Imperial Woman (54 page)

They exchanged look for look in mutual mischief, and she struck him gaily on the face with her folded fan and bade him be off.

“And close your mouth and keep it closed,” she said, “for I swear that vile gusty breath of yours surrounds you as you go.”

“Yes, Majesty,” he said gaily, and put up his hand, thick as a bear’s paw, against his smiling mouth.

It was not her imperial way to make haste in any cause. She meditated much on what her spy had told her. While she let days pass in idle pleasure she showed no fear. The summer passed, one long lovely day upon another, and she pursued her habits, taking pleasure in a large northern dog, his coat as white as snow and he snarling at all except her, his mistress. To her only he showed devotion, and he slept beside her bed at night. Her small cinnamon-colored sleeve dogs were jealous and she laughed much to see them circling the great dog like angry imps. But while she walked in gardens, or picnicked on the lake, or sat in her theater to watch the plays she loved, she was thinking deeply always of the world beyond and what price she must pay to keep peace and beauty living. Twice those island enemies, the men of Japan, had been bought off from war, once by gold and again by yielding to them rights over her tribute people of Korea. Ah that, she now felt, was the weakness of her faithful Viceroy Li Hung-chang, and had he not persuaded her twice to yield, these small brown island dwarfs would not now dream of swallowing her whole vast realm. War, open war against the enemy, brave attack if not on sea then on land, must be her defense at last. And Yuan Shih-k’ai must begin the war, not on Chinese soil but in Korea and from there drive the Japanese into the sea and so to their own bitter rock-ribbed islands. Let them starve there!

On the loveliest afternoon in summer she so shaped her mind and will, and at the same moment she was listening to a love song chanted by a young eunuch dressed as a girl, in that ancient play
The Tale of the Western Pavilion.
The Empress smiled and listened, and she hummed the tune of the love song and all the while within her heart and mind she planned war. That night she summoned Li Hung-chang and laid down her commands, and would not heed his moans and sighs that his armies were too weak, his ships too few.

“You need no great armies or vast fleets,” she said, “even if at worst the enemy attack Chinese soil, why, then, the people will rise up and drive them into the sea, and the waves will drown them.”

“Ah, Majesty,” he groaned, “you do not know the evil times! Here in your palaces you live apart and dreaming.”

And he went out sighing loudly and shaking his troubled head.

Alas, the year was not spent before war was made and victory lost. The enemy came quickly and inside a handful of brief days their ships had crossed the seas. That general, Yuan Shih-k’ai, was driven from Korea and the enemy was next on Chinese soil. The Empress for once was wrong. Her people yielded. Her villagers stood silent when the short strong men of Japan marched up their streets and toward the capital itself. They carried guns, these men, and villagers have no guns and being prudent they did not show knives and scythes which are no more than toys. When the enemy demanded food and drink the villagers, still mute, set forth wine and tea and bowls of meats.

At this evil news the Empress moved quickly. She was a good gamester who played to win but well she knew when she could not. She sent word to Li Hung-chang to surrender before the realm was lost and to accept what terms he must. A bitter treaty then was forged, the terms of which shook even the haughty heart of the Empress so that she retired for three days and nights and would not eat and sleep, and Li Hung-chang himself went to the Summer Palace to comfort her. He told her that the treaty was indeed bitter but the throne had a new friend to the north, the Czar of Russia, who for his own sake would not have Japan grow strong.

The Empress listened and took heart. “Then let us get these yellow foreigners from our shores,” she said. “At any price they must be got away. And from now on I shall spend my whole strength until I devise some plan to rid myself of every foreigner, white or yellow, and none shall be allowed to set foot upon our soil. No, not until the end of time! As for the Chinese whom we Manchus rule, I will win them back again, save for those young men who have breathed in foreign winds and drunk down foreign waters. My Grand Councilor Kang Yi said but the other day to me that we should never have allowed the Christians to set up schools and colleges, for they have encouraged Chinese to be ambitious to rule themselves and the young Chinese now are wily and rebellious and puffed up with false foreign knowledge.”

