The Best Short Stories of 1919 | Page 9

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 dropped 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 labor. 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 graveled 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