Ma Wei Slope

PART FOUR

In the ninth moon, during the period of Cold Dew, the farm stood silent, secret and remote under a slanting sun. The grain had been garnered: the autumn work was done. The farm gates stood bolted and barred, and from a single, high window Father Peng looked out to the north-west.

All day long the battle had been joined there, over the ridges. All the morning long Father Peng had watched men move past the farm towards the fight, too hasty to bend even a glance in the direction of the shut gates. All the afternoon he had seen men stream back towards the Capital, men broken and downcast, archers with their bows loose, horses with sweat dried white on their coats. And all day had come nearer the sound of drums beating the advance, gongs sounding the retreat.

Still Father Peng watched, hastily gulping soup which they brought him, then setting it down and turning back to the high window.

The last few came.

When they, too, had passed towards the Capital, a figure on a horse appeared on the crest and halted there. A second man appeared beside the rider and it seemed from his fuller garments that he could be a priest. He was on foot. Then the two moved slowly down towards the farm and, after they had passed out of range of Father Peng’s window, he could hear the sound of knocking at the outer gate.

When Father Peng reached the gate, Peng Yeh and the servants had reached there first.

“Do not open the gates,” Peng Yeh was saying to the servants, “for these men who knock should be stragglers from the battle, and to let in one side is an invitation to the other to follow.”

Father Peng went towards the bolted doors. “Let me go out and see who they are,” he said, “for I am an old man and they will do no harm to me. Besides, you can bolt the door again after me and only open it when I tell you to.”

When the sound of the bolt behind him had ceased, Father Peng looked at the two men. He could see now that his first guess had been right, for the man on foot was undoubtedly a priest. The other, he saw, was quite young, and there seemed about his face something familiar. Nevertheless, Father Peng could not call to mind the name that ran with that face.

Bowing, Father Peng said: “If indeed, you come bent on peace, what proof have I of that? This is the house of Peng. What is your business?”

The young man replied: “My name is Kuen Ah Lai, and I certainly come with peaceful intentions. That you should not recognise me at once I put down to your honourable years, but I would recall to you a certain poem of which you wrote three lines and I the fourth.”

He recited:

Father Peng cried: “Open the gates!” Then he turned again to Ah Lai, saying: “You are both very welcome.”

Inside the gate Father Peng did not invite Peng Yeh to meet his guests, but led them, bowing, towards his own room. To Mooi-tsai, who had not held herself at such a distance as courtesy dictated, he said: “Child! Tell one of the servants to bring some clear wine and then go to your mother and ask her to instruct you on the correct behaviour of the younger female members of a family when their senior greets a guest.”

When the old man had seen Ah Lai seated to his own satisfaction, and the priest had taken up his position sitting on the floor, enough time had passed for the servant to bring the wine.

Father Peng began: “I sent for wine rather than for tea first because I have the privilege of knowing you and second because I am sure that you have a story to tell, since you came from the direction of the fighting.”

Ah Lai replied: “I am much honoured. This priest is a friend of mine—so much of a friend that I have not asked his name. His title is The Guardian of the Hidden Spring. After all, his profession is more informative than his name, and in the absence of more priests than one there is likely to be no confusion.” He went on to the priest: “This is the honourable Peng Lao, the father of the house.” Father Peng demanded eagerly: “What is the progress of the fight?”

Ah Lai replied: “We have taken no part in it ourselves, as you may see, but it is sufficiently true to say that the rebels are everywhere beaten and that the loyal soldiers of the Bright Emperor and of his son have triumphed. Our forces are now pursuing the enemy towards the city, and it is not expected that An Ching-hsu and his associates will try to hold it.”

Father Peng rose to his feet and, turning towards the north, made a profound obeisance. Then he said: “One must achieve the right direction, though the Emperor in Cheng-tu is to my left and his palace throne to my south-east. However, the formalities are complied with.” He filled Ah Lai’s cup with wine and then hesitated as he turned towards the priest.

The priest said: “It may seem unorthodox to you, but I have always believed that one may seek The Way of Tao as well through a cup of wine as through any other way.” He rose to his feet and held out the cup for Father Peng to fill.

When they had all seated themselves again and Father Peng had given the signal to drink, the priest observed: “Had I known what sort of wine this is, I should have been even more definite in my approval of it.”

Ah Lai said: “The business on which I have come is twin. One half of it, however, immediately concerns you, sir, and that is the intention of the Bright Emperor, who justly foresaw that Heaven could not deny him this victory and his return, to pass through this place when that return has been arranged, and to remain here long enough to relive and enquire into the events of the last fateful day when he was here, when danger and duty alike conspired to make him hasten along the forbidding trail which leads through the Western Mountains to his present temporary palace. He wishes this for a reason which will readily occur to you.”

The priest put in: “Steps may be retraced, but moments never.”

“That sort of sentence,” Ah Lai told Father Peng, “is the sort of sentence to which I have become increasingly accustomed since my meeting with this priest. It is just as well that this should be so, for otherwise the rigours of the life which I have lately been leading, a life of short phrases and shorter orders would have rendered me totally unfit for the company of people as cultured as yourself, sir.”

The priest quoted: “If language is lucid, that is enough.”

“But,” Father Peng replied, “the first thing is to get the words right.”

“I see that I need not teach you,” the priest said.

Father Peng replied: “It is pleasant to persevere in learning.”

“Give up learning and you will be spared much trouble,” the priest said.

Ah Lai contributed: “Every building starts from the ground, and I am still young.”

Then they all laughed.

“Drink up, fill up, and then get up and come with me to see the rest of my family,” Father Peng said. “It will be good for them all. You, sir, have already done so.”

Ah Lai replied: “I have had that honour. But it is an honour that can readily bear repetition.”

“I must warn you,” Father Peng said, “that my eldest granddaughter has suffered the sad affliction of silence since the abominable rebel An Lu-shan seized her and took her to the Capital. Since she was brought back later by a pair of very pleasant girls called Honeysuckle and Clear Rain, who seemed from their conversation to have heard of you, my granddaughter has spoken precisely two sentences. We do not know if she will recover.”

The priest said: “That is my province. Let me see her.” By saying this he drew Father Peng’s attention away from the undoubted surprise and other, deeper emotions which Ah Lai’s face did not succeed in concealing. The old man, however, insisted on their seeing Peng Yeh first.

“My wife,” Peng Yeh said, “is unfortunately occupied at the moment. Later, perhaps . . .”

The priest said: “Show me an empty room and send me your eldest daughter.” He signed to Ah Lai to follow him into the room which Father Peng indicated.

“But this is the room where the woman hanged herself!” Peng Yeh cried.

The priest replied: “So much the better.”

The priest had seated himself with his back to the wall opposite the door which opened in the middle of the opposite wall. Winter Cherry and Ah Lai each faced one of the remaining walls, sitting on mats on the floor. The priest saw that the light through the paper window was failing. He took from inside his robe a small pellet of incense which he placed upon a stone upon the floor in front of him. Then he took out flint and steel, coaxed a tinder spark to flame and kindled the corner of the pellet, which he then put back upon its stone. He put away the flint and steel and sat without sound, without moving.

Ah Lai, as a good Confucian, felt that he should have protested at the use of supposedly magical devices so far out of their proper place, but waited, wondering what the priest’s next move might be.

Then the priest said: “The Way of Tao is not possible to understand. But by not understanding it we can understand what it is. Life goes on in pairs—consciousness and no-consciousness, light and no-light, being and not-being. The essence of Tao which we cannot understand escapes us because of its very simplicity. He who follows Tao loses it because he follows it; he who does not seek it finds it because he does not seek it.”

