He said: “You are hungry, and I am hungry. That is good. Your nature is revolted and you therefore hate me. That is also good. Your nostrils are full of the smell of blood. Your mind is dimly conspiring with your muscles to seize the knife from my belt and thrust it into my side, turning the blade about with the noisy grating of revenge. But you will not do this. You will be a true Chinese, doing nothing at all. Look! As we round this hill, you see Chang-an, my city of Chang-an, before you. We have come an unnecessary distance round to the southern outskirts, so that we may enter by the gate that leads into the Street of Heaven with three roads on our left and five on our right, through Red Bird Gate and the Imperial City to the Palace. And you know what awaits you within the Palace.”
Booking sideways, she could see his profile against the eastern sky. In front of her, as he had said, she saw the full stretch of the city, as she had seen it once before when she first came to enter the women’s apartments in the Pepper Rooms. The mingled dread and pleasure which her heart had then known seemed small indeed beside this emotion which her dulled heart could not even analyse or name. In Chang-an streets, the brown, long streets which now they faced, people lived, people lived and loved and were ordinary. Her thoughts, like a diffident mouse behind grain sacks, roused to ask her why she should thus be poised in publicity, why it was not for her to live the usual life of the people of a hundred surnames, why the sloping roofs of those long, brown streets could not shelter her from the heat and dust, from the rain and biting wind, in a glow of that conventional living which seemed to her now, above everything else, desirable.
Lu-shan said: “My son, Ching-hsu, would kill me as readily as he killed your brother, if he could. He hates me, as you hate me, because I represent something that he cannot understand. He fears me, as you fear me, because I represent something whose actions he cannot predict. He loves me, as you love me, because I represent something that is not in him nor in you, something primitive and great. And now I have lacked dignity enough to step down from my Northern Throne and become like you a Chinese speaking with three neatly balanced platitudes. You are an insidious race, with no clear edges to your shadows. Look at the ruled lines of those shadows where the low sun cuts between the houses. Then look, in your mind’s eye, at the soft outlines of twice seventy-eight fans in the Hall at the summer festival. The first is myself. The second is you. And, though the feet of these horses now clatter proudly on the roads of my Capital city, there is within me the feeling that the fans may overcome the shadows. It is uncertainty, but it is better that it should be uncertainty.”
They swept under Red Bird Gate, through the Imperial City, and drew up beside the Palace buildings.
Beyond lay the darkening Park.
At Sui-yang, Ah Lai was writing a letter, taking a particular joy in the calligraphy.