“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.