The House in the Rain

The road between the river town and the hills was never meant for gentlemen in silk. The rain of that second week proved it, thoroughly. Feng had sent his sedan chair ahead at the ferry. Pride tucked into his pocket. He was walking with his books wrapped in oilcloth under his arm when the sky opened above him like a broken bucket.

He was on his way to visit an uncle who taught at a village school. His prospects were not much to speak of. A mediocre student. A thin purse. A name his father had hoped would amount to something better than a clerkship in a distant yamen. Though sometimes Feng thought a clerkship was exactly what a mediocre student deserved.

Through the sheets of rain he made out a house, dark, standing back from the road among the trees. It should have been a ruin. Tiles missing in patches. The great gate hung crooked on its hinges. The garden had run wild, all broken rock and reeds.

But a light burned in the upper window. A thin thread of smoke rose above the ridge. Feng stood in the rain, water running down his collar, and told himself that a ruin with a fire in it was better than a ditch with a drowned scholar in it.

He pushed the gate. It groaned like an old man waking. The courtyard was swept. That was the first thing that stopped him dead. Swept clean, weeds cut short, the broken stones piled neatly against the northern wall.

A voice called from inside. Dry, courteous, far too steady for a man lost in the rain to have invented. Welcome, it said. We have been expecting a traveler out of this weather. Come in before the water carries you down the hill.

Feng hesitated on the threshold. He was a scholar, and a scholar knows that the safest door in the world is the one that opens before he knocks. But his books had soaked through the oilcloth. His feet had gone numb inside his straw sandals. And the light in the hall looked almost unbearably warm.

He went in. The hall was old but beautifully kept. No garish pictures on the walls, only a few worn scrolls. The chairs had been polished by long use, not bought new. An old man in a plain dark robe rose to meet him, leaning on a staff of black wood.

You are wet through, the old man said, as though this were a matter of genuine concern. Sit by the brazier and let your blood come back. My name is Hu. I am, in my small way, a man of leisure in these hills. The girl will bring you something hot to drink.

Feng bowed and sat. He had not lied about his name. Neither had he volunteered his business. The old man's eyes moved over him with a quiet attentiveness, the way a physician looks at a tongue. Then the old man smiled, and the smile was kind.

Through the inner door came a young woman, balancing a tray with both hands. At first glance she was unremarkable. Then she was remarkable entirely. For a long moment Feng forgot the rain, the road, the soaked books under his arm.

She set the tray down without speaking, but she looked at him once, quickly, as if to measure whether a man who walked in from such weather could be worth the trouble of a bowl of hot wine. The wine was spiced with ginger. It tasted, Feng thought, like a house that had been waiting for him for years.