Imperial Woman (44 page)

His eyelashes fell again before her searching gaze. Alas, those lashes were too long upon a man’s cheek but she had given them to him, they were like hers, and why if a woman can bestow her beauty upon her son, can she not bestow her strength?

She sighed and bit the edge of her lip and seemed to yield. “What do I care whether the foreigners kneel to the Dragon Throne? I am thinking only of you, my son.”

“I know,” he said, “I know it, Mother. Whatever you do is for me. I wish I could do something for you. Not in matters of state, Mother, but something you would like. What would you like? Something to make you happy—a garden, or a mountain made into a garden. I could have a mountain moved—”

She shrugged. “I have gardens and mountains.” But she was touched by his wish to please her. Then she said slowly, “What I long for cannot be restored.”

“Tell me,” he urged. He was eager to feel her approve him again, to know he was safe from her anger.

“What use?” she replied pensively. “Can you bring back life from ashes?”

He knew what she meant. She was thinking of the ruined Summer Palace. She had told him often of its pagodas and pavilions, its gardens and rockeries. Ah, for that destruction she would never forgive the foreigners.

“We could build a new Summer Palace, Mother,” he said slowly, “one as like to the old one as you can remember. I will ask for special tribute from the provinces. We must use no monies from the Treasury.”

“Ah,” she said shrewdly, “you are bribing me to let you have your way—you and your advisors!”

“Perhaps,” he said. He lifted his straight brows and glanced at her sidewise.

Suddenly she laughed. “Ah, well,” she said. “Why do I disturb myself? A summer palace? Why not?”

She rose and he stood and reaching up her hands she smoothed his cheeks again with her soft scented palms and went away. Out of the shadows Li Lien-ying followed.

There is no end to the sorrows that children bring to their parents in palace or in hovel. The Empress Mother, waited upon often by Li Lien-ying, her chief spy, next learned as the days passed that the Emperor had lied to her when he said Prince Kung had advised him to receive the foreign ministers without demanding obeisance. Instead, Prince Kung had reminded the Emperor how his ancestors had refused to allow a privilege to foreigners which they denied to their own citizens. Thus in the time of the Venerable Ancestor Ch’ien Lung, it was required that the English lord McCartney bow to the floor before the Dragon Throne, even though in revenge a Manchu prince must bow in the same manner before a picture of the English monarch, King George. Now Prince Kung made delay after delay when the foreign envoys insisted that they be received at Court, and he pleaded the illness of the Chief Secretary of the Imperial Foreign Office, and this illness lingered through four months until the Emperor himself ended it by commanding that the envoys from the West be presented before the Dragon Throne, thus proving that he, and he alone, was too lenient and too weak.

To this report the Empress Mother listened one day in her orchid garden. The months of spring were gone, it was early summer, the loveliest season, and she had no mind to cope with affairs of state. Enticed by the clear sunlight today, she had walked into her library, and upon a vast table set up therein, she was drawing a map of the new Summer Palace before she summoned architects and builders to put her dreams into brick and marble. Hither Li Lien-ying had come.

“Fetch me Prince Kung,” she commanded him when he had made his report. With impatience she put down her brushes to wait until the Prince arrived.

He found her pacing up and down before the wide doors open to the courtyard. Pomegranate trees were in full bloom, their red flowers studded among the dark green leaves of the thickset trees. The Empress Mother was fond of pomegranates, flowers and fruit. She loved the burning orange red of their flowers and the sweet acid of the juicy pulp surrounding each of the thousand seeds within the tight green skin of the fruit. Prince Kung knew her liking, and when he came and had made obeisance he spoke first of pomegranates.

“Majesty, your trees are very fine. I do not see others like them. Whatever is near you takes on new life.”

He had learned by now to speak to her gracefully and with submission.

She inclined her head, always pleased by praise and ready to be newly generous to him because he did not approve the Emperor’s will. “Let us talk here in the courtyard,” she said. They seated themselves, she upon a porcelain garden seat and he after seeming to refuse, upon a bamboo bench.

