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marriage, when she had accompanied her husband in his dreary odyssey
through the cabarets of the orient, had been a nightmare of dirty trains
and cargo steamers, cheap hotels, hunger, the sluttish bickerings of
vaudeville folk of all races, and the dishonesty of absconding managers.
She had been a convent-school girl in peaceful, clean and pious Macao
and she never got over her horror of the company into which she
found herself thrown by her marriage. After Paco was born she had
refused to follow her husband any more; she settled in Hong Kong,
and went to work to bring up her child, since the boy's father seldom
had any money to send and indeed had to be supported himself when–
ever, ill or without a job, he came to stay with his family in Hong
Kong until the illness or the joblessness had been remedied. But
she
would not let Paco, when he was older, sell papers or shine shoes; he
was going to school at the Christian Brothers and was always provided
with good clothes and pocket-money; and in the squalid apartments
from which they were always moving away because the drains stank
or because the cracked walls crawled with bugs or because a proztitute
had moved next door or because the apartments above had been raided
for opium smokers, the single bedroom was always given to Paco, while
she fixed up a corner in the living room, behind the piano, with a
couch and a dresser for herself.
She endured meekly her boy's coldness and brusque temper be–
cause she thought it arose from shame of their poverty-but he bullied
her from compassion. When he saw her hurrying home in the cold
streets, in her wretched coat, a bag of groceries clutched tightly under
each arm and her face feverishly working because of the wild schemes
for making money that she was always turning over in her head, his
child's heart would be so touched with pity that he would fall
in
fury upon the boys with whom he had been playing, provoke a quarrel
and a fight, and arrive home even more savage than usual, barking
at his frightened mother and reducing her to tears with some cruel
remark, as that she must be a crazy woman to walk about in public
talking to herself. He had early hardened himself against her tears;
she was always crying anyway, and over the silliest rot-but even
when it was the death of his father that wrung her sobs he still could
not bring himself to approach and console her; could only stand and
watch her awkwardly until her sobs had subsided and she leaned
limply against the door, hiding her face in the apron. Then he went
to his room and sat down on the bed and looked at the photograph
of his father hanging over the bureau.
The photograph had been taken when his father was still a
