Chinese -- England -- Fiction; England -- Fiction; Epistolary fiction; Humorous stories
As for myself, revered, it would be immature to hold the gauze screen of
prevarication between your all-discerning mind and my own trepidation.
From the moment when I first saw the expression of utterly depraved
malignity and deep-seared hate which he had cunningly engraved upon his
face by means of the coloured inks, I was far from being comfortably
settled within myself. Even the society of the not inelegant being of
the inner chamber, whom it was now my part to console with alluring
words and movements, could not for some time retain my face from a
back-way instinct at every sound; but when the detail was reached that
she sank into my grasp bereft of all energy, and for the first time I
was just succeeding in forgetting the unpropitious surroundings, the
one Fang, who had entered with unseemly stealth, suddenly hurled his
soul-freezing battle-cry upon my ear and leapt forward with uplifted
knife. Perceiving the action from an angle of my eye even as he
propelled himself through the air, I could not restrain an ignoble wail
of despair, and not scrupling to forsake the maiden, I would have taken
refuge beneath a couch had he not seized my outer robe and hurled me
to the ground. From this point to the close of the entertainment
the vigorous person in question did not cease from raising cries and
challenges in an unfaltering and many-fathomed stream, while at the same
time he continued to spring from one extremity of the stage to the other
surrounded by every external attribute of an insatiable tiger-like rage.
It is circumstantially related that the one near at hand, who has been
referred to as possessing a voiced machine, became demented, and bearing
the contrivance to a certain tent erected by the charitable, entreated
them to remove the impediment from its speech so that it might be heard
again and his livelihood restored. When the action of brandishing
a profusion of knives before the lesser one’s eyes was reached, so
nerve-shattering was the impression which Fang created that the back of
the tent had to be removed in order to let out those who no longer had
possession of themselves, and to let in those--to a ten-fold
degree--who strove for admission on the rumour spreading that something
exceptionally repellent was progressing within.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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