Wu Ti

“ The sound of her silk skirt has stopped.
On the marble pavement dust grows.
Her empty room is cold and still.
Fallen leaves are piled against the doors.
Longing for that lovely lady
How can I bring my aching heart to rest?
The above poem was written by Wu-ti when his mistress, Li Fu-jēn, died. Unable to bear his grief, he sent for wizards from all parts of China, hoping that they would be able to put him into communication with her spirit. At last one of them managed to project her shape on to a curtain. The emperor cried:
Is it or isn’t it? ”

“ THE AUTUMN WIND
By Wu-ti (157-87 B.C.) , sixth emperor of the Han dynasty. He came to the throne when he was only sixteen. In this poem he regrets that he is obliged to go on an official journey, leaving his mistress behind in the capital. He is seated in his state barge surrounded by his ministers.
Autumn wind rises: white clouds fly.
Grass and trees wither: geese go south. ”

“ One day there appeared before Wu Ti in the palace garden a beautiful green sparrow. In China and Japan the sparrow is a symbol of gentleness, and a sparrow of uncommon colour is supposed to indicate that something unusual is to happen. The emperor was puzzled regarding the bird-omen, and consulted Tung Fang So, who informed him that the Queen of Immortals was about to visit the royal palace. ”

“ Webb who gave the information. “Mrs. Jerr is the widow of a Hong Kong silk-merchant, who has lived all her life in the East. She brought Wu Ti with her when she returned to England after the death of her husband. He’s devoted to her is Wu Ti. Although,” added Mrs. Webb with a shiver, “I don’t like him myself: a creepy-crawly kind of man.”
“It’s the English way of looking at foreigners that speaks, sir,” said Webb, with a broad smile. “Wu Ti’s just the same as any other Chink. Eve seen lots of ’em in the Mile End Road, when I lived there, afore the war. ”

“ And none knew how my soul was torn,
How the tears fell surging over my breast.
[89]
THE LIBERATOR
A POLITICAL ALLEGORY
By Wu-ti, emperor of the Liang dynasty (A.D. 464-549)
In the high trees—many doleful winds:
The ocean waters—lashed into waves.
If the sharp sword be not in your hand,
How can you hope your friends will remain many?
Do you not see that sparrow on the fence?
Seeing the hawk it casts itself into the snare.
The fowler to catch the sparrow is delighted:
The Young Man to see the sparrow is grieved. ”

“ Tu Mu’s conjecture seems to be based on a passage in the 漢官解詁 “Wei Wu Ti strung together Sun Wu’s Art of War,” [40] which in turn may have resulted from a misunderstanding of the final words of Ts‘ao Kung’s preface: 故撰爲略解焉. ”

“ He’d punish—strike to the quick, flay to the raw nerve—but not wrangle with his condemned. “The sound of that gong will ring in your ears as long as you live. Go where you will, you will hear it. Go where you will, you will see, waking and sleeping, a pagoda by a lotus lake, while you live; and when you die, you will feel the vengeance of a Wu. Never again will you look upon your mother’s face without seeing too the dead face of Wu Nang Ping—and mine.” ”

“ The older mandarin had graciously appointed them attendants upon his granddaughter and to stay with her in Pekin. But the bear and the juggler were traveling with the home-returning Wus; and when the inevitable chess-board and its jeweled chessmen and the flagons of hot spiced wine were laid between Muir and the mandarin, Bruin—Kung Fo Lo was his name—danced and pranced in the firelight for the boy, who clapped his hands and shook with laughter; the heart of a man-child cannot be for ever sad for a baby-girl, known but two months and not able to crawl yet. But Wu Li Chang did not forget Wu Lu. ”

“ In our moments of greatest personal dilemma and peril we seek the strangest confidants: sometimes in half-crazed desperation, sometimes in shame and fear of our nearer and dearer, sometimes instinctively, and then oddly often it proves well done. But whatever the most general explanation, most of us are prone at such tremulous times to lean upon some one not of our constant or closest entourage.
Basil Gregory had little estimate of Wu’s position and power, and none at all of Chinese character. ”

