Free Mr Ma and Son by Lao She Page A

direction, and saying to herself, It’s not only English men who can beat you cringing cowards – even our heroines could knock you head over heels!
    At the same time, she thought of her boyfriend, John, who was now in China. What a fine figure John would cut in Shanghai. With those two big fists of his, he could surely thump dead a few dozen Chinese with one punch. Her blue eyes shone ever more radiantly. John was the hero of her heart. In his letter he’d written: I’ve joined up as a volunteer. Yesterday with one burst of gunfire I shot dead five of the yellow devils, one of them a girl . . .
    Miss Wedderburn felt that killing a girl wasn’t very humane, but then, it had been a Chinese girl. In awe of John’s heroism, she was oblivious to anything else. But it had said in the newspaper that the Chinese had massacred some English people – surely John couldn’t have been boasting and telling lies? At which juncture in her thoughts, she heard her mother saying ‘Hang Ben’.
    ‘What, Mum?’ she asked, turning her head.
    Her mother told her that the tea was called Hang Ben. Miss Wedderburn tried to pronounce it too. The English always have to show off. She temporarily forgot how loathsome Ma Wei was.
    ‘Hang Ben. Hang Ben. Is that right?’ she asked Ma Wei.
    Naturally Ma Wei said, ‘Yes, that’s right.’
    Breakfast over, Ma Wei was about to go upstairs and see how his father was. Miss Wedderburn came running downstairs, wearing a new hat she’d bought the previous day and on which was displayed a mouse’s tail, as though she had stuck a strip of buckwheat vermicelli there. Mousetails were the latest fashion, and so she was wearing one, too.
    ‘Cheerio!’ she said, giving Ma Wei a sideways glance. And off she dashed like a puff of smoke.

VII
    W HILE MISS Wedderburn went off to work, Mrs Wedderburn wove in and out of the rooms, doing the housework with Napoleon in tow, leaping wildly all around her. Ma Wei sat alone in the drawing room, waiting for the Reverend Ely to arrive.
    Since his mother’s death, when he was eight years old, Ma Wei had had virtually no experience of female love or concern. At primary school, he went round all day in a pack of little ragamuffin boys, and at high school he mixed with slightly bigger ragamuffins. It was only on Sundays, when he went to church, that he had been able to see a few women. During prayers, with his head lowered, he would secretly peep at them out of the corner of his eye. But many a time he was caught at it by Mrs Ely, who would report it to the Reverend Ely. And the reverend would give him a thorough telling-off, partly in English, partly in Chinese.
    ‘Little boy! Mustn’t look at young ladies during prayers! Understand?’ he’d say in Chinese. ‘See?’ he’d add in English.
    As Mrs Ely prayed, she’d always have one eye closed, looking up to God in heaven, and the other eye open to watch the crowd of hell-worthy pupils. Ma Wei’s ‘girl-spotting’ couldn’t escape her.
    Eighty or ninety per cent of the girls in the church were even uglier than Mrs Ely, and, as Ma Wei’s roving glance encountered them, he would sometimes instinctively shut his eyes, musing to himself that when God made humans, He sometimes went a bit wrong. Occasionally, though, he did spy a pretty girl. But beautiful, he couldn’t help being reminded of the paper effigy-dolls in the funeral parlours. That, inevitably, was somewhat off-putting. But never mind if she was a paper doll – she was still a pretty girl, and it was no small thing to catch a glimpse of one. Chatting with her, or holding her hand, however, was beyond the realm of possibility – a foolish fantasy.
    Just once he had actually been around a girl for a good few days. It happened the year before he came to England. Things were hotting up in the student world. Headmasters were striking, teachers were striking, and students were striking. Not many knew what it was all about, but everyone jumped on the