Imperial Woman

by Pearl S. Buck

  “Whenever I have wished to bestow a special honor on this Prince,” she said by royal edict, “he has refused it with tears in his eyes. I have long since granted him My leave to ride in a sedan chair with curtains of apricot yellow silk of the imperial rank, but not once has he ventured so to do. Thus does he prove his loyalty and unselfish modesty, to My people as well as to Myself.”

  Alas, in a few short years after this edict was sent forth the worthy prince fell mortally ill. The Empress had grown so deeply into peace and rest that she showed herself indifferent and did not so much as visit him, although he was her imperial brother-in-law. Censors then reminded her of her duty, which angered her so that she bade them to mind their own affairs, for she knew what she would do and would not. Nevertheless, roused by her anger, she did visit Prince Ch’un and often until in the next summer he died. In her Decree Upon the Death of Prince Ch’un she praised him for the perfect performance of his duties as the Chamberlain of the Palace, the Head of the Navy and the Commander of the Manchu Field Forces, all duties which she had given him. And she herself examined details for the funeral and she presented the corpse with a sacred coverlet to wear inside the coffin, and upon the coverlet she bade her woman embroider many Buddhist prayers for his soul. When he was in his grave she made one more command concerning this dead Prince. His palace she ordered to be divided into two parts, one to be the ancestral hall for his family clan and the other, where the young emperor had been born and whence she had taken him in secret haste so many years ago, she declared now would be an imperial shrine.

  Thus the lingering years drew on to that most honorable dawn when the Empress would celebrate her sixtieth birthday. With matchless vigor she had now completed the Summer Palace, her abode of beauty and of peace for her old age. Under her command, which even the young Emperor dared not refuse, she had taken treasure from all the Government Boards, and at the very last, when all was done, she had the final whim to build a vast white marble boat to stand in the midst of the lake, connected by a marble bridge to the land. Where were the monies to come from for this? The Emperor sighed and shook his troubled head when he received her messages.

  This time he dared to send his doubt back to her, couched in most delicate and filial words. But she flew into one of her mighty rages and tore the sheets of silken paper and threw them into the air above her head and when they came fluttering down upon the floor, she bade a eunuch sweep them up and cast them into a kitchen fire.

  “My idle nephew knows where the money is,” she shouted, for now in her old age when she was denied or that which she ordered was delayed, she indulged in those shouts and shrieks and tantrums which before she had enjoyed only in her childhood. All were astonished to see her thus, and in such moods only Li Lien-ying could calm her.

  “Say where the money is, Majesty,” he said, breathing hard in asthma. “Say where it is, and you shall have it.”

  “Why, you big bag of wind,” she cried. “There is all that unspent money in the Navy Treasury funds.”

  It was true that millions of dollars in silver bullion lay in the Navy Treasury and here was the reason. In those years the dwarf men from the islands in the Eastern Seas also threatened the Chinese shores. These islanders were men used to ships and waters, whereas the people of China were landsmen and had few ships except the old heavy junks upon which fishing families or water merchants lived, and junks could only creep up and down the coasts. But the dwarf men, as Chinese called the Japanese, had learned how to make Western steamships of iron, upon whose decks they fastened cannon as the white men did. In much alarm worthy Chinese citizens throughout the nations had gathered monies together and given the sums to their ruler, first to the Empress when she was Regent and now to the Emperor, saying that these monies were for the building of a new navy, whose ships were to be all of iron and upon whose decks were to be fastened foreign cannon, so that when the islanders attacked, they could be repulsed.

  “And why do we need fear those dwarfs?” the Empress had said with rich contempt. “They can do no more than harass our shores, for our people will never let them march inland. It is folly to spend good gold upon foreign ships which would be no better than those toys my nephew loved to play with when he was a child—and still plays with, I hear.”

  When she had read the Emperor’s message and had torn it into flying pieces, she said, “I daresay my nephew wants those ships for toys again, but this time to sail the seas upon. Thus he wishes to waste the imperial treasures.”

