gods. He stretched out his two hands, and caught a god in each. A
shudder ran through the motionless room.
"It is wickedness!" The porcelain dish fell from the hand of the cook,
and a thousand rice-kernels, like scattered pearls, ran over the floor.
"A blasphemer," the fire-tender whispered, peering around the stove with
terrified eyes. "This household will bite off great bitterness."
Foh-Kyung walked around the corner of the stove. The fire sparked and
hissed. The sunshine filled the empty niche. Not since the building of
the house and the planting of the tall black cypress-trees around it, a
hundred years ago, had the sunlight touched the wall behind the kitchen
gods.
Dong-Yung sprang into life. She caught Foh-Kyung's sleeve.
"O my Lord and Master, I pray you, do not utterly cast them away into
the burning, fiery furnace! I fear some evil will befall us."
Foh-Kyung, a green-and-gold god in each hand, stopped and turned. His
eyes smiled at Dong-Yung. She was so little and so precious and so
afraid! Dong-Yung saw the look of relenting. She held his sleeve the
tighter.
"Light of my Eyes, do good deeds to me. My faith is but a little faith.
How could it be great unto thy great faith? Be gentle with my kitchen
gods. Do not utterly destroy them. I will hide them."
Foh-Kyung smiled yet more, and gave the plaster gods into her hands as
one would give a toy to a child.
"They are thine. Do with them as thou wilt, but no more set them up in
this stove corner and offer them morning rice. They are but painted,
plastered gods. I worship the spirit above."
Foh-Kyung sat down at the men's table in the men's room beyond. An amah
brought him rice and tea. Other men of the household there was none, and
he ate his meal alone. From the women's room across the court came a
shrill round of voices. The voice of the great wife was loudest and
shrillest. The voices of the children, his sons and daughters, rose and
fell with clear childish insistence among the older voices. The amah's
voice laughed with an equal gaiety.
Dong-Yung hid away the plastered green-and-gold gods. Her heart was
filled with a delicious fear. Her lord was even master of the gods. He
picked them up in his two hands, he carried them about as carelessly as
a man carries a boy child astride his shoulder; he would even have cast
them into the fire! Truly, she shivered with delight. Nevertheless, she
was glad she had hidden them safely away. In the corner of the kitchen
stood a box of white pigskin with beaten brass clasps made like the
outspread wings of a butterfly. Underneath the piles of satin she had
hidden them, and the key to the butterfly clasps was safe in her
belt-jacket.
Dong-Yung stood in the kitchen door and watched Foh-Kyung.
"Does my lord wish for anything?"
Foh-Kyung turned, and saw her standing there in the doorway. Behind her
were the white stove and the sun-filled, empty niche. The light flooded
through the doorway. Foh-Kyung set down his rice-bowl from his left hand
and his ivory chop-sticks from his right. He stood before her.
"Truly, Dong-Yung, I want thee. Do not go away and leave me. Do not
cross to the eating-room of the women and children. Eat with me."
"It has not been heard of in the Middle Kingdom for a woman to eat with
a man."
"Nevertheless, it shall be. Come!"
Dong-Yung entered slowly. The light in this dim room was all gathered
upon the person of Foh-Kyung, in the gleaming patterned roses of his
gown, in his deep amethyst ring, in his eyes. Dong-Yung came because of
his eyes. She crossed the room slowly, swaying with that peculiar grace
of small-footed women, till she stood at the table beside Foh-Kyung. She
was now even more afraid than when he would have cast the kitchen gods
into the fire. They were but gods, kitchen gods, that he was about to
break; this was the primeval bondage of the land, ancient custom.
"Give me thy hand and look up with thine eyes and thy heart."
Dong-Yung touched his hand. Foh-Kyung looked up as if he saw into the
ether beyond, and there saw a spirit vision of ineffable radiance. But
Dong-Yung watched him. She saw him transfigured with an inner light. His
eyes moved in prayer. The exaltation spread out from him to her, it
tingled through their finger-tips, it covered her from head to foot.
Foh-Kyung drooped her hand and moved. Dong-Yung leaned nearer.
"I, too, would believe the Jesus way."
In the peculiar quiet of mid-afternoon, when the shadows begin to creep
down from the eaves of the pagodas and zigzag across the rice-fields to
bed, Foh-Kyung and Dong-Yung arrived at the camp-ground of the
foreigners. The lazy native streets were still dull with the end of
labour. At the gate of the camp-ground the rickshaw coolies tipped down
the bamboo shafts, to the ground. Dong-Yung stepped out quickly, and
looked at her lord and master. He smiled.
