So your wild guess amuse me, and will amuse my friend Ah Lai.”
He smiled. “A better thing,” he said, “will be to put you in the same room as Honeysuckle and Clear Rain, and let them discover. I am prepared to bide by their opinion.”
Winter Cherry got up and started to walk back to the house. As she went she said over her shoulder: “Now of Han Im you could not be sure.”
Ah Lai was waiting for her. “Where have you been?” he asked. “I have looked everywhere for you. Tonight there will be a difficulty, for if you sleep with me, or with the girls, your secret is sure to come out.”
She told him of Liu’s words. “I think that he guesses, but is not sure,” she said. “And why, if I sleep in the same room as yourself, should my secret come out?”
Ah Lai replied to the first part only: “I will manage Liu. He will not trouble you.” With that she had to be content.
Han Im came to see her shortly after the sun had begun to fall.
“I am worried,” he said. “We so gaily started on this expedition, unthinking of the difficulties which would ensure. Now these difficulties pile up against us. Liu suspects. Li Po, it is true, does not care. Wang Wei is doubtful, for physicians, even if they only practice occasionally, are skilled in recognising those instinctive movements which make it possible to distinguish between a man and a woman. Last night I did not care if danger lay in our plan. Today, in the full light of the sun, I remember only too clearly the ways in which an angry emperor, an old, angry emperor, may bar for a while the denied gateway between life and death, while he joys in the suffering of one whom he believes he is thus punishing. For you I have, as you know, an almost paternal feeling, but even that cannot compensate me for a possibly unendurable death.”
Winter Cherry sat down on the bed and made room for Han Im beside her. She said: “I would that all of you would think less of possible trouble. I, who have most to lose if I am discovered, seem least fearful. You worry about discovery—Li Po worries about having to be respectable because Wang Wei is here, Wang Wei worries because he is not sure of me, and Liu worries because he wants to be sure of me. The two chattering girls worry because tomorrow they will have to go elsewhere, and Ah Lai worries because he is afraid of everybody’s guesses. Alas, I might as well be in the Pepper Rooms at Chang-an.”
Han Im did not comment on what he felt to be ingratitude, and shortly she was left alone. The day bore on through the hours of the goat and the monkey, and the time of Wang Wei’s feast came nearer. Winter Cherry knew how, with wine, man’s nature sloughs convention, how at the tenth cup all is crystal-clear. She did not look forward to this feast, but as it had to be endured, she endured it.
Ah Lai had been busied much of the afternoon with his uncle, Li Po, and Wang Wei. The two girls tittered when they looked at Winter Cherry, but she put on a brave face and made suggestions to them which she hoped they would not accept, but which made her femininity seem a safe secret.
The hour of the monkey had reached its end when Wang Wei sent a servant for her. He was sitting on a rustic bench beside a high bamboo hedge.
“Sit down,” he said. “As I and my party are to leave tomorrow, I thought it only fitting to seize now the opportunity of seeing more of you, who are the least known to me of all you four who came on foot from the North. Li Tai Po I know only too well—that compound of genius, loose-living and good heart; the eunuch Han Im I remember well from my last visit to the capital, before I decided that Court was not for me and that a few simple herbs and fresh spring water led a man nearer to the Eight Fold Path than the rich messes of cookery and the cellars of wealthy men.” He seemed quite sincere in all this, so that Winter Cherry, in spite of the rich morning meal and the evening’s promised banquet, made no protest at apparent inconsistency, Wang Wei looked at her, and then went on: “I now know Ah Lai to be the nephew of Li Po, and to possess the virtues and faults of his age—impulsiveness and lack of breadth. But of you, young fellow, I know nothing, and it is not my custom nor my pleasure to know nothing of those with whom I share a table, however meagre.”
Winter Cherry replied: “Sir, the deference which youth owes to age prevents my making a fitting reply. It is true that Li Po, Han Im, Ah Lai and I came on foot from the north, and it is also true that Chang-an, the Capital, lies to the north. This should have given you a clue that questions are sometimes better left unasked, for knowledge of high secrets is often fatal to both parties—the teller and the hearer. But even I, who have seen so few summers, may with diffidence point out that we came here expecting to find the place empty, and that your kind hospitality was none of our seeking nor of our expecting. It does not, therefore, give you the right to demand an answer to your question.”
Wang Wei smiled. “Let me tell you a story,” he said. “Two years ago, towards the end of summer, I was in Chang-an. There had been the usual banquets and orgies of poetry, for those of the Court do not realise that the simple life is worth a hundred hundreds of examples of refined cookery and unrefined taste. Well, one day, when I was walking in the Park (for even then, at fifty-three, a certain freedom was allowed me) I met a girl whose name was Winter Cherry. She had not long come into the Emperor’s family, and was more than a little homesick. We talked, and in the course of our talk it turned out that she came from a village through which I had lately passed. Naturally, she asked for news of home. Later, when I sat with my lamp and my thoughts, I wrote:
I was pleased with the poem.”
Winter Cherry said: “It is indeed a poem to be pleased with.”
“If I may excuse the coincidence by expressing my own willingness to forget all that you have not said, I will do so, but when you start at a man’s touch, so, even if the man be a physician like myself, I may claim forgiveness for thinking that it is possible for Winter Cherry, whom I so well remember, and yourself, who wear so awkwardly a man’s clothes, to be one and the same.”
Winter Cherry left him without reply and went back to the house. Ah Lai found her crying, with her bundle half-packed, the flute sticking forlornly from its end.
“I must go away,” she said, and told him of Wang Wei’s suspicions. “I shall bring misfortune upon you all. He is acquainted with my father and, the interfering old man, is prepared to bring us together, like one of the gods in the old plays. He spoke to me two years ago, when he was at the Capital, and has not forgotten me, as I had hoped.”
“You want to see your father?” Ah Lai asked.
She sobbed: “When a girl leaves her father’s house to enter that of the Emperor, she has nothing further to do with her father—if she is an ordinary girl, like me. I know that the Lady Yang’s family has been honoured by the Emperor, so that her relatives have been given titles, but I am not the Lady Yang.”
“These stupid old men!” Ah Lai cried.
Then Li Po entered and sat down with them.
He said: “Whenever I allow my heart and my inclination to rule my actions, I find that I have been unwise. I contrived a desire for change with my foolish whim to do a favour to you, girl, and now every evil that can be has descended on me. Alas, there is no poetry in the world this bitter day.”