BAF 64 - Kai Lung Unrolls His Mat, page 7
part #64 of Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series
“Nevertheless, this small li of yours—”
“We are even now at the poverty-stricken gate,” replied the guide, stopping before the largest and most lavishly ornamented of the mansions, and with a key that he drew from his inner sleeve he unlocked a door leading to the courtyard and stood aside. “Pass in, nobility.”
“Before one whose ancestors doubtless wore the peacock feather?” protested Chun no less agreeably. “These rebellious knees would refuse their sustenance should I attempt so impolite an act,” and he also moved farther away.
“The circumstances are not happily arranged for a really well-kept-up display of mutual refinement,” remarked the other, speaking with some discomfort through his chattering teeth and at the same time stooping to wring an excess of moisture from his body-cloth. “In the name of the Viceroy of Hades let us go in together.”
On this understanding, they went forward side by side, though with some difficulty, the way being narrow and the one who led Chun a person of outstanding attitude.
“This is evidently an underling in the service of some noble,” thought Chun. “His easy manner proclaims that he is not altogether without influence.” But the one concerned did not turn aside toward the living huts. He led the way up to the great house itself, and again drawing forth a key, he unlocked a door.
“This is certainly a personal attendant upon a high official,” next considered Chun, “and unless my memory is grossly at fault, the yamen of the district mandarin should be hereabout. If I have rendered this service to one who has the ear of Wong Tsoi, it may turn, if not actually to my advantage, at least to the disadvantage of Teen King.”
“Let us now rearrange ourselves more in comfort,” said the stranger affably, and with the tone of authority, he struck an imperious gong. “Two changes of fine raiment here without delay,” he cried to the slave who hurried at the call. “Later, let a repast be laid out in my inner room—a display suited to the entertainment of an honoured guest.” “I hear and obey, high excellence,” replied the slave, retiring.
“Excellence!” repeated Keu Chun, falling back several paces from so august a presence. “Can it be that you are——?”
The broad-minded official made a gesture implying caution.
“The wise duck keeps his mouth shut when he smells frogs,” he remarked significantly. “Be discreet, and you may rely upon the advancement of your righteous cause. But should you be so short-sighted as to maintain a special claim on this one’s succour it would be his duty, as an incorruptible upholder of the law, to sentence you to a variety of unpleasant exertions for attempted blackmail.”
“So presumptuous a thought never entered this ill-nourished mind,” replied Keu Chun.
“It is well said,” agreed Wong Tsoi; “and among virtuous friends a slight inclination of the head is as efficacious as the more painful admonition from an iron-shod foot.”
With discriminating courtesy, the tolerantly inclined mandarin forebore to question Keu Chun more closely until a rich and varied abundance had restored their energies. Then, reclining with dignified ease among the cushions of his couch, Wong Tsoi indicated to his guest that he should seat himself upon the floor at a respectful distance away and disclose his past.
“For,” he added, “it concerns one who is responsible for the administration of the best-regulated city of our Celestial Empire to discover what flaw in an otherwise perfect judicial code prompted you to so distressing a remedy.”
“Yet, eminence,” Chun ventured to remind him, “if your benevolent condescension is moved by so slight a matter as this obscure person’s mere misfortune, with what refined anguish must you regard actual crime! The two unseemly outcasts who ventured to lay their sacrilegious hands upon your honoured person—”
“Cherish no apprehension on that score,” replied the far-seeing Wong Tsoi capably. “In cases of absolute wrongdoing, it is impossible for even the least experienced official to deviate from the iron rule of conduct. Cause and effect; effect and cause: these two facets of an integral system corollarate with absolute precision. Two persons having committed a Category One crime, two persons will automatically suffer a Category One punishment, and the Essential Equipoise of Justice will thereby be painlessly maintained.”
“It is what the scrupulous would look for,” assented Chun. “It is what they will inevitably see,” replied Wong Tsoi. “Should your leisurely footsteps chance to turn in the direction of the public execution ground on the occasion of the next general felicity, your discriminating eyes will receive assurance that the feet of the depraved find no resting-place on the upright soil of Hoo-yang.”