“ He had known such slight men by the dozens and twenties at Oxford, scant-minded, uncultured, clad like popinjays; and for this—this English nothing, this manling thing too slight for Wu Li Chang’s hate, almost unworth his crushing—she had made the father that had adored and cherished her grandsire to a mongrel of shame. The pain at Wu Li Chang’s heart was greater and gnawed sharper than that at Basil Gregory’s. The Chinese was the bigger man, and paid the bigger penalty. ”

“ Until the door opened and Wu came in, she sat cowering, her eyes riveted on her cup, her fingers knotting and unknotting in her lap, and under the lace of her sleeve the costly jewel she had worn to pay honor to Sing Kung Yah winked and danced.
She did not look up at the mandarin’s step, and for a space he stood and studied her, hatred and contempt for Basil Gregory’s mother ugly on his face, pity for his vicarious victim—and she a woman—in his Chinese eyes. And in his heart there was self-pity too: his sacrificial office was in no way to the liking of Wu Li Chang. ”

“ O curse of Europe! That such men as you pour into Asia and do this damnable thing! You’ll boil in oil for this. You insufferable ass! Don’t you realize in the least who and what her father is? You might better have affronted Tze-Shi herself. Boil in oil, I tell you, and, by God, so you ought! If it were not for your mother, I’d help Wu to heat it. How would you like some Chinese man to do to your sister what you have done to this girl? ”

“ Every tong in China would have torn at the vitals of any one rash enough to exercise against Sing Kung Yah a social ostracism contrary to his wish. And so the unprecedented festivity of the kinswoman’s widowhood was tolerated even by the Chinese whom it both shocked and affronted.
But anything more, or kindlier, than tolerance, even the great Wu was powerless to win for her—at least from the Chinese. And both he and she knew this, and it was the one fly in her very nice amber. She would have been ostracized fiercely if those of their own caste had dared ”

“ He had no more time for thought, nor need. His thinking was done. His years of selfishness were past. He no longer saw or felt “a divided duty.” He was China’s now—Wu the mandarin. Each hour should be full. He would serve assiduously and relentlessly, not with brooding thought, but with action piled on action.
139 At dusk he smote upon the gong hanging in the smaller audience hall, an apartment half of state and half of intimacy.
Nang Ping heard the deep notes reverberate through the house—she had been listening for the sound all day—and rose to her feet before they died away. ”

“ Bradley threw down the hat he had taken up and sat down again. “You are wrong there,” he said. “For I too believe that Basil Gregory will not be found. But I did go to try to interest Wu Li Chang in what is very urgent to me—for—for several reasons—because I know him to be, humanly speaking, almost omnipotent, and because I trust and like him.”
“Trust and like Wu Li Chang!”
“Emphatically,” was the quiet answer. “I’ve seen153 a great deal of Mandarin Wu since I first came out. He’s a gentleman, and every inch a man. ”

“ Wu flicked that aside with a courteous gesture. “And now,” her voice was little more than a whispered gasp, “Mr. Wu, please tell me——”
“I am about to do so. Patience!” Wu said silkenly. “In China things move slowly. China is the tortoise of the world, not the hare. I was going to tell you”—he spoke with a deliberation that was a torture in itself. ”

“ Wu watched his hostess with lynx eyes, and the more he watched the more be respected and admired. Late at night, in the hour he invariably spent alone, and had done so from his first coming to England—the hour in which he read and wrote and spoke and thought in Chinese, when in spirit, and bodily too, he made obeisance to his ancestors’ tablets across the world—he wrote down carefully much that she had said and that he had learned from her. Among his many sons the gods might send a daughter, and if they did she too should learn of Ellen Muir. ”

“ Like most Chinese of their class, they mingled a loyal observance of the rites of all three of the great Chinese sects and an anxious acceptance of their tripled superstitions, with an easy and respectful contempt for them all—certainly for all except the Confucianism that has made and welded China for twenty-five centuries, but that every Chinese of half Wu’s intelligence knows is, in fact, a magnificent irreligion, a philosophy, a patriotism, but no God-cult. ”

