Ah Lai said: “‘Woman-ridden’. That is the talk of madmen.”
Winter Cherry did not speak, but he was surprised to find that she so far forgot the rules of behaviour as to touch his sleeve gently. From the living rooms a voice sang, just audibly, a song of the Han campaigns.
Ah Lai said: “Life is a campaign, and to him a joyous one. I do not feel to-night that I could ever say to you again the things which I said to you at the Pavilion of Porcelain, but I do not regret having said them. I meant them then, and I am not of those weak ones who veer and back like a lake wind in autumn. Nevertheless I am very tired, and I am going to bed now. I am so tired that for once I am quite content to leave to the military officers the problems which it seems will confront them. You, too, must be tired. Let us bid each other good-night, for if we fell asleep where we are now it might lead to pleasant but awkward misunderstandings. Walk well. If I have seemed to say nothing which was expected of me, you may ascribe that merely to fatigue. Had it been otherwise, I would have spoken otherwise.” He rested his hand for a moment on her shoulder, felt her shiver at his touch in the warm night, took away his hand and rose to his feet. “I was not at my best to-night,” he said as he left her.
Winter Cherry did not for some minutes rise from her seat in the summerhouse, but when she did she was still conscious of his touch upon her shoulder, as a delightfully remembered thing which unbalanced the rhythm of her heart and made it difficult for her to set her mind firmly on what she knew that she had to do on the morrow. Then she went back to her own room.
When Yang Kuei-fei came to the room of Winter Cherry, the girl was sitting on the bed at the end of the room, lost in thought. She started up when Kuei-fei came in, as habit dictates to a minor star when the moon sweeps into the sky.
“You are thinking,” Kuei-fei said, sitting down on the bed and motioning Winter Cherry beside her. “Do not be shy, girl—you and I are in no very dissimilar circumstances. Disaster sniffs at our heels, like a mongrel bitch.”
Winter Cherry replied, sitting down: “Yes. Even when I am awake I seem to be sleeping. I have been so ever since . . .”
Kuei-fei said: “He sent for you, that last night. I was angry with that, for though I did not want him myself, I grudged him to you. Yen told me of it.”
“I had to go,” Winter Cherry told her. “Han Im fetched me. His Majesty talked a great deal.”
“Some men,” Kuei-fei answered, “have need of women to hear what they have to say. Such is our Emperor. I know that it seems disheartening to serve merely as a waste-box for words, but you must remember that I have known him for long, and that in years one gains an insight into failings and virtues which is, by the ignorant, called love.”
Winter Cherry did not reply at once. Then she said, slowly: “I do not wish to think that any man whom I loved could become just a literary habit. But I suppose that, when you come to know them better, men seem very ordinary. That is a thought which I should prefer to put behind me.”
They sat without speaking for a while. Then Kuei-fei observed: “We women who have known a man for a long time are apt to seem not so much patronising as unimaginative, to you who are in the first flight of emotion. It is, I assure you, only a protecting screen to our real feelings. If we regret the passing of romance and take refuge in superficial cynicism, we do so only to conceal (even from ourselves) that our hearts are being slowly but surely ground to powder by the disillusionment born of experience, by the dull colours in which habit can paint what was once inspiration.”
Winter Cherry replied: “I do not think with so many words. I do not strive to spear my meaning on a hair-pin. And I think that I, who shared the honour of the Emperor’s couch not so long ago, should be spared this talk of love, which I begin to suspect is not a frequent visitor to that couch.”
Kuei-fei said, seriously: “What matters is what a girl means by the word ‘Love’. Love, to me, means each of those unforgettable moments when personalities are centred to a fine, glowing point, and these two points play, like amorous fire-flies, in the dark which is the rest of life. At such moments words are spoken which even the speaker hardly hears, but words which are kept unstained and undistorted through a hundred of later-lived moments. Thus I remember our pledging each other . . . Why am I saying this to you?”
Winter Cherry did not speak.
Kuei-fei went on: “On the night of the double seven, in the Palace darkness, we were to be two, mating, one-winged swallows—two limbs of a single tree. That is the sort of pledge which we women remember.”
“No man has ever said that to me,” Winter Cherry said. “But I think that one man once meant it. You will not think me wrong if I tell you? We are both in my father’s house, and I do not feel here as I felt at Chang-an.”
“Go on,” Kuei-fei told her.
Winter Cherry continued: “When His Majesty slept, I ran away to the Porcelain Pavilion, because the poet, Li Po had been kind to me earlier. Han Im followed me, as he said was his duty. But those two could not, between them, have prevented the wall of sorrow which swept over me. I should have killed myself. There was a boy, the nephew of Li Po, and he said things to me which made me forget my sorrow and what I felt should have been my shame. I cannot remember exactly what he said, but I did not want to kill myself any longer.”
Yang Kuei-fei did not urge Winter Cherry to say more. She sat still, on Winter Cherry’s bed, thinking of Ah Lai and of how easy it had been for her to bend him. And, accustomed even as she was to conquest on easy terms, she felt a little sorry to have streaked the bright surface of young love by a momentary and tawdry delight in capture. She knew that this regret was quite unlike her, and that it would probably pass almost at once. And yet she felt something of the sensation of one who has lightly laughed during the Great Sacrifice. She could not clear her mind of this common dross of compunction. What could she set up against Winter Cherry’s simpler yet sublimer love? You smash a vase, and the potter’s graceful thought lies before you in a thousand pieces. You stir the mirror of a pool, and though the ripples subside, the mirror is never quite the same again, afterwards. Was her life really so important, even to herself? Even to the Emperor? And why consider the Emperor now, when all her life had been spent in considering herself?
She brushed at a speck of dust on the back of her hand and got up.
“It must be comforting to love like that,” she said as she went out, leaving Winter Cherry still sitting on the bed, thinking of Ah Lai and the Pavilion of Porcelain.
Han Im, on his mat in front of the door of the room in which the Emperor was sleeping, woke at a touch and realised that he must have been dozing. Father Peng was at his side, making motions with his finger to enjoin silence.
Father Peng said: “Take this sword. It was mine.” He put into Han Im’s hand a beautiful ivory-hiked weapon, sheathed. “Men have been talking outside my window. They are going to take the Emperor’s favourite on to the slope of Ma Wei hill and trample her under the horses. I am fearful that ill should come to his Majesty—the woman does not matter. You are younger and stronger than I, or I would offer my own services to him. Take this and use it. Not for the first time will it be drinking a rebel’s blood.” He crept away and left Han Im with the sword. Han Im belted it on and got to his feet. As he did so a slip of bamboo bearing rapid characters caught his attention. It had been lying by his head on the rough pillow, and he recognised Winter Cherry’s writing.
Kuei-fei must take my place with my mother until the Emperor has gone. I know that he loves her, and I am doing this for him. It will be quick. Winter Cherry.