Ah Lai, who had stood silently beside them, now said: “If you will make up your minds as to your next destination, I will go on and arrange for food. I shall require, also, to know how many men will have to be fed. Also by what means of transport I am to go and whether alone. I shall be ready to change your decision into deeds in an hour from now. For the moment I have to say a goodbye.” He inclined his head to them and went out of the room.
General Tung observed: “I think he will serve the Emperor well, for he does not foresee difficulties. He shall go. Now, give me paper, brush and ink. My mind needs no other laxative. You will see about the carriages.”
Ah Lai came to the room which he had hoped to share with Winter Cherry. The girl slept, her face pillowed on one arm. He stood for a while looking at her, then turned to go without speaking. But as he turned, Winter Cherry woke.
“I thought that you had gone,” she said.
Ah Lai nodded. “I did go,” he said, “and now I have returned before going altogether. I have been talking strategy with General Tung.” Her voice was a question. “General Tung?”
He told her of the arrivals from Chang-an, of the revolt and the Emperor’s coming journey into the inner provinces. “I have always wanted adventure,” he said. “I am to start in less than an hour, to make ready for the Emperor’s reception at his next stopping-place—when General Tung tells me what that next stopping-place may be.”
“You did not always speak so respectfully of the Emperor,” she answered. “But it is as well that you should. I am glad that you did not insist, last, night, on coming here to me. Perhaps you have realised that it would have been imprudent.”
Ah Lai looked at the girl as he listened to her formal speech. There seemed a great distance between them now, and he felt it to be useless to speak, as he had meant to do, of the events of the night. Against the walls of their little world lapped the tide of war, and he knew that, for a time at least, that tide had separated them. And then, suddenly, she sat up, frowning.
“Go and do whatever you have to do,” she said. “If, in that doing, it pleases you to know that now I am certain that I shall not bear a child to the Emperor, then you have the right to be pleased. Now go.”
“But last night you said . . . ,” he began.
She answered: “Last night was last night; today is today. Go now about your new duties, and forget me. You are for greater things that I can give you.”
He inclined his head. “So you think,” he replied, going out
The Lady Yang had not rested long, and now, as she stood waiting for Ah Lai to come to her, with the sheer fall of the invisible mountain to the East before her, she felt something of the spirit of a painter who aims to transfer to paper the sweep of rocky land, the sheltering copses, the rushing streamlets, of a countryside which he sees, and which those who look upon his painting will also see but not believe. “He has idealised it,” these people will say. “It was not so steep. That stream did not so flash in the sunlight. That wood did not so unbelievably fit into the balance of the picture.” Life, she was reflecting, resembled, this landscape. The perfection of her last years with the Emperor were equally incredible. Love, itself, was just such a figment of the imagination, real enough when expressed, but to a hearer of its magic merely a symbol of what the lover hoped to taste. And yet, it was real enough.
Ah Lai came up behind her as she had expected.
“I understand the Emperor now,” the boy said. “Before, I thought that no man could have reason for so distilled a delimit, but, seeing you, I find all the old tales inadequate before your reality.” Then he laughed. “Why, I am talking like a poet!”
“You are talking in the fashion to which I am accustomed,” she replied. “And yet shall I believe that you mean it?”
The steady gaze of her long eyes under the high brow held his eyes. The hair at the back of his neck moved independently of his will. He was not conscious of anything else about her, before the compelling comfort of her eyes.
He replied: “I mean what I have said. And I understand, too, why my uncle would not let me see you when I lived with him at the Porcelain Pavilion, for it seems that, being wise, he feared for me the peril of seeing you. Not that he feared you, for my sake, but that he knew that a man changes when he looks upon you. He changes. He forgets what he was and what he hoped. He knows only that he looks upon you, and the rest of life fades into the shadow of reality. That is what my uncle, Li Po, knew, since he is a poet.”
She said: “You say it all very charmingly, I almost seem to hear the words of your uncle. But this is not time for soft words. You can drive a carriage—I know, for I heard the men talking of it. Will you take me away from here, from the soldiers, whom I fear? If the Emperor were here, it would be different, but I do not trust General Tung.”