“Who are you to speak of poverty?” he demanded, almost angrily. “Are you not clothed in silks, and fed on rich foods, sauced with the odours of a thousand rare and costly scents. . . .”
She replied: “These things are given me by others—by you. I do not own them, and so I do not fear their loss. I have only life to lose.”
He cried: “Life may be lost in more ways than one. The life even of such as you may ebb slowly, painfully. . . .”
She bowed her head. “It is as you say. But, still, I should die at last. I think I could make myself die quickly.”
He laughed. “This is indeed an unsuitable subject for our conversation,” he said. “I have not yet seen enough Springs for me to be unmoved at the thought of your dying, in various unpleasant ways, before your eighteenth year. And you yourself, I think, are not wholly uninterested in the remainder of the years which shall be yours.”
He ceased speaking, and sat down on a couch which creaked suddenly in the silence. Far away in the night, laughter and a lute blended.
“How absurd—how unlikely it is for me to be thus urging you to live!” the Emperor went on again. “Have I not tens—nay, hundreds of lives at my behest? Why should I trouble over yours? But you have only yourself to thank, since you began thus. Come, there are better occupations than bandying words on a summer’s evening while we wait for flutes. I could send for Li Po, who can throw off rhymes like water from a swimmer’s hair. If Kuei-fei were here, I should not lack entertainment.”
She said: “Li Po is a famous poet, and Li Po has no fear of you because no other than he can carve such poems. The Lady Yang, your favourite, has nothing to fear while she is your favourite. But I . . . I can only play my flute, and there are many flute-players.”
“Li Po does not need a flute,” he answered, as Han Im returned with a basket. “He can delight with no other instrument than his tongue.”
As she took out flutes from the basket and felt their fingering, she replied: “Li Po is a man. Besides, even he wrote about flutes, instead of playing them. Do you remember?”
“Tell me,” he commanded.
While she searched, she recited:
The Emperor was silent, sitting now with his eyelids closed. He seemed tired. Winter Cherry tried several of the flutes and, finding one whose fingering was like that of her own, began to play an old song, reciting the lines after the music.
When she had done, the Emperor asked (since any cultured man is bound to pay at least that tribute to Art): “Who was the author, and what the subject?”
Winter Cherry replied: “It was written by Mang I-hiu, at the time of the Warring States, and it is a lonely wife’s lament for her husband, who has gone to fight the Huns on the frontier.”
He observed: “The Huns come from the North, and I observe that
Winter Cherry smiled quietly: “Her heart went South for the sake of the rhyme, I suppose. Any poet would act thus, for the beauty of the poem is far more important than the correct points of the compass. Shall I sing you another?”
“No,” said the Emperor. “Come here.”
“You think of me as if I were an old man,” the Emperor said. “Do not be misled by years: do not let these creases in my skin, creases which do not magically disappear in the clear, smooth surface of youth when I unbend them, delude you into believing me incapable of arousing in you those feelings which now, apparently, you fear to have roused.”