a while the impetus of my start carried me on. Then the bottom dropped
out of Chopin. I went over and sat in the other corner. It was a long
sofa; it felt as long as the world.
"Do you remember that heart-breakingly beautiful voice of his that could
make you feel anything he was feeling? It was like magic. He said at
last:
"'So you are going home to be married?'
"I nodded.
"'Betty,' he said, 'are you happy, quite happy, about--everything?'
"'Oh yes!' I said. 'Oh yes, Professor Fowler!' The curious thing about
it was that I spoke the truth when I considered it seriously.
"He said, 'Then that's all right.' Then he laughed a little and said,
'Do you always call me Professor Fowler, even when you shut your door on
the world at night and are all alone with God and the silence?'
"'And Claudia Jones,' I added, stupidly.
"He considered that seriously and said, 'I didn't know about Claudia
Jones; she may inhibit even the silence and the other ingredient. I
suppose you call me Teacher.'
"I cried out at that. 'I might call you _cher maître_, as they do her.'
"He said, 'That may do for the present.'
"'We looked into the fire and the lilacs filled the pause as adequately
as Chopin could have done. All at once he got up and came over to me--it
seemed the most natural thing in the world--across that wilderness of
sofa.
"'I suppose,' he said, 'that you won't let me off that promise.'
"'No, no!' I cried, all my old panic flooding over me again. I threw my
hands out, and suddenly he had caught them in his and was holding me
half away from him, and he was saying, in that tragic voice of his:
"'No, no! But give me something to make it bearable.'"
"Allah, the compassionate!" sighed Hugh, in ecstasy. He had never dared
hope for all this. His very being went on tiptoe for fear of breathing
too loud.
"We sat there for ages and ages, gazing into the fire, not saying a
word. Then he spoke ... every now and then. He said:
"'The horrible thing would have been never to have known you. Now that
I've touched you I'm magnetized for life. I can't lose you again.'
"'It isn't I,' I told him. 'It's only what you think me.'
"'You are the only creature outside of myself that I ever found myself
in,' he said. 'And I could look into you like Narcissus until I died.
You are home and Nirvana. That's what you are. When I look at you I
believe in God. You gallantest, most foolhardy, little, fragile thing,
you, you're not afraid of anything. You trust this rotten life, don't
you? You expect to find lovely things everywhere, and you will, just
because they'll spring up around your feet. You'll save your world like
all redeemers simply by being in it.'
"No woman ever had such things said to her as he said to me. But most
of the time we said nothing. There wasn't any past or future; there was
only the touch of his shoulder and his hands all around mine. It was
like coming in out of the cold; it was like being on a hill above the
sea, and listening to the wind in the pines until you don't know which
is the wind and which is you....
"It couldn't last forever. After a while something like a little point
of pain began worrying my mind.
"'But there won't be.... This is good-bye,' I cried.
"'Don't you believe it,' he said. 'God Himself couldn't make us say
good-bye again.' He got up and drew me with him. It was quite dark now
except for the fire, and his eyes ... they were like those of the Djinns
who were made out of elemental fire instead of earth. 'You'll come to me
in the blessed sunshine,' he said, 'and in music, and in the best
impulses of my own soul. If I were an old-fashioned lover I should
promise to wait for you in heaven.... Betty, Betty, I have you in heaven
now and forever!' ... I felt his cheek on mine. Then he was gone. That
was all; that was every bit of all."
"And he had that to live on for the rest of his life." Hugh broke the
silence under his breath. "Well, thank God he had _something_!"
The little woman fumbled in her bag for a handkerchief and shamelessly
dried her eyes. As she moved, a brown object fell from the corner of the
couch across her lap. Hugh held his hand out for the morocco portfolio.
"It seems to have the homing instinct," he observed; then, abruptly,
"Wait a moment; I'm going to call them back." He paused, as usual,
before his favourite confidant, the window. "The larger consciousness,
the Universal Togetherness," he muttered. "I really believe he must have
touched it that once. O Lord! how--" His spacious vocabulary gave it up.
When he followed his uncle and aunt into the room Mrs. Shirley came
forward, her thin veil again covering her face.
"I must go," she said. "Thank you once more for letting me come."
With a curious young touch of solemnity Hugh laid the brown case in her
hands. "This belongs to you," he said, "and I wanted them to see you
receive it."
* * * * *
"And you intend to permit this, Winthrop?"
