Ma Wei Slope

PART ONE

When Han Im came to her under the plane-tree, Winter Cherry sat on the soft turf grieving. Now, at the hour of the cock, under the fingers of a lengthening shadow, idly playing with the edge of her goosefeather fan, she wondered why, against the shadowed walls of the courtyard, she could conjure up no clearly-remembered face of her parents.

“The guard has been changed,” Han Im told her in his high, fluting voice. “A new number of bowmen, fresh spearmen, pretend to protect us.”

In the growing shade of the plane-tree it seemed to him that the strawberry colour of her garments merged into the old-gold of their trimming ribbon, and from the high windows of the Pepper Rooms one could hear the chatter of other girls, busied with their infinite futilities of adornment and gossip. He imagined their heads as empty drums of treble pitch, their eyes as little vacant windows to empty rooms. . . .

She sang softly; her thin face lifted:

Then she stopped singing and looked at Han Im. He knew that she was feeling vaguely, as she admitted she always felt when she looked upon him, that his face and her father’s had been cast in the same mould. The sober browns and greens of his silk skirt seemed almost grey in the shade of the plane-tree.

“You are always alone,” he said as he stood looking down at her. She had dutifully risen to her feet, and his body cast a sound-shadow over her, so that the voices of the others in the Pepper Rooms seemed suddenly an octave higher, like the sound of the big bats which would soon come out.

She replied: “You should know why I am always alone. You, too, value at their true worth the moments which succeed each other, the people who speak, the favours which come unasked. Have you, oh Han Im, altered your mind from what it last was? Under this very plane-tree you told me that you valued these things as a man values a grain of rice.”

He said: “Sit down again. You have guessed rightly, for the Emperor desires your presence. Nevertheless, in answer to your last question, I have not changed my mind.” He moved past her and rested his hand upon the bark of the tree.

“When?” she asked as she sat down. “It is early for such an invitation.”

He laughed. The girls in the Pepper Rooms had begun to make the noises which denote a game or a quarrel.

“The dew descends upon the grass,” he replied, “and serves as clock to the glowworm. If you, who care no grain of rice for an invitation which others in the aviary yonder, would barter against their eyebrows, cannot so arrange the hour of your arrival as to space it between awkwardness and awkwardness, you are not whom I think.” He took his hand from the tree as if to move away again. “I have duties,” he reminded her, as if explanation were needed.

“I will use the glowworm’s discretion,” she answered. Then, as she stood up for his going, she said to his back: “Your speech grows every day more like my father’s speech.”

He did not turn round, but said over his shoulder: “They are by the Hwa Ching Pool.”

She uselessly set a hair in place, powdered her knees and followed.

In the Imperial Park it seemed that bright butterflies hovered round the Flower-clear Pool. The colours of the flowers which were everywhere seemed dulled in comparison with the colour of men’s garments. The glow of peonies yielded to scarlet silk. And all this slowly turning, vibrating mass of colour centred round one man: all thoughts hinged on his thoughts, all actions hung on his actions. Every will was the Emperor’s.

Yet, as she watched, she saw that there were two clusters, and (of the two) that round the Emperor showed less motion, less quickening of the living colour of Rainbow Skirt and Feather Jacket, than the group gathered, in the shelter of a hedge, round the prostrate figure of a man. The eunuch Han Im was there, directing others who, with advice and water equally, tried to bring consciousness to one quite willing to dispense with consciousness. It was under the influence of the water that he ultimately opened one eye, waved an uncertain hand and asked for solitude.

“Where am I?” he asked, when they had not gone.

One told him: “You are near the Hwa Ching Pool, and over there, in the Aloe Pavilion, sits the Emperor.” Han Im added: “The Emperor has sent for you. He desires a poem.”

Li Po closed his eyes again and lay down, a lean brown shadow under the bamboos. “Wine brings dreams of poems,” he said. “It scares the words like birds from grain. Bring wine.”

They fetched more water.

Winter Cherry came to them just as Li Po sat up again. She went down on her knees and dried his face with her sleeve. He opened his eyes wearily.

“Commands and kindness consort ill,” he said. “This is no Emperor. Who are you, girl who are wiping my face?”

She told him. “I am called Winter Cherry, and you must come and write verses for the Emperor for, if you do not, his wrath will fall on all of us.” She helped him to rise. One saw that dissipation had not wholly sapped his strength; though his legs were the narrow legs of one accustomed to riding horses.

One of the courtiers said in a reproving voice: “The philosopher Mencius told us that men’s hands and women’s hands should not meet.”

Han Im brusquely replied: “Mencius also said that a general rule was to be broken in emergencies. Li Po, here, is an emergency.” He took the poet’s arm. Winter Cherry followed them both.

“I am coming,” Li Po cried. “It is a duty which I owe to one who wiped my wet face with her sleeve.” And suddenly he seemed not to be drunk at all, for he shook off Han Im’s supporting hand and walked steadily towards the Emperor. The attendants made way for him.

In the Aloe Pavilion the Emperor sat on a throne of ivory and red damask. Near him, a picture with yellow-tiled eaves and red upright pillars for frame, Yang Kuei-fei leaned on the rail. So she had leaned when Hsuang Tsung had first loved her. She had been brought up by her attendants out of the warm water of the pool, and love had come with her. Everybody knew this. Now she stood, in a long robe of deep blue, her hair high above her high forehead, her dark eyes empty, waiting for a word.

Yang Kuei-fei yawned behind her fan.

Li Po approached and bowed with difficulty in the Emperor’s direction. “Your Majesty desires a poem,” he said. “Your Majesty shall have a poem. But, at the risk of your displeasure and your favourite’s surprise, I must attribute the authorship of this poem to Winter Cherry, here.”

The Emperor demanded: “She wrote a poem?”

Li Po replied: “She inspired it. And to inspire a poem, in this world of imperfect people, is rarer than to write one.”

“The girl has begun to interest me,” the Emperor said. “Proceed.”

Li Po turned. Winter Cherry held a skin fan which she had taken from an attendant, an ink block and a brush. She mixed the ink and gave the brush to Li Po.

He wrote on the skin of the fan, intoning as he wrote:—

He handed back the writing materials, bowed low to the Emperor as he gave him the fan, and retired with too obvious dignity into a distant part of the park, where his green-and-white tiled pavilion could be seen between the trees. They all watched him go.

“He should have written that poem to me,” Yang Kuei-fei said.

The Emperor muttered regretfully: “If he were not so exquisite a poet!”

But Winter Cherry did not seem to hear at all, for her heart went with Li Po, who had been kind to her.

It was much later, in the dark.

Han Im said: “You know that this is the custom, as surely as I know it to be the custom. Why, therefore, repine? It cannot, surely, be true that you do not desire the honour which the Son of Heaven is about to confer on you?” He held out the swansdown rug, helplessly.

Winter Cherry cried: “I do not want to go to him. Why should I want to go to him? What is there different . . . .” Then she laughed through her tears. “You look foolish, holding the rug like that—much more foolish than I look. Why should I be carried to the Emperor in no more garments than a swansdown rug?”

Han Im answered: “Long ago, in the past, when it was feared that girls going to the Emperor might do him an injury, the custom grew up: with no more weapons than nature’s nails, he is safe. Come: there is no use in crying, and the hour grows late.”

“If you were not my friend,” Winter Cherry said, “I would say that you are talking like an old woman.”

Han Im said: “I am not very different from an old woman. If I were different, I should not be serving the Son of Heaven by doing what I am doing. And yet, would you not rather have me thus occupied, who remind you somewhat of your father, instead of Yen, who is fat and unsympathetic, or Ho, who is short and sharp and has hard hands, or Wen, whose tongue is like a file?”

He picked her up from her discarded clothes, wrapped her in the rug and bore her along the passage, through a curtained door and into a silent room where the Emperor sat, moodily playing with a jade fingering-piece. When the curtain fell behind her, Winter Cherry knew that she had come into a moment of time when men and events were larger than usual, when all the myriad small things of ordinary living gave place to concentrated reality, when she, a small thing without much of a history, crossed the path of something so much greater than herself that the future would chronicle the Emperor, would paint (on paper) facets of this man whom now she saw, almost motionless, thinking thoughts which she had not ever learned to think, a man whose word sent men on great errands or little, whose wish was death or life, whose glance saw more than another’s stare. He looked tired as he sat there playing with the jade fingering-piece, his long fingers caressing its surface as (she supposed) they would soon caress her. . . . Han Im took the rug from her, and laid it over the back of a couch. The Emperor did not show any sign of having seen her.

Han Im said: “This is the girl who inspired Li Po this afternoon.” Then he withdrew.

The Emperor said: “But I had summoned you for tonight before my favourite poet chose to immortalise you in a dedication.” He turned and looked at her. “Stop shivering girl, and put that quilt round you. Do you realise that even I, the Emperor, am powerless to alter these ancient customs? Do you imagine that, if I had my way, I should be denied the pleasure of stripping petals myself? Go to the next room, where you will find clothes. Put them on and return.”

Winter Cherry, who had heard and disbelieved many tales of the Emperor’s eccentricity, obeyed. When she came back, he was watching her. She saw amusement in his face, and blushed.

He laughed at her: “You have put on the clothes which Kuei-fei ordered to be made for my visit, ten years ago, to the village of Pa, to consult a magician who lived there.” He made a gesture which itself, magically, took her to the crest of a hill overlooking the Yangtsze Gorge, spreading before her the limitless ranges of the land and the arrow of the river. “To see a magician, and now to see you!”

“I have not seen so many places as your Majesty,” she replied, and added, “or so many summers.”

He frowned. “The dignity of time has not yet bestowed on me the disabilities of time,” he said. “Is that what you meant?”

“I mean nothing,” she answered, fencing with the question, and starting to believe some of the tales of Imperial fancy. “But it is true,” her honesty added.

“Listen,” said the Emperor. “Since I took my place as the centre and hub of the world, I have been pursued by the inaccessible meanings of others. They hide their thoughts from me, who can tear from them every other concealment. But they are too stupid even to know what they mean. Again, I am hedged round by the customs and habits of the past. You are carried in to me naked in swansdown because the safety of some ancient emperor was imperilled. We are, today, surrounded by peonies in ugly pots because once, in remote history, an emperor decreed a feast of peonies on this day for the delight of himself and his mouldering favourite. The fact that you are here at all may be laid at the door of past emperors, and even I cannot break the custom.”

Winter Cherry tried not to show that she had not expected a speech.

“Yes,” she said.

“Yes, yes, yes!” he cried. “Always yes! Even Kuei-fei sometimes says ‘yes’ from habit. Sit down, girl. I will stand up: I speak better on my feet.”

Winter Cherry replied: “I will listen carefully.”

“There is no need for that,” the Emperor said. “I will make the words as beautiful as I can. Do you write verse?” He got to his feet.

Her mind went back to all the men who had stood thus, talking to her unheeded. She remembered the men: she forgot what they had said. Men always talked thus, walking up and down, gesticulating, stringing words on words like bubbles in a stream, to break at last in a smooth pool of silence. And yet, these words were different. They were old, chosen words, whose meaning eluded immediate comprehension—not the ordinary conversation of a man who wants something of a girl, but the words of a man who does not care if he gains assent or no, since he feels his utterance too true to need even belief. Her listening broke into the middle of a sentence.

“. . . and even Kuei-fei, who founded her private team of actors—the Pear Tree Players—has not been able to make them leave the beaten track except by her own direction. It is tiring for ever to have to direct others, is it not?”

She said dutifully: “Yes. I do not know.”

He stopped in his pacing. “You do not know. No man knows. And yet you have one virtue, at least—the virtue of not having heard me talk lengthily on my favourite topic. Kuei-fei has heard it all.”

“She is wonderful,” Winter Cherry said, meaning this.

The Emperor countered: “And now it is my turn to say ‘yes’, I suppose. And you do not wonder why she is not here?”

“No. You are master. Even Kuei-fei has to do what you command,” she said.

He smiled, and the smile made turn seem young.

“She is very accomplished,” he agreed. “Whereas you—you have virtues and no accomplishments.”

Winter Cherry murmured, doing justice to herself: “I can play my own flute.”

The Emperor touched a gong, and Han Im appeared.

“As you will have heard,” the Emperor said, “we need flutes. Bring a basket full. One may resemble this flute of hers, which she says she can play.”

Han Im bowed and withdrew. Winter Cherry thought that he must have been standing only just behind the curtained door. The room was bright with the top-heavy blooms of the peonies.

“They are beautiful,” she said. “But they would be more beautiful if they had not been brought in from their gardens.”

The Emperor looked up. His eyes were dark over darker half-circles, and she was instantly afraid.

He said: “The girls whom I summon here are usually too happy to criticise. You speak as though you thought. Do not think too deeply.”

She had the courage to smile. “I have nothing to lose. Fear comes only from possession—courage from poverty.”

“Who are you to speak of poverty?” he demanded, almost angrily. “Are you not clothed in silks, and fed on rich foods, sauced with the odours of a thousand rare and costly scents. . . .”

She replied: “These things are given me by others—by you. I do not own them, and so I do not fear their loss. I have only life to lose.”

