He laughed at her: “You have put on the clothes which Kuei-fei ordered to be made for my visit, ten years ago, to the village of Pa, to consult a magician who lived there.” He made a gesture which itself, magically, took her to the crest of a hill overlooking the Yangtsze Gorge, spreading before her the limitless ranges of the land and the arrow of the river. “To see a magician, and now to see you!”
“I have not seen so many places as your Majesty,” she replied, and added, “or so many summers.”
He frowned. “The dignity of time has not yet bestowed on me the disabilities of time,” he said. “Is that what you meant?”
“I mean nothing,” she answered, fencing with the question, and starting to believe some of the tales of Imperial fancy. “But it is true,” her honesty added.
“Listen,” said the Emperor. “Since I took my place as the centre and hub of the world, I have been pursued by the inaccessible meanings of others. They hide their thoughts from me, who can tear from them every other concealment. But they are too stupid even to know what they mean. Again, I am hedged round by the customs and habits of the past. You are carried in to me naked in swansdown because the safety of some ancient emperor was imperilled. We are, today, surrounded by peonies in ugly pots because once, in remote history, an emperor decreed a feast of peonies on this day for the delight of himself and his mouldering favourite. The fact that you are here at all may be laid at the door of past emperors, and even I cannot break the custom.”
Winter Cherry tried not to show that she had not expected a speech.
“Yes,” she said.
“Yes, yes, yes!” he cried. “Always yes! Even Kuei-fei sometimes says ‘yes’ from habit. Sit down, girl. I will stand up: I speak better on my feet.”
Winter Cherry replied: “I will listen carefully.”
“There is no need for that,” the Emperor said. “I will make the words as beautiful as I can. Do you write verse?” He got to his feet.
Her mind went back to all the men who had stood thus, talking to her unheeded. She remembered the men: she forgot what they had said. Men always talked thus, walking up and down, gesticulating, stringing words on words like bubbles in a stream, to break at last in a smooth pool of silence. And yet, these words were different. They were old, chosen words, whose meaning eluded immediate comprehension—not the ordinary conversation of a man who wants something of a girl, but the words of a man who does not care if he gains assent or no, since he feels his utterance too true to need even belief. Her listening broke into the middle of a sentence.
“. . . and even Kuei-fei, who founded her private team of actors—the Pear Tree Players—has not been able to make them leave the beaten track except by her own direction. It is tiring for ever to have to direct others, is it not?”
She said dutifully: “Yes. I do not know.”
He stopped in his pacing. “You do not know. No man knows. And yet you have one virtue, at least—the virtue of not having heard me talk lengthily on my favourite topic. Kuei-fei has heard it all.”
“She is wonderful,” Winter Cherry said, meaning this.
The Emperor countered: “And now it is my turn to say ‘yes’, I suppose. And you do not wonder why she is not here?”
“No. You are master. Even Kuei-fei has to do what you command,” she said.
He smiled, and the smile made turn seem young.
“She is very accomplished,” he agreed. “Whereas you—you have virtues and no accomplishments.”
Winter Cherry murmured, doing justice to herself: “I can play my own flute.”
The Emperor touched a gong, and Han Im appeared.
“As you will have heard,” the Emperor said, “we need flutes. Bring a basket full. One may resemble this flute of hers, which she says she can play.”
Han Im bowed and withdrew. Winter Cherry thought that he must have been standing only just behind the curtained door. The room was bright with the top-heavy blooms of the peonies.
“They are beautiful,” she said. “But they would be more beautiful if they had not been brought in from their gardens.”
The Emperor looked up. His eyes were dark over darker half-circles, and she was instantly afraid.
He said: “The girls whom I summon here are usually too happy to criticise. You speak as though you thought. Do not think too deeply.”
She had the courage to smile. “I have nothing to lose. Fear comes only from possession—courage from poverty.”
“Who are you to speak of poverty?” he demanded, almost angrily. “Are you not clothed in silks, and fed on rich foods, sauced with the odours of a thousand rare and costly scents. . . .”
She replied: “These things are given me by others—by you. I do not own them, and so I do not fear their loss. I have only life to lose.”
He cried: “Life may be lost in more ways than one. The life even of such as you may ebb slowly, painfully. . . .”
She bowed her head. “It is as you say. But, still, I should die at last. I think I could make myself die quickly.”
He laughed. “This is indeed an unsuitable subject for our conversation,” he said. “I have not yet seen enough Springs for me to be unmoved at the thought of your dying, in various unpleasant ways, before your eighteenth year. And you yourself, I think, are not wholly uninterested in the remainder of the years which shall be yours.”
He ceased speaking, and sat down on a couch which creaked suddenly in the silence. Far away in the night, laughter and a lute blended.
“How absurd—how unlikely it is for me to be thus urging you to live!” the Emperor went on again. “Have I not tens—nay, hundreds of lives at my behest? Why should I trouble over yours? But you have only yourself to thank, since you began thus. Come, there are better occupations than bandying words on a summer’s evening while we wait for flutes. I could send for Li Po, who can throw off rhymes like water from a swimmer’s hair. If Kuei-fei were here, I should not lack entertainment.”
She said: “Li Po is a famous poet, and Li Po has no fear of you because no other than he can carve such poems. The Lady Yang, your favourite, has nothing to fear while she is your favourite. But I . . . I can only play my flute, and there are many flute-players.”
“Li Po does not need a flute,” he answered, as Han Im returned with a basket. “He can delight with no other instrument than his tongue.”
As she took out flutes from the basket and felt their fingering, she replied: “Li Po is a man. Besides, even he wrote about flutes, instead of playing them. Do you remember?”
“Tell me,” he commanded.
While she searched, she recited:
The Emperor was silent, sitting now with his eyelids closed. He seemed tired. Winter Cherry tried several of the flutes and, finding one whose fingering was like that of her own, began to play an old song, reciting the lines after the music.