Winter Cherry observed: “I cannot avoid seeing that you are thinking of doing all this for me, who am a very ordinary person, and quite unworthy of all this planning.”
“To say what is expected of you,” Li Po told her, “is only one side of your character. If the judgment of my friend Han Im here is sound, there is more than mere convention behind your eyes. Come—action. They say that poets cannot act. Observe, then! Han Im, you and I will collect a few necessaries. Ah Lai, while we have gone, will do for the girl what must needs be done for the girl. Come.”
They went out. Ah Lai went out by a different door and returned quickly with clothes and scissors. As he made to leave, Winter Cherry stopped him.
“You need not be so careful for my blushes,” she said. “I am a girl of the Emperor’s . . .”
“Were,” Ah Lai corrected her.
“Was,” she admitted. “I am not like girls who turn the colour of peonies when a man sees them. First cut my hair like a boy’s. We shall not burn the hair, as they suggested, for that would be unlucky. I shall take it with me and bury it beside the road. Cut quickly. Here.”
Ah Lai, between delight and diffidence, bungled his way through his unaccustomed task.
Outside the room, the poet Li Po and the eunuch Han Im looked at each other enquiringly and then, together, broke into laughter.
“We risk our necks, our comfort and our own respect,” Li Po said, “for the sake of a girl.”
“You have more to risk than I,” Han Im replied with the mock-bitterness which he felt that he should like to adopt. “But, seriously, even if matters had not thus come to a feminine head, I was beginning to find things intolerable. You remember that the Master said that if you could not alter a bad government, the only solution was to go away. And you know, as well as I, that here we have infatuation with a lady upsetting all the routine of rule, that the ever-present threat from the Northern borders needs but a signal to move South, and that An Lu-shan, son of a beaten Hun, whom the Emperor favoured and the Lady Yang adopted, requites their kindness by projected rebellion. If we stay, we risk death: if we go, we risk death. Let us go.”
“Yes,” agreed the poet, “that is almost exactly what you said a minute or two past. It gains, of course, by repetition. So let us collect such things as are essential. The boy is right about walking, instead of riding.”
“Your poems, in the chest?” Yan Im asked.
“Hsuan Tsung favours literature,” Li Po replied. “They will be safe with him, however his rage may bubble. I must find you a few ounces of silver.”
They put a few things into a black, shiny case.
“I have nothing else,” Li Po said.
In the room where Ah Lai was helping Winter Cherry to button clothes on the wrong side, she was saying much the same.
“I have nothing to take with me save this flute, and that is not mine. You—you have all the reputation of your honoured family, a reputation which your uncle has built higher. You have scholarship and the hope of more scholarship. One day you will have many sons to whom, in quiet confidence, you may leave the tending of your tombs. It is wrong that you should endanger all this for me, who am so small a thing in the eyes of the world.”
“The button-hole is a finger’s width lower,” he replied. “Here—let me do it. And so you think that I, who have only now balanced the world’s judgment against my own, shall be diverted from my intention? And this button here. So. One day I shall reverse the process.” Then, as tears gathered: “Be still! How can I button you if you shiver?”
Shortly the other two came into the room. Winter Cherry picked up her flute and Ah Lai thrust some things in a bundle.
“Paper—for writing,” he said as he tied it up. “There will be leisure.”
Then the four went out under the dim light of an impending dawn, through a private gate in the Imperial Gardens and so south, Li Po dropped the key of the gate into a stream as they passed.
“I would not wish others to use that gate,” he said.
As they rounded the walls and skirted the city, it was possible to see, ahead of them, the great mass of Chung-nan amidst its fellow hills.
“I have written,” said Li Po, as they plodded along the unending road, “much about travel. I have written of journeys and of meetings, I have praised the workman about his task and the scholar about his administration, I have sung of the delicate feet of girls (often, I confess, for the sake of an elusive rhyme) and only now do I begin to realise what this common means of human progression really implies in effort and discomfort. Such arches as my feet once had seem now to have collapsed like a broken buttress in dust and chaos, the muscles behind my knees ache like the jaw of a taciturn man who has been compelled to narrate to the magistrate the tales of his wife’s short-comings, and now it would appear that I have a stone in my shoe.”
Han Im said: “To laugh at oneself is to admit to cosmic insignificance. It is therefore that I venture to be reminded of certain beasts of burden which may be seen bearing their loads of merchandise into the cities of the North. They sway, these camels, like ships with ballast ill-secured, their pace seems at once slow and hurried, ungainly and yet untiring, and there is but one characteristic which (it seems to me) I fail ignominiously to share with them, since the gods have provided them with a store against thirst which I most conspicuously lack.”
When it was apparent that the two elder men had nothing more immediately to say, Winter Cherry observed: “I used to walk much when I was a child or, playing, run without thought for distances greater than I now walk in discomfort. But, since I became . . .” she hesitated, and then went on—“since I was brought to Chang-an I have ridden and been carried until my feet seem to have lost both their muscles and their hardness of sole. Nevertheless, I am not unhappy now, for it seems that with every step that I urge myself, something returns of me that has been missing for a while.”
Ah Lai had eyes for no one but the girl, and had been unusually silent hitherto. Yet he could not resist saying: “That is why I advised you to wear thick soles.”
“There is a glade with water here,” Li Po observed, halting at a slight turn of the road. “The girl has cakes which we can eat.” His voice had the high chanting note of poetry.
Han Im added a third line: “The water, like our need, is clear.”
They looked at each other then, laughing, Ah Lai tried: “To urge our jaws will ease our feet.”
Li Po said: “Clumsy. Let the girl say.”
Winter Cherry volunteered, after a moment: “A welt-fed army scorns retreat.”
Han Im said: “It does not sound good enough. It lacks the master’s touch. For myself, I think the rhyme should be ‘meet’.”
Then they all looked at Li Po. He smiled, picked up the black case which Han Im had set down at their halting, and walked down in the direction which he had indicated, saying as he went: “Your third line, Han Im, has the form of a fourth line, and therefore to add a fourth to it is impossible. But your choice for the last rhyme is good. Suppose we say ‘Desire and appetite shall meet’, and then look for a third line. Perhaps it might be ‘If life and living be austere’, or ‘If pedantry can disappear’. The first means little, the second less. I will think about it. Here is the place—the spring, fresh grass, a fallen tree for a seat and the birds overhead. What more could be necessary?” He took the cake which Winter Cherry held out to him. “Would you care, Han Im, to analyse that unfinished verse?”
Han Im replied: “It may be all summed up in a word. Thus: