O, for the eyes of an Emperorto see the phoenix!
Now how to go on to suggest that the tree might better serve the throne, without being uprooted from the court where it was? He did not want to be transferred, only approved and promoted.
Something about its gifts being wasted, on the ants and bees, that was safe, or perhaps its sure support only the ravens know.
That might do. It said nothing much and yet it suggested troubled loyalty, anxious to be doing more for the Golden Throne. Hmm hmm hmm…its gifts are wasted…he took the brush more firmly toward the inkstone and was about to dip it in when a small commotion beside him swept it from his hand, and two columns of wet lines scrawled themselves beside his own:
In my garden the Wu t’ung tree is tall,birds from the south, birds from the northare nesting there. At every passing wind the branches tremble.
Hung Tu was crouched beside him, leaning over his elbow. She had just completed his quatrain, taking it in a direction he had never meant it to go, and which he could certainly not use for his promotion.
Birds from every quarter? New ideas from wherever they might come? This was a dangerous, revolutionary thought. And whatever winds passed, with the breath of freedom, of unconventional forces sweeping across the narrow decorums of the day?
What bold, preposterous sentiment! How it lifted the whole poem into a proud challenge, instead of the mild resigned reproach he had planned it to contain. How disquieting that a daughter of his house should think in this free way and be able to express it so well!
“The breath of your mouth is evil,” he said sternly, looking at the sleek dark head pressed against his shoulder. She did not answer, but when she lifted her face to look at him there was no fear in her eyes; in his, a mixture of pride and consternation. He was afraid for her and of what the future would bring to a girl with such ideas.
They sat together in silence, in front of the completed scroll. Then he said:
“Well, I see that when the time comes to order the Red Candles and the Flowery Chair, we must look for a very brave husband.”
He laughed, but he was half in earnest. It was going to be difficult to find a husband for his daughter, not only because she had a free spirit—that might be concealed, with luck—but because the times were so uncertain and money so hard to come by that many men, even the wealthiest heads of great families, were deferring marriage for their sons. He himself had not made any betrothal plans or even negotiations for his second son, and he was hoping that his first son’s future father-in-law would not choose this inconvenient moment to press for the wedding date…which he might, since his daughter was ready, had been ready for a year.
Yet how could he enlarge his household to include a son’s wife and the children to follow, when it was harder every day to maintain it as it was? His sons were little help. They had passed their examinations, but so low on the list there was not much hope they would be named to official posts until he could buy the openings for them. Even with gold, with a brilliant record and with influence, it was a lucky chance for a man to set his sons’ feet on the ladder that led to public office, especially in Cheng-tu, and to send them away was expensive and just as competitive.
He sighed so heavily that Hung Tu looked at him with concern and was glad, for once, when Elder Sister sent for her to run an errand, transparently devised to take her out of her father’s sight. If she made him so unhappy when she was with him, she would as soon not be there.
VII
WORD BEGAN TO GO ROUND, discreetly and in the right places, that the daughter of subofficial Hsueh Yun was ready for marriage. The news stirred up some interest among the young men of the city and those older men who thought of adding a second or third lady to their households, or even a concubine.
The girl was known to be pretty and said to be well raised. The father’s means were straightened and his rank not such that he could demand the highest price for an alliance with his house. It was likely to be a bargain worth looking into, certainly worth looking at.
So Hung Tu was seen in public on such occasions and in such places as she should be seen, sometimes with her father, sometimes with her brothers, sometimes with reliable older servants, but not, the curious noticed, in the company of the First Lady of the House of Hsueh or of her own mother.
Elder Sister was taking no notice of Hung Tu’s coming of age to be married, except to demand her presence at inconvenient moments for trumped-up tasks and to nag at her more bitterly. She did not dare go further than this petty persecution in view of Hsueh Yun’s “unseemly infatuation” for his daughter.
And that spring Second Lady was in declining health after the birth of a stillborn son.
“The ways of Heaven are just and full of wisdom,” Elder Sister declared, burning sticks of incense in conspicuous places. She went on a bustling pilgrimage to the Temple of Shang Shan, above the city, where she offered rice and candles and paid a monk to strike the golden gong in gratitude for her delivery “from a too-heavy event.” She did not have to define it. Everyone present understood what event would have raised Second Lady to a position of honor and dignity in that household. Perhaps, Elder Sister hinted, Hsueh Yun should take notice of the verdict of Heaven.
Second Lady made no gestures toward Heaven, and none to the world outside her gates. She never left her pavilion unless compelled to by Elder Sister’s demands. After a while these ceased, on Hsueh Yun’s orders, and she was left to her seclusion.
Hung Tu, sharing her roof and attending to her needs, grew conscious that her existence was becoming nonexistent to her mother; that at last the constant reproach, endured through the years, had worn down the ties between them, until this gentle, distraught, sick woman felt no emotion, no relationship with anyone except her stillborn son. Even Hsueh Yun was no longer alive to her, though she performed every act of devoted attention to him with more care than before, Hung Tu thought, watching them with aching pity.
Perhaps he did not know what he had lost. He was pressed with cares that spring. Troubles racked up round him. He spent long hours in conference with the Governor. He was working late into the nights. Something was wrong in Shu, and while he grappled with these distant demands and dangers he was blind to his nearer calamity…mercifully…yet Hung Tu felt his blindness was the deepest, most desolate bereavement.
The love between him and her mother had been the fine banner of her childhood, her secret security. Now he did not even know that her mother had gone from him.
Or did he know? Was this restless activity his retreat into seclusion? How could one be sure what older people knew, or felt, or were, barricaded from each other and particularly from their children by rigidly fixed walls?
Bowed heads, hands in sleeves, polite, prescribed gestures, carefully chosen words, always chosen by others, to express “appropriate sentiments,” that was how one met one’s elders. That was how she met her father, except for a few jeweled moments, unexpected as they were brief, when in the courage of her ignorance she had dared to meet him as herself. That was long ago, a small, foolhardy child, accidentally alone with him, but the father she saw then was the father she had loved and trusted all these years and for whom she was troubled now.
If people could face each other stripped of the padded quilts of prescribed behavior and start and go on from there! But some would be intolerable without those imposed restraints. Elder Sister, for instance.
Yet when did any conventional rules foil her? How was it that the meanness of the mean broke through high-built walls to devastate everything in sight, all the smiling landscape of the kind? How was it that the kind were hampered behind their own restraint?
It was a thought she often turned over, a lonely thought, until she heard her brothers discussing casually, as something they had often talked about before, “the chasm, impossible to cross,” between them and the “tight world”