"Nay, I do not fear," Dong-Yung answered, with her eyes on his face.
"Yet this place is strange, and lays a coldness around my heart."
"Regard not their awkward ways," said Foh-Kyung, as he turned in at the
gate; "in their hearts they have the secret of life."
The gate-keeper bowed, and slipped the coin, warm from Foh-Kyung's hand,
into his ready pocket.
"Walk beside me, little Wife of my Heart." Foh-Kyung stopped in the wide
gravelled road and waited for Dong-Yung. Standing there in the sunlight,
more vivid yet than the light itself, in his imperial yellow robes he
was the end of life, nay, life itself, to Dong-Yung. "We go to the house
of the foreign priest to seek until we find the foreign God. Let us go
side by side."
Dong-Yung, stepping with slow, small-footed grace, walked beside him.
"My understanding is as the understanding of a little child, beloved
Teacher; but my heart lies like a shell in thy hand, its words but as
the echo of thine. My honour is great that thou do not forget me in the
magnitude of the search."
Dong-Yung's pleated satin skirts swayed to and fro against the imperial
yellow of Foh-Kyung's robe. Her face coloured like a pale spring
blossom, looked strangely ethereal above her brocade jacket. Her heart
still beat thickly, half with fear and half with the secret rapture of
their quest and her lord's desire for her.
Foh-Kyung took a silken and ivory fan from an inner pocket and spread it
in the air. Dong-Yung knew the fan well. It came from a famous
jeweller's on Nanking Road, and had been designed by an old court poet
of long ago. The tiny ivory spokes were fretted like ivy-twigs in the
North, but on the leaves of silk was painted a love-story of the South.
There was a tea-house, with a maiden playing a lute, and the words of
the song, fantastic black ideographs, floated off to the ears of her
lover. Foh-Kyung spread out its leaves in the sun, and looked at it and
smiled."
"Never is the heart of man satisfied," he said, "alone. Neither when the
willow fuzz flies in the spring, or when the midnight snow silvers the
palms. Least of all is it satisfied when it seeks the presence of God
above. I want thee beside me."
Dong-Yung hid her delight. Already for the third time he said those
words--those words that changed all the world from one of a loving
following-after to a marvelous oneness.
So they stepped across the lawn together. It was to Dong-Yung as if she
stepped into an unknown land. She walked on flat green grass. Flowers in
stiff and ordered rows went sedately round and round beneath a lurid red
brick wall. A strange, square-cornered, flat-topped house squatted in
the midst of the flat green grass. On the lawn at one side was a
white-covered table, with a man and a woman sitting beside it. The four
corners of the table-cloth dripped downward to the flat green grass. It
was all very strange and ugly. Perhaps it was a garden, but no one would
have guessed it. Dong-Yung longed to put each flower plant in a dragon
bowl by itself and place it where the sun caught its petals one by one
as the hours flew by. She longed for a narrow, tile-edged patch to guide
her feet through all that flat green expanse. A little shiver ran over
her. She looked back, down the wide gravelled way, through the gate,
where the gate-keeper sat, tipped back against the wall on his stool, to
the shop of the money-changer's opposite. A boy leaned half across the
polished wood counter and shook his fist in the face of the
money-changer. "Thou thief!" he cried. "Give me my two cash!" Dong-Yung
was reassured. Around her lay all the dear familiar things; at her side
walked her lord and master. And he had said they were seeking a new
freedom, a God of love. Her thoughts stirred at her heart and caught her
breath away.
The foreigners rose to greet them. Dong-Yung touched the hand of an
alien man. She did not like it at all. The foreign-born woman made her
sit down beside her, and offered her bitter, strong tea in delicate,
lidless cups, with handles bent like a twisted flower-branch.
"I have been meaning to call for a long time, Mrs. Li," said the
foreign-born woman.
"The great wife will receive thee with much honour," Dong-Yung answered.
"I am so glad you came with your husband."
"Yes," Dong-Yung answered, with a little smile. "The customs of the
foreign-born are pleasant to our eyes."
"I am glad you like them," said the foreign-born woman. "I couldn't bear
not to go everywhere with my husband."