Miss Fowler turned on her brother. She had suppressed her emotions
before the intruder; she had even said some proper things without unduly
speeding the parting guest. But if you can't be hateful to your own
family, to whom, in the name of the domestic pieties, can you be
hateful?
Mr. Fowler swiveled on her the glassy eye of one who does not suffer
fools gladly. "I permit anything," he responded, icily, "that will keep
that boy ... sane." He retired anew behind the monastic newspaper and
rattled it.
Miss Maria received a sudden chill apprehension that Winthrop was
looking much older lately. "But--" she faltered. Then she resolutely
returned to the baiting. "I suppose you recall her saying that she has a
daughter. Probably," admitted Miss Maria, grudgingly, "an attractive
daughter."
"It might be a very good thing," said the world-weary voice, and left
her gasping. "Two excellent Virginia families." He faced his sister's
appalled expression. "He might do something much more impossible--marry
a cheap actress or go into a monastery. His behaviour to-day prepares me
for anything. And"--a note of difficulty came into what Hugh had once
called his uncle's chiselled voice--"you do not appear to realize,
Maria, that what Mrs. Shirley has done is rather a remarkable thing, a
thing that you and I, with our undoubted appreciation of the value of
money, should probably have felt that we could not afford to do."
Hugh came in blithely, bringing a spring-smelling whiff of outdoors with
him. "I got her a taxi," he announced, "and she asked me to come down to
their place for Easter. There's a hunting club. Oh cheer up, Aunt Maria!
At least she left the money behind."
"Look at my needle!" cried the long-suffering lady. "_You_ did that. I
must say, Hugh, I find your conduct most disrespectful."
"All right, I grovel," Hugh agreed, pleasantly. He picked up the cat and
rubbed her tenderly the wrong way.
"As for the money, I don't see how her conscience could have allowed her
to accept everything. And she married somebody else, too."
"So did Dante's girl. That doesn't seem to make all the difference.
Conscience?" Hugh went on, absently. "Conscience? Haven't I heard that
word somewhere before? You are the only person I know, Aunt Maria, who
has a really good, staunch, weather-proof one, because, like the laws of
the Medes and Persians, it altereth not."
"I should hope not, indeed," said Miss Fowler, half mollified.
Hugh smiled sleepily. The cat opened one yellow eye and moved mystified
whiskers. She profoundly distrusted this affectionate young admirer. Was
she being stroked the wrong way or ruffled the right way?
"Tiger, tiger, burning bright," murmured Hugh. "Puzzle, Kitty: find the
Adventuress."
THE KITCHEN GODS
BY G.F. ALSOP
From _Century Magazine_
The lilies bloomed that day. Out in the courtyard in their fantastic
green-dragoned pots, one by one the tiny, ethereal petals opened.
Dong-Yung went rapturously among them, stooping low to inhale their
faint fragrance. The square courtyard, guarded on three sides by the
wings of the house, facing the windowless blank wall on the fourth, was
mottled with sunlight. Just this side of the wall a black shadow, as
straight and opaque as the wall itself, banded the court with darkness;
but on the hither side, where the lilies bloomed and Dong-Yung moved
among them, lay glittering, yellow sunlight. The little box of a house
where the gate-keeper lived made a bulge in the uniform blackness of the
wall and its shadow. The two tall poles, with the upturned baskets, the
devil-catches, rose like flagstaffs from both sides of the door. A huge
china griffon stood at the right of the gate. From beyond the wall came
the sounds of early morning--the click of wooden sandals on cobbled
streets and the panting cries of the coolies bringing in fresh
vegetables or carrying back to the denuded land the refuse of the city.
The gate-keeper was awake, brushing out his house with a broom of twigs.
He was quite bald, and the top of his head was as tanned and brown as
the legs of small summer children.
"Good morning, Honourable One," he called. "It is a good omen. The
lilies have opened."
An amah, blue-trousered, blue-jacketed, blue-aproned, cluttered across
the courtyard with two pails of steaming water.
"Good morning, Honourable One. The water for the great wife is hot and
heavy." She dropped her buckets, the water splashing over in runnels
and puddles at her feet, and stooped to smell the lilies. "It is an
auspicious day."
From the casement-window in the right balcony a voice called:
"Thou dunce! Here I am waiting already half the day. Quicker! quicker!"
It sounded elderly and querulous a voice accustomed to be obeyed and to
dominate. The great wife's face appeared a moment at the casement. Her
eyes swept over the courtyard scene--over the blooming lilies, and
Dong-Yung standing among them.
