by Pu Songling
185. The Martial Graduate
A man named Shi, who had been a successful candidate in the provincial examinations for military officers, was carrying bags of money with him to the capital as he went to try to obtain an official appointment. As he arrived in Dezhou, he experienced a sudden attack of serious illness, and kept spitting up blood, till at length he laid down in a boat.
His servant stole the money he’d been carrying and fled. Shi was filled with hate for the man, so his illness worsened while his money and provisions began to run out. In addition, the boatman was scheming excuses to abandon him.
Soon thereafter a woman came by in another boat, moored nearby for the night, and when she heard about Shi, volunteered to transport him in her boat. The delighted boatman helped Shi climb into the woman’s boat. When Shi looked at her closely, he saw that she was at least forty, dressed in splendid clothing, and quite lovely.
With a groan, Shi expressed his gratitude to her. The woman examined him carefully and told him, “You’ve been suffering from consumption for some time, and now your spirit is already wandering towards its grave.” When Shi heard this, he wept in sorrow, feeling grieved and miserable. “I have a pill,” she said, “that could keep you from dying. If it cures you, don’t forget about me.” Shi tearfully swore that he wouldn’t.
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Dezhou: Located in modern Shandong province.
The woman then administered the medicine to Shi; in half a day, he felt like he’d begun to recover a bit. The woman brought delicacies to his bed to feed him, more eagerly attentive than even a wife would be to her husband. Shi’s appreciation of her continued to increase.
A month went by, and he was fully recovered. Shi crawled on his knees submissively before her, as respectful as if she were his own mother. She declared to him, “I’m lonely and all alone, with no one to depend on, so if you don’t find my faded appearance too ugly to look at, I would like to serve you as your wife.”
At the time, Shi was about thirty and it had been a year since his wife had died, so when he heard this, he was pleased and happy beyond all expectations, and thus they began to live together as though married. At that point, she took out the money that she’d been setting aside for herself, and sent him to the capital so he could purchase the appointment as he’d originally intended, with the agreement that after he’d done so, he would return and then take her home with him.
Shi traveled to the capital and made connections with the money he’d been given for bribes, so he was selected to serve as a military official in his native province; with the money left over, he purchased a horse and saddle, along with some showy accoutrements appropriate to his position. Once he started thinking that the woman was getting on in years, past her prime of beauty, and hence wouldn’t really make a very fitting wife for him, he decided to take a hundred taels to ensure that a woman from the Wang family would become his wife.
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A pill: See the discussion of such pills in the introductory essay in volume one, “Pu Songling’s Exercise of the Fox Tradition: Moral Allegory and Social Critique” (xxxi-xxxii).
Cowardly and timid about it, Shi was afraid that the woman would learn of what he’d done, so he avoided the road back to Dezhou and took a circuitous route to arrive at his appointment. After more than a year, the woman still had received no word from him.
Shi had a first cousin who moved to Dezhou and became the woman’s neighbor. She knew who he was, and went to visit him to ask him about Shi. The cousin told her everything. The woman shouted a torrent of abuse, and told the cousin about all the care she’d lavished on Shi.
He took her side and agreed that she’d been treated unjustly, so to console her, he suggested, “Maybe all the little details of his position have occupied him, and he hasn’t yet had the leisure to contact you. If you write a letter to him, I’ll deliver it for you.” The woman then took his advice. Shi’s cousin respectfully gave him the letter, but Shi didn’t pay it any attention.
Another year passed, and the woman herself went to see Shi, stopping to rest at an inn. She asked to see the staff member in Shi’s office who was in charge of visiting guests, so he could inform Shi of her arrival, but Shi ordered that she be turned away.
One day, while he was drinking at a banquet, he heard the uproarious sound of someone shouting and cursing; and when he listened attentively to make it out, he realized it was the woman, who by then had already pulled aside the room curtain to gain entrance. Shi was quite shaken, and his complexion turned the color of clay.
The woman pointed at him, reproachfully crying, “You fickle cheat! You’re happy now, right? How well off do you think you’d be if it wasn’t for me? Our fated relationship isn’t a casual one, and even if you wanted to take some additional maidservant or concubine, would it have harmed you to discuss it with me?” Shi stood there holding his breath, unable to find anything to say. After quite some time, he sheepishly went down on his knees and sweet-talked her, begging her pardon. This calmed the woman somewhat.
Shi then took up the matter with Wang, his wife, asking her to consider her relationship to the woman to be that of a younger sister to her elder. His wife definitely didn’t want to do so; but Shi persisted in his pleading, so she finally went along with the idea.
Wang did obeisance to the woman, who then greeted her with equal respect. She told Wang, “Don’t worry, little sister, I’m not the vindictive or jealous type. What he’s done to me would be really unbearable to anyone, and if it’d been done to you, you wouldn’t want to have such a husband.”
Then she proceeded to fill in all the details for Shi’s wife. Wang also became angry with him, and joined the woman in scolding him. Shi couldn’t defend his actions, so he begged to be allowed to redeem himself, and then things settled down in their home.