Dong-Yung liked her suddenly on account of the look that sprang up a
moment in her eyes and vanished again. She looked across at the priest,
her husband, a man in black, with thin lips and seeing eyes. The eyes of
the foreign woman, looking at the priest, her husband, showed how much
she loved him. "She loves him even as a small wife loves," Dong-Yung
thought to herself. Dong-Yung watched the two men, the one in imperial
yellow, the one in black, sitting beside each other and talking.
Dong-Yung knew they were talking of the search. The foreign-born woman
was speaking to her again.
"The doctor told me I would die if I came to China, but John felt he had
a call. I would not stand in his way."
The woman's face was illumined.
"And now you are very happy?" Dong-Yung announced.
"And now I am very happy; just as you will be very happy."
"I am always happy since my lord took me for his small wife." Dong-Yung
matched her happiness with the happiness of the foreign-born woman,
proudly, with assurance. In her heart she knew no woman, born to eat
bitterness, had ever been so happy as she in all the worlds beneath the
heavens. She looked around her, beyond the failure of the foreign
woman's garden, at the piled, peaked roofs of China looking over the
wall. The fragrance of a blossoming plum-tree stole across from a
Chinese courtyard, and a peach-branch waved pink in the air. A wonder of
contentment filled Dong-Yung.
All the while Foh-Kyung was talking. Dong-Yung turned back from all the
greenness around her to listen. He sat very still, with his hands hid in
his sleeves. The wave-ridged hem of his robe--blue and green and purple
and red and yellow--was spread out decorously above his feet. Dong-Yung
looked and looked at him, so still and motionless and so gorgeously
arrayed. She looked from his feet, long, slim, in black satin slippers,
and close-fitting white muslin socks, to the feet of the foreign priest.
His feet were huge, ugly black things. From his feet Dong-Yung's eyes
crept up to his face, over his priestly black clothes, rimmed with stiff
white at wrist and throat. Yes, his face was even as the face of a
priest, of one who serves between the gods and men, a face of seeing
eyes and a rigid mouth. Dong-Yung shuddered.
"And so we have come, even as the foreign-born God tells us, a man and
his wife, to believe the Jesus way."
Foh-Kyung spoke in a low voice, but his face smiled. Dong-Yung smiled,
too, at his open, triumphant declarations. She said over his words to
herself, under her breath, so that she would remember them surely when
she wanted to call them back to whisper to her heart in the dark of some
night. "We two, a man and his wife"--only dimly, with the heart of a
little child, did Dong-Yung understand and follow Foh-Kyung; but the
throb of her heart answered the hidden light in his eyes.
The foreign-born priest stood up. The same light shone in his eyes. It
was a rapture, an exaltation. Suddenly an unheard-of thing happened. The
outside kingdom woman put her arms around Dong-Yung! Dong-Yung was
terrified. She was held tight against the other woman's shoulder. The
foreign-born woman used a strange perfume. Dong-Yung only half heard her
whispered words.
"We are like that, too. We could not be separated. Oh, you will be
happy!"
Dong-Yung thought of the other woman. "In her heart she is humble and
seemly. It is only her speech and her ways that are unfitting."
"We are going into the chapel a moment," said the priest. "Will you
come, too?"
Dong-Yung looked at Foh-Kyung, a swift upward glance, like the sudden
sweep of wings. She read his answer in his eyes. He wanted her to come.
Not even in the temple of the foreign-born God did he wish to be without
her.
A coolie called the foreign-born woman away.
The priest, in his tight trousers, and jacket, black and covered with a
multitude of round flat buttons, stood up, and led the way into the
house and down a long corridor to a closed door at the end. Dong-Yung
hurried behind the two men. At the door the priest stood aside and held
it open for her to pass in first. She hesitated. Foh-Kyung nodded.
"Do not think fearful things, little Princess," he whispered. "Enter,
and be not afraid. There is no fear in the worship of Jesus."
So Dong-Yung crossed the threshold first. Something caught her breath
away, just as the chanting of the dragon priests always did. She took a
few steps forward and stood behind a low-backed bench. Before her, the
light streamed into the little chapel through one luminous window of
coloured glass above the altar. It lay all over the grey-tiled floor in
roses and sunflowers of pink and god. A deep purple stripe fell across
the head of the black-robed priest. Dong-Yung was glad of that. It made
his robe less hideous, and she could not understand how one could serve
a god unless in beautiful robes. On the altar beneath the window of
coloured flowers were two tall silver candlesticks, with smooth white
tapers. A wide-mouthed vase filled with Chinese lilies stood between
them. The whole chapel was faintly fragrant with their incense. So even
the foreign-born worshipers lit candles, and offered the scent of the
lilies to their spirit God. Truly, all the gods of all the earth and in
the sky are lovers of lit candles and flowers. Also, one prays to all
gods.
