Mr Ma and Son Read Free Page B

rompers, are haring to and fro over the grass, their chubby legs waddling and tottering about. Their nurses, sporting white bonnets, chase after these little gods, grumbling and complaining all the while.
    Ma Wei stood there for an age. He lacked any enthusiasm for listening to the speeches, but couldn’t think where else to go. He was twenty-one or twenty-two years old, fairly tall but very thin, with a sallow complexion and a narrow face that showed a resolute willpower. His long eyebrows swept slightly upwards, and the corners of his eyes turned up a bit too. These eyes were extraordinarily black and extraordinarily bright, and that combination rendered the whites of his eyeballs paler by contrast, so that his eyes avoided the dull, lifeless-looking monochrome that paper dolls in funerary shops have. Apart from these eyes, with their constant hint of a smile, his face would have looked quite fearsome. His nose wasn’t very prominent, but it seemed to stick out just the right distance because his cheeks weren’t plump. And his lips curled upwards a bit, serving in conjunction with his twinkly, smiling eyes to create an overall geniality.
    He wore a grey woollen suit under his black woollen overcoat. The suit was very elegantly tailored, but it had, like his face, become drab, lost a lot of its original glow. From his looks and from his age, you’d imagine he oughtn’t really to be so miserable. But with his forehead screwed up in a frown and his back slightly bent, he was missing much of youth’s sprightliness. Compare him with those red-uniformed young men arm in arm with the girls, and he’d certainly seem to come off rather the worse.
    He absent-mindedly fished out a handkerchief and wiped it across his face. Then he stood there in a dumb blur, just as before.
    The sun was setting. Red clouds turned the green-flannel grass a purplish colour. The workmen’s red flag slowly transformed into a patch of congealed scarlet blood. And each minute the speakers’ audiences grew smaller.
    Ma Wei buried his hands in his overcoat pockets, walked on a few steps then came to a stop, leaning against the iron railing that bordered the grass. The red clouds to the west slowly dispelled the last lingering light of the sun. In the dying rays, the sky was covered layer by layer in a pale grape colour, like the frost-blue under the grey of a wood pigeon’s plumage. The grey steadily deepened and imperceptibly merged with the wisps of ground mist, and swallowed all the colours into the dark. The workmen’s flag, too, became a patch of black. And the trees in the distance quietly embraced the dusky shadows and slipped off into the night with them.
    The people departed in ones and twos, until they’d almost all dispersed. The gas lamps all around were lit. Big red and green buses going round Marble Arch flashed past one after the other, looking like some long, moving rainbow. There was no one on the grass now. Only one black shadow leaning by the iron railing. Li Tzu-jung had wriggled down into his bedclothes. As he stretched out a leg to the left, and shifted an arm to the right, in the half-asleep stage, he was dimly conscious of the doorbell ringing. His eyes got to the verge of opening, but then, in spite of himself, he let his head slip back onto the pillow. He could still recall hazily that something had been making a noise just now, but . . .
    DRRRRR!
    The doorbell rang again. He cracked open his only just-closed eyes, then once more lowered his ear back onto the pillow.
    DRRRRRR!
    ‘Who the hell can it be, calling here at midnight! Who is it?’
    He propped himself up with one arm into a sitting position, and with the other hand pulled open the curtain a bit to look outside. Although there was a gas lamp in the street, the mist hung very thick, and it was so dark he couldn’t see a thing.
    DRRRRRRRRRR!
    This time the bell rang a little longer and louder than the previous rings. Li Tzu-jung got up, felt around for his shoes