The Essay on Hidden Virtue

Song was shown to a small desk in a long hall. Brush, ink, and paper lay ready, laid out by invisible hands. At the head of the hall sat three judges, robed in deep blue, their faces hidden in shadow. A clerk stood beside them, holding a scroll.

The topic was read out in a flat voice: "On the weight of hidden virtue as against the renown of the world." It was a topic Song had turned over in his own mind for years. He dipped his brush and began to write.

He wrote of the widow in his lane who had starved herself to keep her stepchildren in school. He wrote of the old charcoal-burner who had once, when a storm washed a traveler's bundle into the river, fished it out and walked three days to return it, refusing even a cup of wine for his trouble. He wrote of how heaven, which sees the heart, does not read the gazette.

He wrote, too, of himself: of the petitions he had not signed, the wrongs he had looked away from, the good he had failed to do when it had cost him nothing. The brush moved honestly; he did not spare himself. It occurred to him, as he wrote, that no mortal examiner had ever asked him this, the only question that mattered.

He wrote plainly, without ornament, as a man speaks when he believes no one is listening. When he had finished, the brush still in his hand, he saw that the hall was very quiet. The middle judge had risen from his seat and was walking slowly down the aisle, holding the sheet.

He stopped at Song's desk. "This passage," he said, reading aloud, "'The deed done in secret is the seed; the fame that men echo is the husk.''— who wrote this?"

"I wrote it," Song said, "because I have seen it true."

The judge returned to the dais and spoke with his two companions for a long time. They did not whisper. Song heard every word: that the essay was the best of the session; that its author had the gravity the office required; that it was out of the question to send such a man back to the dust to scrape a petty living among mortal examiners.

At length the chief judge stood and addressed Song directly. "Master Song, you have been examined. Your essay has been weighed and found not wanting. There is a city to the west whose tutelary god has departed this year, and whose people have been without a protector. We appoint you to that charge."

Song's brush fell from his hand. "My lord," he said, "I am unworthy, and besides — I have a father who leans on me, and a young wife. I have not yet finished what I owe them."

"We know," the judge said gently. "That is why we have not yet called your body to us. You are permitted three days on earth to set your affairs in order. On the dawn of the fourth, the road will open again. Do not fail to come." He bowed slightly, and the hall dimmed. Song felt a hand on his shoulder, and the hall, the judges, and the silent scholars folded away like a curtain pulled aside.