"Behold the small wife, cursed of the gods!" she cried in her high,
shrill voice. "Not even a girl can she bear her master. May she eat
bitterness all her days!"
The amah shouldered the steaming buckets and splashed across the bare
boards of the ancestral hall beyond.
"The great wife is angry," murmured the gate-keeper. "Oh, Honourable
One, shall I admit the flower-girl? She has fresh orchids."
Dong-Yung nodded. The flower girl came slowly in under the guarded
gateway. She was a country child, with brown cheeks and merry eyes. Her
shallow basket was steadied by a ribbon over one shoulder, and caught
between an arm and a swaying hip. In the flat, round basket, on green
little leaves, lay the wired perfumed orchids.
"How many? It is an auspicious day. See, the lilies have bloomed. One
for the hair and two for the buttonholes. They smell sweet as the breath
of heaven itself."
Dong-Yung smiled as the flower-girl stuck one of the fragrant, fragile,
green-striped orchids in her hair, and hung two others, caught on
delicate loops of wire, on the jade studs of her jacket, buttoned on the
right shoulder.
"Ah, you are beautiful-come-death!" said the flower-girl. "Great
happiness be thine!"
"Even a small wife can be happy at times." Dong-Yung took out a little
woven purse and paid over two coppers apiece to the flower-girl.
At the gate the girl and the gate-keeper fell a-talking.
"Is the morning rice ready?" called a man's voice from the room behind.
Dong-Yung turned quickly. Her whole face changed. It had been smiling
and pleased before at the sight of the faint, white lily-petals and the
sunlight on her feet and the fragrance of the orchids in her hair; but
now it was lit with an inner radiance.
"My beloved Master!" Dong-Yung made a little instinctive gesture toward
the approaching man, which in a second was caught and curbed by Chinese
etiquette. Dressed, as she was, in pale-gray satin trousers, loose, and
banded at the knee with wide blue stripes, and with a soft jacket to
match, she was as beautiful in the eyes of the approaching man as the
newly opened lilies. What he was in her eyes it would be hard for any
modern woman to grasp: that rapture of adoration, that bliss of worship,
has lingered only in rare hearts and rarer spots on the earth's surface.
Foh-Kyung came out slowly through the ancestral hall. The sunlight edged
it like a bright border. The floors were wide open, and Dong-Yung saw
the decorous rows of square chairs and square tables set rhythmically
along the walls, and the covered dais at the head for the guest of
honour. Long crimson scrolls, sprawled with gold ideographs, hung from
ceiling to floor. A rosewood cabinet, filled with vases, peach bloom,
imperial yellow, and turquoise blue, gleamed like a lighted lamp in the
shadowy morning light of the room.
Foh-Kyung stooped to smell the lilies.
"They perfume the very air we breathe. Little Jewel, I love our old
Chinese ways. I love the custom of the lily-planting and the day the
lilies bloom. I love to think the gods smell them in heaven, and are
gracious to mortals for their fragrance's sake."
"I am so happy!" Dong-Yung said, poking the toe of her slipper in and
out the sunlight. She looked up at the man before her, and saw he was
tall and slim and as subtle-featured as the cross-legged bronze Buddha
himself. His long thin hands were hid, crossed and slipped along the
wrists within the loose apricot satin sleeves of his brocaded garment.
His feet, in their black satin slippers and tight-fitting white muslin
socks, were austere and aristocratic. Dong-Yung, when he was absent,
loved best to think of him thus, with his hands hidden and his eyes
smiling.
"The willow-leaves will bud soon," answered Dong-Yung, glancing over her
shoulder at the tapering, yellowing twigs of the ancient tree.
"And the beech-blossoms," continued Foh-Kyung. "'The earth is the
Lord's, and the fullness thereof.'"
"The foreign devil's wisdom," answered Dong-Yung.
"It is greater than ours, Dong-Yung; greater and lovelier. To-day,
to-day, I will go to their hall of ceremonial worship and say to their
holy priest that I think and believe the Jesus way."
"Oh, most-beloved Master, is it also permitted to women, to a small
wife, to believe the Jesus way?"
"I will believe for thee, too, little Lotus Flower in the Pond."
"Tell me, O Teacher of Knowledge--tell me that in my heart and in my
mind I may follow a little way whither thou goest in thy heart and in
thy mind!"
Foh-Kyung moved out of the shadow of the ancestral hall and stood in the
warm sunlight beside Dong-Yung, his small wife. His hands were still
withheld and hidden, clasping his wrists within the wide, loose apricot
sleeves of his gown, but his eyes looked as if they touched her.
