Short Stories
and his mother's delectable beatings. So he declined Fu Yee
Po's easy terms, and at much less cost imported his own moth-
er 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 crepes to the most expensive
hand-embroidered silks. For be it known that even in that ear-
ly day Ah Kim's emporium was beginning to cater to the tour-
ist 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, monop-
olized 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 ka-
naka mother, the wearer of white-devil skirts and corsets and
174