Ma Wei Slope полностью

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:

They applauded. Winter Cherry said: “You are not as hungry as that, I hope?”

Ah Lai mumbled with his mouth full: “It is I who shall have the eating of that particular cake.”

Winter Cherry, drinking from her hands at the spring, observed: “I have learned not to blush.” She went to bury her hair at the foot of a bank.

Then they all returned to the road and walked on, between the high trees, southwards. They went on their way up the now slowly-sloping path, between fir and forest trees increasingly unlike those of the plain which they were leaving, trees which forsook the seeming neatness of city gardens for the purposive aspiring of untrammelled growth; ahead of them the great coloured mass of the mountain hung imperially in the southern sky, a beacon, a goal, and an unattained desire. On the lower shoulder of the mountain a cluster of rough roofs, tile and straw impartially, showed where the road ran.

“That is the place,” Li Po told them.

“It may seem strange to you two younger ones,” Han Im said, “to find thus, on the shoulder of a mountain, an almost village devoted largely to the delight, entertainment and relaxation of poets. I have found in the past that poets are apt to take for granted the comforts and facilities which earlier rulers have provided for them. The place before us, for example, was built and furnished by the Empress Wu-chao, who seized the throne nine years before Li Po was born. During her reign and that of the two Emperors who preceded our present monarch, the collection of houses which you now see coming towards you out of their green foliage was built and enlarged as a place where the poets of the capital, exhausted by dissipation or even by making poems to order, could come for resting. The larger building is called ‘The Poet’s House’, and below it you can see the palm thatched farm house whose produce and (I add) cooks make life here a dream of laziness. Here Meng Hao-jen used to come, and of it he wrote his famous ‘On Returning to Chung-nan Hill’. You remember it, Li Po?”

“Why ask me to remember other men’s poems?” Li Po complained.

Winter Cherry said: “You tell us, Han Im.”

Han Im recited:—