  So persistent was she that at last the Emperor did yield, against the advice of his tutors, and so she had her marble boat. Upon this boat she now planned the ceremonies of her sixtieth birthday. In the tenth moon month of that year all was arranged, the thirty days of feasting, a holiday for the whole nation, and many prizes and honors to be awarded to her loyal subjects. To pay for such vast celebration, officials were invited to give the Empress one fourth of their annual salaries, and she declared also that she was ready to receive money gifts before her birthday, in order that all might enjoy the feasts and plays.

  And in her heart the Empress planned a private pleasure for herself. In these years while Jung Lu had been banished because he had once accepted the love of a lonely concubine, she had not seen his face. Now the concubine was dead, and the Empress found her anger dead, too, and buried with that woman, and there was no further reason why she should punish herself by punishing the one she still loved above all. She was past the age of lovers and she and Jung Lu could be friends again, kinsman and kinswoman. She allowed feeling to pervade her shrewd brain at last. A faint echoing warmth stirred even in the ashes of her heart, and it was sweet to think that she would see his face, that they could sit down, forgetting each the follies of the other, and speak of what they were now, she soon to fulfill her sixtieth year, and he already beyond it. She sent him her letter and not as a decree.

  “I do not say this is a decree,” she wrote, her beautiful writing brushing the page with firm yet delicate strokes. “Let it be greeting and invitation, a hope that we may meet again with quiet hearts and wise minds. Come, then, before the ceremonies for my sixtieth birthday. Let us spend an hour together before we mingle with the Court.”

  She set the day before her birthday, the hour, midafternoon; the place, her own library. And because she knew that Jung Lu despised eunuchs, she sent even Li Lien-ying away upon an errand in the city, bidding him examine some new jades that had come in from Turkestan. The afternoon was fair, the season late autumn, a warm day without wind. The sun poured down into the palace courtyards and shone upon the thousands of chrysanthemums in the late bloom. It was already the tenth month of the year, but the court gardeners held back the buds so that upon the imperial birthday the flowers might be at their height. In her library the Empress sat at ease, in robes of yellow satin embroidered in blue phoenixes, and her hands were folded and quiet upon her knees.

  At the third hour she heard the tread of footsteps. Her ladies opened the doors wide and looking down the corridors beyond she saw the tall figure of Jung Lu. To her dismay her old heart sprang to life again.

  “Oh, be still, heart,” she murmured while she watched him come. Still the most beautiful of all men, her heart cried! But he was grave, she saw that, and he had put on somber garments, a long blue robe of dark satin, and a winged black satin hat. Upon his breast he wore an ornament of crimson jade and in his hands a prince’s scepter proclaimed a wall between himself and her. She sat motionless until he stood before her. Their eyes met, and then he made effort to kneel in old obeisance. But she put out her right hand to prevent him and motioning to two chairs nearby, she came down from her throne and holding his sleeve lightly between thumb and forefinger, she led him there and they sat down.

  “Put down your jade piece,” she said imperiously.

  He put it down upon the small table between them, as though it were a sword, and waited for her to speak again.

  “How have you been?” she asked, and she look
ed at him sweetly, her too brilliant eyes grown soft and tender of a sudden.

  “Majesty,” he began.

  “Do not call me Majesty,” she said.

  He bowed his head and began once more. “It is for me to ask how you are,” he said. “But I see with my own eyes. You are not changed. Your face is the face I have carried all these years inside my heart.”

  Neither of them spoke of the years. There was no need now to speak of what was past. No other soul could stay love between their two souls. No other creature lived when they were alone together, except themselves. Yes, she thought, gazing at him frankly with her young-old eyes, he was still her own, her love, the only human whose flesh was of her flesh and hers of his. It was strange to love him so well again but now without longing, a comforting and comfortable love. She sighed and felt a gentle happiness pervade her.

