Imperial Woman

by Pearl S. Buck

  Such was the power of her presence, the hard clarity of her ringing voice, the beauty she still possessed, that even they were subdued and one by one they went away. Then she sent word to the Imperial Guards that indeed these men were to be beheaded and their heads hung on the city gates because they had dared to come into her presence when she had not commanded them.

  On this same day came evil news from Tientsin that the foreign soldiery had captured that city and were marching now in full force to the capital to rescue their beleaguered countrymen inside the fortress of the legations. As for the Imperial Army, it was in retreat. What could she do but wait and pray?

  On the tenth day of the seventh month of the moon year, in answer to her daily prayers to her goddess, the Empress received word that Jung Lu had awaked from his stupor. She returned to the temple to give thanks and then sent baskets of special foods to nourish him quickly to strength again. Nevertheless it was four more days before he could be carried into her presence in a palanquin and when she saw his pallor and the weakness of his limbs, she cried out that he was not to rise. Instead, she came down the two steps from her throne and sat down beside him in a chair.

  “Where have you been, kinsman?” she inquired in her most tender voice. “Your body has lain inert on your bed, while your soul and mind have wandered far away.”

  “Wherever I have been I cannot remember now.” His voice was high and weak. “But I am returned, by whose will I do not know, unless it was your prayers that brought me back.”

  “It was my prayers,” she said, “for I have been alone indeed. Tell me what I must do. Do you know that a war rages in the city and that Tientsin has fallen? The enemy approaches the city—”

  “I know all,” he said. “There is no time. You must heed my words well. You must seize Prince Tuan, whom the foreigners blame for everything and you must order him beheaded. This will prove your innocence and your will for peace.”

  “What—and yield to the enemy?” she cried in outrage. “To behead Prince Tuan is a small matter but to yield to the foreign enemy—no, that is too much, that I cannot do! The meaning of my whole life crumbles into dust.”

  He groaned to hear her. “Oh, stubborn woman,” he sighed. “When will you learn that you cannot stay the tides of the future?” And he motioned to the bearers of his palanquin to carry him away again, and torn in heart and mind the Empress did not bid him stay.

  Day pressed upon day, and she clung to each day, trying to believe that the magic of the Boxer band still held. The city lay half in ashes and the foreigners in the legations still would not surrender. What, then, could this mean except that they had hope of their relieving armies now approaching? Five times on the third day she summoned her princes and ministers to audience in the Hall of Peaceful Longevity. To these audiences Jung Lu also came, and desperately forcing himself he rose from his palanquin and took his place. But he had no other advice to give than that which he had given and which she would not receive. As for the ministers and princes, they remained silent, their faces pale and lined with fear and weariness.

  In this silence Prince Tuan again spoke loudly and boasted much, declaring that the Boxers had prepared their secret incantations and when the foreign troops reached the moat outside the city wall they would not be able to cross. Instead, they would fall in the water and be drowned.

  To this Jung Lu shouted in a voice suddenly strong, “The Boxers are no more than thistledown, and when the enemy foreigners approach they will fly away like thistledown!”

  His words were fulfilled. At the Hour of the Monkey on the fifth day, it being midafternoon, Duke Lan rushed into the library where the Empress perused the wise books where alone now she could find comfort, and he cried out without greeting or obeisance, “Old Buddha, they are here—the foreign devils have broken through the gates as fire through wax!”

  She looked up and the blood drained from her heart.

  “Then my kinsman was right,” she said in a small, wondering voice. She closed the book and rose, and standing there she meditated, pinching her full lower lip between her thumb and finger.

  “You must flee, Majesty,” the old duke cried. “You and the Son of Heaven together! You must flee northward.”

  She shook her head, still pondering, and seeing that she could not be moved he made haste away to find Jung Lu who alone could persuade her. In less than an hour Jung Lu was there and he came in, walking now with a cane and still uncertainly, but strengthened to do what he could for her.

