by Willa Cather
Sum Wing was a year and a half old, and could already say wise Chinese words and play with his father’s queue most intelligently, when fervent little Sister Hannah began to go to Sum Chin’s house, first to see his queer little yellow baby and afterwards to save his wife’s soul. Sum Loo could speak a little English by this time, and she liked to have her baby admired, and when there was lack of other amusement, she was not averse to talking about her soul. She thought the pictures of the baby Jesus god were cunning, though not so cunning as her Sum Wing, and she learned an English prayer and a hymn or two. Little Sister Hannah made great progress with Sum Loo, though she never cared to discuss theology with Sum Chin. Chinese metaphysics frightened her, and under all Sum Chin’s respect for all rites and ceremonials there was a sort of passive, resigned agnosticism, a doubt older than the very beginnings of Sister Hannah’s faith, and she felt incompetent to answer it. It is such an ancient doubt, that of China, and it has gradually stolen the odor from the roses and the tenderness from the breasts of the women.
The good little Sister, who should have had children of her own to bother about, became most deeply attached to Sum Wing, who loved to crumple her white headdress and pinch her plump, pink cheeks. Above all things she desired to have the child baptized, and Sum Loo was quite in the notion of it. It would be very nice to dress the child in his best clothes and take him to the Mission Chapel and hold him before the preacher with many American women looking on, if only they would promise not to put enough water on him to make him sick. She coaxed Sum Chin, who could see no valid objection, since the boy would be properly instructed in the ceremonials of his own religion by the Taoist priest, and since many of his patrons were among the founders of the mission, and it was well to be in the good books of all gods, for one never knew how things were going with the Imperial Dynasties of the other world.
So little Sum Wing was prayed, and sung, and wept over by the mission women, and a week later he fell sick and died, and the priest in the Joss house chuckled maliciously. He was buried in his father’s costly coffin which had come from China, and at the funeral there were many carriages and mourners and roast pigs and rice and gin in bowls of real china, as for a grown man, for he was his father’s only son.
Sum Chin, he went about with his queue unbraided and his face haggard and unshaven so that he looked like a wreck from some underground opium den, and he rent many costly garments and counted not the cost of them, for of what use is wealth to an old man who has no son? Who now would pray for the peace of his own soul or for that of his father? The voice of his old father cried out from the grave in bitterness against him, upbraiding him with his neglect to provide offspring to secure rest for his spirit. For of all unfilial crimes, childlessness is the darkest.
It was all clear enough to Sum Chin. There had been omens and omens, and he had disregarded them. And now the Jesus people had thrown cold water in his baby’s face and with evil incantations had killed his only son. Had not his heart stood still when the child was seized with madness and screamed when the cold water touched its face, as though demons were tearing it with red hot pincers?—And the gods of his own people were offended and had not helped him, and the Taoist priest mocked him and grinned from the Joss house across the street.
When the days of mourning were over he regained his outward composure, was scrupulous as to his dress and careful to let his nails grow long. But he avoided even the men of his own society, for there men had sons, and he hated them because the gods had prospered them. When Girrard came to his shop, Sum Chin sat writing busily with his camel’s hair brush, making neat characters on the rice paper, but be spoke no word. He maintained all his former courtesy toward the mission people, but sometimes, after they had left his shop, he would creep up stairs with ashen lips and, catching his wife’s shoulder, would shake her rudely, crying between his teeth, “Jesus people, Jesus people, killee ma babee!”
As for poor Sum Loo, her life was desolated by her husband’s grief. He no longer was gentle and kind. He no longer told her stories or bought her bracelets and sweetmeats. He let her go nowhere except to the Joss house, he let her see no one, and roughly told her to cleanse herself from the impurities of the Foreign Devils. Still, he was a broken old man, who called upon the gods in his sleep, and she pitied him. Surely he would never have any more children, and what would her father say when he heard that she had given him no grandchildren? A poor return she made her parents for all their kindness in caring for her in her infancy when she was but a girl baby and might have been quietly slipped out of the world; in binding her beautiful feet when she was foolish enough to cry about it, and in giving her a good husband and a trousseau that filled many bales. Surely, too, the spirit of her husband’s father would sit heavy on her stomach that she had allowed the Jesus people to kill her son. She was often very lonely without her little baby, who used to count his toes and call her by a funny name when he wanted his dinner. Then she would cry and wipe her eyes on the gorgeous raiment in which Sum Wing had been baptized.
The Mission people were much concerned about Sum Loo. Since her child’s death none of them had been able to gain access to the rooms above her husband’s store, where she lived. Sister Hannah had again and again made valiant resolutions and set out with determination imprinted on her plump, rosy countenance, but she had never been able to get past the suave, smiling Asiatic who told her that his wife was visiting a neighbor, or had a headache, or was giving a teaparty. It is impossible to contradict the polite and patent fictions of the Chinese, and Sister Hannah always went away nonplussed and berated herself for lack of courage.
