For a while the old man did not speak. The sound of his breathing was clear and yet rusty in the stillness of the undecorated room. While she waited, Honeysuckle looked round her and saw the low table, the scroll in fine calligraphy, and the spartan bed at the end of the room. She saw also the nail upon which nothing hung, and the curved patch of lighter wall just below it.
“Discourtesy is foreign to me,” Father Peng murmured, “but may I be permitted to ask why you are here?”
Honeysuckle replied: “You had a sword once—a sword which is now no longer hanging on your wall. You could not have put it to any purpose save to serve the Emperor. So with yourself. “When he returns, the Emperor will not wish to find everywhere more sorrow than has been directly occasioned by his sad going.”
Father Peng asked: “Who are you, girl, that talk in the old accents of the old tongue to which my ears are tuned? All round me, lately, it has seemed that speech was short and courtesy discounted; courtiers seem no longer courteous, the gemmed words of our ancestors seem now but settings from which the pearls have fallen, and language, that medium for the highest thoughts of man, serves but to count bushels of grain or number the plum stones on an empty dish. Who are you?”
Honeysuckle quoted: “When Lao-Tsu died, his disciple Chin Shih, come to mourn, yelled thrice and went away. He said, in more words than I have, that birth and death are natural things, not to be mourned with white clothes and instruments. He said that though the wood is burned, yet the fire is passed on; we know not that it has an ending.”
Father Peng demanded: “Where did you learn this thing?”
She answered: “Life is a school where wisdom may be learned, and never, until the coffin is last shut, does learning end. I have given you cause for hope, if you have heard rightly what I have said, and yet I find you gazing with closed eyes at nothing, I have traded on your courtesy in listening to me, and I have no right to say more. Your youngest granddaughter is hovering outside the door with a bowl of broth. Have I your permission to tell her to come in and tender it to you?”
The old man said: “Tell her to come in.”
As Mooi-tsai crossed the floor with the broth, Honeysuckle said: “I will leave you now. Walk as well as may be. Do not give Chin Shih cause for further unseemly commotion, I pray of you.”
As she went out she could hear Mooi-tsai saying: “Here, grandfather.”
“I am cruel,” An Lu-shan said, as the hoofs of the horses set small trails of dust wheeling to the sides of the road. “I am cruel. It gives me pleasure to be cruel. The duties and necessities which make me have to seem otherwise, the politenesses expected of a provincial governor—the need for these has now passed. My son and my officials may negotiate and persuade, but I do not now have to screen my nature behind these fragilities.”
Winter Cherry sat on the floor of the carriage, making no reply to this. She did not say anything of the hundred things in her heart, not only because she knew that to speak of them would be to precipitate further calamity, but also because the blows which the Gods had seen fit to award left her mind in so much of a turmoil that even the ability of speech seemed to call for an effort beyond her powers. She was not even conscious that she had not eaten since early morning. The only emotion which dimly penetrated her consciousness was one of smouldering hate—the hate which she felt for these tough unfeeling Northerners, who made pride at their lack of feeling the only outer sign of anything at all within.
Lu-shan seemed to understand.
He said: “You are hungry, and I am hungry. That is good. Your nature is revolted and you therefore hate me. That is also good. Your nostrils are full of the smell of blood. Your mind is dimly conspiring with your muscles to seize the knife from my belt and thrust it into my side, turning the blade about with the noisy grating of revenge. But you will not do this. You will be a true Chinese, doing nothing at all. Look! As we round this hill, you see Chang-an, my city of Chang-an, before you. We have come an unnecessary distance round to the southern outskirts, so that we may enter by the gate that leads into the Street of Heaven with three roads on our left and five on our right, through Red Bird Gate and the Imperial City to the Palace. And you know what awaits you within the Palace.”
Booking sideways, she could see his profile against the eastern sky. In front of her, as he had said, she saw the full stretch of the city, as she had seen it once before when she first came to enter the women’s apartments in the Pepper Rooms. The mingled dread and pleasure which her heart had then known seemed small indeed beside this emotion which her dulled heart could not even analyse or name. In Chang-an streets, the brown, long streets which now they faced, people lived, people lived and loved and were ordinary. Her thoughts, like a diffident mouse behind grain sacks, roused to ask her why she should thus be poised in publicity, why it was not for her to live the usual life of the people of a hundred surnames, why the sloping roofs of those long, brown streets could not shelter her from the heat and dust, from the rain and biting wind, in a glow of that conventional living which seemed to her now, above everything else, desirable. The good man, she remembered, does not think of himself. But here she was thinking of nothing else.
Lu-shan said: “My son, Ching-hsu, would kill me as readily as he killed your brother, if he could. He hates me, as you hate me, because I represent something that he cannot understand. He fears me, as you fear me, because I represent something whose actions he cannot predict. He loves me, as you love me, because I represent something that is not in him nor in you, something primitive and great. And now I have lacked dignity enough to step down from my Northern Throne and become like you a Chinese speaking with three neatly balanced platitudes. You are an insidious race, with no clear edges to your shadows. Look at the ruled lines of those shadows where the low sun cuts between the houses. Then look, in your mind’s eye, at the soft outlines of twice seventy-eight fans in the Hall at the summer festival. The first is myself. The second is you. And, though the feet of these horses now clatter proudly on the roads of my Capital city, there is within me the feeling that the fans may overcome the shadows. It is uncertainty, but it is better that it should be uncertainty.”
They swept under Red Bird Gate, through the Imperial City, and drew up beside the Palace buildings.
Beyond lay the darkening Park.
At Sui-yang, Ah Lai was writing a letter, taking a particular joy in the calligraphy.