The Best Short Stories of 1919 | Page 7

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 odors 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