  She had sat down again, but the book was not opened and she clasped her hands on her knees so tightly that her knuckles and her fingers were white. She looked up when he came in, her great eyes opaque, the pupils lost in the darkness.

  He came close to her and spoke in low and tender tones:

  “My love, you must hear me. You cannot stay here. You are still the symbol of the Throne. Where you are is the heart of the nation. Tonight, after midnight, at the Hour of the Tiger when the moon is down and the stars not yet bright, you must escape.”

  “Again,” she whispered. “Again, again—”

  “Again,” he agreed. “You know the way, and you shall not go alone.”

  “You—”

  “No, not I. I must stay to rally our forces. For you will come back, as you did before, and I must save the Throne for you.”

  “How can you, without armies?” she murmured. Her head drooped and he saw great tears hanging on the long straight lashes. They fell one by one and rolled down the smooth heavy satin of her silver-gray robe.

  “What I cannot do by force I shall do by wisdom,” he said. “The throne will be here for you. That I promise.”

  She lifted up her face and he looked down and saw that she had yielded. To terror she had yielded, to fear, if not to him, and in pitying love he took her hand and held it for a moment. He put her hand to his cheek and pressed it there and then he loosed it gently and stepped back.

  “Majesty,” he said, “there is no time to lose. I must prepare your disguise and select those who shall take my place as guard for you. Your women must stain your skin and dress your hair as a Chinese peasant woman’s and you must leave the palace by the hidden gate. Two ladies only—more will seem too many. The Emperor must go with you dressed as a peasant, too. The concubines you must leave behind—”

  She listened, saying not a word. When he was gone she sat down and opened her book and her eyes fell upon strange words written centuries before by the sage Confucius. “For lack of a broad mind and true understanding, a great purpose has been lost.”

  She stared at the words and heard them as though a voice had spoken them. Out of the past they came direct into her heart and mind, and she received them humbly. Her mind was not broad enough, she had not understood the times, and her purpose was lost—her purpose to save the country. The enemy had won. She closed the book slowly and she surrendered her spirit. From now on she would not shape the times but be shaped by them.

  They marveled at her proud calm, not knowing. She gave commands to everyone concerning the safe disposal of her books, her paintings, her scrolls, her jewels. For the hiding of her treasure, her ingots of silver and gold, she commanded Li Lien-ying to build a false wall in a certain chamber and behind this wall the treasure was concealed. When all was done, in haste but order, at the Hour of the Tiger she summoned first the Emperor, and then the concubines and told the concubines why she could not take them with her.

  “I must preserve the Emperor and myself,” she said, “not for our worth, for, indeed, we have none of ourselves, but because we must protect the Throne. I carry the imperial seal with me, and where I am the state is. Here you will remain and you need not fear, for the Grand Councilor Jung Lu himself, miraculously recovered for this hour, will rally all our armies. Moreover, I do not believe that the enemy will penetrate these palaces. Continue then as though I were here. The eunuchs will be with you to serve, except for Li Lien-ying who goes with me.”

  The concubines wep
t softly and wiped their eyes with their sleeves. None spoke except the Pearl Concubine, whom the eunuchs had dared to bring from her prison. There she stood, her cheeks pale and loose, her beauty gone, her body clad in faded rags. But still she was rebellious. Her onyx eyes, set like jewels under moth brows, still flamed. She cried out to the Empress:

  “I will not stay, Imperial Mother! I claim my right to go with my lord to serve him.”

  The Empress rose up like an angry phoenix. “You!” she called and she stabbed the air with her two little fingers. “You dare to speak, who brought down half this trouble on his head! Could he have thought of so much evil had you not whispered in his ears?”

  She turned to Li Lien-ying and, borne up on the power of her wrath, she gave command.

  “Take this woman and cast her into the well by the Eastern Gate!”

  The Emperor fell on his knees as she uttered this command but the Empress would not allow him to speak. This imperial woman, who could be all softness and charm when she was in the peaceful presence of beauty, in time of danger was ruthless.

