She had always been, secretly of course, on the side of the mutineers. It was the brief year they enjoyed, sacking and looting the city, that made her clamor for their story and follow it raptly to the end. They were defeated, yes, but first she imagined herself among them, living in the Palace, playing with forbidden things. She did not care that they were “wicked men” whose doings were the reason why the Hsuehs “had to leave everything” and “claw their way” to Cheng-tu.
That was just the way people talked. As far as she could remember “everything” had always been here, where she was, first in the garden around her, then in the larger compound and the world beyond the wall.
She would always be glad the mutineers had their year. She saw them as a band of djinns, more than mortal, lighthearted, frisking through the Palace, dancing and cavorting to their own wild tunes. Naturally the oppressive “way of things” put an end to that. They were too free, too enchanting for their own good, these kindred of hers who had lost her or forgotten where she was. She wanted to believe they knew, but could not come for her yet because they had been defeated.
She had not thought of that childish sequence for years. It came back to her when she overheard her brothers talking together. Second Lady had fallen asleep after a restless, pain-filled night. Hung Tu left her with a servant and escaped for an hour of peace to her favorite thinking-place, a stone bench in the shade, hidden from the rest of the garden by clumps of tall bamboo.
She thought they were quarreling at first, as they used to when they were children playing along the paths. Their voices were harsh with anger. But when they came close enough for her to hear what they were saying, she realized that they were angry, not against each other, but against Hsueh Yun. They had just come from his pavilion, where things had gone badly for them.
“…wait another twenty or thirty years…”
“It would take that long for ‘times to improve, my sons.’”
“What does he think? That nobody ever married when the times were bad?”
“He says ‘unrest,’ ‘bandits.’ Whose fault is that? Who herded them all together and let them get organized? All they needed was a leader, and now they’ve got a leader. What did he expect? ‘Times to improve’? Who’s doing anything to make the times improve?”
“You heard him when I offered to go out there and help him. Making soothing noises, as though we were children.”
“That’s what he’d like us to be. A child has ears and no mouth, that’s what they all want, no one to ask questions, no one to answer back…”
“We might as well be castrated as live like this!”
“There are those waiting for us now who would not agree with you!”
“And how long would we all have to wait if it depended on the old bullfrog? Croak, croak, croak! ‘An old man has crossed more bridges than a young man has crossed streets.’ Who was talking about bridges or streets? How much money does he give us to go to the Blue Houses while we wait for women of our own? If it weren’t for the clever way you pick up something now and then…”
“In shooting a tiger or catching a bandit, depend on your own brother.”
“It’s a good saying. But sometimes I wonder whether we shouldn’t look into what the bandits have to offer two ambitious brothers.”
“Except that their leaders are old men too.”
“How old is Pockmark Chou?”
“One hears different things, and of course he has the physique of a bull, but he must be nearing thirty.”
“There must be someone somewhere… Or we could form our own band…”
Their voices faded as they turned into another path, leaving Hung Tu startled by this glimpse into her brothers’ essences, startled and curious to know more of them.
They had gone very separate ways since Honorable Tutor left. For years they never saw each other except at formal gatherings where she, and now she understood they too, had been busy with protective concealment of everything important and true, under the “appropriate” masks prescribed for the young by their elders.
She might never have discovered that Hsueh-Tai and Hsueh-Ts’an were more than official shadows, occupying certain places at certain times, if their father had not been pressed by business, and his wives, for their different reasons, unconcerned with her affairs. It fell to her brothers to exert themselves to find a suitor for her. This was Hsueh Yun’s will.
It tossed them between two fires, their father’s orders, which they were bound to obey, and their mother’s bitter opposition to those orders, which they were also bound, on the surface at least, to respect. Their father’s will came first, but their mother made life hard for them and for Hung Tu in many ingenious ways.
Left to themselves they might have enjoyed their new responsibility. They had never disliked their sister, even in her stormy childhood days. She had stung them, annoyed them, amused them, and subsided into the young girl’s background of her mother’s pavilion, while they went on to the world to become what they were now, handsome, dull young men, twenty and eighteen, who had finished their education, passed their examinations, and were waiting, uneasily, for their first appointments…and for other things too, Hsueh-Tai for his bride, Hsueh-Ts’an for his betrothal to a bride.
Both of them felt injured by their father’s “abnormal attitude” toward their marriages. They were embarrassed before their friends by the long delay. Their hope now was that if they could arrange their sister’s marriage for a good price, their father would be pleased and remember his duty toward them. After all, they were his sons.
“And, in the proverbs he lives by, ‘have a son and everything is all right.’ He should remember that.”
Perhaps he would, if they did things well. It was worth a try, and it should not be hard. Their sister was fifteen, well-formed, adept in the arts of painting her face and putting up her hair. She wore her unimportant clothes with a graceful air of fashion. She could play and sing in a pleasing way. Already she attracted the attention of their friends and other young men whom they would like to call their friends, whenever she was seen. The question was to display her to them properly, to the best advantage, with the least expense, for the purse strings were grudgingly loosened. “The old buzzard, how it sticks to his fingers!” they said half admiringly.
They talked it over and decided the right place to begin was on the river, at the Dragon Festival.
VIII
THE RIVER WAS THE GREAT ARTERY for traffic, the city’s floating market, where the local merchants, farmers, fishermen, peddlers, men with goods to dispose of cried and displayed their wares. It was jammed with junks, rafts, rowboats, barges, and, at this time of the year, houseboats and pleasure boats. The Dragon Festival brought everybody out, especially the young. It was their festival. But even without it there would still be crowds on the river the first fine days of spring, the best days of the year.
The Hsuehs had no houseboat of their own. They hired a punt with a boatman to pole it, comfortable cushions, an awning of embroidered cloth for shade, a hamper of cakes and sweetmeats, a container of wine. Nothing was forgotten for enjoyment.
It was all new to Hung Tu, the sun on the changing stream, the trees they drifted beneath, making unexpected patterns of shadow, the gaily painted boats like theirs, filled with friends calling out to friends, laughter, shouting, music…she