Seuen replied immediately, without thinking: “To obey the orders of his commander.”
Father Peng said softly: “Yet you queried an order.” He laid his hands upon the table, palms upwards.
General Tung said to the Captain: “Tell him to go and wait.”
The Captain of the Guard gave the necessary orders to the two men who were by the door. When Seuen had been taken away General Tung said: “I am not familiar with this situation. It has not occurred in any of the military histories which I have read. Would you do me the incomparable favour of resolving it for me?”
Father Peng began: “It is contained in the records of an obscure campaign of five hundred years past, during the Han Dynasty, in the neighbourhood of the city of Heng Tsin, not far from here. The defending troops were under the command of the magistrate of the city, while a certain rebel general, known as Tiger Lu, rode at the head of the southern forces. It is an old problem. One is compelled to decide whether to attack on the right, centre, or the left. There is only one answer—the centre. I need not trouble you with the reasons for this decision, other than to point out that the man on the lower level is always at a military disadvantage, and therefore the ridge had to be occupied, and that, once astride the ridge and on a level with the defending forces, it is useless and indeed foolish to waste both time and energy in descending from the ridge with any part of one’s forces. If I remind you that he who rides on a tiger cannot dismount, straining the metaphor perhaps, you will understand why. Alas! I have now altered the problem completely, since it would appear that I have eaten two-thirds of this excellent southern force, that the armies are now equal, and that in the absence of the man Seuen (who must certainly be executed tomorrow since he exhibits the most dangerous of all characteristics in a soldier—the ability to think for himself) I find that the motive power behind my thoughts, the incentive to military analysis, has vanished as completely as those unfortunate men whose bones lie scattered here upon the table. Besides, I have hardly heard anything lately from your own lips.”
General Tung and the Captain of the Guard rose to their feet, bowed very low to Father Peng, and went out to their temporary quarters.
Peng Yeh and Ah Lai, each feeling that too much had been said for comment to be tolerable, went out also, bowing as they passed.
Father Peng sat on in the still, unwavering light of the lamps, fighting over a half-remembered campaign, and decimating the opposing melon-seeds quite impartially.
It was late in the first watch—the hour of the dog. Ah Lai, as he came out of the bright lamplight, found that he could see nothing at all of the buildings round him save the glimmers of light at the oiled windows of living rooms, the clear-cut, corrugated outline of roof-ridges against the almost imperceptible violet of the sky, the veiled suggestion of stars which some high haze made seem mysterious and, away towards the village, the gentle glow of two camp-fires fitfully smudging the northern sky. Before him a blacker gap opened in the black rectangle of sheds and storerooms which served as a boundary to the little formal garden beyond, and through this blacker gap he walked, his feet uncertainly feeling their unaccustomed way, towards the little summerhouse which he had seen in daylight beside the miniature and useless bridge. He went to the summerhouse, felt distrustfully for the plank seating which should run round its enclosed sides, and seated himself, prepared to indulge in what his mind would have considered a pleasant quarter of an hour’s analysis of his own position.
It was, he assured himself, a pivotal date. Hitherto he had but been at the whim and wish of his uncle’s fancy: now, if the hints of General Tung meant anything, responsibility would enter. His mind, effortless in the friendly dark, slid easily over a boyish past, through adolescent experiences which his uncle had curiously encouraged, over hunting expeditions and literary evenings and through the narrow, welcoming, scented doorways of blue houses. And had all this, he mused, in any way fitted him for this sudden growing-up, with its unwanted accretions of responsibility, its right to direct the lives of other men who (his innate commonsense assured him) were probably far better qualified to direct their own? He reflected on the cause of this change, on the sudden realisation with which he had first seen Winter Cherry at the Porcelain Pavilion, and on his irrational but quite instinctive and immediate decision that she, without either knowing or intending it, had disrupted the easy flow of events and (since a poet’s nephew might be permitted a metaphor) had scattered the stars of surprise, or, alternatively, had set them swaying drunkenly upon the not-long-ago smooth, dim, surface of his life’s stream. Ah well, what had to be, had to be, and Winter Cherry seemed to have served her purpose only in compressing into a narrower space of months—or was it days?—his undoubted transformation.
Then he realised, even as his eyes became more accustomed to the dark, that someone was breathing within a foot of him and heard Winter Cherry say: “I am sorry that you did not know I was here, but I could not get out.”
After a few thumps his heart resumed its normal beat, and he said: “I did not know that you were there, but it is possible that the curious spirits of the land may have brought our thoughts together, for indeed I was thinking of you and of how you had changed me.”
“This is my home,” she said, “but, even so, I do not think that you and I should be sitting together thus in the dark. I had been thinking, also. Do you know that only my mother recognised me when I came?”
He laughed softly, surprised at the pleasant suggestion of his own laughter. “I thought that you, now that your troubles and your honours alike are over, would not too clearly remember what brought us together. In my experience of women I have always found them ready to forget any inconvenient service which has been paid them, such as the service which my uncle and the eunuch Han Im paid you when they helped you to run away from the palace at Chang-an. If you have been thinking, as you say, I judge your thoughts to have dwelt upon a welcome return to the routine of a woman’s duties, a routine which in spite of its lack of excitement provides for you the alternative to the soft delights of palace life.”
“That was not my thought,” she answered softly. “I was thinking that you, now, . . . Hush!”
Voices were coming towards them. Ah Lai could see nothing of the speakers, and Winter Cherry sat motionless beside him.
One voice said: “Then we shall tell them to-morrow. Such a woman as she is cannot be allowed to live. We must trample her under the horses out there, on the slope of Ma Wei.”
The other voice replied: “What you suggest is very dangerous, but if the opportunity is not seized now, the opportunity will pass. The case of the punishment designed for the fool Seuen is as good a one as is likely to arise. And, if she is killed as well as that fat eunuch Han Im, then we shall at last have a government of men.”
The first voice went on: “Perhaps it will be enough if we kill only the woman. Eunuchs, unlike girls, can be made to see sense. Yes, we must do it now. The Captain of the Guard and General Tung can recognise truth when their noses are rubbed on it, and it is the duty of every loyal man to do for the Emperor what he has been prevented from doing for himself by reason of being woman-ridden.”
The speakers moved off and their voices joined with the gentle movement of the wind.