?” countered the scholar irritably.
The young woman, hanging her head, answered after a moment’s pause,
“Five dollars wasn’t enough!”
The scholar sighed deeply at this and said, “No matter how good I try to be to you,
you still love your husband and your elder son more. I wanted to keep you for another
couple of years, but now I think you’d better leave here next spring!”
The young woman stood there silent and tearless.
Several days later, the scholar again reproached her, “That blue jade ring is a treasure.
I gave it to you because I wanted Qiu Bao to inherit it from you. I didn’t think you would
have it pawned! It’s lucky my wife doesn’t know about it, otherwise she would make
scenes for another three months.”
After this the young woman became thinner and paler. Her eyes lost their luster; she
was often subjected to sneers and curses. She was forever worrying about Chun Bao’s
illness. She was always on the lookout for some acquaintances from her home village or
some travelers going there. She hoped she could hear about Chun Bao’s recovery, but there
was no news. She wished she could borrow a couple of dollars or buy sweets for some
traveler to take to Chun Bao, but she could find no one going to her home village. She
would often walk outside the gate with Qiu Bao in her arms, and there, standing by the
roadside, she would gaze with melancholy eyes at the country paths. This greatly annoyed
the scholar’s wife who said to her husband,
“She really doesn’t want to stay here any longer. She’s anxious to get back home as
soon as she can.”
Sometimes at night, sleeping with Qiu Bao at her bosom, she would suddenly wake
up from her dreams and scream until the child too would awake and start crying. Once, the
scholar asked her,
“What’s happened? What’s happened?”
She patted the child without answering. The scholar continued,
“Did you dream your elder son had died? How you screamed! You woke me up!”
She hurriedly answered, “No, no… I thought I saw a new grave in front of me!”
He said nothing, but the morbid hallucination continued to loom before her—she saw
herself approaching the grave.
Winter was drawing to a close and birds began twittering at her window, as if urging
her to leave quickly. The child was weaned, and her separation from her son—permanent
separation—was already a foregone conclusion.
On the day of her departure, the kitchen-maid quietly asked the scholar’s wife,
“Shall we hire a sedan-chair to take her home?”
Fingering the rosary in her hand, the scholar’s wife said, “Better let her walk.
Otherwise she will have to pay the fare herself. And where will she get the money? I
understand her husband can’t even afford to have three meals a day. She shouldn’t try to be
showy. It’s not very far from here, and I myself have walked some forty li a day. She’
more used to walking than I am, so she ought to be able to get there in half a day.” ··文·檔·共·享·與·在·線·閱·讀·
In the morning, as the young woman was dressing Qiu Bao, tears kept streaming
down her cheeks. The child called, “Auntie, auntie” (the scholar’s wife had made him
called herself “mummy”, and her real mother, “auntie”). The young woman could not
answer for weeping. She wanted so much to say to the child,
“Good-bye, darling! Your ‘mummy’ has been good to you, so you should be good to
her in the future. Forget about me forever!” but these words she never uttered. The child
was only one and half years old, and she knew that he would never understand what she
wanted to say.
The scholar walked up quietly behind her, and put ten twenty-cent silver coins into
her palm, saying softly,
“Here are two dollars for you.”
Buttoning up the child’s clothes, she put the ten silver coins into her pocket.
The scholar’s wife also came in, and, staring hard at the back of the retreating scholar,
she turned to the young woman, saying,
“Give me QIu Bao, so that he won’t cry when you leave.”
The young woman