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PARTISAN REVIEW
cool and quiet within the wide wooden frame. The morning sunshine,
half of its heat filtered out by the dense foliage of the sub-tropical
trees and shrubs, accentuated the beauty of the scene with its playful
golden touches that would light up a yellow plantain flower or a
bunch of red or purple rhododendron flowers. The garden, indeed,
was so overflowing with greenness that splashes of
it
seemed to have
dropped inside and soaked deep into the floor of the porch, and they
added a new luster to the seasoned tawny juniper wood with which
the floor was paved. The shade inside was further deepened by the
tall trees outside the mossy walls; the alley was quiet too. Not a
sound could be heard; the servant, who came in in slippers, did not
make any noise when he put down the bottles of beer and glasses
with ice. The old man, meanwhile, was also gazing at the view before
us, his profile as hard as that of a statue hewn out of a rock, but
the veins were standing out at his temple and they looked gnarled,
tense, and swollen, as if a sort of blue lava rather than blood were
running in them. I was afraid of an eruption.
"Well," I said, as the silence was broken by the little pop with
which the servant had opened the bottle. Now the beer was bubbling
into the glass, melting the ice inside. "Well, this is really a lovely
place, perfect as a residence for a religious man like you. Especially
after the nightmare you lived through during the past few months."
"Do
you see that something is missing here?" He stared at me
.as
he held up the foaming glass.
"We who are from the mainland will of course always miss the
mainland."
"What I miss is greatness. Often I will be sitting here, looking
out at the garden. What do I see? Trees, flowers, grass, sunshine and
shadows--just as they are now-everything within these twenty feet.
Lovely, you may say. But somehow I feel I am constricted, narrowed,
shut in. I miss the grand view, the vast expanse of land, the billows
and waves in the sorghum fields, the columns of wild geese flying
across the rosy sunset, the broad sky meeting the broad earth in a
happy communion."
"Then you would prefer to live in the country? The countryside
III
Formosa is lovely too."
"But it would still be different--different," he sighed.
Beer in hand, I was much impressed with the strange homesick-