Earlier, the woman had initially been unable to gain entrance because Shi had warned the gatekeeper not to let her in. Now, furious with the gatekeeper, he privately interrogated him about why he’d admitted her. The gatekeeper adamantly insisted to Shi that while he’d been in possession of the key to the gate, he hadn’t let her in, she hadn’t entered there, and hence he hadn’t disobeyed him. Shi had suspected this was the case, but didn’t dare ask the woman about it, and though the two continued to talk and laugh together, there was no longer any love between them.
Fortunately for him, the woman remained gracious and uncontentious, making no attempt to sleep with Shi. Except for sharing three meals with him each day, she shut herself in her room, apparently sleeping, and by no means did she ask Shi where he was going to sleep.
Wang was initially worried that the woman would challenge her own position; but when she saw how things were, she became even more respectful towards her. At dawn she’d go into the courtyard and care for the woman like she was her mother-in-law. The woman treated the servants generously and personably, as wise and perceptive as an immortal.
One day, Shi misplaced his silk-ribboned official’s seal, and livid with anger, closed his office, the trivial matter driving him to distraction, yet no one could figure out what to do. The woman laughed and told Shi, “Don’t worry, empty the well and you’ll find it.” Shi followed her advice, and found it there indeed. He kowtowed and asked her how she knew, but she merely smiled and said nothing. He got the impression that she knew the name of the culprit, but wasn’t going to reveal it.
A year passed while she was living there, with Shi noticing a number of strange things about her. Since he’d begun to suspect that she wasn’t human, he often sent someone to spy on her after she’d gone to sleep, and they’d hear her lie down on her bed. But throughout the night they’d also hear the sound of clothing being shaken, though they couldn’t tell what she was doing.
The woman and Wang grew to love each other dearly. One night, Shi went to see a provincial judge and didn’t return home, so the woman and Wang decided to have some drinks. Without realizing s
he was drunk, the woman passed out right there, and transformed into a fox. Wang sympathetically covered her with a brocade blanket.
In a little while, Shi came in, and Wang told him about the strange turn of events. Shi wanted to kill the woman. “Even if she’s a fox, what’s she ever done to you?” Wang demanded. Shi wouldn’t listen, and urgently hunted for a sword.
The woman came to, and started yelling, “You’re a poisonous snake in your actions and an evil man in your heart, and we sure can’t live together any longer! I once gave you a special medicine, and now I want it back!” Then she spat in Shi’s face.
Shi felt like he was standing in a frozen forest, drenched in ice water, and an intense itchiness began growing in his throat; when he vomited something up, it turned out to be the pill he’d originally been given. The woman picked it up and angrily ran outside, and though he chased after her, she’d already vanished. That night, Shi’s consumptive disease returned and he couldn’t stop coughing up blood, so in six months he was dead.
The collector of these strange tales remarks, “Shi was a successful candidate in the provincial examinations for military officers, yet he possessed the potential elegance of a scholarly intellectual. It was said that he was humble to those beneath him, and was afraid to hurt others by his words. He was in the prime of life when he died, and the community of scholars grieved his loss. However, regarding the business of him betraying his fox wife, was he really any different than Li Shilang?”
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Li Shilang: A Tang dynasty figure in the novel Huo Xiaoyu (Zhu 2:643n43), who receives the title’s name in recognition of his performance on an examination given in Chang’an, but also fails to be true to his beloved and suffers for it.
186. The Princess of West Lake
Chen Bijiao, whose courtesy name was Mingyun, was a scholar from Hebei. His family was poor, so he worked as an adjutant to army brigade vice-general Jia Wan, who made him his clerk, and on one occasion they were in a boat moored on Lake Dongting. Just then an alligator began swimming towards them, so Jia shot an arrow that hit it in the back. There was a fish that had attached itself to the alligator’s tail with its mouth and wouldn’t let go, so they caught it, too.
When they tied the alligator to the boat’s mast, it was still alive and breathing; but the creature’s mouth kept opening and shutting, as though it was begging to be saved. Chen was moved to take pity and asked Jia to set it free. The scholar had brought along some medicine for wounds inflicted by metal, which he applied to the place where the arrow had struck, and then released the alligator into the water, where it alternately floated and swam for more than fifteen minutes before submerging.
After a year had gone by, Chen was returning homeward to the north, once again traveling on Lake Dongting, when a mighty wind capsized his boat. Fortunately, he grabbed onto a bamboo basket and drifted aimlessly all through the night, until he came to a stop by running into a tree. Climbing onto the bank, he raised himself up, then saw a body floating towards him—his serving boy.
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Dongting Lake: Located in Henan province.
He used his strength to pull the boy out of the water, but discovered he was already drowned. Heartbroken and drained, he sat down to rest. He watched the waving of slender green bamboo stalks in the small hills nearby, and since there were no passersby, he was unable to ask for directions to the nearest road.
He sat there till long after dawn, dispirited and mournful. Suddenly the boy servant’s limbs twitched ever so slightly, and Chen, overjoyed, began to rub them. Soon, the boy vomited up several dou of water and returned to consciousness, reviving quickly. They laid out their clothes on a rock to dry, and by noontime, they were dry enough to be worn. But their stomachs were empty and rumbling, and they were so hungry that they couldn’t stand it.