In the still light the smoke from the incense rose like a ruler to break above their heads. There was no movement and the priest was silent long enough for Ah Lai to notice that since his last words the light had grown less. Then the priest went on.

“At birth men are weak and soft; at death they are strong and rigid. Weak grass bends to the wind; the strong tree breaks. Such is the nature of wind, of grass, of a tree. You seek Tao to find it bent out of your path and gone. Tao is everywhere and nowhere; everything lives in pairs.”

Again the sun was lower below the unseen ridge.

The priest said: “The smoke of this incense will be a thin dust tomorrow. Yet there would be no dust but for the incense. She who hanged herself here is dust. To the imaginative, her spirit still moves beneath that beam amidst the smoke which will be dust. She did not bend like the grass.”

Ah Lai nodded. The wall in front of him was very hard to see.

The priest went on: “If Tao teaches, it teaches thus. If a lesson is learned, it is learned thus. In the old books we are told to cut and then polish, but by cutting and by polishing we destroy the nature of the thing upon which we work. Tao, if it speaks at all, would say: ‘Relax; offer no resistance; do not allow the happenings of this world to rouse you into that consciousness which, truly, is the death of being . . .’”

Ah Lai nodded twice and sat up with a jerk. The cloying scent of the incense was in his nose and the room was quite dark. He waited for what he thought was too long and then rose to his feet. Feeling his way round the wall he came to where the priest had sat; past the next corner he could hear Winter Cherry breathing evenly and long. He tiptoed out, closing the door behind him and almost fell over the priest, who was sitting just outside the door.

The priest whispered as he steadied Ah Lai: “Come, my nose tells me that someone is cooking something. The girl will not overbalance. What did you dream about?”

“Nothing,” Ah Lai replied, and they moved together through the dark passage towards a glimmer, the sound of stilled voices and the smell of cooking.

“It is good,” Father Peng said when they were seated, “to see my family thus at the one table. A ceremonial separation of sexes and of ages may be appropriate to ceremonial occasions, but there are times when it cheers my heart to see three generations thus doing all the same thing for the same purpose. That we have as guests here my young supplier-of-last-lines and his friend, the Guardian of the Hidden Spring, alters my opinion not at all. As to the last, may I ask him, while we await the first course of our meal, to make a few suitable remarks? That his Hidden Spring is at least the Hidden Spring of Literature, no one can doubt who has heard him quote the great writers of the past with the same facility as he will, I trust, show with his chopsticks.”

The priest said: “On one occasion when Confucius was reproached by his disciples for saying nothing which they could record for posterity, he is said to have replied: ‘Does Heaven speak? The four seasons succeed each other: generations succeed each other. But does Heaven need to speak about this?’ Yet I would venture to comment on what I have just heard. ‘It is good,’ you said, Sir, ‘to see my family thus at the one table.’ There is, however, one of the family which is not seated here with us. Do I not hear her steps outside the door?”

Winter Cherry came in and went to the vacant seat between her mother and Mei.

The priest went on: “After a good and dreamless sleep, however short that sleep may have been, the appetite should be restored. Ah, here is the first course! Are you amazed that I, whose fellows are supposed to take their nourishment from herbs and roots, should gladly contemplate this thick broth whose purpose is to show that the edge of hunger cannot be thus easily blunted? Do not suffer surprise, for food drains the blood from the head and leaves it the clearer. Let the girl serve the broth to us.” As Winter Cherry did so, serving them in the correct order, he went on: “My young friend, you have a poem which you hoped, happily, to deliver yourself. Give it to me.”

Ah Lai took from his pocket the poem which he had written at Sui-yang, and handed it to the priest. Winter Cherry hesitated between the bowls of Mei and Mooi-tsai. Some of the broth fell on the table. She recovered and filled her own bowl last.

When she had sat down, the priest read the even lines of the poem.

Read thus, the poem hangs together, as a good poem should. Girl, since the poem was addressed to you, read me the odd lines.”

When the priest had given her the paper, Winter Cherry read, in a clear voice as if she did not know what words she was reading:

Then she stopped at the word and broke into noiseless sobbing, her face in her hands on the table before her. The Lady of the Tapestry made as if to comfort her, but the priest interrupted quickly: “Leave her alone. Girl, there are but two words remaining to scan the rhythm—two words and one more line. Read those two words and that one line.”

Winter Cherry looked up, then buried her head again in her hands.

The priest repeated: “Read.”

Everyone had stopped eating.

Winter Cherry said: “I cannot.”

The priest said: “Behind me . . .”

Then Winter Cherry cleared her throat and cried: “It was a red, veil of blood, with the sword rising and falling between me and the blood, and a gong beating in time with my heart.”

“The gong was your heart,” the priest said. “Now read the two lines.”

Winter Cherry read:

“And the other line,” the priest repeated.

Winter Cherry read:

Father Peng observed: “If I may venture to offer an opinion, I should say that the poem seems rather more highly-coloured than is customary.”

Peng Yeh “asked: “Will she have recovered?”

The priest replied: “Sir, she had nothing from which to recover. Her mind was clouded, perhaps: she suffered from a misapprehension of the nature of man. But now she sees clearly. Eat, child: here are bean-sprouts. A simple dish, but one calculated to introduce others. A misapprehension of the nature of man.” He addressed Father Peng. “Will you, sir, or shall I tell the story of the squirrel, the cat, the hog and the woodman? It will serve to make my point clearer.”

Father Peng waved the suggestion aside.

“I am sure that I should not bring out quite the shade of instruction which is in your mind,” he said.

The priest helped himself to bean-sprouts from the dish, in the middle of the table, added sauce, stirred the sprouts with his chopsticks, took a trial mouthful, and began: “A certain squirrel, when the weather was cold and snow threatened, remembered a store of nuts which she (for it was a female squirrel) had hidden in a disused rat-hole in a rock face. When she reached the place she found that the entrance to her larder had been blocked by a piece of rock washed into it by the rain, a piece of rock too large for her to be able to move. The first flakes of snow fell, and the squirrel looked round for assistance.

“A cat was passing, and to her the squirrel addressed herself: ‘If you, oh cat, would help me with removing this stone from my store (and the feat is well within your strength) I would gladly repay you with one part in ten of my nuts.’

“The cat replied, scornfully: ‘I do not eat nuts. I eat squirrels, so be off with you.’

“Then the squirrel asked help of a hog who was rooting nearby. If you, oh hog,’ she said, ‘would help me to remove a stone from the door of my store of nuts, I would gladly give you two parts in ten of my nuts.’

“The hog said, eagerly: ‘Nuts? Where?’ So the squirrel did not ask for further help from the hog.

“Then the squirrel went to a man who was felling a tree nearby and said: ‘If you will help me to move a stone from the entrance to my store, I will gladly give you up to five parts in ten of my nuts.’ The woodman put down his axe at once, and went to help the squirrel, and when he had moved the stone and the squirrel had thanked him and was about to enter, he seized the squirrel by the tail, wrung her neck and skinned her on the spot so that the skin could dry a little before he stretched it on a board before curing it. Then he put the skin down, spat on his hands, picked up his axe and went on felling the tree.”

He attacked his bean-sprouts again.

Mei said: “I think that the story is cruel.”

Mooi-tsai said: “Whoever heard of a talking squirrel?”

Winter Cherry said: “Yes. It is the nature of man to skin squirrels. I see.”