The place was very quiet and peaceful, mottled with the gorgeous,
flowerlike splashes of colour. The waiting candles, the echoes of many
prayers, the blossom of worship filled the tiny chapel. Dong-Yung liked
it, despite herself, despite the strangeness of the imageless altar,
despite the clothes of the priest. She stood quite still behind the
bench flooded and filled with an all-pervading sense of happiness.
Foh-Kyung and the black-robed priest walked past her, down the little
aisle, to a shiny brass railing that went like a fence round before the
altar. The foreign-born priest laid one hand on the railing as if to
kneel down, but Foh-Kyung turned and beckoned with his chin to Dong-Yung
to come. She obeyed at once. She was surprisingly unafraid. Her feet
walked through the patterns of colour, which slid over her head and
hands, gold from the gold of a cross and purple from the robe of a king.
As if stepping through a rainbow, she came slowly down the aisle to the
waiting men, and in her heart and in her eyes lay the light of all love
and trust.
Foh-Kyung caught her hand.
"See, I take her hand," he said to the priest, "even as you would take
the hand of your wife, proud and unashamed in the presence of your God.
Even as your love is, so shall ours be. Where the thoughts of my heart
lead, the heart of my small wife follows. Give us your blessing."
Foh-Kyung drew Dong-Yung to her knees beside him. His face was hidden,
after the manner of the foreign worshipers; but hers was uplifted, her
eyes gazing at the glass with the colours of many flowers and the shapes
of men and angels. She was happier than she had ever been--happier even
than when she had first worshiped the ancestral tablets with her lord
and master, happier even than at the feast of the dead, when they laid
their food offerings on the shaven grave-mounds. She felt closer to
Foh-Kyung than in all her life before.
She waited. The silence grew and grew till in the heart of it something
ominous took the place of its all-pervading peace. Foh-Kyung lifted his
face from his hands and rose to his feet. Dong-Yung turned, still
kneeling, to scan his eyes. The black-robed priest stood off and looked
at them with horror. Surely it was horror! Never had Dong-Yung really
liked him. Slowly she rose, and stood beside and a little behind
Foh-Kyung. He had not blessed them. Faintly, from beyond the walls of
the Christian chapel came the beating of drums. Devil-drums they were.
Dong-Yung half smiled at the long-known familiar sound.
"Your small wife?" said the priest. "Have you another wife?"
"Assuredly," Foh-Kyung answered. "All men have a great wife first; but
this, my small wife, is the wife of my heart. Together we have come to
seek and find the Jesus way."
The priest wiped his hand across his face. Dong-Yung saw that it was wet
with tiny round balls of sweat. His mouth had suddenly become one thin
red line, but in his eyes lay pain.
"Impossible," he said. His voice was quite different now, and sounded
like bits of metal falling on stone. "No man can enter the church while
living in sin with a woman other than his lawful wife. If your desire is
real, put her away."
With instant response, Foh-Kyung made a stately bow. "Alas! I have made
a grievous mistake. The responsibility will be on my body. I thought all
were welcome. We go. Later on, perhaps, we may meet again."
The priest spoke hurriedly.
"I do not understand your meaning. Is this belief of such light weight
that you will toss it away for a sinful woman? Put her away, and come
and believe." But Foh-Kyung did not hear his words. As he turned away,
Dong-Yung followed close behind her lord and master, only half
comprehending, yet filled with a great fear. They went out again into
the sunshine, out across the flat green grass, under the iron gateway,
back into the Land of the Flowery Kingdom. Foh-Kyung did not speak until
he put Dong-Yung in the rickshaw.
"Little Wife of my Heart," he said, "stop at the jeweller's and buy thee
new ear-rings, these ear-rings of the sky-blue stone and sea-tears, and
have thy hair dressed and thy gowns perfumed, and place the two red
circles on the smile of thy cheeks. To-night we will feast. Hast thou
forgotten that to-night is the Feast of the Lanterns, when all good
Buddhists rejoice?"
He stood beside her rickshaw, in his imperial yellow garment hemmed with
the rainbow waves of the sea, and smiled down into her eyes.
"But the spirit God of love, the foreign-born spirit God?" said
Dong-Yung. "Shall we feast to him too?"