  “Why do you sigh?” he asked.

  “I thought I had much to tell you,” she replied. “But now, face to face as we are, I feel you know all of me.”

  “And you know all there is of me to know,” he said. “I have not changed—not since the first day we knew what we were, I to you, and you to me, have I changed.”

  She made no answer. Enough, enough was said. The years in the listening palace walls had set the habit of silence upon their lips, and they sat quietly for a space, not moving, and felt their inner souls renewed by such communion. When she spoke to put a question, her voice was sweet and humbled.

  “Have you advice to give me? These many years I have listened to no prince’s counsel, lacking yours.”

  He shook his head. “You have done well.”

  Yet she discerned something held back, words he would not say.

  “Come,” she said, “you and I—have we not always spoken truthfully, you to me, and I to you? What have I done that you do not approve?”

  “Nothing,” he said, “nothing! I will not spoil your birthday. The least of your subjects is allowed the privilege of his sixtieth birthday, and shall you not enjoy yours?”

  She paid heed to this. Her birthday? “Come,” she urged. “The truth, the truth!”

  “I trust your own sense of wisdom,” he replied unwillingly. “If, perchance, our forces are defeated by the Japanese enemy entrenched now in the weak state of Korea after the invasion last summer, then it may be that in the midst of sorrow for the nation, you will not wish to allow rejoicing for yourself.”

  She considered this awhile. She sighed, sat motionless and thoughtful, her eyes downcast. Then slowly she rose and slowly walked across the tiled floor to her throne again and there sat down. And he rose, too, and waited until she was on her throne and he came toward her and knelt in the old obeisance and this time she did not forbid him. She looked down upon his broad bowed back and said: “Sometimes I do foresee such trouble ahead that I know not where to turn for help. In the darkness of my nights I wake and stare into the future, and there, as close to me as my own hand, I see the looming clouds. What will befall my realm? I have thought that, once my birthday is past, I ought to summon soothsayers and know the evil, however monstrous, that I feel approaching.”

  He said in his strong deep voice, “Better than soothsayers, Majesty, is to be prepared.”

  “Then yourself take command of my forces here in the capital,” she urged. “Be near me and protect me as you used to do. I will not forget the night you came to my tent when we were in the wild mountains near Jehol. Your sword saved my life that night—and my son’s.”

  Cold and bitter longing clutched her heart to speak aloud the words she thought. It was our son you saved. But she would not speak them. He was dead, that son, and buried as Emperor and son of Emperor before him, and so let him rest in his imperial grave.

  “I accept the charge,” Jung Lu said, and rising, he grasped his prince’s scepter firmly in both hands and left her presence.

  Alas that her birthday was never to be celebrated! The people gave much money for triumphal arches to be raised above the roadways from the imperial city to the Summer Palace, high altars were built, whereon the abbots of the Buddhist temples were to have recited sutras. The whole nation, peoples of all the provinces and outlaying territories, prepared for a month of rejoicing for the most honorable day of their sovereign. But suddenly, before these enjoyments could come to pass, the enemy from the islands of Japan fell upon the Chinese fleet of junks and utterly destroyed them, and the people of Korea, under suzerainty of the Dragon Throne, sent out loud cries for help, for now the Japanese warriors overran their land too, and unless they were aided, they could be no more a nation.

  The Empress, receiving such messages of disaster by hourly couriers, and but a few days before her birthday, was distracted into rage. In her secret and relentless mind she knew her own guilt, that she had spent upon the Summer Palace the monies from the Imperial Navy Treasury which might have built ships able to overcome the ships of the enemy. But it was her nature that though she knew her fault, she would not allow the knowledge to influence her before the eyes of others, if so to do would weaken her imperial power. The Throne must be maintained inviolable, supreme. She prepared herself therefore for a mighty rage against her enemies. First, she refused to eat for a whole day. Next, she would not sleep or take rest. Instead, she spent the entire day of fasting in pacing up and down inside her palace. Nor would she allow herself to be diverted by her favorite pets, nor by flowers nor by the songs of caged birds. She would not open a book or unroll a scroll or accept any of her usual pastimes. She paced up and down, first in her vast library and then in her corridors until word spread over the Forbidden City like an evil wind that the Empress was in fury and none knew where her wrath would break, but break it must.