Ah Lai put in: “Not all woodmen would behave thus. Besides, it takes many a squirrel-skin to make a coat. He would have obtained the same result for less labour by killing the hog and tanning its hide.”

“That is a fair defence, so far as it went,” Father Peng said. “But I am glad, for the girl’s sake, that you did not pursue the metaphor of the squirrel and its skin too far. She is possibly sore at that point.”

Winter Cherry pretended not to hear this, though Mooi-tsai had to hold the bean-sprouts in her mouth with her chopsticks.

“Little one,” the priest told her, “your turn will come.”

Later, when they had eaten duck with pear-juice, fish fresh from the Wei boiled with chicken-broth, and cakes studded with white peel, Ah Lai, going out for fresh air, saw Winter Cherry following him to the door. He did not stop, as he had intended, but went on towards the summerhouse. Here, after a little, Winter Cherry joined him.

Ah Lai said: “Do you realise that I had hardly the opportunity to speak a single word? It seems to me sometimes that we pay too much deference to age and volubility.”

Winter Cherry answered: “But you did not wish to speak. And the poem was yours. I do not see that you have just cause for complaint.”

They sat down. Ah Lai went on: “Even your father was silent. I can only imagine what it must have been like in the old days, when this prerogative of the old was more fully observed, when you and I should never have been given the chance of speaking thus, together, in the surrounding darkness.”

She, too, went on with what she had been saying before: “It does not matter if one is silent when one has nothing to say. I feel empty and clean.”

“Does Heaven talk about it?” he quoted. “But it is natural that you should have no urgent desire to speak, for you have suffered much, and after suffering the mind is silent in recovering.”

“It does not seem now as if I had suffered anything,” she said. “I feel as I felt before I went to the Palace, the first time. Do you think it right that a girl should have thoughts like mine? Before, it would be a girl’s duty only to cause no anxiety to her parents.”

“Of course you should think for yourself,” he answered. “Of what use is the mind if it is only a reflection of one’s parents? That way, man would never advance. And I cannot avoid feeling that now, with death so near, with death passing by this place and passing on, we cannot remain what we were.”

Winter Cherry said: “A man should share his thoughts.”

“With whom?” Ah Lai asked. “If you share them with these old men they put your thoughts out on a table and stick pins in them. Look at my poem.”

“It was a very good poem,” she replied. “And it was very useful to your friend the priest. I still do not know why I was silent, why I did not seem to be alive, why I did not want to be alive, until he spoke to us both in the growing darkness of the room where Kuei-fei hanged herself, and why speech and living poured back into me when he made me say the word which I feared.”

Ah Lai said: “We are mysterious, even to ourselves. Yes, the priest is a good man. He knows about minds. I wish I could take him with me to Chang-an, where I must go tomorrow on the Emperor’s business. He would be able readily to distinguish between the wise course and the foolish course in those decisions which all those in the Emperor’s service are compelled to take during their duties.”

“I shall talk with him again, if he will allow me to do so,” Winter Cherry said, ponderingly. “I feel that, if I tell him all that is in my mind, that mind will become even clearer. And yet I am afraid to see too clearly. It is as if a man were to become a bird and look down on the doings of men when they were not aware of the bird’s presence overhead. People are different when they do not know that they are being watched. Then, they are more truly themselves. What have you done since I saw you last?”

And Ah Lai, in the darkness of the summerhouse, looked a little ashamed, not of what he had done since he went to Cheng-tu with the Emperor, but of what he had done before then. So, being a little wiser than might have been expected, he strove to give the impression that he would rather not talk about Cheng-tu. He knew that, if she found out from others what had happened there, she would find nothing to his discredit. As regarded the interlude with Honeysuckle and the things that had happened on the road with Kuei-fei, he hoped that she would not enquire. He reserved the right to be himself, he reflected, but all the same it had been summer foolishness. Both of the women had known, much better than he the precise way to get round a man.

Winter Cherry . . . now, was different. She might not understand.

So Ah Lai said that it was late and that he must sleep well before his business at the Capital tomorrow.

Winter Cherry was a little surprised at this, but also a little relieved at the deferment. She followed him back to the buildings and sought to find the priest.

The priest was apparently sleeping in the empty guest-room.

When Winter Cherry entered he sat up and looked at her.

She said: “I wanted to ask if it is right for me to try to see clearly all that is in my mind. I am a little afraid of that.”

The priest replied: “Not to see clearly is not to see at all. You cannot see through a rounded, white pebble in a river bed; though the light comes through it you cannot know what is on the other side of the pebble.”

“But is it wise to see?” she asked. “It may be that at the other side of the pebble are things which we would rather not see.”

“That is for you to decide for yourself,” he said. “The boy is your pebble. Do you wish to turn it over?”

“I do not know,” she said. “I am afraid of what I might find. Yet you have shown me how, by facing my own fears, they may be conquered. Do I wish to face all my fears?”

The priest rubbed his stomach. “As food is not food until a man eats it, so a fear is not a fear until it is experienced. You remember the Master’s words? I mean, of course, Lao Tze, who knew Tao. He said: ‘A window may supply the scenery to fill an empty room. Yet the scenery is not in the room. Hear and see, if you like, but shut out wisdom from the mind.’ You are afraid of being afraid. Open your eyes and your ears, but do not think of what you expect to see or hear. Accept it. Does the boy offer marriage? Has he forgotten all the old formalities about go-betweens and parental arrangements? Then he has forgotten them. That is what you see and hear. Accept it.”

“He has not yet offered marriage,” she said. “His is a very famous family, and famous families observe the conventions.”

“You resemble your very capable mother,” he replied. “She is well-gone with child, yet she strives to conceal it by loose clothing, by unchanged behaviour. Is she trying to conceal it from herself? You, girl, know what is in the boy’s mind, yet you strive to convince yourself that it is proper to await a formal declaration or the visit of a go-between. You know the boy’s mind. Show him that you know it. Now I shall go to sleep again, for this is no problem at all.”

He turned his back on her.

But when Winter Cherry had gone to her room, she found she could not sleep. Somehow she had not said either to Ah Lai or to the priest any of the things which she had intended to say, and although she closed her eyes her imagination drew pictures which she did not wish to dispel. She knew that, in her fresh found clarity of thinking, her mind was playing with thoughts which should not be played with by an unmarried girl until all formalities have been completed and, in a closed and stuffy carrying chair, she is being borne swiftly towards her husband’s threshold.

What was it that the Lady Yang had said, when she and the Emperor had made their secret, solemn pledge?

She rose from her bed, lit the lamp and took writing materials.

She wrote:

She folded up the paper, carried it to the priest’s room and, tiptoeing silently in, put it where he would be sure to find it near his hand. Then she went back to her room, blew out the light, got into bed and was instantly asleep.

On the twenty-third day of the tenth moon, in the city of Chang-an, Ah Lai stood on the outskirts of the crowd to watch Su Tsung, the late Heir Apparent and now, by his own edict, Emperor, enter amidst a thousand shouts. Ah Lai, as he watched, was thinking of the Bright Emperor, Su Tsung’s father, whom the boy had last seen in Cheng-tu. He thought of the Bright Emperor’s self-condemnatory proclamation promising to hand over the Dragon Throne to his son. He compared the present Emperor’s behaviour with the dignity of the old man in Cheng-tu, deciding in consequence that he was himself becoming old-fashioned, conservative and a slave to ceremonial. He slipped away from the edge of the crowd and went to visit Wang Wei, who was next on his list of those officials present in the Capital during the rebels’ period of power, into whose conduct he had been commissioned to enquire very informally and with a particular care to avoid any suspicion that the Bright Emperor (and so his son) wished to have preliminary information before a formal, official enquiry was opened into their conduct. As he went, he regretted, in a way, that he was compelled to send in a card with only his name and family upon it, instead of the pleasantly grandiloquent title which he might have been able to give himself of Enquirer into Activities of Officials during Rebellion.

