The Three Leaps of Wang Lun (32 page)

In those high summer days rumours arrived of the pious band of beggars; here and there a man left his village to seek out the Broken Melon. Everyone heard of the intrigues and assaults directed against these mild people; then came the great bloodbath, the monks withdrew from the lamasery, Ma No’s frightened crowd hid behind strong walls.

Certain adherents of Ma’s who were resident in the area informed the guilds and clansmen’s associations of the sect’s nature and its fate. At once a sympathy for the outcasts set in, a feeling of solidarity with them. Not a sod had been turned for the new canal;
apparently as a result of military expenditures the Imperial Treasury was short of money. The families of many unemployed men wandered northward. Confused rumours of the Broken Melon were carried into the distressed villages: it was a clandestine political movement in league with the White Waterlily; they went defenceless through the land and let themselves be slaughtered; that happened so as to rouse the people and show them you could be lame, crippled and unresisting and still be delivered from the violence of the warlike Manchu and the cheating mandarins.

Frequent conferring among the inhabitants of the various settlements resulted in the formation of a group of representatives of the several guilds and settlements which, in the face of official neglect, decided to migrate to the Broken Melon under Ma No. Hazy thoughts and boiling blood drove these men; they wanted to come together with Ma No, who had already taken possession of a monastery, and with him do something to improve conditions.

It was against this straggling train of peasants and workmen that the monastery gates were hastily closed and hastily opened again. When some brothers rushed to Ma No’s hut and reported that a crowd of peasants and guildsmen of a friendly disposition had come to the monastery and wanted to talk to him, Ma considered it inexpedient to summon his confidants to the interview, had five of the newcomers escorted to the Chanpo’s room and then appeared there himself.

They treated him like a potentate, fell down before him; embarrassed and afraid that someone would see, he had to ask them to look on him as one of themselves; he was one of them, a poor son of the blackhaired hundred surnames. And what did they want, who’d sent them.

This question set them grinning at each other; at a gesture from Ma they squatted in a semicircle on the floor. Then they were
silent, not knowing who was to speak for them.

They were five elderly men, three salt boilers, one of the ruined panners, a wagoner. In arguments at home these canny fellows came up with excellent advice; here they were subdued by the presence of a man of Ma’s reputation, and also by their haziness about this man’s goals. The salt panner, the best educated among them, opened his mouth, looked at each of them in turn, and declared with grins and bobs of his head that since no one seemed to have any objection, he’d better speak. And he related with a few casual phrases who each of them was, where they lived, that they’d been badly treated by the great landlords and the mandarins.

The wagoner, who listened attentively and nodded agreement at every word, took up the tale at once: “And that’s the point. That’s the whole problem. We can’t do a thing. The prefecture doesn’t answer our petitions. Who are you then, Ma No? Where d’you come from? Where do your illustrious parents live? Above all, what’s to be done?”

“That’s the whole problem,” one of the salt boilers in a grumpy tone turned to the sprightly wagoner. “The point still is, as I’ve always said: what’s to be done? And how are we to do it?”

The wagoner hushed him with hand gestures and winked at Ma. “He doesn’t mean it like that. We quarrel now and then because our two domestic tribulations don’t get along. When I say, how are we to do it? he says I’m wrong; I ought to ask, how might it best proceed. And if I say ‘whoa’ he thinks me ignorant and a bletherer, and finally lands up with a ‘ho’. They all know about that in our village, and even farther afield. He’s a fine lad, eh?”

He asked the panner, who coughed and hawked at length and rubbed· his nose; indignantly he rebuked the man: “Settle it how you like; I can’t see anything to choose between you. We didn’t march half a day here just to decide if it’s better to say ‘whoa’ or
‘ho’. What the whole point of it is, that’s still the problem.”

The wagoner, astonished, spread his hands as if to say, “That’s just what I think,” and nudged the irritated salt boiler, who motioned him away.

“So,” the panner addressed Ma through a cold, “we’ve come to hear what you’ve got to say. Six of my villagers have joined up with your crowd and they’ve told us about you and the others. You call yourselves brother and sister, which we all find very friendly. Will you help us?”

