The Emperor replied: “I have formed no habits; perhaps it would have been better for me if I had done so. Seeing oneself thus, in the mirror of one’s own words, it might be possible to avoid some of the mistakes. But, if that is so, it is probable that I have interrupted you in the course of your work.”
Father Peng said: “No, you have not interrupted me, for I have just finished. I was revising and, I hope, improving a poem which I wrote long ago, when I was a young official enjoying his first leave. I called it
“Might I be permitted to inspect it?” the Emperor asked, and the old man gave him a piece of paper.
He read:
The Emperor replied: “Yes. It is the poem of a young man with the added polish of experience. I see that you refer to your wife.”
“She has been dead a long time,” the old man answered.
They both sat silently for a little while, thinking. Then the Emperor continued: “Your poem bears the marks of being a true experience, truly rendered. I have seldom been so fortunate as to catch the moment upon the tip of my brush and then find the result so well worth preserving. In the atmosphere of official circles, you must know, we tend to greater fragility and less real content. I remember a little thing—though I cannot possibly say why I remember it—a little thing which I wrote presumably to record a temptation which I desired to experience. Since you have been good enough to show me yours . . .” He recited:
After they had rolled it on their tongues, he continued: “A whimsy, you see, possessing form but no content.”
The old man smiled and rose to his feet. “What you have just suggested,” he said, “about form without content makes me realise that the sun sets early in this month and that, while we both still have some claim to form, the evening meal is not for another good hour, and that, being hungry, I am not content to lack content. This is the time, I think, to reveal to you that my literary store has other uses.” From the box he took out wine and cups. “A rather special one,” he said.
They settled down to a period of appreciation, and each managed to remember a number of other poems.
Outside, the dusk wind grew, unnoticed, and the wind beneath the door carried cold.
It was during the hour of the ox, when sick men die most easily because they do not regret their ebbing strength, that this wind rose to a high peak, unaccompanied by rain or snow or sleet or any manifestation of the other powers, raging recklessly past walls and doors, round courtyards and over the black, invisible fields, not seeming a destroyer but an angry force demanding entrance, demanding that men should come forth from their snug shelter and join in the eddying dance of the wind.
The priest woke in the darkness and heard the sobbing of Winter Cherry from the floor near the door.
“And now what moves you, girl?” he asked, when he had lit the lamp.
She cried, softly: “He did not speak.”
The priest replied: “Listen to the winds. There are two winds, just as there are the two principles of Ying and Yang. So there are two sorts of people—men and women. Just as the winds meet, just as the Ying meets the Yang, so people meet. All will be well. Come; I will take you to your room.”
She said: “I do not know even if he loves me.”
“You will see,” he answered. In her room she paused a moment and then said: “I still remember her, when I last saw her and she was sorry for me. And when she died she left one of her hair-combs, kingfisher combs, in the room where she hanged herself. I have kept it.”