He cried: “Life may be lost in more ways than one. The life even of such as you may ebb slowly, painfully. . . .”

She bowed her head. “It is as you say. But, still, I should die at last. I think I could make myself die quickly.”

He laughed. “This is indeed an unsuitable subject for our conversation,” he said. “I have not yet seen enough Springs for me to be unmoved at the thought of your dying, in various unpleasant ways, before your eighteenth year. And you yourself, I think, are not wholly uninterested in the remainder of the years which shall be yours.”

He ceased speaking, and sat down on a couch which creaked suddenly in the silence. Far away in the night, laughter and a lute blended.

“How absurd—how unlikely it is for me to be thus urging you to live!” the Emperor went on again. “Have I not tens—nay, hundreds of lives at my behest? Why should I trouble over yours? But you have only yourself to thank, since you began thus. Come, there are better occupations than bandying words on a summer’s evening while we wait for flutes. I could send for Li Po, who can throw off rhymes like water from a swimmer’s hair. If Kuei-fei were here, I should not lack entertainment.”

She said: “Li Po is a famous poet, and Li Po has no fear of you because no other than he can carve such poems. The Lady Yang, your favourite, has nothing to fear while she is your favourite. But I . . . I can only play my flute, and there are many flute-players.”

“Li Po does not need a flute,” he answered, as Han Im returned with a basket. “He can delight with no other instrument than his tongue.”

As she took out flutes from the basket and felt their fingering, she replied: “Li Po is a man. Besides, even he wrote about flutes, instead of playing them. Do you remember?”

“Tell me,” he commanded.

While she searched, she recited:

The Emperor was silent, sitting now with his eyelids closed. He seemed tired. Winter Cherry tried several of the flutes and, finding one whose fingering was like that of her own, began to play an old song, reciting the lines after the music.

When she had done, the Emperor asked (since any cultured man is bound to pay at least that tribute to Art): “Who was the author, and what the subject?”

Winter Cherry replied: “It was written by Mang I-hiu, at the time of the Warring States, and it is a lonely wife’s lament for her husband, who has gone to fight the Huns on the frontier.”

He observed: “The Huns come from the North, and I observe that her heart fled in the other direction.”

Winter Cherry smiled quietly: “Her heart went South for the sake of the rhyme, I suppose. Any poet would act thus, for the beauty of the poem is far more important than the correct points of the compass. Shall I sing you another?”

“No,” said the Emperor. “Come here.”

“You think of me as if I were an old man,” the Emperor said. “Do not be misled by years: do not let these creases in my skin, creases which do not magically disappear in the clear, smooth surface of youth when I unbend them, delude you into believing me incapable of arousing in you those feelings which now, apparently, you fear to have roused.”

Winter Cherry replied: “I am afraid. Outside, in the world, these feelings arise without deliberation: they sweep a girl with them, and she has not to think too much of the mere mechanism of their arousal. With you, there is something of the inevitability of fate. I know that I shall do and be what you expect me to do and be. There will be no chance to run away and hide, laughing, in a garden, until the awkward memory passes. Like men making a road, you will pass inexorably to your intended purpose. . . .”

He said: “You use long words. I am not accustomed to having my motives and technique analysed by a girl. Not that I would have you think that many of my girls are given the chance thus to talk to and of me: I am accustomed to send them away as soon as possible and return to the remembered, familiar ground of my favourite, the Mistress Yang Kuei-fei. But she is indisposed, and thus I am inclined to listen to your prattle.”

Winter Cherry softly sang the siu sing:

He laughed: “That was written in the time of King Wan, which is a very long time ago. But it is interesting to see that the Emperor, then, did not have the girls in singly. The modern habit seems to me to be wiser, for who would have all the courses of a dinner set before him at once?”

Winter Cherry cried indignantly: “It is wrong to speak of me as if I were a piece of food!”

The Emperor replied: “What can the word ‘wrong’ mean to me? But you are right: you are not in the least like a piece of food. Rather you resemble a cool drink, which a man can feel descending his throat. Or, better still, something which combines food and drink—say a melon. You are very like a melon, when I look at you. Several melons.”

“My name is Winter Cherry,” she reminded him, though her teeth were chattering a little, and for one unbearable moment he seemed to her to epitomise all ancient, leering privilege, with his lined face desiring her, and his long, thin fingers with the thumbnails encased in gold sheaths. Then it seemed to her as if in her inmost soul the string of a lute had snapped, and she began to cry.

Han Im, yawning behind the curtain, became aware that the sound from the room beyond was undoubtedly the breathing of a man asleep. He reflected for a while on the strange fact that the immobility of sleep, which should protect from notice and so from attack, is outweighed by a rhythmic snore. He wondered if animals snored as often, or as obviously, as men. Then he heard the rustle of Lady Yang’s borrowed silks, and saw a faint swaying of the curtain as Winter Cherry opened the lattice and stepped out. He went along a passage, wakened the other eunuch, Yen, and went out across the Park.

Winter Cherry’s figure was hard to see, at first. Then, as his eyes became accustomed to the dark (for it was the hour of the Ox) he noticed a movement against the painted trees, and saw that she was making for the Porcelain Pavilion, where Li Po sought relief from official poetry in outbursts of reality.

There were lights in the Pavilion, but no voices, and as Han Im came up and crossed Flying Tiger Bridge, Winter Cherry slipped through the open door and so came to the room where Li Po was sleeping. No sound disturbed the silence of this room, where one lamp burned at the foot of a couch. The poet slept on his left side, with his face to the wall.

She hesitated, then looked round her, at the sleeping poet, at the wine jar, at the camphor-wood box in which, everybody said, Li Po kept the poems which he wrote. Then she turned, as if to go out, and Han Im realised that by being asleep, Li Po had spared himself a man’s duty of comforting a woman. And this seemed to Han Im an unwarranted escape. So he coughed.

The girl stopped in her tracks at the sound and turned. Li Po groaned and sat up. They looked at each other.

Li Po said: “It was not you who coughed.”

Han Im stepped into the room and bowed politely. “The cough was mine,” he said. “If one so unimportant as myself may be admitted to have influenced the course of history, it was I who coughed. The girl here, Winter Cherry, was about to leave, seeing you (as she thought) sleeping, and I knew that discourtesy would be the last thing which you would desire.”

Li Po observed: “I was not asleep. I heard her enter.”

Winter Cherry cried: “Things happen which are not of my doing. I meant to go, taking my sorrow with me. Now I seem as foolish as I am, for I did not know that Han Im, here, was following me, nor that you, sir, were awake. Thus I am made to appear stupid, which I did not wish to be.” She turned away again towards the door.

The poet clapped his hands. Nothing happened.

“My servants are asleep,” he cried. “But since they have no such cause as I for sleep, they must be awakened. And yet—movement seems to cut my head into two parts, slowly and painfully. I wonder if the Emperor would value, as an addition to the official list of tortures, that of enforced movement after a surfeit of wine. I must ask him.” He rose to his feet and went out.

Han Im said: “It is my duty not to leave you.”

She replied: “If one cannot be alone, it matters little who may be the company.” Then she smiled: “I am sorry. That was not what I would have said.”

Li Po came in again. He bore a jug of water, and his face was wet. “The worst moments have passed,” he said. “Now, hunger is a powerful irritant of sorrow, and (since my servants are unutterably lazy) I know that in my eating-room, through that door, will be the not unsubstantial remains of tonight’s feast. ‘Last night’s orgy’, would probably be more accurate. Come, girl, and you, Han Im.”

“I am not hungry,” Winter Cherry said, following the men.

Li Po said over his shoulder: “Repeat that, if you can, when a few sauces have urged your stomach.”

The room into which they came bore, indeed, every sign of having witnessed a party of several people. On the round, central table not even had the bowls been piled. Dried melon-seeds in little saucers showed by their disarray that the meal had, in the usual way, been finished with conversation. On the long table at the side of the room uneaten food remained. The chicken soup had globules of congealed grease on its surface: the noodles recalled the tired roots of convolvulus: a solitary piece of fried duckskin still looked almost appetising.

“You may eat, or cook and eat,” Li Po said. “Here is a small stove for the table, sent to me by the Governor of Kwei Sek, charcoal, tinder and flint. Cooking vessels in the kitchen, I think.”

Winter Cherry said: “Your servants are very remiss. But this is to our advantage.” Then she busied herself with forgotten arts.

Han Im took the poet out on to the verandah and they went to stand on Flying Tiger Bridge.

“Life,” Han Im observed, moving his head in the direction of the sounds of Winter Cherry’s activities.

“Or death,” Li Po replied. “We all wait for death, even if we do not know that we are waiting. All this is temporary stuff. Only Chung-nan mountain, fifteen miles over there, where you cannot see it, is eternal. We three shall moulder; the palace, the capital, Chang-an itself, shall pass. Only the eternal mountain shall watch our passing, and the passing of our thoughts. Or is that but a poet’s fancy?”

“The girl has not wept yet,” Han Im said. “It would be good for her to weep. The Emperor’s pleasantries are best thus washed out.”

Li Po struck the porcelain balustrade of the bridge with the palm of his hand. “You and I,” he said, “know these truths. She will learn these truths. Han Im, I am weary of this life for a little. So are you. So must she be.”

Han Im agreed. “Yes.”

A little later Winter Cherry called them. She had warmed what food was warmable, had boiled fresh rice and put clean bowls and chopsticks.

“You were right about hunger,” she said to Li Po.

Han Im put a saucer of melon-seeds handy, and sat down with the poet. The two men split melon-seeds delicately between front teeth, watching the girl eat.

Li Po said: “Whatever I said about hunger—and I have forgotten what I said—the truth is this: food in freedom tastes like imagined food on the terraces of the gods in the illimitable red clouds of sunset, whereas food eaten under constraint, however well it be cooked, turns in the mouth to strings and balls of undigested matter. It is, I suppose, something to do with the saliva. Wang Wei would know, for he is a physician. But he is not here. What do you say, Han Im?”

The eunuch observed: “There are freedom and freedom. And some of us can never be wholly free. To Winter Cherry, who has before her all forms of freedom, the constraint of the Emperor’s palace doubtless clouds all her mind. To you, who have the freedom of words and who add to that the freedom of wine, the freedom to be self-supporting looms small. To me, who lack the most conspicuous of man’s freedom, all food tastes the same.”

“This duckskin,” Winter Cherry-said, thoughtfully, “is better than many words. All that you say is true and doubtless it is satisfying for a man thus to have all truths set in the black and white of words, yet for me there are unshed tears between my eyes and my food.”

Li Po said: “Let us leave her.”

Outside again, on the bridge, Han Im observed: “The Master told us that bad government is worse than a tiger. I look round and see the Empire failing. The Huns are inadequately held in the Northern frontiers: official business is neglected for the curve of a fair girl’s eyebrow, An Lu-shan has gathered his men and rebellion stands just the other side of T’ung Kuan Pass. Nightly, they say, the Emperor watches from his Calyx Tower for the chain of living lights which beacon to him over the miles the safety of that Pass. I have often thought with pleasure of death, and refrained only for her sake.” He nodded towards the Pavilion. “I feel in a way responsible for her, since she says that she finds my features and my habits like those of her father. A paradox, that! Oh to go away, where man finds herbs for food, when the rain of evening and the sun of midday encourage the fruits of nature, where there is no temporising with an Emperor or a conscience! On the slopes of Chung-nan . . .” He hummed an old song under his breath, then went on: “We could take the girl.”

Li Po picked up a yellow pebble from the path and dropped it into the water. “The eddies report, long after, that the pebble was dropped,” he said. “Yes, let us drop a pebble. Do they know that she is here? Or you?”

“No one knows as yet, but time is short,” Han Im replied. “Tomorrow, or full sun, will be too late. Have you a carriage and a reliable driver? She can cut her hair and dress as a boy dresses. And I have no money with me.”

“Let us be practical for once,” Li Po agreed. “You cut her hair and burn the pieces you have cut. I will first bring clothes for her and then will waken my driver.” Then he made the gesture of one who has just remembered something. “Of course! My nephew will do. I forgot that he was on a visit here. I had been keeping him out of the way of the Lady Yang. He drives a carriage and he has spare clothes for the girl. What could be better?”

Han Im agreed, and they went into the Pavilion, towards the sounds of two voices.

“My family name is Kuen, and my given names Ah Lai,” one voice was saying. “I am a man of Lung Pui, and am on a visit to my uncle here, the honourable poet Li Po. My age is nineteen years. My mother was his sister.”

Winter Cherry replied: “It would be of no avail for me to tell you my family name. My given names are Winter Cherry. I have seen not more than eighteen years. I am a girl in the palace of the Emperor, Hsuan Tsung, so you may as well put me out of your head.”

Ah Lai answered: “To ask me to put you out of my head is to ask an impossibility. Who are Emperors, that they should have you? No. I have tried in the past, like my uncle, to write poetry; I have learned the Four Books from end to end and read the other classics, but now I find myself tongue-tied, like a fish in a golden bowl that has not learned to speak, now that I have seen you. My lips seem gummed with gum from the southern provinces, my tongue adheres to the roof of my mouth, my eyes dumbly behold what my hands are too paralysed to grasp, and you ask me to put you out of my head!”

