Later, when Ah Lai had read the Emperor’s orders in his room, he said to the priest: “I should wish to go to Sui-yang. But . . .”
The priest told him: “If you have read your histories as I expect you to have done, you will have sensed that when any such great events as these thrust themselves on man’s consciousness, he says with convinced optimism: ‘Now, after this, it is impossible for anything to be ever again the same. We start afresh from now. No longer shall we make the same mistakes, for we are wiser.’ And then he goes out and marries a wife or buys a horse or writes a poem, just as he would have done had no great events come to hinder him.”
Ah Lai replied: “Yes, it is as you say. But you have spoken of commonplace actions which we men do in spite of the great events which pass over our heads. I, too, am concerned with those commonplace actions, or at least with one of them, for in the stress of the Emperor’s service I have left behind me in the Capital (or, rather, near it) a girl for whom I have an affection.”
The priest said: “Fevers and the worship of women come upon us unawares, and even wise men cannot avoid them.”
Ah Lai went on: “I saw her first when she was full of the sorrow which overtakes a girl when she has known for the first time what it is to be taken by a man. He was an old man, and she found this made her unhappy. Also, she did not love him. So she ran away, and it was then that I found her. She would not listen to what I had to say to her, and I did not find that unreasonable, for her mind was full of the picture of the old man, so that all her thoughts were coloured by him, and I feared that she had lost more than her maidenhead. Nevertheless, I knew that I loved her, and I think that she is not unmoved by the thought of me. Then I was compelled to come on here, in the Emperor’s train, and had, so, to leave her with hardly a farewell. I do not know what has happened to her: I do not know if sorrow has passed, nor if she would now listen to me. So I proposed to write a poem for her, so that she might know what I feel. And how am I to send this poem to her? I am to go to the key city of Sui-yang, to gain first-hand impressions for the Emperor of the possibility of defending it. The Emperor does not trust the judgment of military men in military matters, for he believes them to be prejudiced. So he sends me, a civilian, to dig for truth. Nevertheless, if I go to Sui-yang, I cannot take letters myself to Chang-an. Besides, the rebels are there, as Han Im said, and I could not pass through their lines to her.”
The priest said: “Then that difficulty is easily settled, for I can carry your letters for you. A priest can pass through battling armies unnoticed. It is true that I had not contemplated going anywhere near Chang-an, but if I have a duty at all it may be done there as well as here. You have friends in Chang-an?”
“I know only of two girls,” Ah Lai answered. “Their names are Honeysuckle and Clear Rain, and anyone in Chang-an will help you to find them. You mean that you would carry my letter to Chang-an and these girls could take it further? But surely I am relying too greatly on the kindnesses of others—on your kindness and the kindness of these girls. I know only one of them at all well, and that was the accident of a summer night.”
The priest replied: “I will take your letter. You may rest assured that I shall persuade the girls to deliver it. Now you need talk no further. Rest to-day. Write your letters. I shall come to see you early to-morrow morning, before I go, by routes which you need not know, back to the Two Capitals.”
Ah Lai sighed with relief to see how circumstances again bent themselves towards him, bowed to the departing priest, and drew writing materials towards him. With the beginnings of an appetite, he began to set words in order for a poem which should show Winter Cherry how he still felt.
It was then, three months later, between the period called Cold Dew and the period when Hoar Frost Descends, at the hour of the dog. Peng Yeh and Father Peng sat before a small table. The remains of the evening meal had been removed. A yard further from the table the Lady of the Tapestry sat, so that she might be referred to, instructed and even, perhaps, consulted in the council-of-family which Peng Yeh purposed. A lamp stood on the table: two rushlights on the walls made the rest of the room dark.
Peng Yeh said: “It is time for me to consider the circumstances of our eldest daughter. I have thought on this matter and come to a conclusion. I wish, my father, to hear from you how this conclusion appears to you. It will then be for us to instruct my wife accordingly.”
The Lady of the Tapestry did not speak. She sniffed just audibly enough for her men folk to hear her. Neither gave a sign of having heard.
Father Peng said: “When I was your age, I consulted my father before coming to conclusions. But you may be right. Let me hear your conclusions and the considerations which led up to them.”
“The girl is no longer in the fullest sense my daughter,” Peng Yeh said. “When a girl has passed out over the family threshold, whether it be to marriage with some suitable young man who has been chosen for her, or to the more honourable state of a girl in the Emperor’s palace, she has ceased to be, fully, a daughter. She no longer ties a red cord round her plaited hair. Her clothing and feeding are at another’s charge, The father does not still have to be opening his coffers for the expenses which girl-children bring with them.”
Father Peng agreed: “It is as you say. But if the husband dies in poverty, the girl comes back.”
“Not of right, but only of compassion,” Peng Yeh returned.
His wife murmured, tentatively: “If . . .”
They both turned to her.
She continued: “If the husband is dead and there is no money after paying for his burial, it would be folly for the wife to go her husband’s family, since they would certainly attribute his death to her neglect, or to some circumstance which would make her visit to their roof (for more than a very brief time) into a source of recurrent sorrows and memories of the son which they had lost. No, it is in her own father’s house that she should find refuge.” Then she added: “She should find refuge there even if she is so changed that only her own mother recognises her.”
Father Peng observed: “Since her husband is not dead, and since I can hardly imagine that the Emperor, constrained as he is by the presence of a usurper on the throne, would again welcome my insignificant grand-daughter into a household which must be in a difficult situation . . .”
Peng Yeh smiled. “We have, indeed, been discussing something which was beside the point,” he said. “But the affair is unprecedented. The girl is neither married nor unmarried. I considered this as soon as you told me of her secret coming, and decided that the balance lay on the side of her being unmarried. I therefore, since we are by now used to doing without her, looked round for a suitable match—a family to whom I might send the official go-between with the confidence born of social equality.”
The Lady of the Tapestry stirred uneasily. Then, taking courage, she said: “The girl seems happy here. She is useful, and does not constitute a drain on our resources. Her fingers are nimble with needle and loom. After all that she has been through, would it not be possible to leave her here a little longer?”
Father Peng asked: “What does the girl herself say?”
They both stared at him in surprise.
Peng Yeh cried: “But surely you do not expect me to ask my own daughter about her future? No one ever heard of such a thing. To consult her would be to rock the foundations of the Empire. Why, even the Master . . .”