The Rash Letter

Spring came, and with it an old companion named Liu, who had been away in the prefectural city. Liu was a smooth-tongued fellow with a talent for making grievances sound like injustices done to himself. He arrived at Feng's door with wine and a long face.

Over their cups he told a tale. A certain wealthy bully named Wang, a man whose father had bought a minor rank and whose brother was a clerk in the magistrate's yamen, had seized a strip of common land to enlarge his garden. Liu's own field lay beside it. He had been beaten when he complained.

"What is a scholar to do?" Liu sighed, pouring Feng another cup. "But to lay his wrong before the magistrate, in a proper petition, signed by men of good repute. Without such signatures, no honest petition can be heard."

Feng's blood, which was never slow to boil, boiled at once. He swore that Wang should not escape. Liu produced a scroll already drafted, all hot indignant periods ready for a brush. Feng seized the pen and signed his name, with a flourish, three times larger than the others.

As he wrote, he felt a thin coldness at the back of his neck, as though the room had grown suddenly quiet. He looked up and saw that the window, which he had left open, had blown shut. He told himself it was the evening air; but the brush trembled in his hand, and for a moment he could not remember why he had ever liked Liu's face.

He came home flushed and boastful. Siniang, who had been sewing, looked up. She read the scroll where he had left it out, and her needle did not move for a long moment.

"Feng," she said quietly, "this Liu is no friend of yours. He has his own quarrel with Wang. Why should your name stand at the head of it? The magistrate is no friend to scholars who trouble his court."

"What would you have me do?" Feng cried, stung. "Shame my own manhood by shrinking from a bully? A scholar's brush is his sword."

"A scholar's brush should also be his shield," Siniang said. "This petition has gone already?"

It had. Liu had ridden off with it that very morning. Siniang folded her hands in her lap and was silent a long while. When she spoke again her voice was gentle, but her eyes were far away.

She did not, however, reproach him. She had lived with him long enough to know that reproach only set his pride against her. Instead she rose, as quietly as she always did, and set out the evening meal, speaking, as though by the way, of the houses in the village that lawsuits had ruined, and of the men who had signed such papers and come home empty.

"Then we must make ready," she said. "Pack what can be carried. Keep nothing of value in the house. And remember, whatever comes, that I did not warn you for my own sake, but for yours." Feng laughed it off and drank himself to sleep; but Siniang sat by the dead fire until the cock crowed.