BY G.F. ALSOP
From Century Magazine
The lilies bloomed that day. Out in the courtyard in their fantastic green-dragoned pots,
one by one the tiny, ethereal petals opened. Dong-Yung went rapturously among them,
stooping low to inhale their faint fragrance. The square courtyard, guarded on three sides
by the wings of the house, facing the windowless blank wall on the fourth, was mottled
with sunlight. Just this side of the wall a black shadow, as straight and opaque as the wall
itself, banded the court with darkness; but on the hither side, where the lilies bloomed and
Dong-Yung moved among them, lay glittering, yellow sunlight. The little box of a house
where the gate-keeper lived made a bulge in the uniform blackness of the wall and its
shadow. The two tall poles, with the upturned baskets, the devil-catches, rose like
flagstaffs from both sides of the door. A huge china griffon stood at the right of the gate.
From beyond the wall came the sounds of early morning--the click of wooden sandals on
cobbled streets and the panting cries of the coolies bringing in fresh vegetables or
carrying back to the denuded land the refuse of the city. The gate-keeper was awake,
brushing out his house with a broom of twigs. He was quite bald, and the top of his head
was as tanned and brown as the legs of small summer children.
"Good morning, Honourable One," he called. "It is a good omen. The lilies have opened."
An amah, blue-trousered, blue-jacketed, blue-aproned, cluttered across the courtyard with
two pails of steaming water.
"Good morning, Honourable One. The water for the great wife is hot and heavy." She
dropped her buckets, the water splashing over in runnels and puddles at her feet, and
stooped to smell the lilies. "It is an auspicious day."
From the casement-window in the right balcony a voice called:
"Thou dunce! Here I am waiting already half the day. Quicker! quicker!"
It sounded elderly and querulous a voice accustomed to be obeyed and to dominate. The
great wife's face appeared a moment at the casement. Her eyes swept over the courtyard
scene--over the blooming lilies, and Dong-Yung standing among them.
"Behold the small wife, cursed of the gods!" she cried in her high, shrill voice. "Not even
a girl can she bear her master. May she eat bitterness all her days!"
The amah shouldered the steaming buckets and splashed across the bare boards of the
ancestral hall beyond.
