per month. He worked a year and a half, and resigned when he was
thirty-three, despite the seventy-five gold per month his Chinese
employers were paying him. Then it was that he put up his own sign: AH
KIM COMPANY, GENERAL MERCHANDISE. Also, better fed, there was about his
less meagre figure a foreshadowing of the melon-seed rotundity that was
to attach to him in future years.
With the years he prospered increasingly, so that, when he was
thirty-six, the promise of his figure was fulfilling rapidly, and,
himself a member of the exclusive and powerful Hai Gum Tong, and of the
Chinese Merchants’ Association, he was accustomed to sitting as host at
dinners that cost him as much as thirty years of towing on the eleventh
cataract would have earned him. Two things he missed: a wife, and his
mother to lay the stick on him as of yore.
When he was thirty-seven he consulted his bank balance. It stood him
three thousand gold. For twenty-five hundred down and an easy mortgage
he could buy the three-story shack-building, and the ground in fee simple
on which it stood. But to do this, left only five hundred for a wife.
Fu Yee Po had a marriageable, properly small-footed daughter whom he was
willing to import from China, and sell to him for eight hundred gold,
plus the costs of importation. Further, Fu Yee Po was even willing to
take five hundred down and the remainder on note at 6 per cent.
Ah Kim, thirty-seven years of age, fat and a bachelor, really did want a
wife, especially a small-footed wife; for, China born and reared, the
immemorial small-footed female had been deeply impressed into his fantasy
of woman. But more, even more and far more than a small-footed wife, did
he want his mother and his mother’s delectable beatings. So he declined
Fu Yee Po’s easy terms, and at much less cost imported his own mother
from servant in a boss coolie’s house at a yearly wage of a dollar and a
thirty-cent dress to be mistress of his Honolulu three-story shack
building with two household servants, three clerks, and a porter of all
work under her, to say nothing of ten thousand dollars’ worth of dress
goods on the shelves that ranged from the cheapest cotton crêpes to the
most expensive hand-embroidered silks. For be it known that even in that
early day Ah Kim’s emporium was beginning to cater to the tourist trade
from the States.
For thirteen years Ah Kim had lived tolerably happily with his mother,
and by her been methodically beaten for causes just or unjust, real or
fancied; and at the end of it all he knew as strongly as ever the ache of
his heart and head for a wife, and of his loins for sons to live after
him, and carry on the dynasty of Ah Kim Company. Such the dream that has
ever vexed men, from those early ones who first usurped a hunting right,
monopolized a sandbar for a fish-trap, or stormed a village and put the
males thereof to the sword. Kings, millionaires, and Chinese merchants
of Honolulu have this in common, despite that they may praise God for
having made them differently and in self-likable images.
And the ideal of woman that Ah Kim at fifty ached for had changed from
his ideal at thirty-seven. No small-footed wife did he want now, but a
free, natural, out-stepping normal-footed woman that, somehow, appeared
to him in his day dreams and haunted his night visions in the form of Li
Faa, the Silvery Moon Blossom. What if she were twice widowed, the
daughter of a _kanaka_ mother, the wearer of white-devil skirts and
corsets and high-heeled slippers! He wanted her. It seemed it was
written that she should be joint ancestor with him of the line that would
continue the ownership and management through the generations, of Ah Kim
Company, General Merchandise.
* * * * *
“I will have no half-_paké_ daughter-in-law,” his mother often reiterated
to Ah Kim, _paké_ being the Hawaiian word for Chinese. “All _paké_ must
my daughter-in-law be, even as you, my son, and as I, your mother. And
she must wear trousers, my son, as all the women of our family before
her. No woman, in she-devil skirts and corsets, can pay due reverence to
our ancestors. Corsets and reverence do not go together. Such a one is
this shameless Li Faa. She is impudent and independent, and will be
neither obedient to her husband nor her husband’s mother. This
brazen-faced Li Faa would believe herself the source of life and the
first ancestor, recognizing no ancestors before her. She laughs at our
joss-sticks, and paper prayers, and family gods, as I have been well
told—”
“Mrs. Chang Lucy,” Ah Kim groaned.
“Not alone Mrs. Chang Lucy, O son. I have inquired. At least a dozen
have heard her say of our joss house that it is all monkey foolishness.
The words are hers—she, who eats raw fish, raw squid, and baked dog.