Wang Wei was living in a small house in Gate Street. When Ah Lai had sent in his card, the servant returned almost at once with Wang Wei ten paces behind him. Paying scrupulous attention to the old ceremonial of greeting, each went backwards eight paces and then came forward again with repeated bows. Wang Wei led backwards into the room beyond, motioned to a seat which the servant brought up and managed with success the difficult business of sitting down at precisely the same moment as Ah Lai without giving to his actions any appearance of lack of spontaneity.

And still Wang Wei had not spoken a word.

Ah Lai waited for his host to speak, waited indeed for a period greater than the most exact courtesy could prescribe. He was at a loss to account for this seemingly chilly reception.

Finally he said: “I trust that you are in the best of health. I have just come from watching the new Emperor pass towards his Palace.”

Wang Wei touched a small gong beside him. Another servant came in bearing writing materials and a small table.

Wang Wei wrote: My heart is fuller of joy than are the thousand hearts of the people of a hundred surnames who greet his Majesty.

Ah Lai, puzzled, read the paper and said: “Your brush has lost none of its skill, your characters none of their beauty and your sentiments none of their wisdom. If you will pardon the enquiry of one who is too young to know better, is it your meaning that joy can be too deep for spoken words?”

Wang Wei motioned for the paper and wrote with flying brush: I could not serve the rebels. When they brought me here against my will I drank a medicine which removes the power of speech.

Ah Lai read this and asked: “Will the power return? It would save effort if you would signal with your hands. I will try to make my questions such that an answer may be one word.”

Wang Wei signed: Yes.

Ah Lai felt himself more awkward than he cared to admit. His dutiful enquiry was plainly answered already. But courtesy could not have permitted his departure after so short though so embarrassing a conversation. He told Wang Wei what he could remember of the new Emperor’s arrival, followed it with a sketch of the happenings when An Lu-shan and An Ching-hsu had gone to the farm at Ma Wei, and the manner in which Winter Cherry had been treated.

Wang Wei wrote: I remember her at the party: a pleasant girl. Honeysuckle was here yesterday. You should go and see her.

Ah Lai managed to round off his visit with compliments which did not call for a wordy reply and finally, concealing his relief, bowed himself out backwards.

In the street he heaved a sigh and went back through one of the side streets in the direction of the focus of excitement. On his way there, he happened to look up and saw the face of Clear Rain round an open door. She beckoned him in.

They were sitting side by side on a low stool at the end of the room when he got in. Clear Rain had her little cheng on another stool in front of her and was idly running the tiny bamboo hammers over the strings.

Clear Rain said: “We were preparing for an entertainment at which we shall be present tomorrow. It is very difficult to remember all the songs which a girl is supposed to know.”

Ah Lai replied: “I was passing when I happened to see you. But do not let me interrupt your practice. What was the name of the song?”

Honeysuckle said, smiling: “Gathering Water-Lilies.”

Clear Rain struck the first notes of the song.

Ah Lai interrupted: “On further thought, I doubt if I really have the time, though I should very much have liked to have heard you again. My real purpose in calling (though it might have been a day or two later had I not seen you) was to thank you not only for having so far disturbed yourselves as to pass on the letter which I sent to Winter Cherry but also to thank you for having acted as you did when she was brought here.”

Honeysuckle observed: “It was fortunate from that point of view that you had written the address of our house on the back of the poem, although, if our friend Winter Cherry exercised her mind at all, she could not but find curious the reference in the note beneath the address to the fact that you could not think of her without thinking of water-lilies.”

Ah Lai replied: “I think that your suggestion when I came in, that you were practising the song which is called ‘Water-Lilies’ was rather more tactful than this second, more direct reference to those plants.”

Clear Rain said: “I must go and see Mother Feng about food.” She rose to her feet, put aside the cheng, and went out.

Honeysuckle said quietly: “There is no sense in being frightened of the title of a song. Besides, I find that my memory is getting worse and worse, so that I cannot possibly imagine why the title of the song or the writing on the back of the poem should make you change your face and look as though there were some secret between us. Remember that Clear Rain knows nothing of that secret. Remember also that my memory is bad. Now, tell me the news.”

Ah Lai spoke of Winter Cherry’s recovery, of the priest, of Father Peng and his interest in the fighting and lastly of the expected arrival of a brother for Winter Cherry.

“It might be a sister,” Honeysuckle told him. “But that would indeed be disappointing.”

Ah Lai said: “The Bright Emperor is coming from Cheng-tu on his way to the Capital and will stop at the Peng’s house for one night. He told me to make arrangements. It seems that he wishes to see the place where she died. I shall have to reach Ma Wei before the Emperor arrives.”

“He wants to remember the Lady Yang?” Honeysuckle asked. “Yes, that is like a man. They miss us, afterwards.”

Clear Rain returned, not with food but with three small cups of wine which she brought and set on a small table beside them. “Do you think,” she asked, “that we might come to the farm again one day? You will realise why when you see me raise my cup, so, and drink to Horses!”

Honeysuckle said: “That soreness, like sorenesses of a different sort, passes rapidly. For my part I drink to my poor memory.”

Ah Lai rose to his feet. “And I,” he said, “beg your permission to drink to both of you. I shall certainly do all that is in my power to have an invitation sent to you.”

They both rose and accompanied him to the doorway.

Ah Lai did not feel that he wished to do any more of the Emperor’s work that day, nor did he find it possible to endure the thought of watching the unique ceremonies whose echoes still crept round the corner of the street as he heard the door shut behind him. He walked rapidly towards the house where he was lodging, thinking against his will of the flat, slowly heaving plates of water-lilies.

Han Im came first. He seemed thinner than when Peng Yeh had seen him last. He did not accept Peng Yeh’s offer to sit down but said: “You will forgive me, sir, if I seem brusque and come to my point at once. The Emperor has been pleased to allow me a few days of leisure from my military duties, and I wish, before the near impending arrival of His Majesty to pay my respects to your honourable father, so that he may be not too much incommoded by the ceremonies of Imperial arrival when I greet him.”

Peng Yeh bowed, passed rapid instructions for last minute preparations to Lo Chin, who stood near the door, and bowed them both towards Father Peng’s room. Then he went away and left them.

The old man strained his eyes and came forward.

Han Im unbuckled the sword from his waist, and held it out towards the old man.

“It has served well,” he said, “and no thanks of mine could be adequate. Shall I put it where it always ought to be?” Without waiting for an answer he tied the straps together and hung the sword on the wall.

Father Peng said: “I am glad that it has been of service to you both. I need hardly say that I have missed it. When the rebels came here my hand itched for the scabbard, but I was helpless. You have heard that they killed my grandson?”

Han Im bowed his head. “No news has reached me,” he replied, “I, of all, am qualified to understand the sorrow which you have not spoken, and to offer the sympathy which is of no avail. I think that you will understand me when I say that your granddaughter, Winter Cherry, brought sorrow to my own heart more often than she knew, when she told me that my face seemed to her like her father’s face. And I, poor fool, had then to look at her and make her feel comfort when it was really I whose claim for comfort was the greater.”