“It is not very good gum,” Winter Cherry laughed. Then the two men coughed and entered.

Li Po said: “If you wish to serve this lady, my nephew, serve her now, as we tell you. Fetch a set of your clothes and put them at her disposal. Aid her to cut off her hair and destroy the cuttings. Then get the carriage ready, for we four shall go to Chung-nan Mountain, fleeing from the haunts of men, and speed is our greatest need if we are to avoid being followed.”

Ah Lai replied: “I do not ask why you tell me this. Does a man ask of a peach-tree why its fruit are golden suns of delight? No, But if you wish to avoid following, we must walk. Carriages make a rumbling, and carriages leave wheel-tracks and much gossip amongst those who see them. But if four men walk on a road, it is afterwards as if they had not passed. Take thick shoes, for the mountain is, I believe, a full fifteen miles, and that only a fair road.”

Winter Cherry observed: “I cannot avoid seeing that you are thinking of doing all this for me, who am a very ordinary person, and quite unworthy of all this planning.”

“To say what is expected of you,” Li Po told her, “is only one side of your character. If the judgment of my friend Han Im here is sound, there is more than mere convention behind your eyes. Come—action. They say that poets cannot act. Observe, then! Han Im, you and I will collect a few necessaries. Ah Lai, while we have gone, will do for the girl what must needs be done for the girl. Come.”

They went out. Ah Lai went out by a different door and returned quickly with clothes and scissors. As he made to leave, Winter Cherry stopped him.

“You need not be so careful for my blushes,” she said. “I am a girl of the Emperor’s . . .”

“Were,” Ah Lai corrected her.

“Was,” she admitted. “I am not like girls who turn the colour of peonies when a man sees them. First cut my hair like a boy’s. We shall not burn the hair, as they suggested, for that would be unlucky. I shall take it with me and bury it beside the road. Cut quickly. Here.”

Ah Lai, between delight and diffidence, bungled his way through his unaccustomed task.

Outside the room, the poet Li Po and the eunuch Han Im looked at each other enquiringly and then, together, broke into laughter.

“We risk our necks, our comfort and our own respect,” Li Po said, “for the sake of a girl.”

“You have more to risk than I,” Han Im replied with the mock-bitterness which he felt that he should like to adopt. “But, seriously, even if matters had not thus come to a feminine head, I was beginning to find things intolerable. You remember that the Master said that if you could not alter a bad government, the only solution was to go away. And you know, as well as I, that here we have infatuation with a lady upsetting all the routine of rule, that the ever-present threat from the Northern borders needs but a signal to move South, and that An Lu-shan, son of a beaten Hun, whom the Emperor favoured and the Lady Yang adopted, requites their kindness by projected rebellion. If we stay, we risk death: if we go, we risk death. Let us go.”

“Yes,” agreed the poet, “that is almost exactly what you said a minute or two past. It gains, of course, by repetition. So let us collect such things as are essential. The boy is right about walking, instead of riding.”

“Your poems, in the chest?” Yan Im asked.

“Hsuan Tsung favours literature,” Li Po replied. “They will be safe with him, however his rage may bubble. I must find you a few ounces of silver.”

They put a few things into a black, shiny case.

“I have nothing else,” Li Po said.

In the room where Ah Lai was helping Winter Cherry to button clothes on the wrong side, she was saying much the same.

“I have nothing to take with me save this flute, and that is not mine. You—you have all the reputation of your honoured family, a reputation which your uncle has built higher. You have scholarship and the hope of more scholarship. One day you will have many sons to whom, in quiet confidence, you may leave the tending of your tombs. It is wrong that you should endanger all this for me, who am so small a thing in the eyes of the world.”

“The button-hole is a finger’s width lower,” he replied. “Here—let me do it. And so you think that I, who have only now balanced the world’s judgment against my own, shall be diverted from my intention? And this button here. So. One day I shall reverse the process.” Then, as tears gathered: “Be still! How can I button you if you shiver?”

Shortly the other two came into the room. Winter Cherry picked up her flute and Ah Lai thrust some things in a bundle.

“Paper—for writing,” he said as he tied it up. “There will be leisure.”

Then the four went out under the dim light of an impending dawn, through a private gate in the Imperial Gardens and so south, Li Po dropped the key of the gate into a stream as they passed.

“I would not wish others to use that gate,” he said.

As they rounded the walls and skirted the city, it was possible to see, ahead of them, the great mass of Chung-nan amidst its fellow hills.

“I have written,” said Li Po, as they plodded along the unending road, “much about travel. I have written of journeys and of meetings, I have praised the workman about his task and the scholar about his administration, I have sung of the delicate feet of girls (often, I confess, for the sake of an elusive rhyme) and only now do I begin to realise what this common means of human progression really implies in effort and discomfort. Such arches as my feet once had seem now to have collapsed like a broken buttress in dust and chaos, the muscles behind my knees ache like the jaw of a taciturn man who has been compelled to narrate to the magistrate the tales of his wife’s short-comings, and now it would appear that I have a stone in my shoe.”

Han Im said: “To laugh at oneself is to admit to cosmic insignificance. It is therefore that I venture to be reminded of certain beasts of burden which may be seen bearing their loads of merchandise into the cities of the North. They sway, these camels, like ships with ballast ill-secured, their pace seems at once slow and hurried, ungainly and yet untiring, and there is but one characteristic which (it seems to me) I fail ignominiously to share with them, since the gods have provided them with a store against thirst which I most conspicuously lack.”

When it was apparent that the two elder men had nothing more immediately to say, Winter Cherry observed: “I used to walk much when I was a child or, playing, run without thought for distances greater than I now walk in discomfort. But, since I became . . .” she hesitated, and then went on—“since I was brought to Chang-an I have ridden and been carried until my feet seem to have lost both their muscles and their hardness of sole. Nevertheless, I am not unhappy now, for it seems that with every step that I urge myself, something returns of me that has been missing for a while.”

Ah Lai had eyes for no one but the girl, and had been unusually silent hitherto. Yet he could not resist saying: “That is why I advised you to wear thick soles.”

“There is a glade with water here,” Li Po observed, halting at a slight turn of the road. “The girl has cakes which we can eat.” His voice had the high chanting note of poetry.

Han Im added a third line: “The water, like our need, is clear.”

They looked at each other then, laughing, Ah Lai tried: “To urge our jaws will ease our feet.”

Li Po said: “Clumsy. Let the girl say.”

Winter Cherry volunteered, after a moment: “A welt-fed army scorns retreat.”

Han Im said: “It does not sound good enough. It lacks the master’s touch. For myself, I think the rhyme should be ‘meet’.”

Then they all looked at Li Po. He smiled, picked up the black case which Han Im had set down at their halting, and walked down in the direction which he had indicated, saying as he went: “Your third line, Han Im, has the form of a fourth line, and therefore to add a fourth to it is impossible. But your choice for the last rhyme is good. Suppose we say ‘Desire and appetite shall meet’, and then look for a third line. Perhaps it might be ‘If life and living be austere’, or ‘If pedantry can disappear’. The first means little, the second less. I will think about it. Here is the place—the spring, fresh grass, a fallen tree for a seat and the birds overhead. What more could be necessary?” He took the cake which Winter Cherry held out to him. “Would you care, Han Im, to analyse that unfinished verse?”

Han Im replied: “It may be all summed up in a word. Thus:

They applauded. Winter Cherry said: “You are not as hungry as that, I hope?”

Ah Lai mumbled with his mouth full: “It is I who shall have the eating of that particular cake.”

Winter Cherry, drinking from her hands at the spring, observed: “I have learned not to blush.” She went to bury her hair at the foot of a bank.

Then they all returned to the road and walked on, between the high trees, southwards. They went on their way up the now slowly-sloping path, between fir and forest trees increasingly unlike those of the plain which they were leaving, trees which forsook the seeming neatness of city gardens for the purposive aspiring of untrammelled growth; ahead of them the great coloured mass of the mountain hung imperially in the southern sky, a beacon, a goal, and an unattained desire. On the lower shoulder of the mountain a cluster of rough roofs, tile and straw impartially, showed where the road ran.

“That is the place,” Li Po told them.

“It may seem strange to you two younger ones,” Han Im said, “to find thus, on the shoulder of a mountain, an almost village devoted largely to the delight, entertainment and relaxation of poets. I have found in the past that poets are apt to take for granted the comforts and facilities which earlier rulers have provided for them. The place before us, for example, was built and furnished by the Empress Wu-chao, who seized the throne nine years before Li Po was born. During her reign and that of the two Emperors who preceded our present monarch, the collection of houses which you now see coming towards you out of their green foliage was built and enlarged as a place where the poets of the capital, exhausted by dissipation or even by making poems to order, could come for resting. The larger building is called ‘The Poet’s House’, and below it you can see the palm thatched farm house whose produce and (I add) cooks make life here a dream of laziness. Here Meng Hao-jen used to come, and of it he wrote his famous ‘On Returning to Chung-nan Hill’. You remember it, Li Po?”

“Why ask me to remember other men’s poems?” Li Po complained.

Winter Cherry said: “You tell us, Han Im.”

Han Im recited:—

“That is a very sad poem,” Ah Lai said. “Did he die here?”

Han Im answered: “I do not know. But the Emperor denied that Meng had been sent away, Li Po, did you not contribute to that?”

“Yes,” Li Po said. “I did, A most inadequate thing called ‘A Message to Meng Hao-jen’. Not only do I forget it, but I should be unwilling to tell it to you, even if I did remember. But it appears to me that we shall not find this place empty, as we had expected, for I see more than signs of life. And, unless my eyes are very faulty, that is Wang Wei himself, making preparations to welcome us.”

“But he is nearly as famous as yourself,” Ah Lai said.

“What is fame?” Li Po asked. “Of Wang Wei I can only tell you that he is first and foremost a fisherman, then that his powers as a doctor are in demand whenever he can be persuaded to exercise them, that he is a devotee of Buddha, and that his poetry is indescribable. He will tell you some, if you pretend that you have allowed it to escape your memory. But now, as we are near them, we must go in order.”

So they formed a procession, and at the gate which led in to the tended stone-pathed garden of the house Wang Wei stood to receive them, hands in his wide sleeves. On the left of but slightly behind Wang Wei another figure bowed—a man of perhaps thirty, slight and (so Winter Cherry felt) a little sinister.

“Greetings indeed!” Wang Wei cried when they had reached the prescribed distance. “I had not dreamed of your coming to visit us. This is Liu Shen-hsu, who also spoils paper with verse. You have not yet eaten your morning rice?”

“Your surprise at seeing us is nothing to our delight in seeing you,” Li Po replied. “We came here on the strength of a whim, ready to find the house empty, prepared to make do for ourselves. Now we find company such as no guess could have expected: we find friends and servants, warmth and welcome. Indeed, I can hardly bear to think of my own feelings if we had walked so far and not encountered you. This is Han Im,” he concluded.

They broke up into groups. Wang Wei and Li Po went to look at the flowers. Liu and Han Im discussed the weather.

Winter Cherry said to Ah Lai: “We had better put the things somewhere. I do not know what tale they will tell our hosts, and it would be as well to hide any evidence which might conflict with that tale.”

“I will show you,” Ah Lai answered. “I have been here before. But remember you are supposed to be a boy, and do not be too polite when they speak to you. Come.”

As they moved towards the building, Li Po called from the garden: “Ah Lai, you two can have the room which you occupied when we were here last time.” Then he turned to the flowers.

Ah Lai said: “My uncle, being a poet, is not what most men would call a practical man, but on this occasion I have no fault to find with his arrangements.”

When they reached the low-ceilinged room, they found that the long bed against the north wall was occupied by two girls who had removed their outer garments and were lying on their backs at opposite ends, eating melon-seeds.

Ah Lai put down the things which he was carrying. “You have made a mistake,” he said. “This room is ours.”

One of the girls turned to look at him, and laughed. “You can see for yourself that what you have said is untrue,” she told him. “This is our room. I am called Honeysuckle, and my sister, here, is Clear Rain. We have come to add sparkle to the verbal wisdom of the old men, and the honourable Wang Wei gave us this room. Nevertheless . . . .”

Clear Rain spoke without turning. “I imagine that you knew the room to be ours,” she said. “Your coming therefore bears another possible interpretation. But it is too early in the day. So go away.”

Ah Lai said: “You are both wrong. First, this is not your room, but ours. Secondly, we did not come to see you. I shall consult the honourable Li Po and tell him about you.”

Both the girls sat up at once. “Li Po is here?” Honeysuckle asked. “Then indeed it will be worth while having come. Wang Wei is old and knows it, Liu Shen-hsu is not old, but thinks that he is. Li Po, alone, possesses the wisdom of age and the abilities of youth. Come, Clear Rain, let us go and find him.”

They ran towards the door, then stopped and put on the rest of their clothes before disappearing with much chatter.

Ah Lai observed: “My uncle seems to have a reputation. Now that the girls have gone, we can leave our things here. We had better go and see him, and the honourable Wang Wei, since it seems the two of them are at cross purposes.”

