The Pagan Madonna

Humdrum isn't where you live; it's what you are. Perhaps you are one of

those whose lives are bound by neighbourly interests. Imaginatively, you

never seek what lies under a gorgeous sunset; you are never stirred by any

longing to investigate the ends of rainbows. You are more concerned by

what your neighbour does every day than by what he might do if he were

suddenly spun, whirled, jolted out of his poky orbit. The blank door of an

empty house never intrigues you; you enter blind alleys without thrilling

in the least; you hear a cry in the night and impute it to some marauding

tom. Lord, what a life!

And yet every move you make is governed by Chance--the Blind Madonna of

the Pagan, as that great adventurer, Stevenson, called it. You never

stop to consider that it is only by chance that you leave home and arrive

at the office alive--millions and millions of you--poor old

stick-in-the-muds! Because this or that hasn't happened to you, you

can't be made to believe that it might have happened to someone else.

What's a wood fire to you but a shin warmer? And how you hate to walk

alone! So sheer off--this is not for you.

But to you, fenced in by circumstance, walls of breathless brick and

stone, suffocating with longing, you whose thought springs ever toward the

gorgeous sunset and the ends of rainbows; who fly in dreams across the

golden south seas to the far countries, you whose imagination transforms

every ratty old square-rigger that pokes down the bay into a Spanish

galleon--come with me.

For to admire an' for to see,

For to be'old this world so wide.

First off, Ling Foo, of Woosung Road, perhaps the most bewildered Chinaman

in all Shanghai last April. The Blind Madonna flung him into a great game

and immediately cast him out of it, giving him never an inkling of what

the game was about and leaving him buffeted by the four winds of wonder.

A drama--he was sure of that--had rolled up, touched him icily if

slightly, and receded, like a wave on the beach, without his knowing in

the least what had energized it in his direction. During lulls, for years

to come, Ling Foo's consciousness would strive to press behind the wall

for a key to the riddle; for years to come he would be searching the

International Bund, Nanking Road, Broadway and Bubbling Well roads for the

young woman with the wonderful ruddy hair and the man who walked with the

sluing lurch.

Ah, but that man--the face of him, beautiful as that of a foreign boy's,

now young, now old, as though a cobweb shifted to and fro across it! The

fire in those dark eyes and the silk on that tongue! Always that face

would haunt him, because it should not have been a man's but a woman's.

Ling Foo could not go to his gods for comparisons, for a million

variations of Buddha offered no such countenance; so his recollection

would always be tinged with a restless sense of dissatisfaction.