“I trust that all has gone well, Sire,” Father Peng said, doubtfully.
“As well as may be,” the Emperor returned. They entered the room where he had last stayed. “Now I will try to solve the riddle which is perplexing your mind. Let us open this box. You see, it contains on the top the clothes which might be worn by any educated man, and here is a scholar’s cap. I remove these trappings, so—help me, Han Im—and replace them by a scholar’s garments, thus. I have a right to wear the scholar’s cap, for I also have written poetry. So. You see before you not the Emperor but the Scholar of the Stream. Forget all but that. The reason, as your raised eyebrow demands? It is this. Let us sit down first. Han Im, scholars talk best with tea. If you could arrange it . . .”
While they waited, the Emperor looked round the room, remembering.
Then Han Im came back, followed by a servant with tea. Han Im sat down, too, and they all sipped.
“Not all my life,” the Emperor said when he had set his cup down, “have I been able, as others have, to speak freely to men,who did not fear me. Now I can do so. Tomorrow I shall leave for the Capital. My son, Su Tsung, will meet me with joy. We shall greet each other. We shall go to the Palace and I shall mourn with him at the desecrated tablets in the Hall of Ancestors. Then I shall give him my great seal—I have it here, in the box—and retire to my other palace, the Palace of Felicity. He will beg me to retain my throne. I shall tell him that I am an old man, and tired. I shall beg to be excused. Then I shall watch my declining years, until the grave provides the solution of all my difficulties. But now—I am the Scholar of the Stream for one day.”
Han Im said: “I understand your mind. Indeed, I am the only one of those about you who has understood your mind for a long while. Like you, sir, I have nothing to lose. Like you, I see left behind me little of good: I look to no productive future.”
Father Peng seemed a little to have recovered his confidence. “As one scholar to another,” he began, hesitated for expected wrath, and went on, “I begin to understand. For us, whose minds should be free, there must be also a time of balancing of accounts.”
The Emperor observed: “Yes. My life has been like the life of the stream whose name I have taken for my one-day tide. A stream starts with small beginnings, silver laughter over stones. Difficulties come—rougher places, mud banks—and the stream flows through a countryside where its direction is at the whim of forces which it does not understand. Men set banks to keep it in. Men take from the stream for their farms and rice fields. More and more sluggishly the stream struggles on towards the wide, calm sea where all memory of it will be lost. I am that stream.”
Han Im said: “Sir, before night falls and you listen in the stillness for footsteps which are not there, would it not be as well if you behaved as simple scholars should? Visiting a friend, thus, one goes first to greet the oldest. Then, with him, one visits the other members of the house. Were you an Emperor, your actions would not have to conform to these rules. As you are but a simple scholar, I would suggest that we visit the honourable Peng Yeh and his household. The boy Ah Lai, who came yesterday, has prepared them for your arrival. He is probably occupied with the girl. If you will see the others . . . By thus conforming, you will the better mould yourself to your chosen part.”
“The fault,” Father Peng said out of turn, “is mine. The suggestion should have come from me. If I may now make it . . . Drink up your tea, Sirs.”
They finished the little cups and Father Peng led the way to the Great Hall.
Peng Yeh shook off Han Im’s restraining hand and prostrated himself nine times.
“I am a simple man,” he said when he had risen, “and I cannot play this game of make-believe. The nine prostrations which are due to you, Sir, are beyond your power to abrogate. I owe them, as we all owe them, to your rank and station, and no Scholar of the Stream can blind my eyes to who you are. Punish me if you will.”
The Emperor said: “Alas, this is a mudbank to my stream. I have, in my life, understood the motives which moved scholars, officials, administrators. I have not been wholly ignorant of the minds of women. But it seems, as I have always suspected, that I knew nothing of the minds of the people of the hundred surnames. Peng Yeh, you have honoured me beyond my wish and you have confirmed the worst fears which I had of my own ignorance.”
Peng Yeh replied: “Sire, I have done my duty. I regret that there are no more men of my family to greet. My wife is in her room surrounded by women. It seems as if her time were to come very soon. My daughters are busy there. I would beg of you to accept my humble greeting as representing all that remains of my family.”
Han Im said: “Sir, this is your own fault. So much of the courtesy of our land has rested on convention that the absence of convention prohibits courtesy.” He chanted:
“You may speak of convention,” Peng Yeh went on doggedly, “but I have been brought up to convention. I have been brought up to expect order and correctness. I plant seed, I watch it grow and ripen, I reap and thresh it. Nature is ordered: nature is conventional. So, if suddenly the ripe grain becomes green, or the grain-shoots shorten and disappear below the earth, I know that the nature of things has altered. So I cannot avoid behaving to you as I should behave to an Emperor. Such is my nature, as it is the nature of grass to grow and ripen.”
Father Peng said: “My son, you do me little credit in thus comparing your conventions, which have been taught to you, and the growth of grain, which is natural to the grain. And yet I remember trying to impress the need for logic upon you. But, if you truly feel thus, it would be better for us to consider this greeting finished.” He bowed, once, to his son. They all bowed once. Peng Yeh again prostrated himself, and they all went out, leaving him on his knees.
“I must apologise for my son,” Father Peng said.
The Emperor replied: “He has shown us what you and I, scholars though we be, will never understand. Would it be possible to see my hostess? I expect your son exaggerates her condition. It is conventional to do so.”
When they reached the women’s rooms, the Lady of the Tapestry was sitting at her embroidery frame.
“You will have to forgive me, your Majesty, if I do not rise to my feet,” she said. “Nature overrides monarchs.”
“Now here is a realist,” the Emperor said, as he stopped the girls from their kotows with a gesture. “Today I am but a simple scholar, Madam—the Scholar of the Stream—and I beg of you to consider that this call is a short one, not made in accordance with custom, but merely from curiosity and an expectation of a more reasonable attitude than that of your husband. Han Im, here I find no new thing. Madam, accept my hopes.”
He led the way out and went back to his own room. Here he found the priest and Ah Lai, waiting for him. He dismissed Han Im and Father Peng, restrained Ah Lai and made him resume his seat, and addressed the priest, who was sitting on the floor.
“So you, at least, recognise that my appearance denotes a change,” he said.
The priest replied: “What matters is the heart.”
Ah Lai produced a list detailing the results of his activities amongst the officials in Chang-an who had worked for the rebels.