Dong-Yung hid her happiness even as the flowers hide theirs, within
silent, incurving petals.
"The water is cold as the chill of death. Go, bring me hot water--water
hot enough to scald an egg."
Foh-Kyung and Dong-Yung turned to the casement in the upper right-hand
wing and listened apprehensively. The quick chatter of angry voices
rushed out into the sunlight.
"The honourable great wife is very cross this morning." Dong-Yung
shivered and turned back to the lilies. "To-day perhaps she will beat me
again. Would that at least I had borne my lord a young prince for a
son; then perhaps--"
"Go not near her, little Jewel. Stay in thine own rooms. Nay, I have
sons a-plenty. Do not regret the childlessness. I would not have your
body go down one foot into the grave for a child. I love thee for
thyself.
"Now my lord speaks truly, as do the foreign devils to the shameless,
open-faced women. I like the ways of the outside kingdom well. Tell me
more of them, my Master."
Foh-Kyung moved his hands as if he would have withdrawn them from his
apricot-coloured sleeves. Dong-Yung saw the withheld motion, and swayed
nearer. For a moment Dong-Yung saw the look in his eyes that engulfed
her in happiness; then it was gone, and he looked away past her, across
the opening lily-buds and the black rampart of the wall, at something
distant, yet precious. Foh-Kyung moved closer. His face changed. His
eyes held that hidden rapture that only Dong-Yung and the foreign-born
priest had seen.
"Little Jewel, wilt thou go with me to the priest of the foreign-born
faith? Come!" He withdrew his hand from his sleeve and touched Dong-Yung
on the shoulder. "Come, we will go hand in hand, thou and I, even as the
men and women of the Jesus thinking; not as Chinese, I before, and thou
six paces behind. Their God loves men and women alike."
"Is it permitted to a small wife to worship the foreign-born God?"
Dong-Yung lifted her eyes to the face of Foh-Kyung. "Teach me, O my Lord
Master! My understanding is but young and fearful--"
Foh-Kyung moved into the sunlight beside her.
"Their God loves all the world. Their God is different, little Flower,
from the painted images, full of blessings, not curses. He loves even
little girl babies that mothers would throw away. Truly his heart is
still more loving than the heart of a mother."
"And yet I am fearful--" Dong-Yung looked back into the shadows of the
guest-hall, where the ancestral tablets glowed upon the wall, and
crimson tapers stood ready before them. "Our gods I have touched and
handled."
"Nay, in the Jesus way there is no fear left." Foh-Kyung's voice dropped
lower. Its sound filled Dong-Yung with longing. "When the wind screams
in the chimneys at night, it is but the wind, not evil spirits. When the
summer breeze blows in at the open door, we need not bar it. It is but
the summer breeze from the rice-fields, uninhabited by witch-ghosts.
When we eat our morning rice, we are compelled to make no offering to
the kitchen gods in the stove corner. They cannot curse our food. Ah, in
the Jesus way there is no more fear!"
Dong-Yung drew away from her lord and master and looked at him
anxiously. He was not seeing her at all. His eyes looked beyond, across
the fragile, lily-petals, through the solid black wall, at a vision he
saw in the world. Dong-Yung bent her head to sniff the familiar sweet
springtime orchid hanging from the jade stud on her shoulder.
"Your words are words of good hearing, O beloved Teacher. Nevertheless,
let me follow six paces behind. I am not worthy to touch your hand. Six
paces behind, when the sun shines in your face, my feet walk in the
shadow of your garments."
Foh-Kyung gathered his gaze back from his visions and looked at his
small wife, standing in a pool of sunshine before him. Overhead the lazy
crows flew by, winging out from their city roosts to the rice-fields for
the day's food.
"Tea-boiled eggs!" cried a vender from beyond the wall. A man stopped at
the gate, put down his shoulder-tray of food, and bargained with the
ancient, mahogany-scalped gate-keeper. Faint odours of food frying in
oil stole out from the depths of the house behind him. And Dong-Yung,
very quiet and passive in the pose of her body, gazed up at Foh-Kyung
with those strange, secretive, ardent eyes. All around him was China,
its very essence and sound and smell. Dong-Yung was a part of it all;
nay, she was even the very heart of it, swaying there in the yellow
light among the lily-petals.
"Precious Jewel! Yet it is sweeter to walk side by side, our feet
stepping out into the sunlight together, and our shadows mingling
behind. I want you beside me."