She struck her palms together and stamped her right foot. “I swear I will not die or let myself grow old until I have destroyed every foreign power upon our soil and have restored the realm to its own history!”

The General could not but admire the woman and his sovereign. The Empress was still beautiful, still strong, her hair as black, her long eyes as great and sparkling as ever they had been in youth. Her will, too, had not abated.

“If anyone can do this, it is only you, Majesty,” he said, and then he swore a simple oath to serve her always.

So time passed. Again the Empress seemed to play the idle days and months away, now painting her dream landscapes, now writing poetry, now toying with her jewels and designing new settings for her emeralds and pearls and buying diamonds from Arab merchants. Yet behind all such employments she wove her plans. She seemed indifferent to the Emperor and his tutors. But at night when all the palaces were still and dark, she listened to the stories that her spies brought to her lonely chamber and thus she knew from day to day the plots of the Emperor and his advisors. Against their plots she thus prepared herself. First she lifted Jung Lu up again, this time to be the Viceroy of the province, and it was made easy by the death of Prince Kung who, if not her enemy, had long not been her friend. On the tenth day of the fourth moon of this severe year he died of lung and heart diseases.

Then she waited, learning meanwhile that the Emperor had summoned Yuan Shih-k’ai to be his general. She was in several minds when she heard this news. Should she wait still longer to seize back the throne or should she move at once? To wait was her decision, for she liked best to appear upon a scene like Buddha, and when all was manifest to bring down judgment. Meanwhile her spies told her that Yuan Shih-k’ai had left the city by a secret way and none knew his direction.

I will wait, she thought. I have found my wisdom always in waiting. I know my own genius and my mind tells me that the hour is not yet here.

And again she let the days slip past. The summer heat subdued itself to early autumn. Days were warm but nights were chill. The autumn flowers budded late, the last lotus lilies bloomed upon the lake, the birds lingered day by day before they flew southward, and autumn crickets piped their fragile music in the pines.

On a certain day after Prince Kung had died and had been buried with due honor, the Empress sat in her library to compose a poem. The air was mild, and as she mixed her inks she chanced to look toward the sunlit court, and in the bright square of sunlight by the open doors she saw a blue dragonfly floating on the air, its wings outspread. How strange, she thought, for she had never seen a dragonfly so blue, nor seen one with its gossamer wings so still. It was an omen, surely, but of what? She wished the color were not blue, a royal blue, for this was the hue of death. She rose in haste and went toward the door to frighten off the creature. But it was not afraid. Evading her hands, it moved higher above her head. When her ladies, waiting in the far corners of her library, saw this they came forward and they too reached up their hands and waved their fans and cried out, but still the creature floated far above them. The Empress then bade them summon a eunuch who was to fetch a long bamboo, but before they could obey her, they heard commotion at the gate and suddenly the Chief Eunuch appeared, unbidden, to say that a messenger had come to announce the arrival of the Viceroy Jung Lu, from Tientsin.

Not often in the years since the Empress had commanded Jung Lu to take Lady Mei to wife had he come near her throne of his free will. He waited to be summoned, and once she had reproached him for this. To which he had replied that she must know that he was always her loyal servant, and she had but to put her jade sign into a eunuch’s hand and send him forth and he, Jung Lu, would come, whatever the hour and wherever he was.

The Empress bade the serving eunuchs to prepare for his coming, and she returned to her seat. But she could not finish the poem, for when she looked up to find the dragonfly, it was still gone. Its coming, then, was portent, an omen which she could not disclose even to the Court soothsayers, for Jung Lu would not come except for gravest cause, and she would not disturb the Court until she knew what the cause was. With fierce impatience covered by her calm bearing she put down her brushes and strolled out about her gardens until noon, and would not rest or touch food before she knew what Jung Lu came to tell her.