“Why should I waste your time?” she began. “But I hear that the Emperor, my son, wishes to receive the foreign envoys without obeisance and this troubles me much.”

“Majesty, he is curious as a child,” Prince Kung replied. “He cannot wait to look upon a foreign face.”

“Are men always children?” she exclaimed. She reached above her head and plucked a scarlet pomegranate flower and pulled it to pieces and let it fall.

He did not reply to this and kept silence until she lost patience. “Well, well,” she cried, “and did you not forbid him? You are the older generation.”

Prince Kung raised his eyebrows. “Majesty, how can I refuse the Emperor when he has the power to cut off my head?”

“You know I would not allow that,” she rejoined.

“Majesty, I thank you,” Prince Kung replied. “Yet I think you know the Consort influences him more deeply every day—a good influence, let me say, since it keeps him from the company of eunuchs and the low flowerhouses where they used to lead him, pretending he went disguised.”

“Ah, but who influences the Consort?” the Empress Mother inquired sharply. “She does not come to me except when duty demands that she pay her respects. When I see her she is silent.”

“Majesty,” he said, “I do not know.”

She brushed the petals from her satin lap. “You do know. It is the Empress Dowager—it is my cousin Sakota.”

He bowed his head and was silent for awhile. Then he said, placating, “Majesty, at least the foreign envoys should not be received in the Imperial Audience Hall.”

“Most surely not,” she agreed, diverted as he had meant she should be. She considered for a moment, the sunlight falling through the pomegranate tree above her head upon her hands now folded and quiet in her lap. Suddenly she smiled.

“I have it! Let them be received in the Pavilion of Purple Light. They will not know it is not the palace proper. Thus we keep to reality and give them illusion.”

He could not resist her mischief, reluctant though he was to yield to it. For the Pavilion of Purple Light was on the farther side of the Middle Lake, which is part of the western boundary of the Forbidden City, and in it the Emperor, by tradition, received only the envoys of the outer tribes, and this but once upon the first day of the new year.

“Majesty,” Prince Kung now said, “you are as clever as the most clever man. I do admire your skill and wit. I will so order and arrange.”

She was in high humor now and, moved by his praise, she invited him to come and see her plans for the Summer Palace.

There for an hour he stood, or walked about the long wide table whereon was stretched the scroll upon which she drew her dreams. He listened to her flowing talk, he heard of rivers winding among rockeries and spreading into lakes, of mountains moved from the western provinces and set with trees and pools of gold-roofed palaces and gilded pagodas set on the mountain sides and by the shores of a vast lake. He said not a word, so great was his dismay, and he dared not open his mouth to speak lest all his anger at such wasted monies rush out of him at once and cause her to command his death. He forced himself to murmur between his teeth at last:

“Who but you, Majesty, could conceive so imperial a palace?”

Then he begged to be excused and hastened from her presence. From her he went straight to the Grand Councilor Jung Lu, a device the Empress Mother guessed at once when, on the evening of that same day, before the curfew fell, her eunuch came to say that Jung Lu waited for audience.

She was at this moment leaning over the map again, her brush pointed fine to ink in a slender high pagoda.

“Let the Grand Councilor enter,” she said, not lifting up her head, and knowing that Jung Lu would not approve what she did, she let him stand awhile behind her back before she spoke.

“Who is there?” she asked after moments.

“Majesty, you know.”

The sound of his deep voice went to her heart now as swiftly as it ever had but she pretended that it did not.

“Ah,” she said indifferently, “and why have you come? Do you not see that I am busy?”

“It is the reason for my coming,” he said. “And I beg you, Majesty, to hear me, for there is but a little while before the gates are locked for curfew.”

She recognized the old power of command. This man alone in the whole world she feared because he loved her and would not yield to her. Yet she was as willful now as she had been when she was a girl betrothed to him and she took her time and let him wait on while she put the jade cover on the ink slab and washed her brush in a small bowl of water and made ado with these small tasks which at other times she left to a serving eunuch. And he waited, knowing very well what she did, and that she knew he knew.

At last she walked slowly across the vast hall to her throne chair and sat down. He came toward her there and knelt before her as custom demanded, and she let him kneel, her black eyes cruel and laughing and tender all at once.

