When she had done, the Emperor asked (since any cultured man is bound to pay at least that tribute to Art): “Who was the author, and what the subject?”
Winter Cherry replied: “It was written by Mang I-hiu, at the time of the Warring States, and it is a lonely wife’s lament for her husband, who has gone to fight the Huns on the frontier.”
He observed: “The Huns come from the North, and I observe that her heart fled in the other direction.”
Winter Cherry smiled quietly: “Her heart went South for the sake of the rhyme, I suppose. Any poet would act thus, for the beauty of the poem is far more important than the correct points of the compass. Shall I sing you another?”
“No,” said the Emperor. “Come here.”
“You think of me as if I were an old man,” the Emperor said. “Do not be misled by years: do not let these creases in my skin, creases which do not magically disappear in the clear, smooth surface of youth when I unbend them, delude you into believing me incapable of arousing in you those feelings which now, apparently, you fear to have roused.”
Winter Cherry replied: “I am afraid. Outside, in the world, these feelings arise without deliberation: they sweep a girl with them, and she has not to think too much of the mere mechanism of their arousal. With you, there is something of the inevitability of fate. I know that I shall do and be what you expect me to do and be. There will be no chance to run away and hide, laughing, in a garden, until the awkward memory passes. Like men making a road, you will pass inexorably to your intended purpose. . . .”
He said: “You use long words. I am not accustomed to having my motives and technique analysed by a girl. Not that I would have you think that many of my girls are given the chance thus to talk to and of me: I am accustomed to send them away as soon as possible and return to the remembered, familiar ground of my favourite, the Mistress Yang Kuei-fei. But she is indisposed, and thus I am inclined to listen to your prattle.”
Winter Cherry softly sang the siu sing:
He laughed: “That was written in the time of King Wan, which is a very long time ago. But it is interesting to see that the Emperor, then, did not have the girls in singly. The modern habit seems to me to be wiser, for who would have all the courses of a dinner set before him at once?”
Winter Cherry cried indignantly: “It is wrong to speak of me as if I were a piece of food!”
The Emperor replied: “What can the word ‘wrong’ mean to me? But you are right: you are not in the least like a piece of food. Rather you resemble a cool drink, which a man can feel descending his throat. Or, better still, something which combines food and drink—say a melon. You are very like a melon, when I look at you. Several melons.”
“My name is Winter Cherry,” she reminded him, though her teeth were chattering a little, and for one unbearable moment he seemed to her to epitomise all ancient, leering privilege, with his lined face desiring her, and his long, thin fingers with the thumbnails encased in gold sheaths. Then it seemed to her as if in her inmost soul the string of a lute had snapped, and she began to cry.
Han Im, yawning behind the curtain, became aware that the sound from the room beyond was undoubtedly the breathing of a man asleep. He reflected for a while on the strange fact that the immobility of sleep, which should protect from notice and so from attack, is outweighed by a rhythmic snore. He wondered if animals snored as often, or as obviously, as men. Then he heard the rustle of Lady Yang’s borrowed silks, and saw a faint swaying of the curtain as Winter Cherry opened the lattice and stepped out. He went along a passage, wakened the other eunuch, Yen, and went out across the Park.
Winter Cherry’s figure was hard to see, at first. Then, as his eyes became accustomed to the dark (for it was the hour of the Ox) he noticed a movement against the painted trees, and saw that she was making for the Porcelain Pavilion, where Li Po sought relief from official poetry in outbursts of reality.
There were lights in the Pavilion, but no voices, and as Han Im came up and crossed Flying Tiger Bridge, Winter Cherry slipped through the open door and so came to the room where Li Po was sleeping. No sound disturbed the silence of this room, where one lamp burned at the foot of a couch. The poet slept on his left side, with his face to the wall.
She hesitated, then looked round her, at the sleeping poet, at the wine jar, at the camphor-wood box in which, everybody said, Li Po kept the poems which he wrote. Then she turned, as if to go out, and Han Im realised that by being asleep, Li Po had spared himself a man’s duty of comforting a woman. And this seemed to Han Im an unwarranted escape. So he coughed.
The girl stopped in her tracks at the sound and turned. Li Po groaned and sat up. They looked at each other.
Li Po said: “It was not you who coughed.”
Han Im stepped into the room and bowed politely. “The cough was mine,” he said. “If one so unimportant as myself may be admitted to have influenced the course of history, it was I who coughed. The girl here, Winter Cherry, was about to leave, seeing you (as she thought) sleeping, and I knew that discourtesy would be the last thing which you would desire.”
Li Po observed: “I was not asleep. I heard her enter.”
Winter Cherry cried: “Things happen which are not of my doing. I meant to go, taking my sorrow with me. Now I seem as foolish as I am, for I did not know that Han Im, here, was following me, nor that you, sir, were awake. Thus I am made to appear stupid, which I did not wish to be.” She turned away again towards the door.
The poet clapped his hands. Nothing happened.
“My servants are asleep,” he cried. “But since they have no such cause as I for sleep, they must be awakened. And yet—movement seems to cut my head into two parts, slowly and painfully. I wonder if the Emperor would value, as an addition to the official list of tortures, that of enforced movement after a surfeit of wine. I must ask him.” He rose to his feet and went out.
Han Im said: “It is my duty not to leave you.”
She replied: “If one cannot be alone, it matters little who may be the company.” Then she smiled: “I am sorry. That was not what I would have said.”
Li Po came in again. He bore a jug of water, and his face was wet. “The worst moments have passed,” he said. “Now, hunger is a powerful irritant of sorrow, and (since my servants are unutterably lazy) I know that in my eating-room, through that door, will be the not unsubstantial remains of tonight’s feast. ‘Last night’s orgy’, would probably be more accurate. Come, girl, and you, Han Im.”