“Or will you do something with us against the landlords and the Prefect, who’re all hand in glove?” This from another salt boiler, a tall gaunt fellow who spoke with forefinger raised like a schoolmaster. “We’re going to do something against them in the next few weeks, but we haven’t got a plan yet.”

“Plan, plan,” grumbled the panner. “What ideas you do have. I could make you a plan easy enough. Don’t go putting too much store by plans. I’ve seen people with the finest plans, and nothing came of ’em in the end. First of all Ma No’s got to answer the question, in short, will he take our part, or not?”

“Or help us or not,” the sprightly wagoner elucidated.

Ma listened without breathing to this idiotic conversation. He was disturbed only by the fact that two of the salt boilers had so far kept out of it; but really they looked no different from their companions. This was the sign he’d been waiting for. Ma met it in a different manner from Wang Lun: while Wang fearfully concealed from himself that something he predicted was coming terribly to pass, it poured with warm filling satiation into Ma’s gorge and belly.

Ma had the feeling that fate was bending beneath him, he flapped uncertainly past the notion, such a ridiculous notion, that his path and the Tao were magically superimposed on one another. While the guildsmen debated before him, he sat there dazzled and
sweating from every pore in a kind of stupor; he strove to master himself.

He said he had no troops to help them with. They knew of course the Broken Melon were being persecuted, people wanted to destroy them. Villagers and Broken Melon alike had been slaughtered. They suffered under great violent lords.

“That’s just why we came to you here in the monastery,” the panner retorted. “Us villagers are at our wits’ end. You’re a clever man and know your books and your numbers.”

The tall salt boiler, who spoke in an relentless schoolmasterly way, raised his forefinger: “There’s something else you ought to know, Ma, since you’re listening so calmly to what they all say, one after the other. It concerns you and all the brothers and sisters. It concerns all of you, I say. A nephew of mine’s employed in a village half a day’s journey from here in the felt-sole trade; he’s a guest at present in my house. A workmate visited him yesterday from his village and told him that fifty or a hundred armed constables are on their way to you on account of the terrible slaughter of a week since. They’re on their way already and will more likely be here today than tomorrow. What they’ll ask you, and how they’ll ask it, you’ll find out soon enough. I tell you, since you’re so clever and listen to them one after the other: this concerns you.”

Ma No smiled: “In the eyes of men my brothers and sisters are already lost. Who will help us? How long can my dear guests wait for the advice of their friend Ma No from P’ut’o-shan?”

They looked at each other. The panner croaked, “Would it suffice our clever friend for his consultations if we waited till midday or an hour later? Our homeward journey’s not a short one, indeed not, and who knows what’s brewing back there.”

“Until midday.”

They clumped out of the room. Ma No sat alone the whole long
hour in front of the bare Buddha altar; to think was beyond him.

Fate was bending under him.

No more slaughter! The way assured. Fierce love for the brothers and sisters, hope blooming for every bliss, the radiant western gate! This feeling of joy grabbed him so hard he nearly called for help. He laughed to himself, softly; what a task these five messengers were taking on, these impudent childish men who compared their passion for guzzling and boozing with the passion of his brothers and sisters. But let them be blessed! What other use could be found for these gangs of salt boilers and stevedores than to station them round about to serve as mobile brickwork, flexible moats, excellently closable gates for the Broken Melon!

One hour after midday the five men stepped into the Chanpo’s chamber, made to fling themselves down, dropped hesitantly onto the stools.

Ma No interrogated the salt panner again: who’d sent them, how many villagers they represented.

He countered with the impatient question: what result had come out of his calculations and what advice had he for them. At which Ma, looking each of them in turn sharply in the eye, said he couldn’t give them any advice, but as soon as they set off for home he’d join them on the road, and two or three of his brothers and sisters would come too. He wanted to make some calculations on the spot. What was necessary and what could be deduced from the time and the conjunction of the Zodiac and the metals would then reveal itself.

The wagoner was astonished; in his view this decision hit the nail on the head in a quite extraordinary way. The learned salt boiler turned his head to his companions as if awaiting an acknowledgement, then he stood up, placed himself beside Ma No and said softly to him, “I’d better tell you, Ma No from P’ut’o,
that this foolish salt boiler standing beside you thought exactly the same way as you, out there in the yard. Of course the others couldn’t see it, they don’t let a man get a word in edgeways. So in the end I just kept it to myself. A man’s the only one who knows his own worth.”

