“But they say it and say it all the time!”
“A true thing, daughter, need only be uttered once, sometimes not at all, to be evident and acceptable. A doubtful thing is repeated many times, loudly, with anger and with argument. This does not make it true or acceptable.”
“But Elder Sister…”
“Elder Sister speaks for our good, and sometimes from unhappiness. Remember that.”
“If Elder Sister is unhappy, she deserves to be. She makes everyone unhappy, even my father.”
“Elder Sister is First Lady of the House of Hsueh,” Second Lady said quickly. “We will speak of her with proper respect.”
“Well, but I would rather give my husband joy than two dull sons.”
“The breath of your mouth is evil,” Second Lady said severely, but her own mouth trembled, hiding a quick smile. She changed the subject from Elder Sister to Hung Tu’s difficulties as a girl.
“There are precepts to be observed,” she said. “A woman must do what she does better than a man would do it, and be sure that it goes unnoticed, to be acceptable to men. It is therefore wise to restrict one’s occupations to those a man does not generally desire to do.”
“But I want to be a poet,” Hung Tu said sullenly. “And when I brush good words I am in disgrace.”
“Not because you brush good words. You could brush good words all day and nobody would mind. It is because you jostle your brothers’ elbows. You claim attention for your words, while some of the greatest poets let theirs go unclaimed.”
Hung Tu pondered this.
“It is never wise to insist on praise from unwilling lips. You would do better to praise your brothers’ words and offer to copy them. You might set them to music and sing them to your father, or to all of us, in the garden.”
“I had rather sing my own words.”
“You may do that too, when they are good enough, and when you have worked harder at your instrument. When I was your age I could play the p’i-pa as well as I do now, and I had already sung before the Emperor.”
It was rare that Second Lady mentioned her childhood, and when she did it usually put an end to the conversation. Hung Tu bowed and went about her duties, but she thought about these things and grew more confident.
VI
HSUEH YUN WAS SOMETIMES DEPRESSED that the head of the House of Hsueh was now a minor official in a provincial city far from former greatness and from the Emperor’s mind. The mood fell upon him most heavily when envoys arrived from the Court with news of the great world and the happenings about the Golden Throne, gossip of this man’s rise or that old friend’s disgrace.
Then he would wonder uneasily about his own position. Should he have returned to the Capital when he heard that the revolution was crushed and the Emperor and his court were once more at Chang-an, in the Imperial Palace? But that was a long year after the flight and he had found his position in Cheng-tu. There would be the terrible road to retrace and at the end of the desperate journey no assurance that he would get his old appointment back, or any appointment. There were new faces now about the Emperor, and he would favor those who had stayed with him and fought with him, moving from camp to camp, while Hsueh Yun had struck out on his own.
So he had stayed in Cheng-tu when he reached it, for good or for ill, and was now in a post too small, he hoped, for envy to set the great wheel turning which might crush him from Chang-an. He was still in the Emperor’s service, still a government official. His salary was paid from the Imperial Treasury, though not directly to him. It was included in the Governor’s monies, who took the customary offering from it, then it went to the minister in charge of his department and then to his immediate superior. After all of them deducted what was proper, he was left with a scarcity of coin, which he in turn made up by extorting gifts and offerings from his subordinates and demanding bribes and payments from anyone else he could.
It was a living, and when travelers arrived from other parts of the land reporting trouble, raids and counterraids, famine and devastation, he was content with his decision. Shu, when once a man could reach it, seemed an oasis of prosperity and peace.
It was an agricultural district, a wide and fertile plain, sheltered by surrounding mountains, watered by a network of ingenious canals devised by an earlier ruler from the meeting of three other rivers with the turbulent River Min. The earth was rich and lavish. Flowers, cultivated with excessive labor in the Emperor’s gardens in Chang-an, here were growing wild: hibiscus in so many varieties that some of them were still unnamed, the yulan, the mountain tea flower, the rose, the lilac, the aster, the apricot, the peach, and now in courts and gardens, the tree peony, lately introduced from India.
Cultivated crops grew even more lavishly, and if there were no unnatural floods or droughts or locusts to contend with, Shu would continue to be what the poets called it, a paradise, far from the rest of the starving, struggling world. It was far, and it was hard to reach, almost impossible by the eastern road and nearly as cut off from the north and south. But too many refugees were reaching it, desperate and dangerous men, with nothing to lose but the remnant of their broken lives. Too many were crawling these days into Shu. It was beginning to be a disquieting thing.
They were arriving from all quarters, farmers and peasants driven off their lands, soldiers defeated in battle. So far the Province could absorb them, those who were able-bodied and willing to work in the fields. The rest starved or went back where they came from or—how would one know? The world was always full of beggars, the sick, the unfortunate. It was Hsueh Yun’s responsibility to settle the suitable where there was need of them.
So far he had managed to keep them out of the city itself, herded into camps at the other end of the valley. Those who were needed for work inside the gates had special passes, good for the day. At nightfall they must leave. This meant a stream of early morning and late evening traffic to be regulated and supervised, but it also kept Cheng-tu free of disruptive elements.
The City of Silk, Shu’s capital, was a walled enclosure of enough great houses and enough established families to make the nucleus of a good society, a replica in miniature of the glittering life in Chang-an, around the Imperial Court. There was wealth here, as there, but the difference was that here a man of reason with only moderate means could mingle with the best, and, if he lived in one of the less fashionable quarters of the city, maintain a good-sized household, safe and fine about him…if he kept his post. That was the crux of it, the great anxiety…if he lost his post, well, from that no man could recover. That was ruin. Unless he had lands and wealth independent from his office. And what man had those? Not Hsueh Yun.
All this was going through his mind one day as he sat alone in his pavilion. He had come from a meeting with the Governor and some officials from Chang-an. One of these officials he had known in the days when they were studying for their first examination. Now that one was riding high and likely to ride higher. Something that he said made Hsueh Yun uneasy. Was it prudent to neglect his old ties completely, to let himself be entirely forgotten at the Court? On the other hand, would it be prudent to recall himself to attention? So long as his salary continued to arrive with the rest of the Governor’s money, should he not let well enough alone?
Perhaps he might rouse himself to send an occasional poem to the Emperor. In the past his poems were well received. He must be careful not to sound too eager to leave or to stay in Shu. A lament of his uselessness to the Throne and a delicate reproach that his political talents were being overlooked might sound the right note. He could determine later whether he would send it.
He went to his tablets and took up his brush.
In my garden the Wu t’ung tree is tall,
That was a good first line, a mighty oak, yes, that described him well…
roots in the