One day, however, she was fortunate enough to catch sight of Sum Loo just as she was stepping into the Joss house across the street, and Sister Hannah followed her into that dim, dusky place, where the air was heavy with incense. At first she could see no one at all, and she quite lost her way wandering about among the glittering tinselled gods with their offerings of meat, and rice, and wine before them. They were terrible creatures, with hoofs, and horns, and scowling faces, and the little Sister was afraid of the darkness and the heavy air of the place. Suddenly she heard a droning singsong sound, as of a chant, and, moving cautiously, she came upon Sum Loo and stood watching her in terrified amazement. Sum Loo had the copy of the New Testament in Chinese which Sister Hannah had given her husband, open before her. She sat crouching at the shrine of the goddess who bestows children and tore out the pages of the book one by one, and, carefully folding them into narrow strips, she burned them in the candles before the goddess, chanting, as she did so, one name over and over incessantly.
Sister Hannah fled weeping back to the Mission of the Heavenly Rest, and that night she wrote to withdraw the application she had sent in to the Board of Foreign Missions.
JACK-A-BOY
I am quite unable to say just why we were all so fond of him, or how he came to mean so much in our lives. He was just a little boy of six, a trifle girlish in his ways, and, as a rule, I do not like effeminate boys. Moreover, he was precocious, and precocious children are almost invariably disagreeable.
Certainly he was handsome, and he carried himself with a spritelike grace and his little suit of “soldier clothes” fitted him like a sheath. But his chiefest charm lay in his eyes, big, tender, gray eyes, that used to make me think of that old song, Thine Eyes so Blue and Tender; they were soft as the color on a dove’s breast, and they looked down into your soul’s secrets and made you remember things you had not thought of for years. Yet I do not see why we should have loved him for that; there were things in my own life I had no desire to remember, and there must have been many things in the life of the Woman Nobody Called On that she preferred to forget. And as for the Professor—oh, well! he didn’t care to remember anything at all but Sanskrit roots and the metres of difficult Greek choruses, and he grudged the space that anything else took up in his brain. I fancy, generally speaking, that none o
f the folk who lived in Windsor Terrace were fond of memories. People who live in terraces are not usually those who have made the most brilliant success in life.
We were not prepared to give Jack-a-Boy a very cordial welcome when his parents moved into Number 324. It put us all in an ugly humor when we saw a hobbyhorse lifted out of the moving van. Of course there would be children, we said; we might have known that. Other people’s children are one of the most objectionable features attendant upon living in terraces—and such children! We had more than enough of them already, and we resented a single addition. When he came we all eyed him sourly enough, and if looks could kill, the florist would have been sending white roses up to Number 324.
The day after Jack-a-Boy’s arrival I went up to the Professor’s room to borrow a book and found him in a great state of nervous agitation.
“More children!” he cried, throwing down his pen; “and these partitions are so thin I can hear him laughing. I suppose he will have all the other children in the street in there, romping all day long; and I am just in the middle of a chapter on Vowels of Variable Quantity. Decidedly, I shall have to move!”
My friend, the Professor, was writing a work on Greek prosody, which he believed would be invaluable to English scholars. He had been writing it ever since I had first met him, and I don’t care to say just how long ago that was. He was a thin, frail man, angular and much bent, who seemed to have put all his blood into his grammars, and to have only thousands of tiny Greek accent marks and smooth and rough breathings where the red corpuscles should be. His nerves were none of the best, and he worked through two pairs of powerful spectacles, and the strain of his labor was so heavy that I was sorry that he should be subjected to the annoyance of having a boisterous child next door.
The next day the Professor had another visitor, no less a person than the enfant terrible himself. The good man was seated at his desk, scratching away furiously, his door slightly ajar. When he got up to go to the case for a book, he saw a little boy dressed in a gray cadet suit standing outside his door, cap in hand. He ground his teeth and sat down and began writing again. Presently he looked up and saw that little gray figure still at his door.
“Well, what is it?” he asked sharply.
“Oh, I was just waiting until you were through. I came to call for a minute. I’ve been calling on almost everyone in the Terrace, but I saw you were busy, so I thought I’d wait.”
“Well, as my occupation is likely to last for some years yet, you may as well come in,” said the Professor, rather gruffly. It was impossible to answer that clear little treble voice very savagely.
Jack-a-Boy was accustomed to taking people at their word, so in he went.
“My, what a lot of books you have!” he gasped, looking about. “Are there any with pictures in?”
“Pictures? Umm, let me see.” The Professor got up and turned the revolving bookcase and took out a big book that looked like a portfolio, and smiled grimly as he gave it to the boy.
“Now, you go on with your work, and I’ll just sit here and look at these, and I won’t bother you. I never bother Papa when he writes.”
Jack-a-Boy curled himself up on the soft, woolly hearth rug, his chin propped on his hands and the book open before him, and the Professor went back to his desk and forgot Jack-a-Boy’s existence.