And he grasped Ma familiarly by the shoulder.

The panner couldn’t quite work it out: “So there’s to be no advice, not direct, like ‘Go there, go there, over here, down there’? We learn something every day. Different things are quite different. You wouldn’t believe it. We need calculations on the spot so we know how to get started. There’s something in that. No doubt about it; I’ll not deny that.”

And he turned with coarse words on the conceited wagoner.

While the delegates conversed with their fellow villagers in the courtyards, surrounded by uneasy brothers and sisters, Ma No had a short, sharp discussion with his confidants in the secluded burial ground. Ma wanted these confidants to accompany him.

He wanted to break off his tactic of waiting. He desired unconditional agreement, submission to what he planned. In a curtly domineering tone he expressed the wish that they go with him to the mutinous district.

Only Yuan wanted to go with him; the Lius, and in particular Yellow Bell, declined to involve themselves in fighting. Lovely Liang-li stared at Ma No. This man horrified her more and more.

Then Ma, who was wandering up and down among the willows, assumed an uncommonly hard and agitated tone before this group of advisers. He scolded them for leaving him in the lurch, for knocking him, his courage already gone, to the ground. They had no feelings for the brothers and sisters, who, driven out from kin and guild and neighbours, sought refuge with them and within a few days would perish here like rats fed poisoned corn. They were
his confidants; but instead of standing by him they encumbered, suffocated him.

At these reproaches Yellow Bell was seized with a wild trembling; he interrupted Ma several times with an exclamation; then he struggled for words: “It is not seemly to speak like that to us, Ma. What these brothers are willing to endure from you I don’t know; you shan’t speak to me in this unseemly way, as if to a house slave. We owe you nothing. You are blunt, and lacking in your wise demeanour. You rave. We don’t deserve this. You mustn’t treat us so.”

He trembled so violently that, sitting on the ground, he fell onto his face; down his thin brown cheeks tears flowed.

Anger flashed from Liang’s eyes; she could not bring herself to speak; the younger Liu, the sceptical Little Third, set himself in front of Ma, said calmly, “Us Lius are made of baser metal than Yellow Bell; we don’t cry. Ma’s no longer treating us as confidants. Why does he want to go with the peasants, why should we accompany him? If we’re not told anything, he’ll learn that us Lius can take a scolding; for the rest, we do what we think right.”

Ma controlled himself. “All of you, even Yellow Bell, will understand at once why I rave and will refrain from accusations and stop plaguing me with tears. Provincial troops are on their way, the peasants told me. This time they’re no hired bandits, ha, for sure, now you look at me. But you don’t trust me. Whatever I don’t peel away like the layers of an onion I’ve made up, and if I succumb to anger at it you’ll still kill me one of these days. How many days is it, dear Liu, dear sister Liang, brother Yellow Bell, until the Great, Great Traverse?”

Yuan was the most nervous of them. Since the assault he had slept little, had wild dreams and cried out in his sleep; in actual danger he bore himself as a rule with notable steadfastness and by his demeanour instilled courage in others. Blood rushed to his
head when he heard of the impending attack; he cried to the two Lius, “Can we stop arguing now? Does any of us want to be called traitor against the hundreds out there? We must hurry, hurry and again hurry, that’s the end of this whole discussion. What are we doing sitting here so long?”

“We shall stay sitting here,” replied Liang. “Whoever fears for his body should stay in the city, compose verses and lounge in a sedan chair.”

Yuan’s highcoloured face grew mottled; his throat seemed swollen, so gummy and husky his voice as he burst out: “The chatter of women does not disturb the educated man. No more than the howling of grown men should put a stop to a serious debate. One’s agitated, another’s not. What of it? You all sit there and sit till evening, and when the hundreds who follow us feel the sabre between their shoulderblades it’s all over. But it mustn’t all be over. That’s not for you to decide by squatting there. I’m in this as much as you. Ma must speak, Ma No must put us right.”