Thus they quickly climbed into the hills, hoping to find a village. Just as they’d made it halfway up one of the hills, they heard the sound of arrows whizzing through the air. As they were trying to detect the sounds’ source, two girls galloped by on excellent horses, the horses’ hooves making a sound like the threshing of beans. The girls both wore red silk tied around their foreheads and pheasant feathers stuck into the hair coiled on their heads; they were dressed in tight-sleeved, purple clothing, with green brocade belts around their waists; in one hand they held a weapon, and on the other arm they each wore an archer’s leather wrist band.
When Chen and his servant had climbed to the top of a ridge, they spotted several dozen hunters riding through the lush vegetation, each of them equally lovely and dressed as the earlier two had been. Chen didn’t dare approach them.
A man rode up who was apparently a horse groom, so Chen walked over and asked him about the women. “The Princess of West Lake is hunting on Shou Hill,” he replied. Chen told him how they had come to be there, and mentioned that they were both famished.
The groom untied a bag of food, and offered it to them with the advice, “You should get far away from here, lest you offend the mistress and be killed for it!” This so frightened Chen that he hurried down the hill with his boy servant.
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Dou: A measure equal to one deciliter, or about 1/5 pint.
Hidden in the dense forest were some halls and pagodas, which Chen said were probably part of a Buddhist monastery. They drew near a whitewashed wall that surrounded the grounds, with a stream flowing alongside it; a vermilion gate was opened halfway, and a stone bridge led to the buildings inside. They leaned upon the door and looked in through the gate, where they saw garden terraces and buildings surrounded by clouds, thinking it must be a royal garden, or at least a nobleman’s.
They walked around it for a bit, then entered, encountering vines that obstructed the path, as well as fragrant flowers to greet passersby. Passing several twisting, winding balustrades, they came across another house and grounds, with dozens of tall weeping willows, brushing against the building’s vermilion eaves. Mountain birds cried out, scattering flower petals as they flew away; from the depths of the garden a gentle breeze sprung up, causing young elm seeds to fall. They were cheered by the pleasing sights that seemed almost somehow otherworldly.
Passing through a small pavilion, they found a swing there that seemed to be supported by clouds; but it was hanging there quietly, with no signs of anyone else having been there. Because he’d begun to suspect that they’d unwittingly entered some family’s quarters, Chen timidly didn’t dare go any further.
Just then they heard horses galloping outside the gate, and something like women laughing and talking. Chen hid among the flowers with his boy servant. Soon afterwards, the sound of laughter gradually came closer, and they heard a woman say, “We’re just not in the mood for hunting today, and we haven’t bagged much in the way of fowl.”
Then another woman commented, “If not for the princess shooting a wild goose, all our efforts would’ve been for nothing.”
Before long, several young women gathered around as another young lady entered the pavilion and sat down. The lady wore a military uniform with tight sleeves, and appeared to be fourteen or fifteen years old. The hair on top of her head had been combed into fluffy clouds, her waist was so slender that it seemed like a strong wind might blow her over, and she seemed like jade while all other women were jadeite, for there were no analogies sufficient to describe her beauty. The other young women, whose clothing shone so brilliantly that when gathered together they looked like piles of brocade, brought her fragrant tea.
Shortly afterwards, the young lady stood up, and went downstairs. One of the young women declared to her, “You must be exhausted from riding your horse—do you still have the energy to play on your swing?” The princess laughed that indeed she did.
Then with one of them steadying her shoulders, another holding her arms, and another lifting up her skirt, they supported her while she pulled herself up to stand in the swing. The pri
ncess then relaxed, holding the ropes with her white arms, standing in her pointed shoes, swinging as lightly as a swallow in flight, launching herself up into the darkness of the clouds. Soon she was finished and they helped her down. They all exclaimed, “Princess, you’re truly a fairy!” She giggled and then left the pavilion.
Chen watched them for a good long while in fascination. He waited until the sounds of the women receded, then came out of hiding to inspect the swing again, pacing around it while meditating thoughtfully. He noticed that next to a bamboo fence there was a red scarf, and he realized that someone in the throng of beauties had lost it, so he happily slipped it inside his sleeve.
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A swallow in flight: A clever play on words by Pu, since the characters feiyan (飞燕) here also signify “quick and agile,” as well as Fei Yan, or Flying Swallow, a Han dynasty queen renowned for her slender figure.
He climbed up into the pavilion, and saw that there were writing materials set out on a table there, so he inscribed on the scarf,
What kind of person is playing in this swing?
Clearly this is a fairy damsel from heaven, scattering flowers.
The Moon Palace beauties jealously fear their splendor inferior to hers,
But no one believes she can really fly to the Ninth Heaven.
When he finished writing, he recited the verse aloud, and then exited the pavilion.
The two searched for the path that they’d used previously, but instead found a heavy gate bolted fast, shutting them inside. Uncertain about what to do, they returned and explored the towers, pavilions and terraces, wandering until they were nearly exhausted. A girl came upon them suddenly, and asked in amazement, “How’d you manage to come here?”