"Nay, it is not fitting to feast to two gods at once," said Foh-Kyung.
"Do as I have said."
He left her. Dong-Yung, riding through the sun-splashed afternoon,
buying coloured jewels and flowery perfume and making herself beautiful,
yet felt uneasy. She had not quite understood. A dim knowledge advanced
toward her like a wall of fog. She pressed her two hands against it and
held it off--held it off by sheer mental refusal to understand. In the
courtyard at home the children were playing with their lighted animals,
drawing their gaudy paper ducks, luminous with candle-light, to and fro
on little standards set on four wheels. At the gate hung a tall
red-and-white lantern, and over the roof floated a string of candle-lit
balloons. In the ancestral hall the great wife had lit the red candles,
speared on their slender spikes, before the tablets. In the kitchen the
cooks and amahs were busy with the feast-cooking. Candles were stuck
everywhere on the tables and benches. They threw little pools of light
on the floor before the stove and looked at the empty niche. In the
night it was merely a black hole in the stove filled with formless
shadow. She wished--
"Dong-Yung, Flower in the House, where hast thou hidden the kitchen
gods? Put them in their place." Foh-Kyung, still in imperial yellow,
stood like a sun in the doorway.
Dong-Yung turned.
"But--"
"Put them back, little Jewel in the Hair. It is not permitted to worship
the spirit God. There are bars and gates. The spirit of man must turn
back in the searching, turn back to the images of plaster and paint."
Dong-Yung let the wall of fog slide over her. She dropped her
resistance. She knew.
"Nay, not the spirit of man. It is but natural that the great God does
not wish the importunings of a small wife. Worship thou alone the great
God, and the shadow of that worship will fall on my heart."
"Nay, I cannot worship alone. My worship is not acceptable in the sight
of the foreign God. My ways are not his ways."
Foh-Kyung's face was unlined and calm, yet Dong-Yung felt the hidden
agony of his soul, flung back from its quest upon gods of plaster and
paint.
"But I know the thoughts of thy heart, O Lord and Master, white and
fragrant as the lily-buds that opened to-day. Has thy wish changed?"
"Nay, my wish is even the same, but it is not permitted to a man of two
wives to be a follower of the spirit God."
Dong-Yung had known it all along. This knowledge came with no surprise.
It was she who kept him from the path of his desire!
"Put back the kitchen gods," said Foh-Kyung. "We will live and believe
and die even as our fathers have done. The gate to the God of love is
closed."
The feast was served. In the sky one moon blotted out a world of stars.
Foh-Kyung sat alone, smoking. Laughter and talk filled the women's wing.
The amahs and coolies were resting outside. A thin reed of music crept
in and out among the laughter and talk, from the reed flute of the cook.
The kitchen was quite empty. One candle on the table sent up a long
smoky tongue of flame. The fire still smouldered in the corner. A little
wind shook the cypress-branches without, and carried the scent of the
opened lilies into the room.
Dong-Yung, still arrayed for feasting, went to the pigskin trunk in the
corner, fitted the key from her belt into the carven brass wings of the
butterfly, and lifted out the kitchen gods. One in each hand, she held
them, green and gold. She put them back in their niche, and lifted up a
bowl of rice to their feet, and beat her head on the ground before them.
"Forgive me, O my kitchen gods, forgive my injurious hands and heart;
but the love of my master is even greater than my fear of thee. Thou and
I, we bar the gates of heaven from him."
When she had finished, she tiptoed around the room, touching the chairs
and tables with caressing fingers. She stole out into the courtyard, and
bent to inhale the lily fragrance, sweeter by night than by day. "An
auspicious day," the gate-keeper had said that morning. Foh-Kyung had
stood beside her, with his feet in the sunshine; she remembered the
light in his eyes. She bent her head till the fingers of the lily-petals
touched her cheek. She crept back through the house, and looked at
Foh-Kyung smoking. His eyes were dull, even as are the eyes of sightless
bronze Buddhas. No, she would never risk going in to speak to him. If
she heard the sound of his voice, if he called her "little Flower of the
House," she would never have the strength to go. So she stood in the
doorway and looked at him much as one looks at a sun, till wherever else
one looks, one sees the same sun against the sky.
In the formless shadow she made a great obeisance, spreading out her
arms and pressing the palms of her hands against the floor.
"O my Lord and Master," she said, with her lips against the boards of
the floor, softly, so that none might hear her--"O my Lord and Master, I
go. Even a small wife may unbar the gates of heaven."