T.
A. Hsia
THE JESUIT'S TALE
Father Friedrich Kolzberg, S.]., was an even bigger man
than I had expected. I had made an appointment with him, and
arriving at his door, after the servant, a devout-looking, middle-aged
man, had let me through the nice little garden, I found him waiting
for me. The sliding door was open and he was standing on the en–
trance platform inside the doorway, his tall black-robed figure stoop–
ing under the low ceiling of the toy-like house. Such a big man
struck me, indeed, as out of place among the flimsy paper doors, the
quaint little screen made out of a cross-section of the root of an old
tree, the tiny carvings on the top of the wall in the forms of little
birds perched on slender trees or in flight among flowers. But he was
all smiles: his pale blue eyes shining out from the depths formed
by thick gray eyebrows and myriads of wrinkles and his mouth,
covered by bushy beard, open like a cavern- these all seemed eager
to offer me the welcome.
"So you are the ·Young man introduced by Professor Chang?
Please come in."
"Father Kolzberg? I am very glad to meet you," I said in
English.
"Please don't call me that foreign name. I am simply Ko Fei Li.
Or
if
you like, call me Ko Shen-fu.* And I would appreciate it if
you would speak your own language." He continued in Chinese. I
was embarrassed when he seemed not to notice the hand I held out
for him to grasp. Perhaps he had become unused to that form of
Western civility. after, as I had learned, his fifty years in China. I
could only draw my hand back and began to apply it to my shoes.
"Oh don't bother about the slippers. Just walk in. Up here."
*
Meaning Father Ko.