“It is indeed a matter for rejoicing that your penetrating gaze recognized the degraded miscreants who will thus be brought to an appropriate end.”
A faint absence of agreement for the moment obscured the well-balanced exactness of the law-giver’s expression.
“If,” he remarked profoundly, “so sublime a principle as Justice should depend upon so fallible a thread as a single human attribute, all feeling of security would be gone forever. The two misbegotten harbingers of shame who submitted this hard-striving person to the indignity of thrusting him down into a polluted stream will sooner or later meet with a fate that will be both painful and grotesque. In the meanwhile, the wholesome moral of retribution will be inculcated in the throng by two others (doubtless quite as abandoned in their several ways) demonstrating that authority does not slumber.”
“It has been claimed that there is equally one law for the just and for the unjust,” assented Chun, “and in a certain guise—”
“Your loyal approbation nourishes the roots of our endeavour,” interposed Wong Tsoi, rewarding the speaker with a handful of melon seeds cast in his direction. “Now disclose your own involvement.”
“Beneficence,” replied Chun readily, “my obscure happening may be likened to a scorpion’s tail, in that it is short but sharply pointed. My lowly name is Chun, that of my father’s meagre house being Keu, and having ever been of a wayward bend, I earn my scanty rice as an inefficient Brother of the Peach Orchard.”
“An actor” exclaimed Wong Tsoi, regarding his guest with a special interest.
“Alas, exalted,” confessed Chun, “such is my offensive calling.”
The leniently inspired official made a gesture of dissent, after satisfying himself that no attendant lingered.
“That which would brand you as an outcast in the eyes. of the tightly buttoned, to me contains an added flavour,” he admitted. “In the security of this inner chamber I will confide to your specific ear that I also am of a straggling and romantic nature, though the dignity of office makes it impossible for me to go very far in any impropriety. Nevertheless, half a cycle of years ago, when I had failed for the third time to attain the degree of Budding Genius in the competitions, I had all but decided to throw up an official career and go upon the wooden platform…Does your refined gift lie in the portrayal of noble youths of exalted lineage who are for a time alienated from the path of happiness by the machination of an elderly vampire?”
“At one time my ambition reached in that direction, but, as the saying has it, ’One learns to itch where one can scratch,’ and my unworthy talents are considered most effective in the delineation of club-armed guardians of the street who slip heavily backward on over-ripe loquats, and similar devices of a gravity-removing nature.”
“Proceed with the recital of your story,” commanded the Mandarin briefly.
“Over against my low-born father’s bankrupt hovel there stands the home of Fragrant Petal, the graceful and entrancing offspring of the autumnal widow Le-she. From an early period it has been the habit of the sympathetic maiden and the calamitous earthworm now before you to meet unostentatiously in a convenient spot that was suitably screened from the windows of both houses. Here a binding arrangement was mutually exchanged, together with the pledges of appropriate gifts, that each would remain faithful to the other. Fortified with this incentive, nothing seemed too excessive, and a score of moons ago the one who is now relating his sordid experience set forth to achieve distinction and to win an agreeable superfluity of taels. To-day he returned—”
“Doubtless to entrust a few bars of gold to a discreet friend’s keeping?” suggested Wong Tsoi politely, as the other paused.
“To recover a still serviceable pair of sandals that he remembered leaving in an outer shed, esteemed,” replied Keu Chun with conscious diffidence. “Then only did he learn of the grossly unfit-to-live Le-she’s perfidy. Taking advantage of this one’s absence and of the obscene Teen King’s infatuation, she had bartered Fragrant Petal to be that glutinous-eyed produce monger’s possession at the price of a hundred taels of silver.”
“In these close-handed times, a hundred taels are not to be spat at,” remarked the Mandarin judicially.
