Go Ask the River. Evelyn Eaton
there… Chance Met… Chance Met…he leaned toward her urgently.
“There is a lifetime to make up between us,” he said. “All the long, lonely hours of this person’s life…”
“But not in one short evening, T’ien Chu. Now that you have come here, you will come again.”
This must mean that she liked him, that he was not just the guest of an evening, imposed on her by the Governor.
“I will come here many times,” he said exultantly.
“And harmonize poems with me. That will be a pleasure, T’ien Chu. It is too long a time since I composed a new poem.”
“Two or three days?” he teased her. “A moon at least, I suppose?”
“Centuries. Let us continue. The lines we have brushed are good. It is your turn to stir up the petals.”
“They shimmer in sun. They wilt under rain.”
“They fall into the upraised cup of the poet.”
“There they go, into my cup, and I am drunk again, but not with wine. I am drunk with joy of you…”
“Into the poet’s enameled cup falls the rarest flower of all.”
“As a dream melts away, they mingle with the yellow catkin of the willow.”
“Versatile petals. They go everywhere, on every wind. Shall we bring them to rest?”
“Not yet, T’ien Chu.”
“Very well. Hold them against loneliness.”
“Let them stay where they have fallen”
“on the steps, on the path into the garden.”
“This color is balm for one abandoned”
“who wakes in night and walks in the rustling leaves.”
Long lonely night.
The short shared night wore on as they scribbled furiously together, in a fusion of mind and spirit that obliterated everything for him, even the passing of the hours. It was near dawn when the sleeping mat was finally spread and he stumbled into her arms.
II
HE WOKE TO PAIN AND NOISE. Someone was kicking him, someone was shouting. He was lying, naked, on a pile of heaped-up leaves. He sat up groggily. Two angry men stood over him…soldiers…
“Wha…wha…where?”
They struck him. They yanked him to his feet. They were rough-looking brutes with mean faces. One of them, the older, had a scar across his lips that puckered them into a sneer.
“If those are yours, get into them,” this Scarface said, tossing him a bundle scooped up from the ground.
They were his clothes. He groped to put them on, shaking with shock, with fear.
“I don’t understand… I don’t understand…”
He saw his pack a few feet away, hanging from a bush, and stumbled toward it. It was still fastened. He loosened the straps and looked in. His purse was there. He had not been robbed. But something terrible had happened…
“How did I get here?”
Scarface clouted him savagely across the mouth.
“Quiet, Scum!”
The other man laughed. “How did I get here?” he said mincingly. Then they both guffawed.
They took his arms and began to hustle him forward, through a crowd of curious, watching people who made no effort to help him. They halted for a moment, stared, and went hurrying about their business, while new ones came and stared.
He tried to appeal to the nearest. “Wait…wait…these soldiers are making a terrible mistake…help me…help me…” “Come on!” Scarface struck him again.
He staggered a few feet farther, then he stopped and tried to wrench himself free. “Take me to the Inn…they know me there…they’ll tell you…”
“Shut your lying mouth,” Scarface said, hitting him once for every word. “Save your strength to move your feet.”
“Shall we slice him up a bit? Let’s take off his ears.”
Someone in the watching crowd laughed. They were dragging him between them now like a sack of stones.
“You’d better stop,” he shouted. “I tell you it’s a mistake. The Governor will punish you for this. He’s expecting me.”
“You’re an envoy from the Emperor, I suppose?”
“Can’t you see, he’s the Emperor himself.”
“I’m in the Governor’s service.”
“Ho! It so happens we’re in the Governor’s service and we never saw you before.”
“I’ve just come from Canton. I’m the tutor for his sons.”
They slackened their hold for a moment while they considered this. He looked at them hopefully, but they rejected it.
“A fine tutor you’d make, sleeping off your wine, stark naked in a public place! Are you going to step along, or shall we finish what the wine began?”
“If we have to carry you,” the other man said, “we’d as soon tote you dead.”
He gave up struggling then and walked beside them, dazed, trying to remember what had happened, what he could have done to be dumped out naked on a pile of leaves…who put him there?
The last thing he remembered was rising with his Chance Met Lady from writing the last poem together, following her to a pavilion where the sleeping mat was spread, taking off his robe and sinking down upon her, then her arms around him, then… hot shame flooded him, he must have fallen into a drunken sleep, a stupor, on her very breast.
Was that it? Had he insulted her, and was she so disgusted with him that she had her servants throw out the drunken boor?
“No more funny stories?”
“Left his tongue somewhere. At that inn he’s raving about.”
They guffawed again, winked, made signs to the passing crowd, but they stopped hitting him and twisting his arms.
“Where are you taking me?”
“To the jail.”
He knew what that meant. Months, a year perhaps, and meanwhile nobody would know where he had gone or be able to find him. He would rot…
“Take me to the Governor first…”
“Still harping on the Governor.”
He looked at their stupid, cruel faces. “Listen,” he said, “if you’ll take me to a magistrate or any city official, I’ll pay you well.”
“Ho! In gold, I suppose.”
“Yes, in gold. One piece each.”
“And what would scum like you be doing with gold pieces?”
“Stolen, perhaps?”
“Well, let’s see them anyway.”
He undid his pack and handed them his purse. There was some silver in it besides the two gold pieces. They took it all, dividing it between them.
“Hey, what else is in that pack?” Scarface snatched it and started rummaging. T’ien Chu’s few belongings fell out, slippers, pen case, clothes, a scroll…
“Give me that!” He struggled with Scarface, who held him off and shook him, while the other undid