The priest replied: “A hand moves in the darkness upon the fur-lined rug. The fingers of this hand searching . . .” He turned his head towards the door and called: “Enter, and bring a lamp with you.”
In the yellow, flickering wedge of light which advanced and widened as Han Im came in with the lamp, the Emperor’s fingers closed upon the broken half of the comb.
“Leave me for a little,” he said.
Han Im observed: “I have the edict here, with brush and ink.”
The Emperor seized the brush and signed the paper. Han Im and the priest bowed once and went out.
The door shut.
The priest told Han Im: “Carry this to the boy’s room, wake him and tell him to take it to his wife. My work is done. You are, I think, of all these here the nearest to knowing the brightness of Tao. But I shall not say: ‘It would be good to meet again,’ for Tao takes no cognisance of meetings, and in Tao desire even for so small a thing is dead.”
He bowed to Han Im and went to his room.
When Ah Lai, carrying a black case with all his belongings, went into Winter Cherry’s room, she was fully dressed and the light was lit.
“I have just come from my mother,” she told him. “Mei and I are sharing the watching. She is there now with one of the old servants. I was just about to sleep. But why are you here? You have much work to do tomorrow, and must sleep soundly in order to do it well.”
He replied: “I have already slept a little. But I was awakened by Han Im. He gave me this.” He handed her the Emperor’s edict.
She read it and then looked up. “But how did he know about us?” she asked with wonder in her voice.
He said: “Such small matters as the ways of knowing of an Emperor concern us not at all now. I do not know and it is certain that you cannot know either, so what is the use of asking, my wife?”
She replied: “You are quite right. And all the while I thought that you, even, did not know how I felt.”
“Little Star,” he cried, “I have felt so ever since I first saw you, trembling a little, in the Porcelain Pavilion. So has my heart been moved since first I heard you speak, since first I saw the sorrow in your eyes lessen at the sight of me, since first I learnt how useless fingers are for tasks which are new to them.”
“It is easy to hear that you have been brought up in the company of poets,” she told him, “for even those thoughts which I think you feel are neatly marshalled into epigrams and antithesis, so that they glitter with what I trust is not a too misleading brilliance.”
“You, yourself, have been well educated,” he replied. “The wind has dropped, but there is still a draught beneath the door. I shall put a mat, thus, in front of the crack, and set this chest upon it.”
Winter Cherry hesitated. “But you cannot intend to stay here, with me, in my own room,” she objected. “My parents would be angry and turn me out.”
He took the Emperor’s written edict from her hand and read out: “All law, customs and conventions notwithstanding. Your parents cannot be angry, with the Emperor’s written words before them. Besides, you yourself said that your mother was not in a fit state to be troubled by such things. And your father?”
“My father,” she replied, “sits on the edge of a stool, awaiting news. He would be a practical man, if we told him, and say that the birth of a son is a much more important matter than our marriage, and that our marriage can therefore await his impatience.”
Ah Lai laughed. “But you, Little Star, do not think that anything could be more important than our marriage, do you? Besides, it is not for your father to say, since the wishes of the Emperor come first.”
“You have latterly become a very conservative,” she said. “Now that you have the Emperor on our side, you defer to the Emperor. Before, you used to say ‘Who is the Emperor, that he should have you?’”
Ah Lai returned: “Do not strive to make me too consistent. You would not like that. And if you go on talking it will soon be too late for us to sleep at all. Besides, you will not have the duty of explaining to your parents. Now that you are my wife, that duty devolves upon me, and I shall have no fear in telling them that you have had the good fortune to enter my distinguished family without the expensive ceremonies with which custom hinders the consummation of sense, and without endless discussions through commission-taking go-betweens regarding dowries, marriage settlements and other financial arrangements which matter not at all to us, standing here for the first time together without the need for dissimulation or subterfuge.”
“That makes it very different,” she agreed.
He went on: “Also, I would rather face your family with accomplished facts, for I believe that your father, at least, regards marriage as something lower than the friendship which one man has for another. Our more personal feelings are new-fashioned and fit ill with the general opinion of the times. That is all the more reason for telling your parents later, when there is no chance of their interposing difficulties. They are even capable of arguing about a thing so final as the Emperor’s edict. And now, have I talked enough for us to go to bed?”
She said: “Yes. But give me that paper first. I must put it in a safe place in order that I may show it to my mother tomorrow. It would not be right to do otherwise.” Then she smiled up at him and went on: “I am not afraid, now. I am glad that you have always felt like this.”
He laughed: “Not always.” Then he relented, and added: “Not before I met you at the Pavilion. That would have been too much to expect. Now, I believe that the things which husbands and wives usually say to each other begin: ‘Do you remember’ and so I ask if you remember how clumsy my fingers were when I buttoned your boy’s clothes upon you. Do you?”
“Only too well,” she replied, helping him.
Later, when the wind had died so that it no longer moved the piece of loose thatch on the wall by the gate, and it seemed that the line of the first light was breaking if anyone cared to look for it, there was a bustling and a hurrying in the rooms of the Lady of the Tapestry, and after a while a thin cry and then the sound of Peng Yen’s footsteps as he hastened round to his father’s room and, breaking into dreams of ancient ceremonies cried: “It is a son!”
But neither these noises nor the padding of Father Peng’s feet as, furred and waistcoated, he passed on his way to demand more certain proof, came into the consciousness either of the two who lay, clasped in each other’s arms upon too narrow a bed, nor of the Emperor as he slept with peace in his face and both hands still grasping a broken comb.
But when it was just light enough to see the clear outlines of her window, Winter Cherry woke. She woke slowly, luxuriously, and without a question in her mind. How strange it was to greet the morning thus, not alone! How curious to know at once, instinctively, that she had now a duty to rouse her husband and set him on his business for the Emperor. He would need hot broth, and then something a little more filling. . . .
She shivered, wholly with delight, and moved Ah Lai’s arm from her neck, laying it between them. He did not wake. She climbed out from under the rugs and skins and stepped carefully over his sleeping body to the floor. The embers in the narrow flue under their k’ang glowed still perceptibly, and she put a stick or two of fresh charcoal on the glow, fanning it a little, inaudibly, with her breath as she squatted on all fours by the bed.
She stood up and looked through the crack in the oiled paper window at the growing line of the horizon. The cool wind of dawn seemed to caress her skin: she ran her hands down from breast to hips with a tremulous delight. It was all his. There was certainty in her love. All the past was past and, forgotten. She hoped her hair would soon grow to its proper length: she was sure her husband liked properly long hair. Just now it was neither one thing nor the other—a sort of mane which defied orderly treatment.