Ours is the foolishness of monkeys. Yet would she marry you, a monkey,
because of your store that is a palace and of the wealth that makes you a
great man. And she would put shame on me, and on your father before you
long honourably dead.”
And there was no discussing the matter. As things were, Ah Kim knew his
mother was right. Not for nothing had Li Faa been born forty years
before of a Chinese father, renegade to all tradition, and of a _kanaka_
mother whose immediate forebears had broken the taboos, cast down their
own Polynesian gods, and weak-heartedly listened to the preaching about
the remote and unimageable god of the Christian missionaries. Li Faa,
educated, who could read and write English and Hawaiian and a fair
measure of Chinese, claimed to believe in nothing, although in her secret
heart she feared the _kahunas_ (Hawaiian witch-doctors), who she was
certain could charm away ill luck or pray one to death. Li Faa would
never come into Ah Kim’s house, as he thoroughly knew, and kow-tow to his
mother and be slave to her in the immemorial Chinese way. Li Faa, from
the Chinese angle, was a new woman, a feminist, who rode horseback
astride, disported immodestly garbed at Waikiki on the surf-boards, and
at more than one _luau_ (feast) had been known to dance the _hula_ with
the worst and in excess of the worst, to the scandalous delight of all.
Ah Kim himself, a generation younger than his mother, had been bitten by
the acid of modernity. The old order held, in so far as he still felt in
his subtlest crypts of being the dusty hand of the past resting on him,
residing in him; yet he subscribed to heavy policies of fire and life
insurance, acted as treasurer for the local Chinese revolutionists that
were for turning the Celestial Empire into a republic, contributed to the
funds of the Hawaii-born Chinese baseball nine that excelled the Yankee
nines at their own game, talked theosophy with Katso Suguri, the Japanese
Buddhist and silk importer, fell for police graft, played and paid his
insidious share in the democratic politics of annexed Hawaii, and was
thinking of buying an automobile. Ah Kim never dared bare himself to
himself and thrash out and winnow out how much of the old he had ceased
to believe in. His mother was of the old, yet he revered her and was
happy under her bamboo stick. Li Faa, the Silvery Moon Blossom, was of
the new, yet he could never be quite completely happy without her.
For he loved Li Faa. Moon-faced, rotund as a water-melon seed, canny
business man, wise with half a century of living—nevertheless Ah Kim
became an artist when he thought of her. He thought of her in poems of
names, as woman transmuted into flower-terms of beauty and philosophic
abstractions of achievement and easement. She was, to him, and alone to
him of all men in the world, his Plum Blossom, his Tranquillity of Woman,
his Flower of Serenity, his Moon Lily, and his Perfect Rest. And as he
murmured these love endearments of namings, it seemed to him that in them
were the ripplings of running waters, the tinklings of silver wind-bells,
and the scents of the oleander and the jasmine. She was his poem of
woman, a lyric delight, a three-dimensions of flesh and spirit delicious,
a fate and a good fortune written, ere the first man and woman were, by
the gods whose whim had been to make all men and women for sorrow and for
joy.
But his mother put into his hand the ink-brush and placed under it, on
the table, the writing tablet.
“Paint,” said she, “the ideograph of _to marry_.”
He obeyed, scarcely wondering, with the deft artistry of his race and
training painting the symbolic hieroglyphic.
“Resolve it,” commanded his mother.
Ah Kim looked at her, curious, willing to please, unaware of the drift of
her intent.
“Of what is it composed?” she persisted. “What are the three originals,
the sum of which is it: to marry, marriage, the coming together and
wedding of a man and a woman? Paint them, paint them apart, the three
originals, unrelated, so that we may know how the wise men of old wisely
built up the ideograph of _to marry_.”
And Ah Kim, obeying and painting, saw that what he had painted were three
picture-signs—the picture-signs of a hand, an ear, and a woman.
“Name them,” said his mother; and he named them.
“It is true,” said she. “It is a great tale. It is the stuff of the
painted pictures of marriage. Such marriage was in the beginning; such
shall it always be in my house. The hand of the man takes the woman’s
ear, and by it leads her away to his house, where she is to be obedient
to him and to his mother. I was taken by the ear, so, by your long
honourably dead father. I have looked at your hand. It is not like his
hand. Also have I looked at the ear of Li Faa. Never will you lead her
by the ear. She has not that kind of an ear. I shall live a long time
yet, and I will be mistress in my son’s house, after our ancient way,
until I die.”