  “Not a word,” she cried, stabbing her fingers into the air above the Emperor’s head. “This concubine was hatched from the egg of an owl. I brought her here to nourish and to uphold me and she has rebelled against me.”

  She looked at Li Lien-ying and immediately he beckoned to a eunuch and the two of them laid hold upon the concubine and carried her away, she silent and pale as stone.

  “Get you into your cart,” the Empress said to the kneeling Emperor, “and drop the curtain lest you be seen. Prince P’u Lun is to ride on your shaft, and I will lead in my own cart. The mule is for Li Lien-ying. He must follow as best he can, though he is the worst of riders. And if anyone stops us, say that we are poor country folk fleeing into the mountains. Ah, but go first by the Summer Palace!”

  So said, so done. Behind her curtains the Empress sat upon the cushion in her cart, straight as a Buddha, her face fixed, her ears alert, her eyes resolute. Only when, hours later, the carts passed by the Summer Palace did she issue command again. “Stay,” she said when the beloved towers of the pagodas came into view. “We will remain here a little while.”

  She descended from her cart though she would allow no other to descend, and alone, except for one eunuch, she wandered the marble corridors, the empty palaces, and beside the lake. Here was the core of her heart. Here she had dreamed of living out her quiet old age among people peaceful and prosperous. Here it might be she could never return. What if the foreign enemy again destroyed this place, as long ago they had done? Ah, but she had come back, she had rebuilt, and in rebuilding she had strengthened and glorified the past. But then she had been young and now she was old. Age, too, had defeated her.

  In quiet she stood for the last long gaze, and then she turned, a figure slender and elegant in the coarse blue cotton garments of a Chinese peasant, and she stepped into her cart.

  “Westward,” she commanded, “westward to the city of Sian.”

  The journey proceeded day by day for ninety days and the Empress kept her face resolute and calm whatever her heart was. Never did she forget that the Court looked to her as to the sun, although she was in flight. When they had left one province and had entered into the next, it was no longer necessary to maintain disguise, and the Empress, after bath, could put on her royal garments again. With this she felt renewed spirits, and her courage rose. In this province of Shansi the people were not afraid of war but they were bitter with a fearful famine. Nevertheless on the very first evening her favorite general, who had come north with his troops, gave to the Empress a basket of fresh eggs, a jeweled girdle, and a satin pouch for her pipe and tobacco. This cheered her, too, and was a good omen of the love which her subjects still felt for her. Indeed, as the days passed, starving though they were, the people brought baskets of wheat and millet and thin fowls to the Empress and she was ever more comforted by such love, and she began to take pleasure in the surrounding beauty.

  At a pass between the hills, named the Pass of Flying Geese, she commanded all to halt, in order that she could enjoy the spectacle. As far as eyes could reach the bare-flanked mountains rose against a sky of royal purple. In the valleys the shadows were black. Her favorite general, now traveling with her as guard, wandered away for a short distance and found a steep meadow upon whose grasses grew a mass of yellow flowers. He plucked an armful of them and brought them to the Empress saying that the gods had spread them there as an imperial welcome. The Empress was touched by such a pretty compliment, and she told a eunuch to pour the general a bowl of buttermilk tea to restore his strength. By such small pleasant means the weight was lifted somewhat from her heart. She slept well at night and she ate heartily even of the poor fare.

  On the eighth day of the ninth month she reached the capital of the province and there the Viceroy Yü Hsien awaited her with every show of reverence. This Viceroy was he who, believing in their show of magic, had upheld the Boxers, and he had caused every foreign man, woman and child in his province to be killed. The Empress accepted his obeisances and his gifts when he met her at the city gates for welcome and she praised him saying that he had done well to clean his province of the enemy and that she knew that he was honest and loyal.

  “Nevertheless,” she said, “we are defeated and it may be that the foreign enemy, when they are victorious, will demand your punishment, and if this is so, then I must seem to punish you, but I shall reward you in secret. We must hope for future victory yet to come, in spite of present defeat.”