Toward evening he came, and his palanquin was set down in the great outer courtyards and eunuchs carried the news. The Empress waited for him in her central courtyard, in these summer months a vast outdoor living space, for mattings, woven of sweet straw and the color of honey, were spread over bamboo framework to make roofs. In the soft cool shade tables were spread and chairs set out, and around the many verandas that walled the courtyards were pots of flowering trees. The Empress seated herself upon a carved chair set between her two favorite ancient cypress trees, which the imperial gardeners kept closely trimmed into the lean shapes of wise old men, and this because the Empress wished to be reminded always of the true ways of the ancestors, shaped to staid beauty and simple dignity.

A summer warmth had returned that day and now a southern wind wafted the fragrance of the late lotus flowers from the lake where they closed slowly for the night. The scent pervaded the air and the Empress breathed it in and she felt the old sharp pain of contrast between the calm of everlasting beauty and the turmoil of human conflict. Ah, if Jung Lu had been coming to her now as her old and well-loved husband, and if she could but wait for him as his old and loving wife! They were young no more, their passion spent unused, but the memory of love remained eternal. Indeed, her mellowed heart was more tender now than ever toward him and there was nothing left that she could not forgive him.

Through the dusk, lit by great flickering candles set in stands of bronze, she saw him coming. He walked alone and she sat motionless and watching. When he reached her he prepared to fall upon one knee but she put out her hand upon his forearm.

“Here is your chair,” she said, and motioned with her other hand toward the empty chair at her left.

He rose then and sat beside her in the sweet twilight, and through the gate they watched the torches flare upon the lake for the night’s illumination.

“I wish,” he said at last, “that you could live your life here undisturbed. Your home is beauty and here you do belong. Yet I must tell you all the truth. The plot against you, Majesty, now nears its crisis.”

He clenched his hands upon the knees of his gold-encrusted robe, and her eyes moved to those hands, large and strong. They were still the hands of a young man. Would he never be old?

“Impossible to believe,” she murmured, “and yet I know I must believe, because you tell me.”

He spoke on. “Yuan Shih-k’ai himself came to me four nights ago in secret, and I left my post in haste to tell you. The Emperor sent for him twelve days ago. At midnight in the small hall to the right of the Imperial Audience Hall they met.”

“Who else was there?” she asked.

“The imperial tutor, Weng T’ung-ho.”

“Your enemy,” she murmured, “but why do you recall another woman to me now? I have forgot her.”

“How well you love cruelty,” Jung Lu retorted. “I forgive him, Majesty, and you do not. The pale small love that sprang up in a woman’s lonely heart is nothing to me. I learned a lesson from it, nevertheless.”

“And what lesson needed you to learn?” she asked.

“That you and I stand somewhere far from other humans, and though we are lonely as two stars in Heaven we must bear our loneliness, for it cannot be assuaged. Sometimes I feel our very loneliness has kept us one.”

She moved restlessly. “I wonder that you speak so when you came to tell me of a plot!”

“I speak so because I take this moment to pledge myself again to you,” he said.

She put her fan against her cheek, a screen between them.

“And was no one else in the small hall?” she asked.

“The Pearl Concubine, the Emperor’s Favorite. You know, for you know every wind of gossip, that the Emperor will not receive his Consort, whom you chose. She is still a virgin. Therefore all her heart has turned to hate. She is your ally.”

“I know,” she said.

“We must count every ally,” he went on, “for the Court is divided. Even the people on the streets know that it is so. One party is called Venerable Mother and the other is called Small Boy.”

“Disgraceful,” she muttered. “We should keep our family secrets private.”

“We cannot,” he replied. “The Chinese are like cats. They creep through every crevice in silence, smelling out their way. The country is in turmoil and Chinese rebels who are ever waiting to destroy our Manchu dynasty are again ready to seize power. You must come forth once more.”

“I know my nephew is a fool,” she said sadly.

“But those about him are not fools,” he said. “These edicts that he sends forth like pigeons every day, a hundred edicts in less than a hundred days—have you read them?”

“I let him have his way,” she said.

“When he comes here to call upon you each seven days or so, do you ask him nothing?”

“Nothing,” she said. “I have my spies.”

“One reason that he hates you,” he said bluntly, “is that your eunuch keeps him waiting on his knees outside your doors. And did you bid the Emperor kneel?”