* * * * *
“But she is my revered ancestress,” Ah Kim explained to Li Faa.
He was timidly unhappy; for Li Faa, having ascertained that Mrs. Tai Fu
was at the temple of the Chinese Æsculapius making a food offering of
dried duck and prayers for her declining health, had taken advantage of
the opportunity to call upon him in his store.
Li Faa pursed her insolent, unpainted lips into the form of a half-opened
rosebud, and replied:
“That will do for China. I do not know China. This is Hawaii, and in
Hawaii the customs of all foreigners change.”
“She is nevertheless my ancestress,” Ah Kim protested, “the mother who
gave me birth, whether I am in China or Hawaii, O Silvery Moon Blossom
that I want for wife.”
“I have had two husbands,” Li Faa stated placidly. “One was a _paké_,
one was a Portuguese. I learned much from both. Also am I educated. I
have been to High School, and I have played the piano in public. And I
learned from my two husbands much. The _paké_ makes the best husband.
Never again will I marry anything but a _paké_. But he must not take me
by the ear—”
“How do you know of that?” he broke in suspiciously.
“Mrs. Chang Lucy,” was the reply. “Mrs. Chang Lucy tells me everything
that your mother tells her, and your mother tells her much. So let me
tell you that mine is not that kind of an ear.”
“Which is what my honoured mother has told me,” Ah Kim groaned.
“Which is what your honoured mother told Mrs. Chang Lucy, which is what
Mrs. Chang Lucy told me,” Li Faa completed equably. “And I now tell you,
O Third Husband To Be, that the man is not born who will lead me by the
ear. It is not the way in Hawaii. I will go only hand in hand with my
man, side by side, fifty-fifty as is the _haole_ slang just now. My
Portuguese husband thought different. He tried to beat me. I landed him
three times in the police court and each time he worked out his sentence
on the reef. After that he got drowned.”
“My mother has been my mother for fifty years,” Ah Kim declared stoutly.
“And for fifty years has she beaten you,” Li Faa giggled. “How my father
used to laugh at Yap Ten Shin! Like you, Yap Ten Shin had been born in
China, and had brought the China customs with him. His old father was
for ever beating him with a stick. He loved his father. But his father
beat him harder than ever when he became a missionary _paké_. Every time
he went to the missionary services, his father beat him. And every time
the missionary heard of it he was harsh in his language to Yap Ten Shin
for allowing his father to beat him. And my father laughed and laughed,
for my father was a very liberal _paké_, who had changed his customs
quicker than most foreigners. And all the trouble was because Yap Ten
Shin had a loving heart. He loved his honourable father. He loved the
God of Love of the Christian missionary. But in the end, in me, he found
the greatest love of all, which is the love of woman. In me he forgot
his love for his father and his love for the loving Christ.
“And he offered my father six hundred gold, for me—the price was small
because my feet were not small. But I was half _kanaka_. I said that I
was not a slave-woman, and that I would be sold to no man. My
high-school teacher was a _haole_ old maid who said love of woman was so
beyond price that it must never be sold. Perhaps that is why she was an
old maid. She was not beautiful. She could not give herself away. My
_kanaka_ mother said it was not the _kanaka_ way to sell their daughters
for a money price. They gave their daughters for love, and she would
listen to reason if Yap Ten Shin provided _luaus_ in quantity and
quality. My _paké_ father, as I have told you, was liberal. He asked me
if I wanted Yap Ten Shin for my husband. And I said yes; and freely, of
myself, I went to him. He it was who was kicked by a horse; but he was a
very good husband before he was kicked by the horse.
“As for you, Ah Kim, you shall always be honourable and lovable for me,
and some day, when it is not necessary for you to take me by the ear, I
shall marry you and come here and be with you always, and you will be the
happiest _paké_ in all Hawaii; for I have had two husbands, and gone to
high school, and am most wise in making a husband happy. But that will
be when your mother has ceased to beat you. Mrs. Chang Lucy tells me
that she beats you very hard.”
“She does,” Ah Kim affirmed. “Behold! He thrust back his loose sleeves,
exposing to the elbow his smooth and cherubic forearms. They were
mantled with black and blue marks that advertised the weight and number
of blows so shielded from his head and face.
“But she has never made me cry,” Ah Kim disclaimed hastily. “Never, from
the time I was a little boy, has she made me cry.”