But when they readied the garden, the difficulties seemed to have been resolved, for the girls were laughing and joking with Li Po, while Wang Wei looked on benevolently. The younger poet, Liu Shen-hsu, came towards them.

“It seems that there has been trouble over accommodation,” he said. “Though why two youths such as yourself should object to the presence of two such accomplished girls as Honeysuckle and Clear Rain, I cannot imagine. It must be the first time that those two have met with such an affront. But the honourable Wang Wei has said that you are to have the girls’ room and the girls can have the next room.” He looked enquiringly at Winter Cherry and Ah Lai, as if he held doubts which he did not voice. Then he added: “There will be a meal in a short time.”

Ah Lai said: “That is only right. I and my friend will go and wash off the dust of travel. We shall look forward to seeing you again.”

Winter Cherry did not speak until they had reached the room. Then she arranged her things and said: “Ah Lai, you have hinted much of what you expect from me. But do not expect what it is not right to expect. I belong to the Emperor, and even if I have run away from the Emperor, I do not mean to give myself to anyone else. Let us be clear on that.”

Ah Lai replied: “My uncle says that I have the confidence of my youth. I know that, when we were at Chang-an, in the Porcelain Pavilion, he kept my presence secret, lest the Lady Yang Kuei-fei, who is said to have a fierce eye for men of my age, should hear of me and make trouble. How different are women! She has to be kept from me, and you tell me to expect nothing. Well, what will be, will be, and . . . .”

She interrupted: “It is only last night since I was with the Emperor.”

“When a woman speaks to you, smile but do not listen,” he quoted from the ancient Li-kin. Then they washed and went out again, and Winter Cherry knew that she felt uneasy. It was strange that men never realised what girls thought or felt, and that Ah Lai took no more seeming note of last night than he did of her warning.

The garden, bright with tended flowers under the sun, stretched behind the house, up the slope. All the others were now grouped, talking, while servants from the house were setting out a round table for the morning meal.

When they had leisurely taken their places, Wang Wei said: “I think that you will quite understand how, in view of the fact that my medical abilities are occasionally in demand amongst such as are unwise enough to desire to defer death, I have ventured to prescribe a morning meal. There are two aspects of this which must be considered—the meal and its eaters. In taking the second first, I am of course pandering to that interest in himself which is natural to man, and in doing so I shall subdivide my subject into the groups of those who, exercised and anxious, await their meal, and those who, with appetites jaded by surfeit and by a method of life which cannot medically commend itself to me, spur food down their unworthy throats in anticipation of some new and perhaps justificatory flavour.”

Ah Lai observed to Winter Cherry: “Hunger grows with air.”

Wang Wei continued: “The food must be both nourishing and appetising. The edge, therefore, shall be taken from your need by a mere preface of chicken broth with previously fried snails and nuts—strange but effective.” He waved a hand and the servants brought in a steaming dish. “Do me the favour of tasting it. It was, you will remember, said of the Master that he was never without ginger when he ate. Ginger, therefore, in fact, shall be the foundation of our second dish. It shall be not only the foundation, but the full limit and extent of that dish. In fact, ginger from jars of Kiang-su porcelain (for clothes enhance the beauty of a girl and a coffin shows the riches of the relatives of the departed) shall be brought to you when you are ready.”

Li Po said, smiling: “I am reminded of the old poem about the morning meal.”

Liu objected: “I have written a much better one.”

Wang Wei said: “The first thought is always the fresher. Let us have yours, Tai Po.” Thus, using Li Po’s social title, he recalled to the younger man that he was younger.

Clear Rain, smiling at Li Po, sang in a rounded voice:

Han Im said: “These expensive little pets know everything which they can use for our discomfiture, Liu. After that classic example of Li Po’s, can you bear to favour us with your own poem?”

“I heard it when I last ate ginger in Kiang-su,” Honeysuckle said. “It goes:

They praised the poem, and spoke of smaller things until the jars of ginger were brought in.

“Preserved in honey,” Wang Wei told them. “It is to be followed by a quite ordinary main dish of rice, chicken, bamboo-shoots and lichen, on which will be laid the foundation of the day’s energies. And now, to formalities. It is only fitting that we should thus welcome our friends the honourable Li Po, the eunuch Han Im, and these two youths whose names I did not catch. It is in the highest degree fortunate that our own stay should have overlapped theirs by one day, for we intend, as you know, to leave tomorrow for the west, away from the rumours of disorders and war which trickle from the Capital source to this, our rural backwater.”

Li Po yawned and rose to his feet. “All that you have so excellently said, we echo,” he observed. “And (since here profound effort seems out of place) I need go no further than the first chapter of the Master’s words to remind you that it is pleasant to have friends coming from distant places and it is equally delightful to be those friends. I would ask you to spare me the need for further felicitations, since I find that the sequence of Indulgence, Hunger and again Indulgence has led to an unconscionable onset of indigestion. I therefore thank you again, and sit down.”

Wang Wei hastened to prescribe a drug from his collection and, when Li Po felt better, the meal proceeded to its end.

The hour of the serpent had just given place to the hour of the horse, and over the bright colours of the garden the silent climax of midday was growing. Liu Shen-hsu caught up with Winter Cherry as she went back to the house, and steered her along a path leading through low shrubs towards a half-moon clearing on the edge of the woods.

“It is useless,” he told her when she had unwillingly sat down to listen, “to continue with this pretence of being a boy. No—do not speak yet. Any man such as myself, with experience of the world, could see at once that your clothes were buttoned on the wrong side. To such a man as I, who lives for the poetry of movement, every gesture is a betrayal of the truth. I do not know who you are, or why you thus masquerade, but the fact that you came with the eunuch, Han Im, and the dissolute poet, Li Po, suggests a puzzle whose key lies in the palace at Chang-an.”

Winter Cherry knew that he was not certain of her sex, and judged that he did not dare to put his theory to the test, preferring rather to let her betray herself. So she said: “You remember the song of Mu-lan? She went to fight the Tatars in place of her father, and for twelve years served in the army. Then, when she finally came home, her fellow-soldiers were surprised to find her to be a girl. The song ends, you know:

So your wild guess amuse me, and will amuse my friend Ah Lai.”

He smiled. “A better thing,” he said, “will be to put you in the same room as Honeysuckle and Clear Rain, and let them discover. I am prepared to bide by their opinion.”

Winter Cherry got up and started to walk back to the house. As she went she said over her shoulder: “Now of Han Im you could not be sure.”

Ah Lai was waiting for her. “Where have you been?” he asked. “I have looked everywhere for you. Tonight there will be a difficulty, for if you sleep with me, or with the girls, your secret is sure to come out.”

She told him of Liu’s words. “I think that he guesses, but is not sure,” she said. “And why, if I sleep in the same room as yourself, should my secret come out?”

Ah Lai replied to the first part only: “I will manage Liu. He will not trouble you.” With that she had to be content.

Han Im came to see her shortly after the sun had begun to fall.

“I am worried,” he said. “We so gaily started on this expedition, unthinking of the difficulties which would ensure. Now these difficulties pile up against us. Liu suspects. Li Po, it is true, does not care. Wang Wei is doubtful, for physicians, even if they only practice occasionally, are skilled in recognising those instinctive movements which make it possible to distinguish between a man and a woman. Last night I did not care if danger lay in our plan. Today, in the full light of the sun, I remember only too clearly the ways in which an angry emperor, an old, angry emperor, may bar for a while the denied gateway between life and death, while he joys in the suffering of one whom he believes he is thus punishing. For you I have, as you know, an almost paternal feeling, but even that cannot compensate me for a possibly unendurable death.”

Winter Cherry sat down on the bed and made room for Han Im beside her. She said: “I would that all of you would think less of possible trouble. I, who have most to lose if I am discovered, seem least fearful. You worry about discovery—Li Po worries about having to be respectable because Wang Wei is here, Wang Wei worries because he is not sure of me, and Liu worries because he wants to be sure of me. The two chattering girls worry because tomorrow they will have to go elsewhere, and Ah Lai worries because he is afraid of everybody’s guesses. Alas, I might as well be in the Pepper Rooms at Chang-an.”

Han Im did not comment on what he felt to be ingratitude, and shortly she was left alone. The day bore on through the hours of the goat and the monkey, and the time of Wang Wei’s feast came nearer. Winter Cherry knew how, with wine, man’s nature sloughs convention, how at the tenth cup all is crystal-clear. She did not look forward to this feast, but as it had to be endured, she endured it.

Ah Lai had been busied much of the afternoon with his uncle, Li Po, and Wang Wei. The two girls tittered when they looked at Winter Cherry, but she put on a brave face and made suggestions to them which she hoped they would not accept, but which made her femininity seem a safe secret.

The hour of the monkey had reached its end when Wang Wei sent a servant for her. He was sitting on a rustic bench beside a high bamboo hedge.

“Sit down,” he said. “As I and my party are to leave tomorrow, I thought it only fitting to seize now the opportunity of seeing more of you, who are the least known to me of all you four who came on foot from the North. Li Tai Po I know only too well—that compound of genius, loose-living and good heart; the eunuch Han Im I remember well from my last visit to the capital, before I decided that Court was not for me and that a few simple herbs and fresh spring water led a man nearer to the Eight Fold Path than the rich messes of cookery and the cellars of wealthy men.” He seemed quite sincere in all this, so that Winter Cherry, in spite of the rich morning meal and the evening’s promised banquet, made no protest at apparent inconsistency, Wang Wei looked at her, and then went on: “I now know Ah Lai to be the nephew of Li Po, and to possess the virtues and faults of his age—impulsiveness and lack of breadth. But of you, young fellow, I know nothing, and it is not my custom nor my pleasure to know nothing of those with whom I share a table, however meagre.”

Winter Cherry replied: “Sir, the deference which youth owes to age prevents my making a fitting reply. It is true that Li Po, Han Im, Ah Lai and I came on foot from the north, and it is also true that Chang-an, the Capital, lies to the north. This should have given you a clue that questions are sometimes better left unasked, for knowledge of high secrets is often fatal to both parties—the teller and the hearer. But even I, who have seen so few summers, may with diffidence point out that we came here expecting to find the place empty, and that your kind hospitality was none of our seeking nor of our expecting. It does not, therefore, give you the right to demand an answer to your question.”

Wang Wei smiled. “Let me tell you a story,” he said. “Two years ago, towards the end of summer, I was in Chang-an. There had been the usual banquets and orgies of poetry, for those of the Court do not realise that the simple life is worth a hundred hundreds of examples of refined cookery and unrefined taste. Well, one day, when I was walking in the Park (for even then, at fifty-three, a certain freedom was allowed me) I met a girl whose name was Winter Cherry. She had not long come into the Emperor’s family, and was more than a little homesick. We talked, and in the course of our talk it turned out that she came from a village through which I had lately passed. Naturally, she asked for news of home. Later, when I sat with my lamp and my thoughts, I wrote:

I was pleased with the poem.”

Winter Cherry said: “It is indeed a poem to be pleased with.”

“If I may excuse the coincidence by expressing my own willingness to forget all that you have not said, I will do so, but when you start at a man’s touch, so, even if the man be a physician like myself, I may claim forgiveness for thinking that it is possible for Winter Cherry, whom I so well remember, and yourself, who wear so awkwardly a man’s clothes, to be one and the same.”

Winter Cherry left him without reply and went back to the house. Ah Lai found her crying, with her bundle half-packed, the flute sticking forlornly from its end.

“I must go away,” she said, and told him of Wang Wei’s suspicions. “I shall bring misfortune upon you all. He is acquainted with my father and, the interfering old man, is prepared to bring us together, like one of the gods in the old plays. He spoke to me two years ago, when he was at the Capital, and has not forgotten me, as I had hoped.”

“You want to see your father?” Ah Lai asked.

She sobbed: “When a girl leaves her father’s house to enter that of the Emperor, she has nothing further to do with her father—if she is an ordinary girl, like me. I know that the Lady Yang’s family has been honoured by the Emperor, so that her relatives have been given titles, but I am not the Lady Yang.”

“These stupid old men!” Ah Lai cried.

Then Li Po entered and sat down with them.

He said: “Whenever I allow my heart and my inclination to rule my actions, I find that I have been unwise. I contrived a desire for change with my foolish whim to do a favour to you, girl, and now every evil that can be has descended on me. Alas, there is no poetry in the world this bitter day.”

Ah Lai replied: “You, sir, are not alone. Winter Cherry, here, finds her sex suspected by Wang Wei, who is inclined to hint at the improper. Liu Shen-hsu has his own ideas, too, and desires to draw advantages from them, and the two singing-girls look askance at her. No, assuredly you are not alone.”

