Fighting Angel - Portrait of a Soul

FIGHTING ANGEL PORTRAIT OF A SOUL Pearl S. Buck a JOHN DAY book REYNAL HITCHCOCK NEW YORK By Pearl S. Buc FIGHTING ANGEL THE EXILE A HOUSE DIVIDED THE MOTHER THE FIRST WIFE AND OTHER STORIES SONS THE GOOD EARTH EAST WIND WEST WIND ALL MEN ARE BROTHERS SHUI HU CHUAN TRANSLATED FROM THE CHINESE FIGHTING ANGEL, the biography of the authors father, is a com panion volume to THE EXILE, which is a biography of her mother Together they form a work to he en tttled THE SPIRIT AND THE FLESH COPYRIGHT, 1936, BY PEARL S BUCK ALL RIGHTS RESERVED, including the nght to reproduce tks lw J or portions thereof in any form. Wished by JOHN DAY in association with REYNAL HITCHCOCK PAINTED AND BOUND IN THE UNITED STATES 07 AMERICA BY THE HADDON CRAFTSMEN, INC, CAMDEN, N J, ANGEL one of an order of spiritual beings, attendants and messengers o God, usually spoken of as employed by him m ordering the affairs of the universe, and particularly of mankind. They are commonly regarded as bodiless intelligences. Century Dictionary Who maketh his angels spirits And his ministers a flame of fire The Epistle to the Hebrews. YOU might have seen him walking along the street of any little Chinese village or market town, a tall, slender, slightly stooping American. At one time in his life he wore Chinese clothes. I have a picture of him thus, seated upon a stiff carved Chinese chair, his large American feet planted before him in huge Chinese shoes, those shoes which made the Chinese women laugh behind their hands when they cut the soles, and which made many a passerby stop and stare as he strode by in dust or upon cobblestones. He even smiled himself, a little painfully, when open jokes were shouted as he passed. But theChinese shoes, the long Chinese robe, the little round black Chinese hat with its red button none of these made him in the least Chinese. No one could possibly mistake him. The spare, big-boned frame, the big, thin delicate hands, the nobly shaped head with its large features, the big nose, the jutting lower jaw, the extraordinary, pellucid, child-blue eyes, the reddish fair skin and slightly curly dark hair these were purely and simply American. But he wandered about China for more than half a cen tury. He went there young, and there he died, an old man, his hair snow white, but his eyes still child-blue. In JO those days of his old age I said to him, I wish you would write down what your life has been for us to read. For he had traveled the country north and south, east and west, in city and country. He had had adventures enough to fill books and had been in danger of his life again and again. He had seen the Chinese people as few white men ever have in the most intimate moments of their own lives, in their homes, at marriage feasts, in sickness and in death. He had seen them as a nation in the cycle of their times he had seen the reign of emperors and the fall of empire, revolution and the rise of a republic and revolution again. So he wrote down the story of his life as it seemed to him when he was seventy years old. He spent his spare time throughout a whole summer writing it. I used to hear his old typewriter tapping uncertainly during hot afternoon hours when everybody else was sleeping, or in the early dawn, because, having had as a boy to rise early on a farm in West Virginia, he could never sleep late. It was more than a physical inability it was spir itjjaL Arise, my soul, for it is day The night comcth when no man can work. The night the night He re membered always the shortness of life. As for man, his days are as grass as a flower of the field, so he flourished. For the wind passeth over it, and it is gone and the place thereof shall know it no more. But when it was finished the story of all his years made II only twenty-five pages. Into twenty-five pages he had put all that seemed important to him of his life. I read it through in an hour. It was the story of his soul, his un changing soul...