Once in a while Foh Wong had news of Yang
\nShen-Li. His friends would read in Canton papers, or in the local Chinatown weekly, the Eminent Elevation, owned and edited by Yung Tang, how the Manchu also was steadily making his way\u2014how, a favorite of the Dowager Empress, he had been appointed captain-general of the Pekin troops, commander-in-chief of the Northern army, and finally\u2014this happened at the turn of the century, at about the same time when Foh Wong paid off the twenty-thousand-dollar mortgage on his Pell Street house\u2014military governor of his native province.
\nWith every rise in the other\u2019s fortunes, Foh Wong\u2019s ambition grew. His hate, expressed by his jealousy of material achievement, was not weakened by his own success, although in this thoughts of Na Liu no longer played a direct part.
\nHe was still a good husband to her, in that he treated her with scrupulous politeness and presented her occasionally with expensive gifts. But his passion was dying. For several reasons. One\u2014logically, inevitably\u2014was that he had never been able to make her love him. Besides, she was getting to be an old woman. And\u2014the gravest reason\u2014she had borne him no children.
\nShe, on the other hand, had not ceased to be his faithful wife: looking after his bodily comfort, making his home a thing of tidiness and beauty, cutting down household costs. Nor did she dislike him. Not at all. Indeed, it would be a hunting after lying, sentimental effect to say that she blamed him for having forced her into marriage. For she also was of Mongol race. She believed, to quote a Chinese proverb, that it was just and proper to take by the tail what one could not take by the head; and she would have acted as Foh Wong had acted\u2014in fact, did act so several years later\u2014had the positions been reversed.
\nTherefore she gave him her respect. She even gave him a measure of friendship. But no love; she could not. She had not forgotten the Manchu; could never forget him.
\nSo Foh Wong\u2019s love died. It became indifference. And then one day his indifference changed to hate, as blighting as his hate for Yang Shen-Li. . . .
\nOn that day, coming home for lunch, he found his wife in tears. He asked her what was the matter. She did not answer, only sobbed.
\nHe saw a crumpled letter on the floor. He picked it up, forced her to read it aloud to him. It was from her brother.
\nThe latter wrote\u2014for that was the time, after the death of the Dowager Empress, when revolution all over China was no longer the pale, frightened dream of a few idealists, but a fact that seared the land like a sheet of smoldering flame, yellow, cruel, inexorable\u2014he wrote how in Ninguta, too, several months earlier, the masses had turned against their rulers, the iron-capped Manchu princes. He wrote vividly\u2014and Foh Wong smiled as he pictured the grim scene.
\nTHE mob of enraged coolies\u2014hayah! his own people\u2014racing through the streets, splashing
\nthrough the thick blue slime, yelling:
\n\u201cPao Ch\u2019ing Mien Yong\u2014death to the foreign oppressors!\u201d
\nRunning on and on, like a huge snake with innumerable bobbing heads, mouths cleft into toothy cruel grimaces, crying:
\n\u201cPao Ch\u2019ing Mien Yong!\u201d
\nRushing on through Pewter Lane. Through the Bazaar of the Tartar Traders. Past the Temple of the Monkey and the Stork. On to the palace of the military governor. Wielding hatchets and daggers and clubs and scythes. Overpowering the Manchu banner-men who fought bravely.
\n\u201cPao Ch\u2019ing Mien Yong!\u201d
\nHeads then\u2014heads rolling on the ground like over-ripe pumpkins. Heads of Manchus, of foreign oppressors; and among them\u2014doubtless, wrote Na Liu\u2019s brother, though it had not been found in the crimson shambles\u2014the head of Yang Shen-Li.
\nYang Shen-Li\u2019s head, thought Foh Wong\u2014his handsome, arrogant head!
\nHe laughed. Then suddenly his laughter broke off\u2014and staring at Na Liu, so wrinkled and faded and old, he said:
\n\u201cI wish he had lost his head years ago, when I gave him the choice between losing it, and losing you. For had he chosen death, I would not have married you, O turtle-spawn!\u201d<\/p>\n
She did not reply. She kept on weeping. And then he beat her\u2014partly because he hated her, and partly because her tears told him that she still loved the Manchu, loved his memory even after death. . . .
\nHe left the room, the house.
\nHe thought, with self-pity:
\n\u201cHere I am, wealthy and powerful, and my loins still strong\u2014and saddled with this ancient gnarled crone! Hai! Hai!\u201d\u2014as he saw three young Chinese girls crossing Pell Street arm in arm, with swaying hips and tiny mincing steps. \u201cWhen there are so many soft, pretty buds waiting to be picked!\u201d
\nHe turned and looked. He knew one of them: SiSi, the daughter of Yung Tang, editor of the Eminent Elevation.
\nFoh Wong did not care for the latter. The man, New York born and bred, was a conservative, an adherent of the former imperial regime, and had recently returned from China, whence he had sent articles, to his own and American papers, praising the Manchus and denouncing the revolutionaries as tools of the Bolshevists.
\nStill, considered Foh Wong, his daughter was lovely. What an exquisite wife she would make! And he smacked his lips like a man sipping warm rice wine of rich bouquet. . . .
\nSo time passed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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