“Excellence!” cried Keu Chun springing to his feet, “it is not the equivalent of a single hair among the ten thousand glossy ones that go to crown her high perfection. When she smiles, her eyes throw out continuous beams of violet light—even sideways. At every step her classically proportioned feet leave the impress of a golden lily. The Imperial treasury within the Purple City does not contain sufficient store to buy one glance of approbation—”
“It was thus with this one also in the days of his own brightly coloured youth,” sighed Wong Tsoi reminiscently, as he removed the outer skin of a choice apricot. “There was Che-Che who danced on pigeons’ eggs at the ‘Melodious Resort of Virtue’ in Chiang-foo, and another, whose attractive name has escaped my weed-grown memory, who was reputed to have invisible wings, for in no other way could her graceful unconcern, as she progressed upon one foot along a distended cord, be accounted for. But maidens are no longer what they were in the days before they gummed their hair. Doubtless this Fragrant Petal—”
“If your own distinguished eyes could but see—”
“Enough!” interposed Wong Tsoi decisively. “Shall one measure the bounty of the Yang-tse-kiang by a teacup? But for your graceful versatility with a perverse-willed steering pole, the misshapen eyes to which you so fittingly allude would at this moment be unable to regard anything beyond the ill-made bed of an offensive watercourse.”
’Then, benevolence-?” begged Chun, stirred by new hope.
“The engaging qualities you display—added to the fact that the low-conditioned Teen King recently deluded this confiding person in a matter affecting the quality of some reputed swallows’ nests—establish the justice of your cause. How to proceed is another matter, for the contaminating refuse-blender has both wealth and legality on his side. Speaking strictly as one loyal subject to another, it may well be admitted that it is not infeasible to outstrip legal forms by means of a well-lined sleeve, nor yet to get the better of mere riches by a dexterous use of lawful methods. But to defeat both of these while posessing neither would melt the tenacity of demons.”
“Could you not,” suggested Keu Chun helpfully, “in the exercise of your exalted office, denounce the unclean Teen King to vigilant authority as one worthy of immediate death, without disclosing too exactly the nature of his crime?”
“Undoubtedly,” agreed Wong Tsoi. “It is by no means an unusual course, and it has the merit of ruling out a mass of evidence which is wholly irrelevant when the result has already been decided. But by a most corrupt enactment, it is necessary for any official submitting a complaint to begin it with a full recital of the various times that he himself has been degraded.”
“Degraded!” exclaimed Keu Chun, incredulous of so harsh an infliction toward one so spotless. “Surely these blameworthy ears—”
“On seven misjudged occasions—thrice charged with ’ordinariness of character’ and on yet four times more for ‘displaying originality of conduct unseemly in a high official,’” replied Wong Tsoi dispassionately. “Rearrange your composure, worthy Keu Chun; these are but formalities in the daily life of a zealous servant of the state and merely indicate that another would gladly wear his button.”
“Why, then, graciousness-?”
“It nevertheless bars your well-meant plan. So inauspiciously sired a plaint would be consigned by the merest official pencil-moistener to the eternal oblivion of the dove’s retreat,” explained the Mandarin, with a meaning flicker of his wrist. “If you hope to look forward to a hundred strong sons to venerate your name, Keu Chun, something more apt must emerge from our mutual endeavour.”
“Benevolence,” confessed Keu Chun with some dejection, “the one before you would cheerfully face the torments to achieve his quest, but in matters involving guile he is as devoid of wisdom as a new-laid egg is destitute of feathers.”
“Certainly the enterprise will need qualities of no common order,” agreed Wong Tsoi ungrudgingly. “To your knowledge, did the maiden go unwillingly, and is she still allegiant to your cause?”
Chun put a hand within his sleeve, and from a hidden fold he offered to the Mandarin a sheaf of polished bamboo slips tied together with a crimson thread. A score and five there would be in all, or even more.
’This missive awaited my discovering thumb within a certain hollow cypress tree which often served our need,” he said. “Read freely, excellence, of her gracefully expressed affection and of the high-minded repugnance with which she regards her detested lot.”
“Your meritorious word suffices,” replied the Mandarin hastily, as he recognized the formidable proportion of the letter. “It is scarcely meet that another eye should rest upon the context of so privileged a message. Doubtless, after this avowal, you sought to approach beneath Teen King’s inner window?”
