Читать книгу Go Ask the River - Evelyn Eaton - Страница 18

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” of the elders.

They talked about it cynically, with a natural taken-for-granted resentment that astonished her. She had never dreamed that anyone except her depraved self, and certainly not any man, could be dissatisfied with the order of society, the way things were on earth. How else could they be but the established way, decreed from the beginning by Heaven? Yet her brothers spoke as though there were a choice, or could be a choice, of other ways. To them it was not a question, as it was to her, of the subjugation of half the human race, the separation of man from woman. They were in revolt against the old, against authority. They were like those mutineers who sacked the Emperor’s Palace, and triumphed for a year…and were defeated.

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.