“Are your knees aching?” she asked after a while.

“It is of no importance, Majesty,” he said calmly.

“Rise,” she said. “I do not enjoy your kneeling before me.”

He rose with dignity and stood, and she surveyed him from foot to head. When her eyes reached his she let them rest. They were alone and she could meet his look with none to reproach. Her eunuch stood his distance in the entrance hall beyond, on guard.

“What have I done wrong?” Her voice was sweet as a child’s with pleading.

“You know what you do,” he answered.

She shrugged her satin shoulders. “I have not told you about the new Summer Palace, for I knew that someone would tell you—Prince Kung, doubtless. But I receive the new Summer Palace as a gift from my son. It is his wish.”

To this Jung Lu replied most gravely. “You know there is no money in the treasury for a pleasure palace in these times. The people are already too much taxed. Yet new taxes must be levied on every province if this palace is to be raised.”

She shrugged again. “It need not be money. It can be stone and wood and rock and jade and artisans. These are everywhere.”

“Men must be paid,” he said.

“They need not be,” she answered carelessly. “The First Emperor did not pay the peasants who built the Great Wall. When they died he put their bones among the bricks and there was no need even for burial money.”

“In those days,” he said in the same grave voice, “the dynasty was strong. The people dared not rebel. The Emperor was Chinese, not Manchu, as we are, and the wall was to protect their own people against invading northern enemies. But will the people now be willing to send their goods and men only to build a Summer Palace for you? And could you find pleasure in a place where walls are filled with bones of men who died for naught? I think even you are not so hard.”

He and he alone of all the world could bring the tears to her eyes. She turned her head to hide them. “I am not hard—” Her voice was a whisper. “I am—lonely.”

She took the end of the kerchief of flowered gauze hanging from the jade button of her robe and she wiped her eyes. The cords between the man and the woman drew taut. She longed to hear his footstep coming toward her, his hand put out to touch her own.

He did not move. She heard his voice still grave. “You should have told your son, the Emperor, that it ill behooves him to give you a gift of palaces, while the nation is beset with threats of war, with poverty and floods in the middle provinces. It was your duty to remind him.”

She turned her head at this and the tears glistened on her long black lashes and shone in her tragic eyes. “Oh, this realm,” she cried, “there is always misery!” Her lips quivered and she wrung her hands together. “And why do you not tell him?” she cried. “You are a father to him—”

“Hush,” he said between his teeth. “We speak of the Imperial Emperor.”

She drooped her head and the tears fell upon the rose-red satin of her gown.

“What ails you?” he asked. “You have all you have ever lived for. What more do you desire? Is there a woman in the world more high than you?”

She did not answer and her tears kept dropping while he spoke on.

“The dynasty is safe while you live, at least. You have made an emperor, you have given him a consort. He loves her, and being young and loving him, she will give him an heir.”

She lifted her head, her eyes startled.

“Already?”

“I do not know it,” he replied, “but doubtless it will be so, for I know their mutual love.”

He met her eyes, his own compassionate. “I saw them a few days ago, by accident, not knowing they were near. The hour was late and I was on my way to the great gate, before the curfew fell. They were in the Pavilion of Favorable Winds.”

“Too near the palace of the Empress Dowager—” she murmured.

“The gate was open,” he said, “and without thought my eyes went there, and I saw them in the twilight, walking like two children, their arms about each other.”

She bit her lip, her round chin quivered and her tears welled up again. At the sight of her face, beautiful in sorrow, he could not stay himself.

He took three steps and then two more, closer to her than he had been in many years. “My heart,” he said, so low that none but he could hear, “they have what you and I can never have. Help them to keep it. Guide them aright. Pour all your strength and power into this new reign, for it is based on love.”

But she could bear no more. She put her hands before her face and wept aloud. “Oh, go,” she sobbed. “Leave me—leave me alone as I have always been!”

So passionately and deeply did she sob that he was forced to heed her lest others hear and wonder why she wept. He hesitated, sighed, and took a step backward to leave her as she had begged him to do.