“That would have served no profitable end, esteemed. For a reason not yet clear, Fragrant Petal has been straightway conveyed to that corrupt spice adulterator’s summer-seat, a lonely tower lying off the northern earth-road, where she is strictly held.”
“Yet Teen King himself has not passed beyond the city gates during the present moon,” observed Wong Tsoi shrewdly. “His ardour has a strangely tardy bend that it must loiter so.”
“Perchance the chief one of his inner chamber has raised a contentious voice—”
“There you have struck the wooden skewer on its thicker end, Keu Chun!” exclaimed the other with conviction. “Her forbidding name is Tsoo, and hitherto she has allowed no secondary to share her place. Teen King, stricken with this corroding passion of his unsavoury old age, has acted thus and thus, hoping doubtless to sway Tsoo on one plea or another, or, perchance, failing that, to dispose of her inoffensively by some simple but well-tried method.”
“If that is indeed the case, then Fragrant Petal may still
“May still be yours, you would say? Yet, should that come to pass, is there any secure retreat into which you and the ornamentally described one could imperceptibly fade? Assuredly, in so amiable a cause, some unnamed well-wisher would be forthcoming to contribute a double hand-count of taels to your virtuous success.”
“Munificence,” replied Keu Chun, “to elude pursuit would then be easy. A propitious friend, lying at no great distance from this spot, trades a commodious junk far into the lower reaches of the river. Once there—”
“Truly. As well look for an eel in a cartload of live adders. Forego despair, Keu Chun. I am by no means desirous that my careworn ghost should be under the burden of this obligation to your exacting ghost in the Hereafter. What a far from slow-witted official can do to readjust the balance now will be discreetly effected.”
“I am in your large and never-failing hand,” replied Keu Chun submissively.
Wong Tsoi waved a gesture of benevolent dismissal and closed his eyes to indicate tactfully that a concentrated reverie was necessary in which to mature his plans. So deep indeed became the profundity of his thoughts that neither Keu Chun’s deferential leavetaking nor yet the various gong-strokes of the night were suffered to obtrude, and the early light of dawn found him with his eyes still closed in meditation and his body in the same pliant attitude of introspective calm.
Let it be freely admitted that, when Wong Tsoi stepped forth from his yamen on the following day, he had not the most shadowy idea of how to bring about Keu Chun’s desire and thus fulfil the obligation that the saving of his life—at the risk of incurring the malignity of the presiding demon of the river—had imposed upon him.
“Yet,” he remarked self-reliantly as he set out, “I am pledged to the undertaking, and as the wise philosopher of Ts’i has so observantly remarked, ‘Where the head has already gone, the hind quarters are bound to follow.’”
In pursuit of a guiding omen, the scrupulous official dismissed his chair and bearers presently and bent his not entirely reluctant feet in the direction of the “Abode of Harmony and Well-seasoned Dishes” at about the time of the evening rice. Beneath this auspicious sign might be found at that hour many of his more opulent and mentionable neighbours within Hoo-yang. The honour of an unceremonious visit from so high a dignitary was a conspicuous event, and the gratified Comptroller of the Table, meeting Wong Tsoi at the door, preceded him backward to his place, chanting meanwhile a happily arranged song in his honour, into which the versatile person gradually blended the names of the various delicacies available as they neared the highest seat Wong Tsoi having made an appropriate choice, the one who had attended him retired in the same becoming order, extolling the guest’s discernment in another set of verses, wherein he pronounced the selected viands in a louder key, thus to apprise the Custodian of the Grill of what was required from him. When the first dish duly arrived, following the dictates of ordinary courtesy, the latest guest stood up and pressed everyone around to join him in partaking of it.
“The one before you is a thoroughly inadequate host,” he announced, bowing graciously in the four directions; “a worse combination of courses than those that he has chosen could not well be hit upon, and, as is quite befitting, the most inferior portion of each dish has been specially reserved for him. How great, therefore, will be your amiable condescension if you will but leave your own attractively arranged tables and endure the unappetizing deficiencies of his.”
