“A cat was passing, and to her the squirrel addressed herself: ‘If you, oh cat, would help me with removing this stone from my store (and the feat is well within your strength) I would gladly repay you with one part in ten of my nuts.’
“The cat replied, scornfully: ‘I do not eat nuts. I eat squirrels, so be off with you.’
“Then the squirrel asked help of a hog who was rooting nearby. If you, oh hog,’ she said, ‘would help me to remove a stone from the door of my store of nuts, I would gladly give you two parts in ten of my nuts.’
“The hog said, eagerly: ‘Nuts? Where?’ So the squirrel did not ask for further help from the hog.
“Then the squirrel went to a man who was felling a tree nearby and said: ‘If you will help me to move a stone from the entrance to my store, I will gladly give you up to five parts in ten of my nuts.’ The woodman put down his axe at once, and went to help the squirrel, and when he had moved the stone and the squirrel had thanked him and was about to enter, he seized the squirrel by the tail, wrung her neck and skinned her on the spot so that the skin could dry a little before he stretched it on a board before curing it. Then he put the skin down, spat on his hands, picked up his axe and went on felling the tree.”
He attacked his bean-sprouts again.
Mei said: “I think that the story is cruel.”
Mooi-tsai said: “Whoever heard of a talking squirrel?”
Winter Cherry said: “Yes. It is the nature of man to skin squirrels. I see.”
Ah Lai put in: “Not all woodmen would behave thus. Besides, it takes many a squirrel-skin to make a coat. He would have obtained the same result for less labour by killing the hog and tanning its hide.”
“That is a fair defence, so far as it went,” Father Peng said. “But I am glad, for the girl’s sake, that you did not pursue the metaphor of the squirrel and its skin too far. She is possibly sore at that point.”
Winter Cherry pretended not to hear this, though Mooi-tsai had to hold the bean-sprouts in her mouth with her chopsticks.
“Little one,” the priest told her, “your turn will come.”
Later, when they had eaten duck with pear-juice, fish fresh from the Wei boiled with chicken-broth, and cakes studded with white peel, Ah Lai, going out for fresh air, saw Winter Cherry following him to the door. He did not stop, as he had intended, but went on towards the summerhouse. Here, after a little, Winter Cherry joined him.
Ah Lai said: “Do you realise that I had hardly the opportunity to speak a single word? It seems to me sometimes that we pay too much deference to age and volubility.”
Winter Cherry answered: “But you did not wish to speak. And the poem was yours. I do not see that you have just cause for complaint.”
They sat down. Ah Lai went on: “Even your father was silent. I can only imagine what it must have been like in the old days, when this prerogative of the old was more fully observed, when you and I should never have been given the chance of speaking thus, together, in the surrounding darkness.”
She, too, went on with what she had been saying before: “It does not matter if one is silent when one has nothing to say. I feel empty and clean.”
“
“It does not seem now as if I had suffered anything,” she said. “I feel as I felt before I went to the Palace, the first time. Do you think it right that a girl should have thoughts like mine? Before, it would be a girl’s duty only
“Of course you should think for yourself,” he answered. “Of what use is the mind if it is only a reflection of one’s parents? That way, man would never advance. And I cannot avoid feeling that now, with death so near, with death passing by this place and passing on, we cannot remain what we were.”
Winter Cherry said: “A man should share his thoughts.”
“With whom?” Ah Lai asked. “If you share them with these old men they put your thoughts out on a table and stick pins in them. Look at my poem.”
“It was a very good poem,” she replied. “And it was very useful to your friend the priest. I still do not know why I was silent, why I did not seem to be alive, why I did not want to be alive, until he spoke to us both in the growing darkness of the room where Kuei-fei hanged herself, and why speech and living poured back into me when he made me say the word which I feared.”
Ah Lai said: “We are mysterious, even to ourselves. Yes, the priest is a good man. He knows about minds. I wish I could take him with me to Chang-an, where I must go tomorrow on the Emperor’s business. He would be able readily to distinguish between the wise course and the foolish course in those decisions which all those in the Emperor’s service are compelled to take during their duties.”