“So Mrs. Chang Lucy says,” Li Faa observed. “She says that your
honourable mother often complains to her that she has never made you
cry.”
A sibilant warning from one of his clerks was too late. Having regained
the house by way of the back alley, Mrs. Tai Fu emerged right upon them
from out of the living apartments. Never had Ah Kim seen his mother’s
eyes so blazing furious. She ignored Li Faa, as she screamed at him:
“Now will I make you cry. As never before shall I beat you until you do
cry.”
“Then let us go into the back rooms, honourable mother,” Ah Kim
suggested. “We will close the windows and the doors, and there may you
beat me.”
“No. Here shall you be beaten before all the world and this shameless
woman who would, with her own hand, take you by the ear and call such
sacrilege marriage! Stay, shameless woman.”
“I am going to stay anyway,” said Li Faa. She favoured the clerks with a
truculent stare. “And I’d like to see anything less than the police put
me out of here.”
“You will never be my daughter-in-law,” Mrs. Tai Fu snapped.
Li Faa nodded her head in agreement.
“But just the same,” she added, “shall your son be my third husband.”
“You mean when I am dead?” the old mother screamed.
“The sun rises each morning,” Li Faa said enigmatically. “All my life
have I seen it rise—”
“You are forty, and you wear corsets.”
“But I do not dye my hair—that will come later,” Li Faa calmly retorted.
“As to my age, you are right. I shall be forty-one next Kamehameha Day.
For forty years I have seen the sun rise. My father was an old man.
Before he died he told me that he had observed no difference in the
rising of the sun since when he was a little boy. The world is round.
Confucius did not know that, but you will find it in all the geography
books. The world is round. Ever it turns over on itself, over and over
and around and around. And the times and seasons of weather and life
turn with it. What is, has been before. What has been, will be again.
The time of the breadfruit and the mango ever recurs, and man and woman
repeat themselves. The robins nest, and in the springtime the plovers
come from the north. Every spring is followed by another spring. The
coconut palm rises into the air, ripens its fruit, and departs. But
always are there more coconut palms. This is not all my own smart talk.
Much of it my father told me. Proceed, honourable Mrs. Tai Fu, and beat
your son who is my Third Husband To Be. But I shall laugh. I warn you I
shall laugh.”
Ah Kim dropped down on his knees so as to give his mother every
advantage. And while she rained blows upon him with the bamboo stick, Li
Faa smiled and giggled, and finally burst into laughter.
“Harder, O honourable Mrs. Tai Fu!” Li Faa urged between paroxysms of
mirth.
Mrs. Tai Fu did her best, which was notably weak, until she observed what
made her drop the stick by her side in amazement. Ah Kim was crying.
Down both cheeks great round tears were coursing. Li Faa was amazed. So
were the gaping clerks. Most amazed of all was Ah Kim, yet he could not
help himself; and, although no further blows fell, he cried steadily on.
“But why did you cry?” Li Faa demanded often of Ah Kim. “It was so
perfectly foolish a thing to do. She was not even hurting you.”
“Wait until we are married,” was Ah Kim’s invariable reply, “and then, O
Moon Lily, will I tell you.”
* * * * *
Two years later, one afternoon, more like a water-melon seed in
configuration than ever, Ah Kim returned home from a meeting of the
Chinese Protective Association, to find his mother dead on her couch.
Narrower and more unrelenting than ever were the forehead and the
brushed-back hair. But on her face was a withered smile. The gods had
been kind. She had passed without pain.
He telephoned first of all to Li Faa’s number but did not find her until
he called up Mrs. Chang Lucy. The news given, the marriage was dated
ahead with ten times the brevity of the old-line Chinese custom. And if
there be anything analogous to a bridesmaid in a Chinese wedding, Mrs.
Chang Lucy was just that.
“Why,” Li Faa asked Ah Kim when alone with him on their wedding night,
“why did you cry when your mother beat you that day in the store? You
were so foolish. She was not even hurting you.”
“That is why I cried,” answered Ah Kim.
Li Faa looked up at him without understanding.
“I cried,” he explained, “because I suddenly knew that my mother was
nearing her end. There was no weight, no hurt, in her blows. I cried
because I knew _she no longer had strength enough to hurt me_. That is
why I cried, my Flower of Serenity, my Perfect Rest. That is the only
reason why I cried.”
WAIKIKI, HONOLULU.
_June_ 16, 1916.