Old Father Peng’s keen ears heard her voice and divined her meaning. He said, nodding: “Yes. The Master told us that
It is not in my usual style, I know. Just an idea while I was sitting with the late sunlight on my knee. A memory from before you were born. But it illustrates my meaning.”
Winter Cherry exclaimed: “So you know, too?”
Father Peng replied: “It is more difficult not to know, if one has lived at all. You young ones are apt to regard the aged as a dried fruit-peel. The peel was not always dry. Now, tell us, girl, what you want done about yourself. Let there be an end of this having no opinions. Why, even your mother was not deceived.”
“Even?” said the Lady of the Tapestry.
Peng Yeh laughed.
“When my father takes charge of a conversation,” he said, “everything turns upside down, like the guests in Li Po’s poem about the Porcelain Pavilion.”
Winter Cherry said: “I ran away, after I had been sent for to the Emperor. He was asleep, and I went to the Pavilion because Li Po had been kind to me when he was drunk, earlier, in the low-sunned garden by the Aloe Pavilion.”
Her father and mother clicked their tongues. Father Peng smiled and rang a little bell on the table. To the servant who came he said: “Wine.”
They all waited until this had been brought. Father Peng turned the little silver cup in his hand.
“It is a dissolver of doubts,” he said. “Drink, all of you. And girl, fetch a porcelain stool and sit down with us. Daughter-in-law, draw up your seat. Son, relax that look of discipline. Now, drink!”
In a little while they were all talking freely, and Winter Cherry had told her story.
“And when he was about to drive away,” she finished, “he told me that I was as free as if I had never left my parents’ roof. But I did not like to tell you this, my father.”
Father Peng said: “Freer, for you are no longer ignorant, but must be consulted. Of course the best thing would be for you to go into a nunnery, but you might not like that.” He sipped a fresh cup. “Son, you can give up your ideas for her future. Let her stay here, as if she had not gone. Then things will settle themselves—probably in a way which you would not have foreseen.”
He rose to his feet and set down an empty cup. The others, rising, waited for Father Peng to speak further, but he nodded, tucked his poem carefully inside his sleeve, and went to his own room.
Peng Yeh, with a motion of helplessness, went out too.
The Lady of the Tapestry said: “I thought your father’s plan might prove impracticable. Your grandfather thought so, too, when I told him yesterday. You left your embroidery in my room this morning. Some of the stitches will have to come out. I will show you.”
They went out together.
The four empty wine-cups stood on the table.
Peng Chan-mu leaned against the doorpost of the women’s room, watching his three sisters working. His youngest sister, Mooi-tsai, compared his stocky, robust figure, hardened by toil and toughened by weather, with the remembered slighter build of Ah Lai, who seemed to have in his appearance a little of his uncle’s poetry, while her brother undoubtedly suggested something much more earthy.
Chan-mu said: “Still pretending to work? It seems that you three girls recognise the need for justifying your existence.”
Peng Mei answered: “At least, we work. You stand against the door-post as if you were afraid that it would fall down.”
Mooi-tsai said scornfully: “He is thinking. That is hard work—for my brother. That is why he has to have support for his back.”
“Support for my back!” Chan-mu cried with scorn equal to hers. “Indeed, you, who sit here softly, making soft things for posterity, are qualified to talk of supports for the back! So I, labouring in the fields day in and day out, am a weakling, while that ornamental poet’s nephew who was here, who never spent his strength in honest toil, is laudable—is to be held up as an example to us, just because our eldest sister has learned what I can only call a palace attitude.”
Mooi-tsai leaped to her feet, letting her embroidery fall, and sprang towards him. He raised his foot and pushed her with it, not too gently, in the stomach. She went backwards, tripped and fell on her back.
“Don’t you adopt the palace attitude, too,” he laughed. Then Mooi-tsai got up again in a temper, and her two sisters joined her in the attack. Chan-mu pushed a stool in front of them, slipped through the door and went out, singing.
Mei said: “He is ill-bred. He learns his manners from the men on the farm.”