Short Stories
stick. Li Faa, the Silvery Moon Blossom, was of the new, yet he
could never be quite completely happy without her.
For he loved Li Faa. Moon-faced, rotund as a water-melon
seed, canny business man, wise with half a century of living—
nevertheless Ah Kim became an artist when he thought of her.
He thought of her in poems of names, as woman transmuted
into flower- terms of beauty and philosophic abstractions of
achievement and easement. She was, to him, and alone to him
of all men in the world, his Plum Blossom, his Tranquillity of
Woman, his Flower of Serenity, his Moon Lily, and his Perfect
Rest. And as he murmured these love endearments of
namings, it seemed to him that in them were the ripplings of
running waters, the tinklings of silver wind- bells, and the
scents of the oleander and the jasmine. She was his poem of
woman, a lyric delight, a three-dimensions of flesh and spirit
delicious, a fate and a good fortune written, ere the first man
and woman were, by the gods whose whim had been to make
all men and women for sorrow and for joy.
But his mother put into his hand the ink-brush and placed
under it, on the table, the writing tablet.
"Paint," said she, "the ideograph of to marry."
He obeyed, scarcely wondering, with the deft artistry of
his race and training painting the symbolic hieroglyphic.
"Resolve it," commanded his mother.
Ah Kim looked at her, curious, willing to please, unaware of
the drift of her intent.
"Of what is it composed?" she persisted. "What are the three
originals, the sum of which is it: to marry, marriage, the coming
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