“ But Low Soong began to understand, and as each moment passed understood more and more. The women and the peasants of no other race chatter so much or so incessantly as the Chinese do; only the gentlemen and the children are often still. But no other race has so little need of words. The Chinese is the psychic of all the races. Even the women have wizard minds. They are all sensitives. And as the girls paced silently, but arm in arm, Low Soong learned it all.
In the early afternoon Basil contrived to send a note to Miss Wu, and it reached her safely. ”

“ That was bad and crude enough; but he went on and made it worse (such men usually do) . “I—I am not a mandarin in my own country, not even the son of one; and you know you are to marry a mandarin here in your—your own country.” (He had heard that more than once in Hong Kong; and really he had supposed she knew he knew. It was commonly known. And many wondered why Wu Li Chang had let it wait so long.)
Nang Ping looked up at him, her narrow eyes wide with horror. “Not now!” ”

“ Wu will never forgive you or the poor child; though it’s he himself he ought not to forgive for having let a Chinese girl out and unwatched so with us English about. He’ll punish you both, and what Wu does he does well. There’ll be no escaping him. No boat will take you beyond his reach, no spot on earth hide you. You can’t stay in China with her. Her position would be too intolerable,85 even for one of us to inflict on a woman. ”

“ She read it all—his soul, and hers—and suffered as she had not suffered in the K’o-tang of Wu Li Chang. And her soul quailed and grew very sick before the vengeance of Wu, a greater vengeance and a more terrible even than he had planned.
We need never snatch at vengeance with our poor, feeble, fumbling hands. God always repays. And sometimes it seems as if He, like the Chinese, enforces vicarious atonement—daughters scourged for fathers, mothers for sons, and even friend for friend. But sooner or later the great ax of retribution always falls. ”

“ Wu said. “She is ostracized by the ladies of our race. I am a powerful man among my own people, madame, but I cannot influence or soften the prejudices of Chinese femininity in the slightest. Because she is a widow, she should, according to one of the absurdest of the many absurd canons of our race, live in seclusion, sackcloth and discomfort. She is a nice creature, Mrs. Gregory, and she longs for friends. Will you visit Sing Kung Yah?” ”

“ And she went out a little hurriedly, the others with her. But Ah Wong, who naturally went last, looked at the great man deliberately—a192 strange thing for a Chinese woman of her caste to do. And as he looked, she read his face and saw the tragedy hidden there. But Ah Wong and the Mandarin Wu had met before.
The Chinese clerk had slid off his stool and crept cringing towards Wu—cringing, almost grovelling. Wu snarled at him noiselessly, and the fellow almost crawled from the room; and Murray went after him and closed the door. Holman had already closed the other. The duellists were alone. ”

“ Wu quizzed good-naturedly.
Really, she must do better than this. She would not give offense. “Not only civilized,” she said, contriving a slight laugh—it was an awkward one—“but refined to the last degree.”
There was very fine sarcasm and some contempt in the little bow he gave her—not a Chinese bow—but his voice was sincere and almost pleading. “My dear Mrs. Gregory,” he began, “there is not so very much difference between the East and West, after all. Perhaps we in the East have a finer sense of art; certainly we care more for nature. ”

“ The fan shut with an ominous click—a rattle of ivory, a hiss and a rustle of silk. “It lies by that door”—he pointed it with his fan—“which leads to my own inner chamber.”
The woman smothered a scream, but she could not smother a groan.
Wu laughed. He took a step towards her. “Have you no desire to hear my news of your son?” he asked softly. “Good news? I promised that you should—I am here to keep my promise.” The terrible significance of his words could not have been clearer, but he emphasized it hideously by gliding still a little nearer to the stricken, appalled woman. ”

“ But Ah Sing—still with an expressionless face—leaned across the table, leaned between the blow and Wu Li Chang.
And almost as Gregory sprang the other servants seized and held him—they, too, with indifferent, blank faces. They would have shown far more interest sweeping wistaria leaves from the graveled paths, far, far more watching a quail fight.
“An eye for an eye!” the mandarin cried fiercely. “A tooth for a tooth. That is what you teach us, you Christian gentlemen! And,” he hissed, from enfoamed, protruding lips, “Woman for woman! We’ll teach you that!” ”