'I am a neighbour of your friend Dong, who was also a dear friend of mine,' she replied. 'Poor man! A fox cast a spell on him and he is with us no more! Foxes can cast powerful spells. Young gentlemen in particular, such as you and your friend, should guard against them.'

Wang was deeply moved by her words and loved her all the more. As the days went by, he too began to waste away and his reason started to wander. One night, in a dream, Dong came and spoke to him: 'Beware! Your lover is a fox. First she took my life, and now she wants yours. I have already laid charges against her before the courts of the Nether World, hoping to bring some comfort to my wounded spirit. On the night of the seventh day, you must burn some incense outside your room. On no account must you forget these words!'

Wang awoke and marvelled at his strange dream. He decided to speak to the girl.

'I am seriously ill,' he said, 'and it may soon be all up with me. It would be advisable for us never to make love again.'

'Do not worry,' she replied. 'All is destiny. If you are destined for a long life, then no amount of love-making is going to kill you. And if you are destined to die, no amount of abstinence will save you.'

She sat by him and toyed with him, smiling so sweetly the while that Wang was unable to restrain himself and soon found himself in her arms again. Every time they made love, he was filled with remorse. But he was incapable of resisting her advances.

The evening of the seventh day, he lit sticks of incense and stuck them in his door, but she pulled them out and threw them away. That same night, in a dream, Dong came to him again and reproached him for having failed to act on his advice. The next night, Wang secretly instructed his servants to wait until he was asleep and then to light the incense.

The girl was already in his bed.

'That incense again!' she cried, suddenly waking.

'What incense?' protested Wang, feigning ignorance.

She rose at once, and taking the sticks of incense, broke them into little pieces.

'Who told you to do this?' she said, as she returned to their room.

'My wife,' lied Wang. 'She is concerned at my illness, and believes that it can be exorcized.'

The girl paced up and down, greatly perturbed.

One of the servants, meanwhile, seeing that the incense sticks had been extinguished, lit some more.

'Ah!' cried the girl. 'Your aura of good luck is too strong for me. I shall have to tell you the truth. Yes, I did hurt your friend, and yes, then I came running after you next. I have done great wrong. I must go to the Nether World now and face your friend in the court of Yama. If you remember your love for me, I beg you, keep my body from harm.'

With these words she climbed slowly from the bed and then promptly lay down and died. When he lit the lamp, he saw the body of a fox on the ground. Fearing it might come to life again, he instructed his servants to skin it and hang up the pelt.

His illness now entered a critical phase. One day, he saw a fox come loping towards him.

'I have been before the court of the Nether World,' said the fox. 'Judgement was given against your friend Dong, whose death was reckoned to have been the consequence of his own lust. But I was still found guilty of enchantment. They took away my Golden Elixir, the fruit of all my years of toil. They have sent me back to be reborn. Where is my body?'

'My servants knew no better and skinned it.'

The fox was greatly distressed. 'It is true that I drove many men to their death. I deserved to die long ago. But nonetheless, what a heartless man you are!'

She took her leave, sadly, bitterly.

Wang all but died of his illness. But after six months he was restored to health.

39.

EATING STONES.

His Excellency Wang Qinwen, an old gentleman of Xincheng, had a groom also named Wang who, while still a youth, went off to Mount Lao to study the Tao. As time went by, he abstained from eating any cooked food and lived exclusively off pine kernels and white stones. He grew a shaggy coat of hair over his whole body.

He gradually started taking food again several years later, when, concerned for his ageing mother, he returned to live in his village. But he still continued to eat stones as before. He held them up to the sunlight to tell if they were sweet or bitter, sour or salty, then bit into them just as if they were yams.

When his mother died, he went back to the hills. That was some seventeen or eighteen years ago.

Caption

He held the stones up to the sunlight.

40.

THE LAUGHING GIRL.

Wang Zifu, a young man of Luodian Village in Ju County, lost his father at an early age. He was a brilliant youth, and successfully took his first degree at the age of fourteen. His mother doted on him and seldom allowed him to go on excursions out into the country. She betrothed him to a girl of the Xiao family, but the girl died before the marriage could be celebrated. He had looked for a suitable wife since that time, so far without success.

Our tale begins one Lantern Festival, on the first full moon of the year, when Wang's maternal cousin, a young man by the name of Wu, invited him out for a stroll. No sooner had they reached the outskirts of the village than a family servant came hurrying up to summon Wu home. Wang continued on his own. He had seen how many good-looking girls there were out taking the air, and felt in the mood for a promenade.

One young lady was out walking with her maid and had just picked a spray of plum-blossom. She had the prettiest face imaginable, with a great beaming smile. Wang stared at her utterly captivated, mindless of the usual rules of modesty and propriety. She walked a few steps past him and then turned to her maid: 'Who is that young man staring at me, with those burning burglar's eyes?'

She dropped the plum-blossom on the ground and walked on, talking and laughing animatedly as she went. Wang retrieved the blossom from the ground with a melancholy air and stood there a while musing abstractedly, before returning home in a mood of profound dejection.

When he reached home, he hid the plum-blossom beneath his pillow, lay disconsolately down to sleep, and from that moment on would neither talk nor eat. As the days went by, his mother became very anxious about him. She had elaborate rituals of exorcism performed, but despite all her efforts her son grew thinner and thinner. Doctors examined him and prescribed herbal concoctions to bring out the disease, but his mind seemed to wander all the more feverishly. He was like a man possessed. When his mother tried asking, with great tenderness and concern, how it had all started, he refused to say anything.

One day, his cousin Wu came to the house, and Wang's mother secretly begged him to try to extract the truth from her son. Wu approached his bedside, and the minute he saw him, Wang burst into tears. Wu began by speaking words of comfort, and then gradually brought the conversation round to the subject of his cousin's illness and its origin. Wang confided in him, telling him the whole story of his hopeless infatuation with the smiling girl and begging him for his advice.

'Oh, you foolish fellow!' said Wu, laughing, but pleasantly. 'Your desire can easily be fulfilled. Let me seek the young lady out on your behalf. Since she was allowed to go out walking like that on her own, it is highly unlikely that she is from some grand family. So long as she is not yet betrothed, you can consider the match as good as settled! And even if she is betrothed, I am sure a generous gift in the right quarter will clear the way for you. You just concentrate on making a full recovery and leave the rest to me.'

Wang smiled wanly when he heard this, and Wu went out and informed his aunt, before himself setting off in search of the girl. Although, to the growing despair of Wang's mother, his exhaustive inquiries brought no results, Wang himself had been greatly cheered by his cousin's visit, and gradually recovered his appetite.

When Wu called round again several days later and Wang asked him how the matter was progressing, Wu felt obliged to invent a story. 'It's all settled! It turns out (would you believe it!) that the girl you saw that day is my own cousin which makes her yours too, on your mother's side. She is still waiting to be betrothed. The two of you are a little more closely related than is usually thought proper, but that won't stop you from getting married. I'm sure I can explain everything to them, and the wedding can go ahead.'

Wang's joy knew no bounds. 'Where does she live?' he asked.

Wu improvised. 'In the hills south-west of here, ten miles or so away.'

Wang begged him again and again to be sure to take care of everything, and Wu went striding off, giving him every assurance that he would do so. Wang now began to eat and drink quite normally, and within a matter of days was quite restored to health. