She stood up and looked through the crack in the oiled paper window at the growing line of the horizon. The cool wind of dawn seemed to caress her skin: she ran her hands down from breast to hips with a tremulous delight. It was all his. There was certainty in her love. All the past was past and, forgotten. She hoped her hair would soon grow to its proper length: she was sure her husband liked properly long hair. Just now it was neither one thing nor the other—a sort of mane which defied orderly treatment.
Ah Lai said: “I can see that I shall not need to leave my own house for entertainment. No—no; you need not start so hurriedly to protect yourself against the chill of the morning. You did not do so until I spoke to you. It is absurdly early: come back here. Many a husband has wisely sent his wife back to her parents because she woke him too early. I am still quite sleepy. You have put some charcoal in the
She protested: “But you have to be up early, to go on your duty. Oh! Do not look at me like that!”
He laughed: “Why not? But if you prefer it, you can have this fur rug and pretend to be a bear, and then I shall look at you differently. If you stay out there like that, you will be so cold that I shall not welcome you back here. Come, let us agree under more comfortable circumstances.”
“Fetch me,” she answered, and when he had done so and they were both warm again she said: “You are not in the least like what I expected.”
He said: “Well, what did you expect? Were you judging me by a high standard, or a low? I did not marry you in order to be compared to someone else. A husband must be incomparable.” He patted her. “There! I did not mean to be cruel. A life with a poet uncle has unfitted me for the more considerate sort of sincerity.”
She snuggled down under the rugs. “I am defenceless now,” she told him. “Before, I did not mind what people said to me, for the people themselves did not matter to me. But now you . . .”
“I?” he said. “I matter very much. Listen, if you are not too busy. A girl once told me the tale of the man whose wife was too imaginative. Do you want to hear it, you there, under the rug?”
There was an affirmative movement.
He went on: “It happened in the winter, in the North, where the snow can be very thick and the cold very bitter. The husband had come in after his work and, when he had eaten the evening meal which his wife had cooked for him, they went to bed. Now she had prepared against the cold by making a larger fire than usual under their
There was no reply. He, too, retired further under the rugs and shut his eyes. Outside the window the dawn climbed.
Dawn lit the swiftly moving clouds, dappled salmon and cinnamon. The Great Gate opened and the Emperor came out with Han Im. Two servants carried the box and set it down outside the gates. Then they went in and the main gates closed. Father Peng came out of the left hand, smaller gate, dressed in his last official robes, and waited. A carriage drove up along the outer wall and the driver, getting down, pulled the box up into it. The carriage turned and went back the way it had come, to the lower ground on the right which was not yet fully lit.
As the sun came up, its first rays touched the bright tip of the Dragon Banner which hung at its post in front of the cavalry on the left of the line. In the centre the infantry waited; on the right the archers, their bows of mulberry slung, reached out of the lower ground into the growing light.
The Emperor started walking up the slope. Han Im, following, wondered how many of the cavalry were the same men who, not long ago, had galloped in line across and across the ground in front of them, to which the Emperor was leading. How many remembered that day?
The Emperor walked on towards the spot.
So did times, seasons, and events repeat themselves. For, after all, life was but an endless repetition of the life of one’s fathers, and historians, writing in the centuries to be, would not know what filled the thoughts of this man as he paced slowly towards the spot which had been for him almost the end of living.
“This was the place,” Han Im said.
The Emperor stood motionless with lowered head.
Beside them other figures had come now, officials who had fled on that fatal morning with the Emperor and who now shared the Emperor’s thoughts. Their eyes were wet.
Then the Emperor raised his head and looked at the ridge, where Han Im, too, could see the figure of the priest motionless against the moving clouds. The Emperor bowed, looked once again at the ground, and said to Han Im: “Let us go.”