  In the ferment of her mind, her thoughts whirling about the clear cold center of her own knowledge of where the chief fault lay, she chose two to blame, and she was not one of them. First, she would summon the lesser of the two, that general whom she had most trusted, Li Hung-chang, and upon him she would pour her anger. This decided, she sent the Chief Eunuch for him, and she waited at the appointed hour in her private audience hall, but she commanded all the doors to be left open so that listening ears could hear the tumult of her wrath and spread the news throughout the palace, whence it would penetrate the city and the nation.

  “You!” she cried at the stout tall general when he stood before her. She would not deign to use her forefingers to point at him but only her two little fingers, her hands outstretched. “You dare to lose our boats, even that good chartered troopship, the Kowshing! It lies at the bottom of the sea. Where shall we find the money to pay for it? See what your stupidity has done for our realm!”

  The general knew better than to utter a word. He remained kneeling in obeisance, his splendid robes spread out upon the floor. And she knew that he would not dare to reply and so she rushed on to fresh wrath.

  “You!” she cried again, and she hurled the word at him like a curse, and she pointed her two little fingers at him as though to stab him through. “Where has your mind been all these years and upon what has your heart dwelled? You have forgot the welfare of the nation! Your concern has been only for those merchant steamboats you have made to sail upon our rivers, and for the foreign railroads you built, though you know very well how I hate such foreign objects, and I hear that you have even built a foreign weaving mill in Shanghai, whose profits you pocket! Do you not know that proper devotion to the Dragon Throne requires your entire time and thought? How dare you think only of yourself?”

  Still he would not answer, though the Empress waited with both little fingers outstretched toward him. So she began again, stabbing the air above his head with her two fingers.

  “During these ten years, how much has been lost because of your greed and your selfishness! France has seized Annam and attacked Taiwan, and only with difficulty were we able to free ourselves from a foreign war with that nation, and this at the same time that we have been distressed by the war in Korea with Japan. And how
is it that all these foreign peoples dare to threaten us and attack us? It is because our armies and navies are weak, and whose fault is this weakness but yours? You shall stay by your post, you recreant and traitor, for what you have not been able to do you must now do, and you shall be stripped of all honors. Like a slave you may not rest, and like a slave you shall be punished.”

  She put down her hands and drew her breath in and out loudly several times and then she ordered him to leave her.

  “Get up,” she said. “Go to your duty. By any means you can, undo what you have done. Peace we must have, with whatever honor you can save for your Sovereign.”

  He rose and dusted off his knees and walked backward from her presence, bowing as he went, and on his full square face she saw a look of patience which somehow struck her to the heart. For this man had saved her more than once and he had been obedient to her command, and she knew that he was still loyal. Some day she would be lenient toward him again but not today. She would not let her heart soften to anyone and her greatest wrath was yet to fall. For next she summoned the Emperor by her own handwriting and to her name she set the imperial seal.

  But on that day when she had dispatched the command, a strange mad turmoil upset the whole Summer Palace. Near evening, when the Empress rested in the Pavilion of Orchids, one of her ladies came running through the round marble gate, her robes flying and her hair disordered. The serving woman, who knelt beside the Empress to fan the small insects away, put up her hand for silence, for the Empress slept. But the lady was too frightened to heed and she cried out in a shrill high voice,

  “Majesty, Majesty—I saw—I saw—”

  The Empress woke at once and fully, as she always did. She sat up on her couch and looked at the lady with a piercing stare.

  “Saw what?” she asked.

  “A man shaved like a priest,” the lady gasped. She clutched her bosom and began to weep with fright.