“But that is not all,” Li Po went on, as if he had not heard what Ah Lai had said. “When I gaily walked out of my Porcelain Pavilion, the affair had the outlines of a prank, such as is amusing to middle-aged fools like myself. Han Im regarded it as an escape for himself and a good deed for the girl. Had that been all it would have been all. But a while ago they tell me that a traveller passed through from Chang-an, and politics seem to have combined with major strategy to undo us. In short, they say that the rebel An Lu-shan has gathered his forces and is marching on the Capital. T’ung Kuan Pass has fallen. The road lies open. The Emperor’s forces are almost in a state of rebellion, saying that as the result of government by girls and eunuchs they are ill-armed and ill-trained, and that unless the Lady Yang is sent away they can no longer be counted on as soldiers. Nevertheless the Emperor has prevailed on the officers of his guard to withdraw with him from the Capital to the South, leaving An Lu-shan an empty triumph. Alas, this is the South, and, if they should pass through here, as is most likely, I fear that an angry, disappointed Emperor and the officers of a dissatisfied army will display to me little of the courtesy to which I am accustomed. I fear that I, too, must flee before they come.”

“I should have done better to have put myself down a well,” Winter Cherry said. “I have brought disaster on all of you three.”

“When will they be here?” Ah Lai asked, and the poet shook his head.

“Tomorrow, at earliest,” he replied. “But I shall not wait for them. You, boy, will come with me. I owe it to my sister’s dead husband to safeguard you.”

Ah Lai cried: “Then, my uncle, it is a debt you will not pay, for I shall stop here, to see that no ill befalls the girl. She, surely, is in much greater danger than you, who can always charm anger away with a jade phrase. And Han Im, too, is more in danger. What of his plans?”

Li Po said: “He must decide. But even I cannot waste the time to argue with a stubborn nephew. I have told you my plans. What you do now, if you disobey me, is your own affair.”

Winter Cherry cried: “You must go with him. I will not endanger your life and your relations with your family.”

“I shall not go,” Ah Lai declared.

Then Wang Wei entered, bringing with him an atmosphere of decision.

“I have heard the news,” he said. “As host it therefore frees me to arrange what is to be done. As you will be aware, when my wife died (I had seen thirty-one summers at the time) I left all official duties and returned to a small place on the western slope of this mountain. There I enjoy peace and sufficiency, save for an occasional revisit to the world of men. My coming here was really a courtesy to Liu Shen-hsu, who showed a regrettable reluctance to leave my roof. I therefore came with him. That courtesy has, I feel, extended far enough. I am going home alone. But to you, Li Po, I have always extended the shelter of my poor roof: you shall come with me, if you will. Liu goes elsewhere, at his own pleasure. Ah Lai, I know would prefer to remain here (for reasons which he is reluctant to admit, and which I shall not state). Han Im stays, too, since he feels that, whatever may come, it is unfitting for a man of his figure to be running round the country looking for cover.

“But the trouble does not materialise until tomorrow, and I have invited a friend, Peng Yeh, who lives near here at Ma Wei, to dinner. Therefore that dinner shall be held, and at early dawn the party will break up. Have you anything to say, Li Po?”

Li Po replied at once: “With your permission, I shall leave immediately to prepare your household for your return. It was my purpose, when I left on this wild scheme, to remove myself from danger and boredom. If, now, danger and boredom follow me, I must go further. My nephew—I leave him at your care, Wang Wei. The ties of blood engendered by a sister’s choice and nightly efforts cannot now control me, I take it that you will see that Han Im does not lack comforts? We left Chang-an without the time even to collect money. At least, he did. To you, girl, who caused all this, my farewells and good wishes. All my life I have found women and trouble delightfully interlocked. The technique of cutting that union is only gained by considerable experience, and others, less skilled, are apt to be jealous of that technique. In fact, you will say that I am selfish. I am. Farewell to you all.”

He went out without looking behind him. Wang Wei laughed.

“He was always able in self-protection,” he said. “We shall eat towards the end of the hour of the cock. And, girl, I think you had better abandon this masquerade and return to the clothes of your proper sex, which is proclaimed by every line of you.”

When he had gone, Ah Lai and Winter Cherry stood looking at each other.

“That is as it may be,” she said, “but I have no clothes other than those of yours, and there are the two other troubles—Liu Shen-hsu and my father. You did not know that my family name is Peng?”

She told him of Wang Wei’s invitation to her parent to attend the dinner.

Honeysuckle sniffed.

“If a father cannot recognise his own daughter, even when she is dressed and painted as a singing girl, can it really be said that he is a fit person to control her?” she demanded. “I should have thought that it would have been simple for her to go to some other place.” She busied herself with making the most of Winter Cherry’s remaining hair, with the aid of a headdress which concealed much of it.

Clear Rain, mixing powders, said: “Of course, this boy here seems to think that he knows best, and Winter Cherry listens to what he says as if he were one of the seven wise men. Still, we will try.”

“And if she had gone away,” Ah Lai laughed, scornfully, “Wang Wei would have told her father, and then she would have been searched for and brought back. Now Wang Wei will regard the whole thing as a joke of his own making, and will not reveal her secret. But we shall be compelled to introduce Winter Cherry by some other name, as a girl who came here after you two, being prevented by illness from coming earlier. That will excuse her poor performance, for I do not imagine that she is as skilled in the arts of entertainment as you two. She shall, be called Foam on the Stream. I have never met one of that name, and thus we can remedy the omission.”

“Go away while I change her clothes,” Clear Rain said. “To remain would be a privilege of which you are unworthy. I have no proof so far that you have demonstrated yourself to be a man.”

Ah Lai replied: “A man must have opportunity first.”

Honeysuckle laughed: “Make it,” and the three of them pushed him out of the door. “Tell the honourable Wang Wei of her new name.”

Winter Cherry had been dressed and powdered in the conventional way, and now she. Honeysuckle and Clear Rain sat side by side on the bed talking together as if they had known each other for many moons.

“I am reminded,” Clear Rain was saying, “of stories—many stories—of young romance, but I had never hoped to assist, myself, in the attainment of the happy ending which these stories sometimes have.”

Winter Cherry put down the polished copper mirror in which she was trying to recognise herself, and said: “I do not expect a happy ending. Such things only happen to people in stories. But, though some people have been kind to me before, Ah Lai is the first man who has ridden straight towards the threatening spears of circumstance.”

Clear Rain laughed: “You see that she has been associating with poets. What words!”

Honeysuckle smoothed the sleeve of the silk jacket which she had lent to Winter Cherry, her dark, sleek head nodding judged assent. “It suits you,” she said. “He is very young, and quite foolish; but all men are that, at some time or other. At least, I have found them so. I remember——”

But the reminiscence was cut short by the entry of Wang Wei and another man whose tanned skin and easy, balanced stride bespoke the countryman. Before his steady eyes Winter Cherry’s face paled beneath her powder, but she restrained herself from showing by any sign that this was her father. They stood up.

Wang Wei waved a hand towards them. “We had intended a party by a stream in the moonlight after the classic manner,” he said. “I was hoping to show to you, Peng Yeh, how much you missed by living secluded in your country fastnesses, remote from the pleasures of the town. Not that I believe, myself, in these frivolities, but it amuses me to see others stretch forward an eager hand to grasp the nettle’s lovely blossom. These are the nettles. Their names are Honeysuckle, Clear Rain, and, in the middle, Foam on the Stream, who only arrived today, having been delayed by illness or family matters or I know not what.”

The three kotowed deeply without venturing to speak.

Peng Yeh inclined his head. “I am honoured and embarrassed by the warmth of your hospitality,” he said. “For me, the country amidst which I live necessitates no such opulent display of beauty. We manage, you know, with a wife and perhaps another girl or two to relieve her, a few servants and simple food. Myself, I have one son and two daughters now, since my eldest went to the family of the Emperor. So you see how ill able I am to do justice to your thoughtful providal of these sterile blooms from an exotic tree.”

Clear Rain murmured: “That would make life easy.”

Wang Wei said: “You will need a short rest, sir, before our meal. Your servants and horses are being attended to. Will you do me the honour of using my poor room?”

They moved out and down the passage.

Winter Cherry cried: “He is just the same still. He is like a plum flowering amidst wisteria—honesty amidst snow.”

“They bloom at different days of the season,” Honeysuckle said. “You behaved yourself well. And I wish that my father had trained me, as yours has, not to bite my nails. Look at that!” She held out her hands for inspection.

Wang Wei was speaking. “The Empress Wu-chao, who built the beginnings of this house, furnished this room especially for entertainments,” he said. “To me, a simple man, it is somewhat overpowering to consider the beauties and the talents which must, in the past, have gathered here.”

Liu said: “We are not so far from the noises of Chang-an as to be unable to reproduce some, at least, of the curious scenes which these walls must have seen. I am full of anticipation.”

Ah Lai whispered to Winter Cherry: “Do not forget that you have been ill and cannot partake of these so-called curious scenes. The mind of the poet Liu is not like your mind, or my mind.”

“Sh!” Winter Cherry whispered back.

Peng Yeh rose to his feet. “Alas,” he began, “that I should have to confess myself so ignorant in these matters of entertainment! Alas that to me even the famous Hunting of the Emperor’s Charms should be a largely unopened scroll, of almost unintelligible writing. Since I, sirs, am so far from being your equal in this field, could not we students have a lesson from one, at least, of so learned an assembly of experts? But, before we hear that, may I propose the healths of you all? To the honourable Wang Wei, who combines in one person literature and painting, medicine and fishing, wisdom and simplicity. To Liu Shen-hsu, whose written words bid fair to excuse his present comparative silence. To Han Im, whose outlook on life has not been jaundiced, but merely simplified. To Ah Lai, the to-be-famous nephew of the great (though absent) Li Tai-po, whose youth promises what his age will fulfil. To these three girls, who personify so charmingly skill in the arts of love, whose measured movements serve as meat for the poet’s thoughts and who themselves, in the flesh, serve cunningly the dessert for that meat. To you all!”

They all drank and Peng Yeh sat down on Wang Wei’s left.

Liu rose. “I am sure that the honourable Wang Wei would not desire to outrage his modesty by replying to such an eulogy as that which we have just heard,” he began. Then he chanted, improvising:

Ah Lai drained his cup of wine and rose to his feet

“I cannot converse in verse,” he said, “nor con the pros and cons in prose with brilliance inverse to their meaning, but I find Liu’s suggestions almost . . .” he hesitated, and knew that the wine was strong, “. . . shocking. Even my absent uncle’s past pales before them, and I, like a snail yet short of the winning-post, passed by the speedier, or an archer, plucking his erring string to hit the gold but finding the easier outer . . . that was going to be a good sentence,” he concluded, “but the beginning of it has escaped me.”

He sat down suddenly, and Honeysuckle giggled as she picked up her lute. “I shall sing you a love-song,” she said and began:

They all applauded her as the last notes of her lute put a period to the song. Clear Rain sang, without accompaniment:

Then the servants brought in jellied duck soup, tamed out from little bowls, and everybody laughed at Clear Rain’s song.

“What is poetry coming to?” Wang Wei demanded “To an old man like myself such innovations in rhyme seem to fall between bad verse and bad prose.”

Ah Lai said, from his position at the table: “When I write the poems which will make my name immortal, they will have rhymes like those.”

Liu suggested: “And now let the third member of this trio of girls do something to contribute to our pleasure. So far she has merely sat and eaten, and eaten and sat. Let her perform.”

“She has been ill lately,” Honeysuckle said. “If you would have the kindness to excuse her . . .”

“You see how pale she is under her powder,” Clear Rain added.

Liu persisted: “If she comes here to entertain us, she can surely do more than sit like the spirit of a white fox in the mist . . .”

Winter Cherry volunteered: “I can play the flute.”

“You see!” Liu cried. “She has a tongue, besides the other things which we would expect a woman to have.”

Ah Lai said: “I want to hear the other two girls sing again. She can play while they sing.”

Wang Wei, reprovingly, observed: “You are the youngest man here.”

Han Im, who had spoken little during the first part of the meal, interposed.

“I shall tell a story,” he said. “If, after that story you all feel as you felt before—well. If not—well, also.”

Wang Wei asked: “So is your story a destroyer of appetites?”

“No,” Han Im replied. “It concerns a man whose name was Tseng, who lived during the great dynasty of the Hans, and is known as the story of the man who was jealous of his housekeeper.”

“I have not heard this story,” said Wang Wei, and they all prepared to listen.

“There was once, in a city of the state of Lu,” Han Im began,” a man whose wife had, against his will, entered into a compact with the moon-spirits, so that she was unable to cook for him or to perform any of her household duties. Finding this state of affairs intolerable, he sent her back to her father’s family with a letter to explain the matter, for it seemed more fitting to him that her parents should have the necessity of breaking this compact of hers—a compact which must in some measure have been clue to a lack of proper parental upbringing—than that he, her husband, should be compelled both to endure the indigestion caused by her cooking and to undertake the no doubt lengthy process of re-education and exorcism.”

“I have met cases like that in my medical experience,” Wang Wei put in. “They are usually incurable.”