The last words rang with sudden warmth. Dong-Yung trembled and
crimsoned. It was not seemly that a man speak to a woman thus, even
though that man was a husband and the woman his wife, not even though
the words were said in an open court, where the eyes of the great wife
might spy and listen. And yet Dong-Yung thrilled to those words.
An amah called, "The morning rice is ready."
Dong-Yung hurried into the open room, where the light was still faint,
filtering in through a high-silled window and the door. A round, brown
table stood in the center of the room. In the corner of the room behind
stood the crescentic, white plaster stove, with its dull wooden
kettle-lids and its crackling straw. Two cooks, country women, sat in
the hidden corner behind the stove, and poked in the great bales of
straw and gossiped. Their voices and the answers of the serving amah
filled the kitchen with noise. In their decorous niche at the upper
right hand of the stove sat the two kitchen gods, small ancient idols,
with hidden hands and crossed feet, gazing out upon a continually hungry
world. Since time was they had sat there, ensconced at the very root of
life, seemingly placid and unseeing and unhearing, yet venomously
watching to be placated with food. Opposite the stove, on the white
wall, hung a row of brass hooks, from which dangled porcelain spoons
with pierced handles. On a serving-table stood the piled bowls for the
day, blue-and-white rice patterns, of a thin, translucent ware, showing
the delicate light through the rice seeds; red-and-green dragoned bowls
for the puddings; and tiny saucer-like platters for the vegetables. The
tea-cups, saucered and lidded, but unhandled, stood in a row before the
polished brass hot-water kettle.
The whole room was full of a stirring, wakening life, of the crackling
straw fire, of the steaming rice, all white and separate-kerneled in its
great, shallow, black iron kettles lidded with those heavy hand-made
wooden lids while the boiling tea water hissed, and spat out a snake of
white steam.
With that curious democracy of China, where high and low alike are
friendly, Dong-Yung hurried into her beloved kitchen.
"Has the master come?" asked the serving maid.
"Coming, coming," Dong-Yung answered, "I myself will take in his morning
rice, after I have offered the morning oblations to the gods."
Dong-Yung selected two of the daintiest blue-and-white rice-pattern
bowls. The cook lifted off the wooden lid of the rice-kettle, and
Dong-Yung scooped up a dipperful of the snow-white kernels. On the tiny
shelf before each god, the father and mother god of the household,
Dong-Yung placed her offering. She stood off a moment, surveying them in
pleased satisfaction--the round, blue bowls, with the faint tracery of
light; the complacent gods above, red and green and crimson, so
age-long, comfortably ensconced in their warm stove corner. She made
swift obeisance with her hands and body before those ancient idols. A
slant of sunshine swept in from the high windows and fell over her in a
shaft of light. The thoughts of her heart were all warm and mixed and
confused. She was happy. She loved her kitchen, her gods, all the
familiar ways of Chinese life. She loved her silken, satin clothes,
perfumed and embroidered and orchid-crowned, yet most of all she loved
her lord and master. Perhaps it was this love for him that made all the
rest of life so precious, that made each bowl of white rice an oblation,
each daily act a glorification. So she flung out her arms and bent her
head before the kitchen gods, the symbol of her ancient happiness.
"Dong-Yung, I do not wish you to do this any more."
Dong-Yung turned, her obeisance half arrested in mid-air. Foh-Kyung
stood in the doorway.
"My lord," stammered Dong-Yung, "I did not understand your meaning."
"I know that, little Flower in my House. The new meaning is hard to
understand. I, too, am but a blind child unused to the touch of the
road. But the kitchen gods matter no more; we pray to a spirit."
Foh-Kyung, in his long apricot-coloured garment, crossed the threshold
of the kitchen, crossed the shadow and sunlight that stripped the bare
board floor, and stood before the kitchen gods. His eyes were on a level
with theirs, strange, painted wooden eyes that stared forth inscrutably
into the eating centuries. Dong-Yung stood half bowed, breathless with a
quick, cold fear. The cook, one hand holding a shiny brown dipper, the
other a porcelain dish, stood motionless at the wooden table under the
window. From behind the stove peeped the frightened face of one of the
fire-tenders. The whole room was turned to stone, motionless, expectant,
awaiting the releasing moment of arousement--all, that is, but the
creeping sunshine, sliding nearer and nearer the crossed feet of the
kitchen gods; and the hissing steam fire, warming, coddling the hearts
of the gods. Sun at their feet, fire at their hearts, food before them,
and mortals turned to stone!