"No wonder! We have a safety lamp hereabouts," someone else would remark, unimpressed by his glare.
"You haven't got it, anyway." This retort, which he finally hit upon, gave him some comfort, as though his scars were no longer shiny evidences of a by-gone affliction but something quite extraordinary, something to be envied.
As the idlers still would not let him alone, a fight usually followed. Ah Q inevitably lost and ended up by being held by the queue while his head was thumped noisily against the wall. This was of course only an outward defeat. After his adversary had gone with the laurels of victory. Ah Q would say to himself, "I have been beaten by my son. What a world we live in today!" and he too would go off satisfied and spiritually victorious.
At first he thought thus only to himself; later he got into the habit of saying it aloud. This method of securing spiritual victory became generally known, so that an idler, holding him by his queue, would say to him:
"Now Ah Q, this is not a case of a son beating his father, but a man beating a beast!"
Protecting his hair with his hands, Ah Q would plead:
"You are beating a worm. I am nothing but a worm. How is that? Now let me go!"
Even after this humiliating admission the idler would not let his victim go without first banging his head half a dozen times against something convenient. Surely Ah Q cannot claim a victory this time, the victor would think as he went away in triumph. But in less than ten seconds Ah Q would also go away in triumph, for he felt that surely he was the most self-deprecatory of men, and is not a superlative—the first or the most of anything—a distinction to be achieved and envied? Is not a chuang-yuan only the first in the ranks