Han Im continued: “Yes. Well, when he had got rid of his wife and put up the statutory notice to that effect upon his main house-door, Tseng began to look round for a housekeeper. He felt, reasonably enough, that he would prefer not to commit himself to any permanent arrangement after the so obvious failure of his marriage, of which there had been no issue. With a housekeeper who may be dismissed at any time, a man has the advantage of the method of trial and error. After a week’s search and enquiry amongst his friends and acquaintances, he was told of a woman who seemed in every way suitable. She, too, had been driven to independence by the strange conduct of her own partner, who had excited the interest of the neighbours by stripping his wife naked at the village well and painting the Buddhist symbol of the mantse in eight different places on her bare skin. This done, he had allowed her to find her way home alone, saying that, if she followed The Eightfold Path, she could only go astray seven times.”

Liu Shen-hsu observed: “There is much of this religious symbolism even nowadays, when we should imagine that the superstitions of earlier dynasties would have been swept away by better education.”

They had finished the jellied soup, and the main dish of shredded duck, rice, peppers and mushrooms was brought in.

Han Im continued: “The man Tseng engaged this woman and settled down to a quiet life, prepared to try her in all ways. He found almost immediately that a housekeeper is more expensive than a wife, since it is needful to provide her with both salary and housekeeping money, but she seemed a good cook in ail respects save one, and that difficulty (for she proved incapable of boiling beans to the right degree of edibility) was overcome by hiring a girl who possessed some experience in the matter. The housekeeper soon found that the girl (whose name, if it matters, was Dawn Gate) could cook more than beans, and rapidly handed over to her all culinary duties. This girl’s pay, though small, had also to come from the not-too-capacious sleeves of the man Tseng. Nevertheless he felt that the absence of indigestion made up for much of the expense.

“One day he sent for the housekeeper, and when she had stood before him long enough for him to muster his thoughts, he addressed her thus: ‘When I engaged you, it was understood that, in return for your salary, you should undertake all the household duties. I do not object greatly to the hiring of the girl Dawn Gate, for certainly she can cook well, and she is not expensive, as girls go. But today I was told in the market place that you are seeking to hire another girl to do the sewing and mending. If this goes on, you will soon have as many as ten girls to do your work, and this was not my intention when I engaged you. What have you to say to this?’

“His housekeeper replied: ‘What you have said is very true, and yet, if you had not engaged me, you would be subject to the demands of all these various girls, unable to defend yourself. As it is, I stand between you and them. Thus you may in peace and confidence see your household kept in order, while I, in return for my labours in organising and controlling them, enjoy for a short time each day a little leisure and freedom to reflect on the causes which have thus satisfied both of us.’ Tseng looked at his store of silver, now not so large as before, and said: ‘That is all very well, but I think that, in order to satisfy both ourselves and our neighbours, it would be better if you came into my household permanently. Thus you would gain warmth at night and authority in dealing with the girls.’ His housekeeper answered, laughing: ‘And you would be saving my salary and gaining the right to paint religious symbols on my person! Oh, no: if the arrangement does not suit you, I can always return to my own husband. I hear from friends that he has spoken kindly of me since I left him. Then you would be able to do what you will with the girls of your house. The sewing-girl comes tomorrow. She is a big, powerful girl, and I cannot think why she has not married already. Her name is Deep Well, and I expect that the name suits her.’ She bowed and left him.”

Clear Rain observed: “He seems to have had all the trouble and expense without the usual compensations.”

Han Im went on: “Tseng was perplexed by this state of affairs, and often, when he knew that his housekeeper was sleeping soundly in her room while he, from behind the lock of his door, had perpetually to be assuring his growing number of maid-servants that he needed nothing more save quiet, he would reflect on the days when his difficulties were limited to one woman, and his store of silver was higher than now.

“Then, one day, he found that a ball of paper had been put into the lock of his room, so that the key would not turn. He went to his store, and found that his housekeeper had moved it to some other hiding-place. As he was leaving the house, his housekeeper called after him: ‘You are going out?’ But determination lent wings to his feet, and he did not answer her. He went to the nearest Buddhist temple and took vows as a novice. Here, in the peace of religious contemplation, he forgot to consider his indigestion. The housekeeper, who had chosen her sewing-maids carefully, now set a blue lantern over the door and began to invite, to the house the men of the town. The store of silver grew higher and higher. Dawn Gate proved very popular, and Deep Well justified her name. The housekeeper’s husband, hearing of this, came to live in the house on the best possible terms, since he could not be turned out by his own wife, and the only loser was the wife of the man Tseng, for the magistrate, hearing of the illegal compact with the spirits of the moon, had her whipped in public and sent to another city. The man Tseng, when he was being initiated into the full Buddhist faith, reflected that the little pastilles of burning sulphur which had been stuck to his shaven head really caused much less pain than the loss of his house, his money and his position. That is all the story.”

They laughed to show that they did not understand Han Im’s story. Only Wang Wei, leaning over, whispered to Han Im: “You show so perfect an understanding of the mind of a woman that I find it hard to believe that you have not invented the story.”

The servants had brought in the remaining dishes for those capable of eating further. The wine was taken round by Honeysuckle and Clear Rain, and these two pledged the various guests, one by one as they poured out for them.

Peng Yeh said: “This is indeed a delightful party, and quite exhilarating for one who, like myself, uses the plough more often than the pen. I wish you to understand how much I appreciate your courtesy and kindness.”

Liu grumbled: “It is nearly all eating and drinking, with very little else. For instance, we have not yet heard the flute-playing which was promised us by your young friend Foam on the Stream, who has sat silent and is drinking hardly anything at all.”

Then Winter Cherry took her flute and played, alone, Waiting for the Sunrise, which they all applauded. When it was done, Liu leaned over to Ah Lai and asked: “And where is your friend of this morning? It is strange that he should disappear and this third girl fill his place.”

Ah Lai replied: “If my friend chooses to go, it can only be because of the way in which you treated him. If this girl, Foam on the Stream, arrives late because of family troubles, am I to know the precise reason? Better that you should devote yourself to entertaining our friend Peng Yeh, to whom you have said hardly a word. Here are the two girls and their wine jar. Now is your opportunity to aid the honourable Wang Wei in acting his difficult part of host.”

And, indeed, Clear Rain and Honeysuckle were pouring out wine for Peng Yeh and Liu Shen-hsu.

“To poetry and agriculture,” Clear Rain cried, and they drank the toast.

Honeysuckle said, raising her own cup when she had refilled theirs: “To town and country: may they never know how much they need each other.”

“That is a peculiar toast,” Liu said. “I suppose she means that to know our dependence is humiliating.”

“The town is but a disease of the country,” Peng replied. “Alas, your wine has made me sleepy, and I have far to go tomorrow. I almost feel inclined to ask the permission of my host to retire, early as it is. I feel that drowsiness and verbal brilliance consort ill.”

And, in fact, everyone seemed sleepy, so that the little bowls of melon-seeds were only half empty when Wang Wei led the way from the room, full of apologies for the exhilarating effect of mountain air.

It was quite early in the hour of the rat, and a thin moon shed sparse light through the oiled paper windows of the room where Winter Cherry lay alone. From the next room an occasional treble snore told that Honeysuckle and Clear Rain were asleep. The rest of the house seemed shrouded in silence, a silence, so deep as to seem unnatural. Winter Cherry lay on her back, wondering why the party had broken up with so dramatic a suddenness, why Wang Wei had gone off to his room without the usual leave-taking of his guests, why her unrecognising father, Peng Yeh, had just disappeared, and why Clear Rain and Honeysuckle had not chattered, as should have been their wont, before finally blowing out the lamp. And Liu . . . she felt that Liu had intended to talk to her. Ah Lai had seemed angered by Liu’s attitude. The boy was amusingly proprietorial about her. Calf-love. His impassioned declaration at the Pavilion of Porcelain, before they had started off on their walk—she would have laughed at him if it had not been for the turmoil in her mind. But then, kindness had filled the void in her heart, and what would, at another time, have seemed laughable had then touched her as the magic jade in the story had touched and turned dross to gold. The Emperor . . .

Then Ah Lai came in like a peacock, preening.

“They are all asleep,” he told her.

She replied: “To sleep at night is natural. We did not do so last night, and I should have thought that you would be tired. But I cannot close my eyes without waking up. It seems as if one could be too tired to sleep.”

“It does not matter if the others are tired or no,” he said. “They sleep. It was magic stuff, that medicine from Wang Wei’s box which I put in the wine. And to think that those two girls believed me when I told them that it was a love elixir! They were pouring the wine, and probably drank more than the others. Listen to their snoring!”

“You put a medicine in the wine?” she cried. “Then that is why everything is so silent. But you should not have done so. It might have caused harm. My father . . .”

He reassured her: “The honourable Wang Wei did not have any, and he knew what I was doing. I told him that the girls had threatened to come to my room, so he gave me the medicine. He is very old-fashioned.”

She began again: “My father——”

“Come and see your father,” he said.

Peng Yeh was sleeping with his face towards the door. Winter Cherry saw a smile on his face. His breathing was regular and easy. She knelt down before the bed and kotowed three times. Ah Lai wanted to laugh. Then he knelt with her and kotowed too.

“You need not be so quiet,” he told her. “He only took one large cup, but look how soundly he sleeps!” He lifted Peng Yeh’s hand and put it under the rugs. Peng Yeh’s breathing did not alter in its rhythm. They went out together, back to Winter Cherry’s room.

“Save for the honourable Wang Wei, who is at the opposite end of the house, we are alone together,” Ah Lai said. “I have waited for this since first I saw you at the Pavilion of Porcelain. Did you not wonder, when I told you that I loved you, why I told you so? Did you not wonder that I, young as I am, found courage to say so? And did you not give me a little cause to hope?”

“I am afraid of Liu,” she answered. “Did he, too, drink of your medicine?”

“Nearly as much as the girls,” he told her.

They went to look at Liu. He slept with his mouth open, and his narrow lips seemed cruel, his nose as if it were about to twitch.

“I think it would be amusing to carry the two girls here, to his room,” Ah Lai said, “and put them in his bed. He would be angered to wake and find them there in the morning.”

She shook her head. “That would not be fair,” she replied. “It is hardly for me, who belong to the Emperor, to say that a girl should only go to a man if she desires to go to him, but I do say so. I would not have them made unhappy. They have shown me kindness.”

“You are no longer the Emperor’s,” he cried. “You are mine. Whatever has been is past and forgotten.”

“It cannot be forgotten,” she said, “if I bear the Emperor a child.”

“If could be forgotten, even then,” he answered. “But you will not bear the Emperor a child.”

She said simply: “I do not know, yet.”

“Let the child be mine—be ours,” he said.

She answered: “No. And it is not right that you and I should talk of these things, under the same roof as my father.”

“I cannot understand your mind,” he protested. “What difference does it make to truth if your father be sleeping here, under the same roof? Does your father know who you are? Did he not lose his responsibility for you a while ago, when you left him? It is the Emperor who should answer to your father. Do you hate the Emperor?”

She answered: “I do not know. I had never slept with him before—or with any man. I do not know if I hate him. I only know that I have not slept for a long while, and my eyes are heavy. Even so, I am not sure whether I shall sleep.”

“You will sleep,” he said. “Lie down. So. I will stay with you—nothing more. It seems foolish to act thus, but I am prepared to be foolish. Lie down. Put your head down, so, away from the thin moon against the window. A rug over you—thus. Now I shall count this as one of the emergencies of Mencius, for I shall hold your hand in mine, so, and you will sleep. . . . You do not want to ask Wang Wei about the Emperor, do you? He would know if you were going to have a child. These doctors know far too much. A husband should know—not a doctor, but if you wish. . . .”

She murmured: “No. It would be wise of you and better for both of us, if you went next door. You will become famous, like your uncle Li Po—it is not right for you to think of me, who would only be a weight against your climbing. Leave me alone, and forget. They are there, and you say they are asleep.” She took her hand from his. He was not sure if there was the faintest squeeze. . . .

He tiptoed to the door, and behind him Winter Cherry’s breathing settled down into the steady breathing of one who is asleep.

Ah Lai stood before the bed on which Honeysuckle and Clear Rain lay. The single small lamp which they had forgotten to put out threw a gentle light over their dark heads, turned towards each other. A gleam was reflected back to him from Honeysuckle’s hair, loose from its pins.

“She sent me to you,” he whispered. “And I do not want you.” He turned down the rug. “You cannot hear, so what does it matter if I say, again, that I do not want you? My uncle would write a poem about the petals of flowers, seeing the breasts of Honeysuckle, I know. And he would include the moon, for good measure, and weave a silken scarf of words about you as you lie there for me to see. He would imagine you as all the girls whom he has ever desired, and speak of his desire in allegory and metaphor. He would bring his mouth between your breasts and say: ‘I love you,’ in rhyme and perfect cadence. I can but follow his example, without the rhyme, so—saying not ‘I love you’ but ‘I love Winter Cherry, whom you represent and who you are, now, in my imagining.’ Then my uncle would take paper and brush and ink and put you into words. I have no words. What would he say? Or sing?

Honeysuckle opened her eyes and sat up.

“That love elixir has made me very sleepy,” she said. “And yet I did not drink much, for we girls learn to appear to drink when we really do not.”

“It was not a love elixir,” Ah Lai told her. “It was a sleeping medicine which will do no harm. I got it from the honourable Wang Wei.”