  At this Yü Hsien made obeisances nine times in the dust before her. “Majesty,” he said, “I am ready to accept dismissal and punishment at your hands.”

  But she wagged her forefinger at him. “You were wrong, though, in promising me that the Boxers could not be killed because of their magic. They are dead in large numbers. The foreign bullets went through their bodies as though their flesh were wax.”

  “Majesty,” Yü Hsien said in all earnestness, “their magic failed because they did not abide by the rules of their order. For robbery, they killed innocent persons who were not Christians and thus allowed themselves to be overcome by their own greed. Only the pure can use magic.”

  She nodded her head to this and so proceeded to the viceregal palace which was prepared for her. And she was pleased when upon her arrival she found certain gold and silver vessels taken from a storeroom and cleaned and polished for her use now. These vessels had been made two hundred years before for the Imperial Ancestor Ch’ien Lung, when he came to this city on his way to worship at the Five-Crested Mountain.

  Never was autumn more glorious than now. Day after day the sun shone down upon land and people. Harvests were once more plentiful and farmhouses were full of food and fuel. The war was far away and the citizens seemed scarcely to have heard of it. In peace and plenty they gave her homage and declared that indeed she was their Old Buddha and to her they gave thanks. Again her spirits rose and her heart was robust with courage and pleasure, and the more because many of her princes and ministers now followed her and slowly the Court assembled itself.

  Her mood was dimmed suddenly by a letter, written as a memorial from Jung Lu, and he told her therein that their cause was lost and that his good aide, Chung Chi, had hanged himself in despair. To this the Empress replied, first bestowing honors upon the dead man for his loyalty and bravery and then commanding Jung Lu to come to her to make full report. She was prepared then for no better news when he arrived, for while he journeyed to her, his wife was taken suddenly ill and died in a strange city. This news the Empress heard by courier, and she was determined to comfort him and rouse his spirits by her own renewed health.

  When Jung Lu was announced upon the day after her own arrival at the city of T’ai Yuan she sent word that he rest only an hour and then appear before her.

  She received him in a small ancient hall. There she sat with folded hands upon a great carved chair of southern blackwood set on a low platform to resemble a th
rone. She allowed none to be near when she and Jung Lu met. Her ladies she dismissed, saying that they must go into the fresh air and the sunshine and Li Lien-ying she commanded to wait in the anteroom.

  The door opened and Jung Lu came in, tall and gaunt from sorrow and fatigue, but always fastidious in her presence, he had used his hour to bathe and put on fresh robes. As usual he made a feint of obeisance and as usual she put out her right hand to prevent him. He stood before her and she rose, the platform lending her height, and they exchanged a long lingering look.

  “I grieve that your wife has left you for the Yellow Springs,” she said in a low voice.

  He acknowledged this by a slight bow. “Majesty, she was a good woman,” he said, “and she served me faithfully.”

  They waited, one for the other, but what could be said between them now?

  “I shall lift up another to her place,” the Empress said at last.

  “As you will, Majesty,” he said.

  “You are tired,” she observed. “Do not act with ceremony. Let us sit down together. I have need of your wisdom.” She descended from the platform and crossed the room with her old controlled grace, a slender figure regal and upright as she had ever been, and she sat down in one of two straight wooden chairs between which was a small two-tiered table. At her gesture he sat down in the other chair and waited for her to speak.

  She waved a silk fan upon which once, in a moment of idleness, she had painted a landscape of this province. “Is all lost?” she asked at last, and looked sidewise at him from her long eyes.

  “All is lost,” he said firmly. He sat with his large beautiful hands planted upon his satin-covered knees and upon these hands she now fixed her eyes. They were fleshless hands, but exceedingly strong, and well did she know their strength.

  “What is your counsel?” she asked.

  “Majesty,” he said, “there is only one course for you to follow. You must return to your capital and yield to the demands of the enemy and so again save the Throne. I have left Li Hung-chang behind to negotiate the peace. But before you return you must order Prince Tuan to be beheaded, as an earnest of your repentance.”