Father Peng replied: “To such a sorrow there is no answer; for such a loss there is no recompense.”

They stood without speaking for more than a little while and then Father Peng performed the courtesy of stools.

“My daughter-in-law,” he said, “is in a position to save me from this great ill. But I am not a magician; I cannot, by divining the cracks on a tortoise shell, know whether my tomb will lastly go untended.”

“Let us hope,” Han Im returned. “Now I must go and stand in the gate, for I was only a little in front of the Emperor. It would be gracious of you, sir, and in consonance with the accepted tradition if you would accompany me to that gate.”

Father Peng replied: “Yes. I will put on my robes of ceremonial greeting. Help me.”

They went out together and stood in front of the great central doors which could only be opened on an occasion such as this.

The Bright Emperor came first, alone, on foot. Behind him two men carried a large sandal-wood box, strung from a pole which they bore on their shoulders.

Father Peng and Han Im kotowed. The Emperor stopped them.

“Once is enough,” he said. “Later you will know why. Han Im, tell the bearers to take the box to the gate, set it down and return. They all have their orders.”

Father Peng seemed disappointed, looking along the path by which the Emperor had come. The bearers had set down the box and gone back.

“No,” the Emperor told him, “there are no others coming. Today I come alone. Han Im, go in and see that I am taken, unmet, to the room which I occupied when I was last here.” He turned back to Father Peng. “Sir, if you will, come with me.”

Father Peng, puzzled, followed. He did not seem able to understand why the Bright Emperor’s commands were couched as requests. Han Im was waiting for them.

“I trust that all has gone well, Sire,” Father Peng said, doubtfully.

“As well as may be,” the Emperor returned. They entered the room where he had last stayed. “Now I will try to solve the riddle which is perplexing your mind. Let us open this box. You see, it contains on the top the clothes which might be worn by any educated man, and here is a scholar’s cap. I remove these trappings, so—help me, Han Im—and replace them by a scholar’s garments, thus. I have a right to wear the scholar’s cap, for I also have written poetry. So. You see before you not the Emperor but the Scholar of the Stream. Forget all but that. The reason, as your raised eyebrow demands? It is this. Let us sit down first. Han Im, scholars talk best with tea. If you could arrange it . . .”

While they waited, the Emperor looked round the room, remembering.

Then Han Im came back, followed by a servant with tea. Han Im sat down, too, and they all sipped.

“Not all my life,” the Emperor said when he had set his cup down, “have I been able, as others have, to speak freely to men,who did not fear me. Now I can do so. Tomorrow I shall leave for the Capital. My son, Su Tsung, will meet me with joy. We shall greet each other. We shall go to the Palace and I shall mourn with him at the desecrated tablets in the Hall of Ancestors. Then I shall give him my great seal—I have it here, in the box—and retire to my other palace, the Palace of Felicity. He will beg me to retain my throne. I shall tell him that I am an old man, and tired. I shall beg to be excused. Then I shall watch my declining years, until the grave provides the solution of all my difficulties. But now—I am the Scholar of the Stream for one day.”

Han Im said: “I understand your mind. Indeed, I am the only one of those about you who has understood your mind for a long while. Like you, sir, I have nothing to lose. Like you, I see left behind me little of good: I look to no productive future.”

Father Peng seemed a little to have recovered his confidence. “As one scholar to another,” he began, hesitated for expected wrath, and went on, “I begin to understand. For us, whose minds should be free, there must be also a time of balancing of accounts.”

The Emperor observed: “Yes. My life has been like the life of the stream whose name I have taken for my one-day tide. A stream starts with small beginnings, silver laughter over stones. Difficulties come—rougher places, mud banks—and the stream flows through a countryside where its direction is at the whim of forces which it does not understand. Men set banks to keep it in. Men take from the stream for their farms and rice fields. More and more sluggishly the stream struggles on towards the wide, calm sea where all memory of it will be lost. I am that stream.”

Han Im said: “Sir, before night falls and you listen in the stillness for footsteps which are not there, would it not be as well if you behaved as simple scholars should? Visiting a friend, thus, one goes first to greet the oldest. Then, with him, one visits the other members of the house. Were you an Emperor, your actions would not have to conform to these rules. As you are but a simple scholar, I would suggest that we visit the honourable Peng Yeh and his household. The boy Ah Lai, who came yesterday, has prepared them for your arrival. He is probably occupied with the girl. If you will see the others . . . By thus conforming, you will the better mould yourself to your chosen part.”

“The fault,” Father Peng said out of turn, “is mine. The suggestion should have come from me. If I may now make it . . . Drink up your tea, Sirs.”

They finished the little cups and Father Peng led the way to the Great Hall.

Peng Yeh shook off Han Im’s restraining hand and prostrated himself nine times.

“I am a simple man,” he said when he had risen, “and I cannot play this game of make-believe. The nine prostrations which are due to you, Sir, are beyond your power to abrogate. I owe them, as we all owe them, to your rank and station, and no Scholar of the Stream can blind my eyes to who you are. Punish me if you will.”

The Emperor said: “Alas, this is a mudbank to my stream. I have, in my life, understood the motives which moved scholars, officials, administrators. I have not been wholly ignorant of the minds of women. But it seems, as I have always suspected, that I knew nothing of the minds of the people of the hundred surnames. Peng Yeh, you have honoured me beyond my wish and you have confirmed the worst fears which I had of my own ignorance.”

Peng Yeh replied: “Sire, I have done my duty. I regret that there are no more men of my family to greet. My wife is in her room surrounded by women. It seems as if her time were to come very soon. My daughters are busy there. I would beg of you to accept my humble greeting as representing all that remains of my family.”

Han Im said: “Sir, this is your own fault. So much of the courtesy of our land has rested on convention that the absence of convention prohibits courtesy.” He chanted:

“You may speak of convention,” Peng Yeh went on doggedly, “but I have been brought up to convention. I have been brought up to expect order and correctness. I plant seed, I watch it grow and ripen, I reap and thresh it. Nature is ordered: nature is conventional. So, if suddenly the ripe grain becomes green, or the grain-shoots shorten and disappear below the earth, I know that the nature of things has altered. So I cannot avoid behaving to you as I should behave to an Emperor. Such is my nature, as it is the nature of grass to grow and ripen.”

Father Peng said: “My son, you do me little credit in thus comparing your conventions, which have been taught to you, and the growth of grain, which is natural to the grain. And yet I remember trying to impress the need for logic upon you. But, if you truly feel thus, it would be better for us to consider this greeting finished.” He bowed, once, to his son. They all bowed once. Peng Yeh again prostrated himself, and they all went out, leaving him on his knees.

“I must apologise for my son,” Father Peng said.

The Emperor replied: “He has shown us what you and I, scholars though we be, will never understand. Would it be possible to see my hostess? I expect your son exaggerates her condition. It is conventional to do so.”

When they reached the women’s rooms, the Lady of the Tapestry was sitting at her embroidery frame.

“You will have to forgive me, your Majesty, if I do not rise to my feet,” she said. “Nature overrides monarchs.”

“Now here is a realist,” the Emperor said, as he stopped the girls from their kotows with a gesture. “Today I am but a simple scholar, Madam—the Scholar of the Stream—and I beg of you to consider that this call is a short one, not made in accordance with custom, but merely from curiosity and an expectation of a more reasonable attitude than that of your husband. Han Im, here I find no new thing. Madam, accept my hopes.”