“My sister always drinks more than I do,” she said, looking at Clear Rain and drawing the rug up to the other girl’s chin. “Shall I come with you to your room?”

“I did not intend to awaken you,” he answered. “The sleeping medicine, I thought, would be enough. I was pretending that you were Winter Cherry.”

She laughed. “You are very young. Men do not usually tell girls that girls are all the same, but they think so. At least, I have found it so.” She swung herself off the bed. “Clear Rain is just like this, too. Look!” She turned down the rug, then put it back. “And if you want Winter Cherry, why do you not take her? Girls like to be taken.”

“You do not understand,” he said. “This is different.”

Honeysuckle ignored this. “This night is hot,” she went on. “Why do you not take off at any rate your outer clothes? Or we could go and swim in the pool by the woods. That will be cooler. It does not matter to me.” Then, as he hesitated, she put on a long blue coat and her shoes. “Now that I am warmer, you should be cooler,” she said. “Come—we will go to the pool.”

“I am a fool,” Ah Lai replied, following her.

Honeysuckle chattered as her short steps kept up with his. “My father taught me to swim before he died. Many girls cannot swim, I know. Clear Rain cannot. But I have never forgotten. It is one of the things which one does not forget. You can swim? How thin the moon is! The shadows seem only a little blacker than the stones by the path. There is the pool. They say that Han Meng-tsu used to swim here, at night, too. He died, you know. Wang Wei was his great friend. But your uncle, Li Po, will have told you of Han Meng-tsu. Look—the moon is in the water. Your uncle always writes about the moon. He seems very fond of it. One might almost say that he loves the moon. The weeds are on the other side: this is quite clear. Give me your hand: I do not know how deep it is, just here. Ah, the bottom is stone. Come: the water is lovely and cool, like a lover who does not know desire. If this were the whole of life! Do not stand there watching me! Of what use is it if I bring you to the pool and you only watch me? I will swim to the other end, if you are shy, though why you should be shy, with such an uncle, I do not know.”

She moved off through the silent water, her dark head a shadow on the quiet ripples, hardly stirring the black, round plates of the water-lilies. Ah Lai slipped off his clothes, shivered as he put a toe into the water, then stooped and with hands and feet on the hard, stone bottom, looked out at the surrounding trees, the faint line of the clouds, the bank. . . . He waded in farther, upright now. The cool water rose to his waist, to his chest. The lilies, nearer, rustled continuously together with the ripples of his movement.

Honeysuckle came up in front of him from her noiseless dive. She was holding one foot close to her face.

“Something sharp on the bottom,” she said. “Carry me.”

He picked her up and waded to the shore. She was unaccountably warm in his arms, and her hands clung to his shoulders when he put her down and knelt beside her.

“You are very strong,” Honeysuckle told him, in woman’s earliest gambit.

Han Im turned uncomfortably in his sleep, and (like Chuang Tzu’s butterfly) his consciousness came near the surface. In this half-waking state he was aware of doubts as to the wisdom of his actions. At the Porcelain Pavilion he had stressed the need for haste if escape were to be successful—now he was dallying here, at the Poet’s Pleasure Cottage—he told himself with sleepy scorn—while along the roads the Emperor’s messenger rode post haste in search of a girl, a poet and an eunuch!

Winter Cherry’s fate he could dimly descry, but women, he reflected, were meant to suffer in the end, and were better fitted than men to endure pain and punishment, by reason of their inferior sensibility. The poet? Li Po would escape anything, as he had always escaped everything, by a mixture of bluff and lying. And (Han Im reflected, waking up) Li Po had shown the good sense to remove himself to another place, remote from what would be the immediate cause of the Emperor’s wrath. Himself? By persistence and intrigue had eunuchs come to exercise an increasing power in the palace, a power commensurate only with that of the favoured Lady Yang and her family, and now, with so perfect an opportunity for venting rage on a eunuch, would it be to be wondered at if the Emperor’s inventiveness rose to the occasion? Han Im had seen examples of the Emperor’s inventiveness. He shivered a little and drew up the clothes, determined to be miserable.

And to think that he had only, as an added reason for his sentimental folly, the sudden, worshipping passion of Ah Lai for this girl Winter Cherry! Had he, Han Im, shown himself so unworldly, so unwise, simply from transferred emotions? Had he sublimated his almost forgotten but ever present loss into actions which would put him forever beyond the reach of further loss—save of his head?

Conscious that his thoughts were being muddled, and since it would be stupid indeed to get up and do something now, immediately, when dawn hesitated like a laggard dancer, Han Im slept.

He was awakened in earnest by the loud beating on the main door, and his heart leaped to his throat. Well, let them find him in the dignified sleep of one whose conscience is clear! He lay, flat on his back, the wooden pillow making him think every moment more regretfully of an executioner’s block, his arms straight at his side, controlling his breathing to the steady rustle of innocence.

The knocking was repeated. There were men’s voices, and a women’s voice, raised. This woman’s voice seemed familiar. Then he heard a man cry: “Open for the Lady Yang!” and become on the instant cool, awake and capable.

He went out, lit a torch and unbarred the door. Sleepily, beside him, Ah Lai came from the room which Li Po had occupied, and Han Im spared a moment to wonder why the sleeping arrangements had been changed. Could the girl have turned him out so soon?

The Lady Yang came towards them from her carrying chair.

She wore the same dark blue robe in which he had last seen her, at the Aloe Pavilion, and her hair was still dressed high upon her forehead. Han Im had the impression that she had been hurried in her departure, for the Lady Yang was not accustomed to be seen twice by the same man in the same clothes.

“His Imperial Majesty sent me first, with the forces under General Tung,” she said. “Is there a place where I can rest?”

Han Im replied: “There is certainly a place where you can rest, for it is unseemly that the flower of the Emperor’s garden should thus be exposed to the chill air of night. Come with me.” To the chair-carriers he said: “Wait.”

As she followed him into the house, she said: “It would seem that you have not heard the news. There were no beacons. The Pass has fallen. An Lu-shan and his barbarians have marched on the capital and the Emperor follows us.”

“But why?” Han Im asked. The door of Wang Wei’s room stood open, and there was every sign that the occupant had left. He went into the room and set the bed ready for her. “You can rest here,” he said. “Why does not the royal army crush these barbarians? Is it intended to let them enter the city?”

She sat down with the sigh of one who is tired.

“The army will not fight,” she said. “They complain that they are ill-armed and ill-led. Only General Tung remains loyal, and his troops are few. Some are here, now—the rest will come with the Emperor. No, the city cannot be defended.”

Han Im bowed. “I shall leave you,” he said. “Doubtless the General will give me other news. Rest now.”

Outside the house the chair-carriers were stacking their chairs. He showed them where to go, to the servants’ quarters. Ah Lai came up, talking to a short, squat Southerner with sharp eyes.

“This is General Tung,” Ah Lai said. “You know him?”

The General answered: “We know each other. Lead me to a room where we may talk. You may come with us, boy.”

When Han Im and the General had seated themselves in the empty hall, Tung said: “You clearly have not heard the news—or all of it. The situation is serious.”

Han Im replied: “No situation is too serious to be met by resolution. Until a man is dead, that is. What has happened?”

The other said: “The rebel, An Lu-shan, has struck. The men under my control are sound, but for the rest . . . .” He made a gesture of helplessness. “Already, since we left with the Lady Yang, a swift runner reached me with a tale of wholesale elimination of her relatives and of sundry others, of your sort, at the Palace. I left an Emperor’s Guard: His Majesty will follow. But we are few—I do not see how we can resist the numbers which will he brought against us. Who is here?”

Han Im told him: “Wang Wei seems to have gone. Li Po went yesterday. Liu—I do not know, but I believe he sleeps somewhere. There are three singing-girls and this lad, Li Po’s nephew, whom you met before me. And the servants. And Peng Yeh, whose farm is on the slope of Ma Wei, and who was passing through on his way to Chang-an.”

“When a eunuch leaves the palace, there is a reason,” replied General Tung. “None of those whom you have named seem to me sufficient reason for your presence here. Li Po, who came with you, would have served, but he has left you, you say. Why, then, have you deserted the pleasures of Chang-an for the austerities on this mountain residence?”

Han Im said: “Enough that I came. It seems to me, now, that the immediate need is some plan for the future of the Lady Yang. They have killed her relations? Then she, too, is in danger.”

Tung laughed: “It shall be as you wish. The subject is evidently one which you wish to change. It is changed. We must, of course, retreat as soon as the Emperor reaches here. The West is wide and wild. Until the forces of loyal men can be raised, we must, like the chess-player, withdraw our weak defence into the impenetrable hills. The western provinces may be loyal. They probably will be, with my men to make up their minds. I brought a few boxes of silver for immediate needs—it seemed to me that when His Imperial Majesty finally decides to take the road hither, he may forget, in his haste, such a worldly detail as that. And, since you are fortunately here, it is your province to take charge of that silver and act as treasurer.”

Han Im bowed. “I am honoured,” he said.

The General continued: “Transport. Always transport—the problem for all commanders. My men walk. I rode. The Lady Yang came in a carrying chair, and the silver in another. Can you provide a carriage or two—and horses? Then you had better arrange for them to be ready at dawn. One for you and the silver. One for the Lady Yang. The chairs we can send back. Food? We have enough for two days.”

Ah Lai, who had stood silently beside them, now said: “If you will make up your minds as to your next destination, I will go on and arrange for food. I shall require, also, to know how many men will have to be fed. Also by what means of transport I am to go and whether alone. I shall be ready to change your decision into deeds in an hour from now. For the moment I have to say a goodbye.” He inclined his head to them and went out of the room.

General Tung observed: “I think he will serve the Emperor well, for he does not foresee difficulties. He shall go. Now, give me paper, brush and ink. My mind needs no other laxative. You will see about the carriages.”

Ah Lai came to the room which he had hoped to share with Winter Cherry. The girl slept, her face pillowed on one arm. He stood for a while looking at her, then turned to go without speaking. But as he turned, Winter Cherry woke.

“I thought that you had gone,” she said.

Ah Lai nodded. “I did go,” he said, “and now I have returned before going altogether. I have been talking strategy with General Tung.” Her voice was a question. “General Tung?”

He told her of the arrivals from Chang-an, of the revolt and the Emperor’s coming journey into the inner provinces. “I have always wanted adventure,” he said. “I am to start in less than an hour, to make ready for the Emperor’s reception at his next stopping-place—when General Tung tells me what that next stopping-place may be.”

“You did not always speak so respectfully of the Emperor,” she answered. “But it is as well that you should. I am glad that you did not insist, last, night, on coming here to me. Perhaps you have realised that it would have been imprudent.”

Ah Lai looked at the girl as he listened to her formal speech. There seemed a great distance between them now, and he felt it to be useless to speak, as he had meant to do, of the events of the night. Against the walls of their little world lapped the tide of war, and he knew that, for a time at least, that tide had separated them. And then, suddenly, she sat up, frowning.

“Go and do whatever you have to do,” she said. “If, in that doing, it pleases you to know that now I am certain that I shall not bear a child to the Emperor, then you have the right to be pleased. Now go.”

“But last night you said . . . ,” he began.

She answered: “Last night was last night; today is today. Go now about your new duties, and forget me. You are for greater things that I can give you.”

He inclined his head. “So you think,” he replied, going out

The Lady Yang had not rested long, and now, as she stood waiting for Ah Lai to come to her, with the sheer fall of the invisible mountain to the East before her, she felt something of the spirit of a painter who aims to transfer to paper the sweep of rocky land, the sheltering copses, the rushing streamlets, of a countryside which he sees, and which those who look upon his painting will also see but not believe. “He has idealised it,” these people will say. “It was not so steep. That stream did not so flash in the sunlight. That wood did not so unbelievably fit into the balance of the picture.” Life, she was reflecting, resembled, this landscape. The perfection of her last years with the Emperor were equally incredible. Love, itself, was just such a figment of the imagination, real enough when expressed, but to a hearer of its magic merely a symbol of what the lover hoped to taste. And yet, it was real enough.

Ah Lai came up behind her as she had expected.

“I understand the Emperor now,” the boy said. “Before, I thought that no man could have reason for so distilled a delimit, but, seeing you, I find all the old tales inadequate before your reality.” Then he laughed. “Why, I am talking like a poet!”

“You are talking in the fashion to which I am accustomed,” she replied. “And yet shall I believe that you mean it?”

The steady gaze of her long eyes under the high brow held his eyes. The hair at the back of his neck moved independently of his will. He was not conscious of anything else about her, before the compelling comfort of her eyes.

He replied: “I mean what I have said. And I understand, too, why my uncle would not let me see you when I lived with him at the Porcelain Pavilion, for it seems that, being wise, he feared for me the peril of seeing you. Not that he feared you, for my sake, but that he knew that a man changes when he looks upon you. He changes. He forgets what he was and what he hoped. He knows only that he looks upon you, and the rest of life fades into the shadow of reality. That is what my uncle, Li Po, knew, since he is a poet.”

She said: “You say it all very charmingly, I almost seem to hear the words of your uncle. But this is not time for soft words. You can drive a carriage—I know, for I heard the men talking of it. Will you take me away from here, from the soldiers, whom I fear? If the Emperor were here, it would be different, but I do not trust General Tung.”

