The Lady of the Tapestry cried: “Alas, my son is dead and my husband does not know what to do. I know that his honourable father will certainly die from sorrow if he is left thus with his face to the wall. Aiya!”
Clear Rain, who had come up, said softly: “Let Honeysuckle go in to him. He is old and therefore courteous, and will feel compelled to talk with her. It may be that he will hate her, but if he talks he will not die. Prepare a bowl of hot broth and send it in by your youngest daughter. He will not blame her for disobeying his orders. The old are always absurdly tolerant of the young.”
Honeysuckle looked at the Lady of the Tapestry and the Lady of the Tapestry nodded assent. Honeysuckle went in through the dark door into the darker room.
“I am not of your family,” Honeysuckle said, “and therefore I am bold to enter. Further, the trouble was of my making, though not my intentional making, and though your son’s son has
For a while the old man did not speak. The sound of his breathing was clear and yet rusty in the stillness of the undecorated room. While she waited, Honeysuckle looked round her and saw the low table, the scroll in fine calligraphy, and the spartan bed at the end of the room. She saw also the nail upon which nothing hung, and the curved patch of lighter wall just below it.
“Discourtesy is foreign to me,” Father Peng murmured, “but may I be permitted to ask why you are here?”
Honeysuckle replied: “You had a sword once—a sword which is now no longer hanging on your wall. You could not have put it to any purpose save to serve the Emperor. So with yourself. “When he returns, the Emperor will not wish to find everywhere more sorrow than has been directly occasioned by his sad going.”
Father Peng asked: “Who are you, girl, that talk in the old accents of the old tongue to which my ears are tuned? All round me, lately, it has seemed that speech was short and courtesy discounted; courtiers seem no longer courteous, the gemmed words of our ancestors seem now but settings from which the pearls have fallen, and language, that medium for the highest thoughts of man, serves but to count bushels of grain or number the plum stones on an empty dish. Who are you?”
Honeysuckle quoted: “When Lao-Tsu died, his disciple Chin Shih, come to mourn, yelled thrice and went away. He said, in more words than I have, that birth and death are natural things, not to be mourned with white clothes and instruments. He said that though the wood is burned, yet the fire is passed on; we know not that it has an ending.”
Father Peng demanded: “Where did you learn this thing?”
She answered: “Life is a school where wisdom may be learned, and never, until the coffin is last shut, does learning end. I have given you cause for hope, if you have heard rightly what I have said, and yet I find you gazing with closed eyes at nothing, I have traded on your courtesy in listening to me, and I have no right to say more. Your youngest granddaughter is hovering outside the door with a bowl of broth. Have I your permission to tell her to come in and tender it to you?”
The old man said: “Tell her to come in.”
As Mooi-tsai crossed the floor with the broth, Honeysuckle said: “I will leave you now. Walk as well as may be. Do not give Chin Shih cause for further unseemly commotion, I pray of you.”
As she went out she could hear Mooi-tsai saying: “Here, grandfather.”
“I am cruel,” An Lu-shan said, as the hoofs of the horses set small trails of dust wheeling to the sides of the road. “I am cruel. It gives me pleasure to be cruel. The duties and necessities which make me have to seem otherwise, the politenesses expected of a provincial governor—the need for these has now passed. My son and my officials may negotiate and persuade, but I do not now have to screen my nature behind these fragilities.”
Winter Cherry sat on the floor of the carriage, making no reply to this. She did not say anything of the hundred things in her heart, not only because she knew that to speak of them would be to precipitate further calamity, but also because the blows which the Gods had seen fit to award left her mind in so much of a turmoil that even the ability of speech seemed to call for an effort beyond her powers. She was not even conscious that she had not eaten since early morning. The only emotion which dimly penetrated her consciousness was one of smouldering hate—the hate which she felt for these tough unfeeling Northerners, who made pride at their lack of feeling the only outer sign of anything at all within.
Lu-shan seemed to understand.