He led the way out and went back to his own room. Here he found the priest and Ah Lai, waiting for him. He dismissed Han Im and Father Peng, restrained Ah Lai and made him resume his seat, and addressed the priest, who was sitting on the floor.

“So you, at least, recognise that my appearance denotes a change,” he said.

The priest replied: “What matters is the heart.”

Ah Lai produced a list detailing the results of his activities amongst the officials in Chang-an who had worked for the rebels.

“Give it to Han Im,” the Emperor said. “I expect that he is talking with the old man. Go now and see.”

When they were alone, the priest repeated: “What matters is the heart.”

The Emperor said: “I know. But my heart is torn and perplexed, I seek everywhere for some sign that her presence left its mark, and there is no sign. Instead of what I expected, I find a family who have few common thoughts with me, desperately polite, but concerned only with their own way of life. The old man, I know, desires me to write poems with him. Peng Yeh desires only my going and his consequent return to his usual business. The others . . . need I go on?”

The priest replied: “That is what I meant when I said what matters is the heart. Had you really changed, you would not now selfishly be seeking balm for what you think your own tragedy. You would be seeing the tragedies of others, and striving to lessen the effects of those tragedies. The old man—what have you done to ease his sense of frustration, of ineffectual going to a predestined goal without its mattering greatly what he says or does in these, his last few days? Peng Yeh—what have you done to show him that, if no more, you know that the problems of the ordinary man exist, that to wrench a living from the reluctant earth is no problem-free, easy task? And the others, as you say? What have you done for them? Do you not think only of yourself?”

There was silence in the room. Outside, voices distantly, and the wind.

The Emperor said: “No—you are unfair. As a priest you are bound to believe that, after death, souls shall be reunited. It is for the peace of the soul of Yang Kuei-fei that I strive. I need reassurance that all her beauty has not passed wholly into dust, like the beauty of a tree, the beauty of a picture . . .”

“You need reassurance,” the priest replied. “You. It is not she with whom you are concerned.”

The Emperor countered: “Apply the argument to yourself. You have powers, but you will not use them. Do you remember in the Book of Poetry in the minor festal odes?

You have the power, I say. You can cross the highest hills and mountains of the after-land; you can plumb the deepest depths. Take her my message and bring me hers back.”

The priest smiled and said: “The rites are ended. What rites? Do you expect me to do what the old priests did without the payment of a sacrifice? The white bull, the black bull, wine and grain. . . . This is to take but part of the Ode and neglect the other part. Have you an answer to that?”

“Tell me what answer to give,” the Emperor replied.

The priest said: “Ah, the heart is changing. No longer does your Imperial Majesty assume that all men are wrong because you are right. Instead, the Scholar of the Stream asks. Yes, I can give you the answer. It was given before by the great Chuang Tzu, and we priests believe that our Founder himself said it. This is that answer.

There stands your answer. Since, therefore, you have with your scholars’ garments put on also the humility of a scholar, you shall not find yourself unrewarded. Now, go and please the old man. Busy yourself with small things. It is not on every day that he will share brushes with an Emperor.”

The Emperor started on a phrase of thanks, but cut it short in the middle and went out to Father Peng’s room.

“The dusk wind is rising,” Father Peng said. “It gives an overtone to one’s thoughts. I wonder how many poets have thought that thought before and not considered it worth writing down. Have you formed, as I have, the habit of putting down something on paper each day?”

The Emperor replied: “I have formed no habits; perhaps it would have been better for me if I had done so. Seeing oneself thus, in the mirror of one’s own words, it might be possible to avoid some of the mistakes. But, if that is so, it is probable that I have interrupted you in the course of your work.”

Father Peng said: “No, you have not interrupted me, for I have just finished. I was revising and, I hope, improving a poem which I wrote long ago, when I was a young official enjoying his first leave. I called it Returning Home.”

“Might I be permitted to inspect it?” the Emperor asked, and the old man gave him a piece of paper.

He read:

The Emperor replied: “Yes. It is the poem of a young man with the added polish of experience. I see that you refer to your wife.”

“She has been dead a long time,” the old man answered.

They both sat silently for a little while, thinking. Then the Emperor continued: “Your poem bears the marks of being a true experience, truly rendered. I have seldom been so fortunate as to catch the moment upon the tip of my brush and then find the result so well worth preserving. In the atmosphere of official circles, you must know, we tend to greater fragility and less real content. I remember a little thing—though I cannot possibly say why I remember it—a little thing which I wrote presumably to record a temptation which I desired to experience. Since you have been good enough to show me yours . . .” He recited:

After they had rolled it on their tongues, he continued: “A whimsy, you see, possessing form but no content.”

The old man smiled and rose to his feet. “What you have just suggested,” he said, “about form without content makes me realise that the sun sets early in this month and that, while we both still have some claim to form, the evening meal is not for another good hour, and that, being hungry, I am not content to lack content. This is the time, I think, to reveal to you that my literary store has other uses.” From the box he took out wine and cups. “A rather special one,” he said.

They settled down to a period of appreciation, and each managed to remember a number of other poems.

Outside, the dusk wind grew, unnoticed, and the wind beneath the door carried cold.

It was during the hour of the ox, when sick men die most easily because they do not regret their ebbing strength, that this wind rose to a high peak, unaccompanied by rain or snow or sleet or any manifestation of the other powers, raging recklessly past walls and doors, round courtyards and over the black, invisible fields, not seeming a destroyer but an angry force demanding entrance, demanding that men should come forth from their snug shelter and join in the eddying dance of the wind.

The priest woke in the darkness and heard the sobbing of Winter Cherry from the floor near the door.

“And now what moves you, girl?” he asked, when he had lit the lamp.

She cried, softly: “He did not speak.”

The priest replied: “Listen to the winds. There are two winds, just as there are the two principles of Ying and Yang. So there are two sorts of people—men and women. Just as the winds meet, just as the Ying meets the Yang, so people meet. All will be well. Come; I will take you to your room.”

She said: “I do not know even if he loves me.”

“You will see,” he answered. In her room she paused a moment and then said: “I still remember her, when I last saw her and she was sorry for me. And when she died she left one of her hair-combs, kingfisher combs, in the room where she hanged herself. I have kept it.”

“Give it to me,” the priest told her, and she obeyed. “”Why! it is broken in two halves. She knew, then, that death would part her from her lover. I am glad that you have told me all your troubles. Tomorrow you shall have your Ah Lai. Now sleep.”

He left the room and went back to his own. On his way, he saw Han Im about to enter the room of the Emperor. From within came the Emperor’s voice, calling. Han Im shrugged his shoulders and they went in together.

“Let the lamp be lit,” the Emperor cried. “Let more lamps be brought. I cannot sleep, and I am afraid. Call the girl Winter Cherry so that I may not be alone.”

The priest sat down on the floor. “When at the Great Sacrifice, you ploughed your ceremonial furrow, did you turn or stop half way?” he asked.

The Emperor cried: “You are impertinent. I . . .”

The priest interrupted him. “A thing either is or is not,” he replied. “If you are the Emperor, I shall leave you. If you are yet the Scholar of the Stream, I could stay.”

Han Im lit the lamp and was going back to stand beside the door when the priest said: “Put it out. It is for him to learn that thought in the darkness is wiser than thought by lamplight. Wu Ti did not thus call for lights.”

“What of Wu Ti?” the Emperor asked.

The priest said: “Han Im, tell him the story. He should know it already.”

Han Im blew out the lamp and said: “If it is your will, Sire . . .”