He looked at her, and found that he could not take his eyes away. He forgot Winter Cherry; he forgot Honeysuckle. The world, and the edges of the world moved back and behind him as though he were advancing from the audience on to a brightly lit stage, moving without his own volition, towards the woman who now stood watching him calmly, as if nothing depended on his answer.

He rubbed his eyes.

“I will take you,” he said. “I am to start with one carriage as soon as General Tung has written his instructions. You will clothe yourself in ordinary clothes, so that none shall know you. They will think that I am taking another girl with me. And hide those jade pins in your hair. I will bring you clothes, and you will wait here. When I bring the carriage past, you will run out and climb in.”

She nodded, showing no sign of relaxation from the strain of wondering if she could have her way with this youth.

He left her, fetched outer garments from the room of Honeysuckle and Clear Rain, gave them to Yang Kuei-fei and went to see to the horses.

There was the sound of horses, and of men shouting, so that the night, now less dark under a faint lightening of the Eastern sky, was less quiet also. It seemed that with the coming of these men a dawn wind stirred. A sentry challenged.

General Tung went to meet the Emperor. Behind him Han Im stood, wondering why eunuchs should now stand behind generals, and reflecting on the inversion of proper procedure which war brings in its train. The Captain of the Guard galloped towards them and drew rein in a spectacular whirl of dust in the dark.

“I have performed my duty,” he said. “His Imperial Majesty is here.” He dismounted.

Behind him the outriders came to a halt, then drew aside. More horsemen emerged from the darkness, and then a carriage drawn by two horses. The Emperor descended from the carriage and advanced towards them. Even in the glistening light of the torches which suddenly appeared in the doorway, the Emperor seemed older, more tired, as if he had shrunk within his robes. Han Im had for a moment the fancy that these robes were draped upon a skeleton. Then the Emperor spoke.

“You are the last of my people,” he said. “I have left Chang-an. The palaces of Chang-an contain but my ghost to keep my Empress company. Is it not strange that I should think of her now, I, who have not thought of her for many a day? Where is Yang Kuei-fei?”

General Tung bowed stiffly.

“All is ready for your departure to a place of further safety,” he said. “A messenger has gone on to prepare for your arrival and see to provender for the troops. He left not long ago. Your Majesty will rest for an hour or two, until dawn?”

Han Im stepped forward and kotowed. Then he stood awaiting orders.

The Emperor said: “Take me to her.”

Han Im moved into the house in front of the Emperor, opening doors.

But Wang Wei’s room was empty.

The Emperor looked wildly round him. “Where is she?” he cried.

Han Im said: “I will look for her. I left her in this room.” But when he had searched the house, finding no knowledge of Yang Kuei-fei’s whereabouts from the two girls or from Winter Cherry, or from a just-wakening Liu, his heart sank as he returned to the room which had been Wang Wei’s. He felt the silken cord of suicide against his neck. Outside the door of Wang Wei’s room he met General Tung, clearly awaiting news.

“You have not found her?” the General asked.

Han Im said: “No. Nobody knows where she is. I wonder . . . could she have gone with Ah Lai? You ask your men. I will go in to the Emperor. I feel my neck’s insecurity growing with every minute. All well, a man can die but once.”

“And an eunuch has less to lose by death than have common men,” the General laughed, keeping a brave face against another man’s misfortune. “I will enquire if any one saw the boy depart.”

The Emperor was pacing up and down the room. He was quieter than Han Im had expected, but seemed to hold the promise of a sudden explosion of anger. He appeared conscious of his clothes and intolerant of them, as if their formal loveliness were an affront at such a moment.

Han Im said: “It is believed that the Lady Yang went forward with the advance party, by carriage.”

The Emperor’s wrath burst. “It is believed!” he cried. “Believed! Where is she? Tell Yen to come to me.”

Han Im replied: “I regret that I am the only one of your palace eunuchs to be here.”

“Then let the others be fetched, together with a ten or so of silken cords, that they may have the doubtful privilege of death!” the Emperor cried. “And bring wine. Am I, the Son of Heaven, to stand here in a draughty, unwarmed room, pacing a wretched mat like any one of my subjects. . . .”

Han Im took his courage in both hands.

“Sire,” he observed, “the great Emperor, Tang the Completer, said: ‘The peoples’ faults are mine, and mine the peoples’.”

The Emperor said, more quietly: “I used to listen to the wisdom of the past. Perhaps if I had listened more willingly—go and find out.”

Han Im breathed again and went to speak with General Tung. The two met in the passage.

Tung said: “She went with the boy. At least, one of my men saw a girl go with him, and as the other three girls are here, it must have been the Lady Yang. Can you think why she should do that?”

Han Im replied, after thought: “She went because she feared that the soldiers would do to her as has been done to her family. I think it would be better if she had left a message. What message did she leave?”

“No message,” the General said, raising his eyebrows.

Han Im shook his head. “I think she said that she would meet his Imperial Majesty at the next halt. It would be far better for her to have said so to your man—the one who saw her. I should recommend you to go in and tell this message to the Emperor.”

General Tung answered: “If you think it better, I will do so. But I shall blame you if he finds that no message was actually left. We start in half an hour. It will be a slow progress, with so many of my men on foot. He will be impatient.”

He went to calm the Emperor.

Liu Shen-hsu woke, and with difficulty held together the two sides of his splitting head. As he sat up, Peng Yeh came into the room.

“They are going to my estate in the time it takes to harness a horse,” he told the poet. “May I extend a similar invitation to you?”

Liu demanded: “Who are going, and why?”

Peng Yeh told him. Liu’s headache appeared to be passing.

“No,” he answered. “Let us call it Invitation on Waking, an impromptu after the manner of Master Li Po.

“Then you will forgive me if I make my own arrangements,” Peng told him. He regarded poets with disquiet.

The two-horse carriage rolled noisily onward under the pale lavender dawn. Behind, the great mass of Chung-nan Mountain grew less menacing: before them ridges and spurs lay in an unbroken sequence.

Ah Lai said: “I am not very sure of the road. If Winter Cherry were with us, she could set my mind at rest.”

Yan Kuei-fei replied: “Whoever Winter Cherry may be, I am sure that she would resent the mere duty of setting your mind at rest. Women are apt to aim at higher purposes than serving as guides.”

A golden pheasant rose from a slope to their right.

“That is a sentence of the Master’s which no one has ever understood,” the boy said. “You remember? ‘Thrice it smelt him, and then rose’. Have you ever heard any explanation of it?”

She smiled. “A golden pheasant,” she said, “serves as a neat direction to our conversation. You were speaking of a girl called Winter Cherry. Now, thanks to the bird, we speak of Confucius and matters literary. ‘The good man,’ you remember, ‘speaks seldom, hut always to the point.’ It seems either that the point irks you, or that you are not what the Master would have styled a good man.”

“I did not change the conversation,” he objected. “It was the pheasant. But, as you wish to speak of Winter Cherry, I will explain that she knows the road well, having travelled it before, under conditions which she is not likely to forget.”

“And which I cannot forget either,” she said, “since I do not know them. As to your pheasant, the line answers for itself. ‘Thrice it smelt him,’ uncertain as to his purposes—to watch, to shoot, to trap, to seek its eggs—‘and then’—having made up its mind that all men are unreliable—‘it rose’. So anything with a bird’s wildness will flee what it does not understand. So, also, your mind and your tongue flee conversation about anything more interesting than pheasants.”

They turned a corner on the breast of a hill.

Ah Lai observed: “It would be easy to amuse oneself by inventing sayings which one could attribute to the Master. But, of course, it is always likely that what one says has been said before, by someone. So almost anything might be a quotation from somebody.”

“Mo Ti was my favourite,” she replied. “His idea that almost everything which one could do made the situation worse, appeals to some laziness in me. It is a very easy doctrine to justify, superficially at least. Here we are in comparative discomfort, jolting towards doubtful safety, while I might so easily be lying untidily in my own palace gardens after a short instant of knowledge—the knowledge of the reality of a steel blade.”

“There are other deaths which rebels give to favourites,” he said. “And Mo Ti did not so much, my uncle says, urge doing nothing as he urged that everything was, however disguisedly, good. Besides, Mencius put Mo Ti in a very small place, so far as philosophy is concerned. So let us speak no more of Mo Ti, but of yourself, for it is not every day that I drive with you.”

She looked away, into the quickening light.

“I am a poor excuse,” she said. “But for me, this trouble would not have come on my country or my Emperor. I know—indeed I know—that with me he forgot statecraft and preparation for wars. Through silken curtains the war gongs do not sound. My Pear Garden Players performed many a play about Emperors and favourites, but never one like this. Do you think he will come quickly enough? I do not trust the troops.”

Ah Lai countered: “If you think that I am doing this service for General Tung, without being certain that General Tung will take advantage of it, you think wrong. No: all will be well—we shall go into the distant mountains and, with fresh, loyal troops return to strike the heads from traitors. Do not concern yourself with strategy: you are a woman, and a woman’s strategy is different from the strategy of men. You are fitted to be what you are, and therefore safe from dangers which afflict us. As they say, a hunchback has many advantages: he can earn a living by washing without noticing his bent back, and he is safe from the army.”

“You compare me to a hunchback?” she laughed. “Your uncle would have made no such mistake.”

He answered: “I did not mean to compare you, and that you know well.”

They drove on. The countryside was less barren now.

Later, she asked him: “This girl of yours, Winter Cherry, why have you left her behind you?”

“You would not understand,” he replied. “To you, who have always had whatever you desired, it is impossible to explain how lovers may separate without quarrels, in order to meet later.”

She tossed her head.

“Who are you to say that I should not understand?” she cried. “No facet of love can go unscanned for one who loves an Emperor and is loved by him.” Then, as suddenly swerving as a bird, her mood changed. “I will sing you a song.” She tuned her voice to the rhythm of the wheels.

She stopped singing and looked at him sideways.

Ah Lai said: “To your song about Winter Cherry I can only reply with a reminder that you, too, will grow old, and that your lover, the Emperor, has grown old already. Do you (since revenge is always brutal) take pleasure in the touch of a man so many years old? Do you (since you did not spare me pain) enjoy his lack-lustre eye, his hollow cheek? Do you (since we are alone here) find in his bed the rhythm of a dance and the laughter of a light moment in unnoticed sunshine? Do you . . . .”

She replied through her teeth: “Turn the carriage round.”

He shook the reins so that the horses went faster. “No,” he answered, “I cannot do that. I serve General Tung, and through him the Emperor. It is not my custom to take orders from a woman. Still, if what I have said is too offensively truthful, consider that only the wind has heard it.”

They drove without speaking further, until, on a hill, the horses slowed. Then, as if this broke her thought, she hummed gently the old interminable driving-song.

“There is a carriage coming towards us,” Ah Lai said. “I shall ask the driver the way.”

“Do so,” Kuei-fei answered. The boy felt that she did not altogether welcome the interruption.

Both carriages came to rest beside a thicket of willows.

“The estate of the honourable Peng Yeh?” the driver said. He was a short, burly man. “It is not an hour from here. I myself am going after my master. News has reached us of revolts in the Capital, and my mistress desires my master to return from the neighbourhood of danger.”

Ah Lai said: “He will be following along this road in an hour or so, and not alone. I carry the Emperor’s commands to your mistress, so we had better exchange carriages, for my horses are not as fresh as yours.”

The man shook his head. That is a tale,” he said, “which no man could credit, for the messengers of the Emperor wear other clothes than yours. They have red kneecaps and other men on horseback with them. No—you are not the Emperor’s messenger.” He drew on the reins as if to move forward.

Ah Lai answered: “Your mistake is a natural one. Perhaps it would be truer to say that I am the messenger of General Tung, who is commanding the soldiers whom the Emperor brings here. I have his letter, if you will look at it.”

But the driver of the other carriage made his whip whistle round his head and, as his own horses moved forward, slashed sharply at Ah Lai’s. For a little while the thicket moved rapidly round him and Kuei-fei, and when the horses were again on their four feet Ah Lai saw Peng’s driver nearly out of sight oh the road by which they had come. Kuei-fei was sitting on the floor of the carriage, laughing.

“Help me to my feet,” she said. “There must be a stream in the midst of that thicket of willows. Would it not be wise to see if we can reach it, and water the horses? That will calm them, after their fright, I think I have twisted my foot.”

He left her on the floor while he coaxed the horses by an almost overgrown track towards the edge of the hidden stream. He loosened their girths and let them drink. Then he tied the reins to a bush and lifted Yang Kuei-fei out of the carriage and set her down.

“You have not twisted your foot,” he told her. “That is a trick which women have when they want men to touch them. I know.”

She stood straight up, lovely in her anger. Then she lifted her hand and slapped him hard across the face. Neither said anything, but they could hear each other breathing. Slowly he stretched out his hand and caught hers, drawing her towards him. She took his hand and bit it. He turned her round and put her on the grass face down.

“So much for the Emperor,” he said.

She was still trying to slap him as he untied her girdle.