She said, “Oh, Joseph!” and looked on him with love.
“What is this? What is this?” demanded Anne, able no longer to remain a silent listener and coming to the door.
“I want to put the wedding forward,” Joseph said.
“I heard you. There’s selfishness for you! Marry the day after tomorrow—with the guests bidden for eight weeks ahead. So you’re tired of fending for yourself and to spare yourself just that short time more you’d do Mary out of her wedding day. In the whole of my life I never heard anything so preposterous!”
As in the early days, faced by Mary’s mother he felt all hands and feet and angular elbows. He said, as awkwardly as though his request had been made from purely selfish motives:
“I thought if Mary didn’t mind …”
Mary said, “I don’t, I’d be glad.”
“You be quiet,” Anne said.
“You’re so soft, you’d stand by the door and give away your nose for a whistle if anybody asked you!” The tone in which she said that was almost rough, yet she was expressing, for the first time, fully and freely, her inmost opinion of her own daughter. She was so tender-hearted, so easily troubled, so altogether, in Anne’s opinion, unfitted for the hard battle that was ordinary life, that somebody must stand up for her, protect her, save her from herself as it were. And Anne had hoped that Joseph would be that somebody. That had been her only reason for showing him any favour; he was getting on in years, he wasn’t and never would be rich; but she had thought him kind and reliable. Now he was the very one to come along with this most selfish suggestion.
“We,” Anne said, giving the contemptible fellow a fierce look, ‘have relatives, on both sides of the family, scattered all over Galilee and Judah. I have a brother in Capernaum and another in Bethsaida; Joachim has two sisters in Sechem. And there’s Zacharias,” she said, naming, with some pride, the husband of Mary’s cousin who was a priest in the Temple.
“How do you think they’re going to feel when they hear she’s been married without their presence? It’s all very well for you to come strolling along and suggest getting married the day after tomorrow,
just, because you’ve spoiled your breakfast. Things aren’t done like that in decent families.”
Mary said, “At least my dress is ready.” .
“So it may be. But nothing else is.”
if Joseph felt rather than saw that Mary was looking at him with appeal. What could he say?
Speaking almost as the words came into his mind he said:
“What I said to Mary wasn’t the whole of it. When we set the day I didn’t know this job was coming up, did I? Now I can see I’m going to be so busy that it’d be very inconvenient to take three days off then. This week I could do it.” From first to last a properly celebrated wedding in humble families went on for three days, with richer people it could extend to six.
“Too busy to attend your own wedding!” Anne exclaimed.
“That’s the first time I ever heard that.”
From behind her Joachim said, as he fastened his girdle:
“What is going on here?”
Anne turned and in the short sharp words informed him. Joachim looked at Joseph, who appeared to be embarrassed and awkward, at Mary, who seemed to be on the brink of tears, and at his own belligerent wife. And he thought—Why of course, they’re in love and it’s Spring, poor fellow he doesn’t want to wait any longer. On top of this understanding thought he felt the instinctive impulse to side with one of his own sex.
“Well,” he said, when Anne had finished, “I can’t see so much amiss with that. Unless Mary minds. It’s her wedding; it’s for . her to say.”
“I’d like to be married the day after tomorrow,” Mary said.
“That’s settled then,” Joachim said before Anne could speak.
“Now perhaps one of you would come in and give me my breakfast.”
Speechless, Anne flounced into the house.
Mary said, “Oh, thank you, Joseph! I can never thank you enough. You do believe me?”
“I believe you,” he said.
Her joy at being believed was so transcendent that he decided not to mention the dream yet. He’d save that for an unjoyful day. Looking ahead he could see plenty of that sort to come.
TWO
PYANGYONG
6,000 miles At the foot of the stone stairs that led up to his tower, Melchior turned and looked at old Senya; she’d never been, in his opinion, particularly bright, and now, with age, her wits, as well as her hearing and eyesight, were failing. He had to say things over and over again, and even then could never be sure that she had heard and understood. Her own few remarks she repeated so often that had he taken any notice of what she said, he would have found the reiteration quite tiresome.
Wrapped up against the cold, muffled and shrouded in the remnants of several garments, once of varying colour but now from age and dirt a uniform dun, she crouched by the pitiable fire.
“Senya,” he said. She was his slave, but as always he addressed her with gentle courtesy.
“Senya, you did understand me?” Her head, like a tortoise’s, emerged from the carapace of wrappings and turned towards him.
“I am going up now and I shall not be down until tomorrow morning. Don’t call me and don’t cook any supper for me.”
He had told her that twice before and she had merely nodded and grunted. This time she said:
“Master, there is nothing to cook. Nothing. Nothing at all. When what we have is eaten we shall starve.”
“I’ll think about that tomorrow.”
She had been muttering about the nearness of starvation for quite a long time now, sometimes he took no notice, when he did he always soothed her by saying he would think about it presently.
“The pig is hungry, too,” she said in her flat old voice. He was the cleverest man in Korea, maybe the cleverest man in all the world, but
in many ways he could act like an idiot, and he wasacting that way about the pig. It was good housekeeping to have a pig in a pen to eat the household scraps and a panful of meal now and again, and this year, as in former years, she had bought a little pig, the runt of a litter; very cheap it had been because the man who had sold it thought it would be dead -before she got it home. What she had been trying, without success, to make Melchior see for the last fortnight, was that When there was so little for people to eat there were no scraps for pigs, and when there was no money there could be no meal. The pig was loosing flesh; and its hungry squealing, shrill enough to pierce the constant buzzing in her ears, made Senya perpetually aware of its plight. However, Melchior was her master, the pig was his, bought with his money—she looked at the little jar which stood in a niche in the wall, an empty jar now—and she would never dream of doing anything about the pig until Melchior told her to.
“I’ll think about the pig, too; but presently.”
In the bitter depths of her heart she said to herself—Always presently, always tomorrow, shuffling things off; so he has brought ruin to himself and hunger to us both.
But when he had disappeared around the first turn of the spiral staircase and was reasonably certain not to turn back and tell her again what she had fully understood in the first place, she roused herself, took a knife and, with a savage, a self-mutilating cut, halved the bit of stale bread, the bit of hard cheese that lay on the bench. Then, opening the door, she stole out into the bitter wind and went to where at the base of the tower there was a basket, attached to a long rope. She slipped her offering into it, covered it again and went back to the fire.
Only a few minutes earlier, showing him the poor portions of bread and cheese, she had said, “Master, this is all we have!” And he had for a moment brought his mind back from the wide fields of the sky where it ranged, and he had looked closely at the food.
“Enough for today,” he had said, quite contentedly.
“Halve it between us.” It had never occurred to him to say—Halve it fairly because for years it had been understood that whatever there was was to be thus divided. And under his eye, attentive for once, she had made a fair division. Now she had given him half her portion; because he was her master, and because she had loved him slavishly for more than fifty years. He wouldn’t notice; he never noticed anything; at least not anything on that level; that was why they were in this sad state.