I can think of no place where a child’s presence—that is, an ordinary child’s presence—could be more incongruous than in the Professor’s room. It is a very large room, or would be for an ordinary tenant who furnished it in an ordinary manner. But under the Professor’s occupancy it looked as though an effort had been made to crowd into it the entire contents of the British Museum. There were detail maps of every dead and forgotten city in which antiquarians had ever burrowed; dusty plaster casts of all the Grecian philosophers marshaled in rows above the bookshelves; bronzes of several of the later Roman emperors; terracotta models of the Acropolis and Parthenon and several other edifices whose very names I have forgotten, if I ever knew them; even an Egyptian mummy was wedged in between the lavatory and chiffonier. As for the books, they had overflowed all the cases long ago, and there was not a niche left for another shelf. The Professor’s shoe box had been removed to make room for the last bookcase, and he kept his shoes under his bed. So the tomes were packed in under his desk, piled in the corners and on the chairs, on his table and on his bed. They were particularly in evidence on his little iron bed, and almost crowded him out entirely. The housemaid often told me that when she went to make his bed in the morning she found dozens of books piled up on the side next the wall, and a narrow indentation at the outer edge was the only indication that the Professor had gone to bed at all. I believe at one time he had another room in which to sleep, but he caught so many colds trapesing into his study in his pajamas at all hours of the night when some grammatical perplexity awoke him, that he had decided to abolish the last slight barrier between his books and himself and lived with them in good earnest. His room was on the third floor, where the doings of his landlady could not disturb him and where his windows commanded a magnificent view of the harbor, lying far away across the housetops. Not that the Professor spent much time looking out of his windows; when he first moved into the Terrace he had thought he would, but on his way to the window he always caught sight of some book or other and would pick it up and go back to his desk with it. All his life his excursions from his desk had ended just so. Very often, as he was starting out for his dinner, he would stop, hat in hand, for a look into Autenrieth or the Griechische Formenlehre, and the dinner hour would steal by and he would light his pipe and console himself with the thought that he worked more when he ate little, and on the whole was very glad that he had gained an hour.
As I say, the Professor had quite forgotten that he had a visitor when he heard a clear little voice asking politely:
“Would you please tell me what these pictures are about? They are not like the ones in my picture books. I think these must be knights, ’cause they have helmets on!”
The Professor started, and looked at him over his spectacles. The book he had given the child was a volume of Flaxman’s immortal illustrations to Homer. Going over to the hearth rug, he sat down by the boy, and before he knew what he was about he had launched into an abbreviated and expurgated version of the Trojan War. For the Professor’s heart was not really dead after all, you see, only buried beneath an accumulation of Sanskrit forms and Greek idioms.
After that, Jack-a-Boy went often to see the Professor. One evening, when I went in to borrow a book from my learned friend, I found a scarlet and gold Harlequin all hung with silver bells perched on a volume of Friedrich Nietzsche. I took no pains to conceal my amusement, and the Professor looked up very sheepishly, muttering: “That rascal left the thing here this afternoon.”
He made friends with everyone in the Terrace in just the same way, and seemed personally interested in all our miserable little doings. Even the crabbed old spinster in Number 326, whose lodgers stood in absolute fear of her, was soon known to be one of his conquests. She made him a little toy dog that was stiff and hard and gray like herself. It was solidly stuffed with sawdust, and had four corncob legs of uneven lengths, and it was an awkward and uncomfortable thing to hold in your arms. But Jack-a-Boy carried it about with him religiously for days, “For I wouldn’t like to hurt her feelings,” he said. He did not care much for toys, but he was very proud of anything that was given to him. I believe if any one had given Jack-a-Boy the most unsightly of love tokens, he, who was so fond of pretty things, would have received it joyfully and treasured it.
Soon after he came he asked if he might sit in my music-room while I was giving lessons, and when the piano was not in use he used to sit down and pick out the most charming little airs for himself, simple minor melodies, indefinitely sad, like the verses of young poets, but so graceful and individual that they made those ho
urs sweet to remember. Music came as easily and naturally to him as speech, and the sense of harmonies was strangely developed in him, though he was such a nervous child we never dared let him practice much. I fell into a habit of playing to him in the twilight, after the long, dull days were over, and when be was not with the Professor, hearing about Grecian heroes, he was usually with me at that hour. I used to fancy that Jack-a-Boy would make music of his own some day, perhaps quite as beautiful as any that I played for him, and I used to wonder what form of expression the beautiful little soul of his would choose.
He did not play much with the other boys of the street. “They are such rough boys,” he whispered confidentially to me. The gentle ways of the girls suited him better, and deep down in my heart I was afraid that, in spite of his soldier clothes and his love for the Grecian heroes, Jack-a-Boy was a coward. But one morning as I was sitting on the piazza, watching Jack-a-Boy play with one of the little girls of the Terrace, I saw another boy come up and maliciously stick a pin in the little girl’s balloon. Jack-a-Boy flew at him like a wildcat, fists, teeth, feet and all the rest of him. I never saw such anger in a child. It was the frenzied, impotent revolt of a high and delicate nature against brutality and coarseness and baseness, like those outbursts of Stevenson’s youth. The boy’s comrades flew to his rescue, and in a moment our boy was down under four of them. I ran screaming to the edge of the porch, but an angular form darted past me. It was the Professor, hatless and coatless, with both pairs of spectacles on his nose. In a moment he came back carrying what was left of Jack-a-Boy, with the little girl wailing at his heels.