The priest cried: “It is not his will but my will. Tell him the story.”

Han Im began: “When Li Fu-Yen, the mistress of the Emperor Wu Ti, died, he sent for magicians to bring her spirit back, and one magician, Shao Weng, did bring her spirit to him so that, seated behind a curtain, he was permitted to see his beloved. Do you not remember, Sire, how he cried:

The Emperor said: “I remember.”

The priest went on: “It would be strange if, here in this dark, another priest should follow a little in the footsteps of Shao Weng.”

The Emperor asked: “Could you do that?”

The priest replied: “With Tao it is possible. But what matters is the heart. The Emperor Wu Ti forgot that he was an Emperor and resigned himself to the will of Shao Weng. He made his mind empty, and the fullness of the Infinite poured in. He asked permission to go beyond the curtain, where her figure walked, but because this permission was not given to him he did not go. Such was the character of Wu Ti.”

The Emperor said: “To make the mind empty is to be like a child. And yet, to have the reason for making the mind empty, one must have passed through childhood. How can you reconcile these two?”

The priest told him: “Because you have asked, by that you have emptied your mind. Therein you have done what is necessary. But there is more yet.”

“What?” asked the Emperor.

The priest replied: “When you first mounted the Dragon Throne you did much good to your people. You forbade extravagance, you established houses for the study of literature and the training of performers in plays. You founded the Han-Lin Academy, where scholars study before they are allowed to govern. And then, for ten years, you have passed these things by and thought only of yourself and your lady. By what of these actions would you choose to be remembered when, in the unthinkable future, historians shall allow one line to your reign?”

The Emperor replied: “I had rather be known for the Academy.”

The priest returned: “Good. But yet, in these last ten years, there have been many whom you have wronged. Would you right those wrongs now?”

For the first time the Emperor’s voice seemed softer. It was almost as though he took pleasure from what he said as he uttered the single word: “Yes.”

The priest said: “If the Scholar of the Stream would write an edict to say that he renounces all his claims on the girl Winter Cherry and gives her (all laws, customs and conventions notwithstanding) to the boy, Kuen Ah Lai, who loves her and is loved by her, and if the Scholar of the Stream would affix the Emperor’s sign-manual at the foot of the paper, one wrong would have been righted.”

Han Im asked: “Shall I light the lamp?”

The Emperor replied: “No. It is not needed now. The fear has passed.”

The priest said: “Han Im, it is not fitting that you should share this. Go and prepare a draft of the edict.”

When Han Im had gone out, the priest lit incense at the bottom of a deep bowl, so that when their eyes again were accustomed to the darkness (for even the flicker of the tinder seemed bright) it was possible to see a faint glow from this bowl. Then he said: “It would be a strange tale if the Guardian of the Secret Spring were sent on an errand, and if he succeeded in that errand; it would be strange if, like Shao Weng, he searched the thousand hills and plumbed the thousand depths, if finally he found, in the Blessed Isles, tales of a fair lady who waited for reunion with her lord. It would be stranger still if having come to a palace in the clouds, he knocked and to him came the maid named Piece of Jade, who told him that her mistress, too, had waited news from across the barrier. And most miraculous of all would it be if this lady herself came to meet him with hair disordered by her sudden joy above her white forehead, her kingfisher pins awry in her haste, and gave him messages of love, saying that she also was waiting for their union, sending her lover half of her broken hair-comb for a token, and, for proof that she was she, telling of words which they spoke together at midnight in the palace garden when seven moons and seven days had passed, words that no other lips had spoken, words that no other ears had heard.”

The high wind had dropped to little more than a rustle and the room was filled with the acrid, sweet smell of the incense. A voice called somewhere else in the building and then was silent.

The Emperor, tenseness in his voice, asked: “What were these words of recognition?”

The priest replied: “Would she not have said that they prayed to be like two one-winged birds, mating, or two limbs of the one tree?”

The Emperor cried: “These were our very words! So did we pledge each other on the day of the double seven. And the token?”

The priest replied: “A hand moves in the darkness upon the fur-lined rug. The fingers of this hand searching . . .” He turned his head towards the door and called: “Enter, and bring a lamp with you.”

In the yellow, flickering wedge of light which advanced and widened as Han Im came in with the lamp, the Emperor’s fingers closed upon the broken half of the comb.

“Leave me for a little,” he said.

Han Im observed: “I have the edict here, with brush and ink.”

The Emperor seized the brush and signed the paper. Han Im and the priest bowed once and went out.

The door shut.

The priest told Han Im: “Carry this to the boy’s room, wake him and tell him to take it to his wife. My work is done. You are, I think, of all these here the nearest to knowing the brightness of Tao. But I shall not say: ‘It would be good to meet again,’ for Tao takes no cognisance of meetings, and in Tao desire even for so small a thing is dead.”

He bowed to Han Im and went to his room.

When Ah Lai, carrying a black case with all his belongings, went into Winter Cherry’s room, she was fully dressed and the light was lit.

“I have just come from my mother,” she told him. “Mei and I are sharing the watching. She is there now with one of the old servants. I was just about to sleep. But why are you here? You have much work to do tomorrow, and must sleep soundly in order to do it well.”

He replied: “I have already slept a little. But I was awakened by Han Im. He gave me this.” He handed her the Emperor’s edict.

She read it and then looked up. “But how did he know about us?” she asked with wonder in her voice.

He said: “Such small matters as the ways of knowing of an Emperor concern us not at all now. I do not know and it is certain that you cannot know either, so what is the use of asking, my wife?”

She replied: “You are quite right. And all the while I thought that you, even, did not know how I felt.”

“Little Star,” he cried, “I have felt so ever since I first saw you, trembling a little, in the Porcelain Pavilion. So has my heart been moved since first I heard you speak, since first I saw the sorrow in your eyes lessen at the sight of me, since first I learnt how useless fingers are for tasks which are new to them.”

“It is easy to hear that you have been brought up in the company of poets,” she told him, “for even those thoughts which I think you feel are neatly marshalled into epigrams and antithesis, so that they glitter with what I trust is not a too misleading brilliance.”

“You, yourself, have been well educated,” he replied. “The wind has dropped, but there is still a draught beneath the door. I shall put a mat, thus, in front of the crack, and set this chest upon it.”

Winter Cherry hesitated. “But you cannot intend to stay here, with me, in my own room,” she objected. “My parents would be angry and turn me out.”

He took the Emperor’s written edict from her hand and read out: “All law, customs and conventions notwithstanding. Your parents cannot be angry, with the Emperor’s written words before them. Besides, you yourself said that your mother was not in a fit state to be troubled by such things. And your father?”

“My father,” she replied, “sits on the edge of a stool, awaiting news. He would be a practical man, if we told him, and say that the birth of a son is a much more important matter than our marriage, and that our marriage can therefore await his impatience.”

Ah Lai laughed. “But you, Little Star, do not think that anything could be more important than our marriage, do you? Besides, it is not for your father to say, since the wishes of the Emperor come first.”

“You have latterly become a very conservative,” she said. “Now that you have the Emperor on our side, you defer to the Emperor. Before, you used to say ‘Who is the Emperor, that he should have you?’”

Ah Lai returned: “Do not strive to make me too consistent. You would not like that. And if you go on talking it will soon be too late for us to sleep at all. Besides, you will not have the duty of explaining to your parents. Now that you are my wife, that duty devolves upon me, and I shall have no fear in telling them that you have had the good fortune to enter my distinguished family without the expensive ceremonies with which custom hinders the consummation of sense, and without endless discussions through commission-taking go-betweens regarding dowries, marriage settlements and other financial arrangements which matter not at all to us, standing here for the first time together without the need for dissimulation or subterfuge.”

“That makes it very different,” she agreed.

He went on: “Also, I would rather face your family with accomplished facts, for I believe that your father, at least, regards marriage as something lower than the friendship which one man has for another. Our more personal feelings are new-fashioned and fit ill with the general opinion of the times. That is all the more reason for telling your parents later, when there is no chance of their interposing difficulties. They are even capable of arguing about a thing so final as the Emperor’s edict. And now, have I talked enough for us to go to bed?”

She said: “Yes. But give me that paper first. I must put it in a safe place in order that I may show it to my mother tomorrow. It would not be right to do otherwise.” Then she smiled up at him and went on: “I am not afraid, now. I am glad that you have always felt like this.”

He laughed: “Not always.” Then he relented, and added: “Not before I met you at the Pavilion. That would have been too much to expect. Now, I believe that the things which husbands and wives usually say to each other begin: ‘Do you remember’ and so I ask if you remember how clumsy my fingers were when I buttoned your boy’s clothes upon you. Do you?”

“Only too well,” she replied, helping him.

Later, when the wind had died so that it no longer moved the piece of loose thatch on the wall by the gate, and it seemed that the line of the first light was breaking if anyone cared to look for it, there was a bustling and a hurrying in the rooms of the Lady of the Tapestry, and after a while a thin cry and then the sound of Peng Yen’s footsteps as he hastened round to his father’s room and, breaking into dreams of ancient ceremonies cried: “It is a son!”

But neither these noises nor the padding of Father Peng’s feet as, furred and waistcoated, he passed on his way to demand more certain proof, came into the consciousness either of the two who lay, clasped in each other’s arms upon too narrow a bed, nor of the Emperor as he slept with peace in his face and both hands still grasping a broken comb.

But when it was just light enough to see the clear outlines of her window, Winter Cherry woke. She woke slowly, luxuriously, and without a question in her mind. How strange it was to greet the morning thus, not alone! How curious to know at once, instinctively, that she had now a duty to rouse her husband and set him on his business for the Emperor. He would need hot broth, and then something a little more filling. . . .

She shivered, wholly with delight, and moved Ah Lai’s arm from her neck, laying it between them. He did not wake. She climbed out from under the rugs and skins and stepped carefully over his sleeping body to the floor. The embers in the narrow flue under their k’ang glowed still perceptibly, and she put a stick or two of fresh charcoal on the glow, fanning it a little, inaudibly, with her breath as she squatted on all fours by the bed.

She stood up and looked through the crack in the oiled paper window at the growing line of the horizon. The cool wind of dawn seemed to caress her skin: she ran her hands down from breast to hips with a tremulous delight. It was all his. There was certainty in her love. All the past was past and, forgotten. She hoped her hair would soon grow to its proper length: she was sure her husband liked properly long hair. Just now it was neither one thing nor the other—a sort of mane which defied orderly treatment.

Ah Lai said: “I can see that I shall not need to leave my own house for entertainment. No—no; you need not start so hurriedly to protect yourself against the chill of the morning. You did not do so until I spoke to you. It is absurdly early: come back here. Many a husband has wisely sent his wife back to her parents because she woke him too early. I am still quite sleepy. You have put some charcoal in the k’ang? Then come and keep me warm.”

She protested: “But you have to be up early, to go on your duty. Oh! Do not look at me like that!”

He laughed: “Why not? But if you prefer it, you can have this fur rug and pretend to be a bear, and then I shall look at you differently. If you stay out there like that, you will be so cold that I shall not welcome you back here. Come, let us agree under more comfortable circumstances.”

“Fetch me,” she answered, and when he had done so and they were both warm again she said: “You are not in the least like what I expected.”

He said: “Well, what did you expect? Were you judging me by a high standard, or a low? I did not marry you in order to be compared to someone else. A husband must be incomparable.” He patted her. “There! I did not mean to be cruel. A life with a poet uncle has unfitted me for the more considerate sort of sincerity.”

She snuggled down under the rugs. “I am defenceless now,” she told him. “Before, I did not mind what people said to me, for the people themselves did not matter to me. But now you . . .”

“I?” he said. “I matter very much. Listen, if you are not too busy. A girl once told me the tale of the man whose wife was too imaginative. Do you want to hear it, you there, under the rug?”

There was an affirmative movement.

He went on: “It happened in the winter, in the North, where the snow can be very thick and the cold very bitter. The husband had come in after his work and, when he had eaten the evening meal which his wife had cooked for him, they went to bed. Now she had prepared against the cold by making a larger fire than usual under their k’ang, and he was tired enough to go to sleep at once without noticing the added comfort. Since she followed him, she had no means of knowing what was happening, and soon slept also. In the morning, when they woke . . . Are you listening?”

There was no reply. He, too, retired further under the rugs and shut his eyes. Outside the window the dawn climbed.

Dawn lit the swiftly moving clouds, dappled salmon and cinnamon. The Great Gate opened and the Emperor came out with Han Im. Two servants carried the box and set it down outside the gates. Then they went in and the main gates closed. Father Peng came out of the left hand, smaller gate, dressed in his last official robes, and waited. A carriage drove up along the outer wall and the driver, getting down, pulled the box up into it. The carriage turned and went back the way it had come, to the lower ground on the right which was not yet fully lit.

As the sun came up, its first rays touched the bright tip of the Dragon Banner which hung at its post in front of the cavalry on the left of the line. In the centre the infantry waited; on the right the archers, their bows of mulberry slung, reached out of the lower ground into the growing light.

The Emperor started walking up the slope. Han Im, following, wondered how many of the cavalry were the same men who, not long ago, had galloped in line across and across the ground in front of them, to which the Emperor was leading. How many remembered that day?

The Emperor walked on towards the spot.

So did times, seasons, and events repeat themselves. For, after all, life was but an endless repetition of the life of one’s fathers, and historians, writing in the centuries to be, would not know what filled the thoughts of this man as he paced slowly towards the spot which had been for him almost the end of living.

“This was the place,” Han Im said.

The Emperor stood motionless with lowered head.

Beside them other figures had come now, officials who had fled on that fatal morning with the Emperor and who now shared the Emperor’s thoughts. Their eyes were wet.

Then the Emperor raised his head and looked at the ridge, where Han Im, too, could see the figure of the priest motionless against the moving clouds. The Emperor bowed, looked once again at the ground, and said to Han Im: “Let us go.”

The Emperor’s carriage and those of the few who had stood with him came, halted, then wheeled back to their places in line. Han Im mounted the horse which had been brought for him. In the now level rays of the full sun the ranks broke into ordered movement down towards the road for Chang-an.

Han Im suddenly remembered what he had forgotten. He galloped down towards Father Peng, dismounted and bowed.

“It is the Emperor’s command,” he said, “that your grandson-in-law, Keun Ah Lai, be instructed to report at the Palace tomorrow, not today.”

Father Peng bowed and replied: “It shall be as you say. The child is strong, like his father. He was feeding just before I came out.”

They bowed again to each other and Han Im rejoined his company.

As the sun rose higher and lemon came to take the place of pink, and then that lemon turned to a misty white, Father Peng saw the last of the Emperor’s force turn the corner and pass from sight.

He made the full nine-fold kotow, dusted his knees and went back through the gate.

The tenth day of the first moon, new style.

Winderton.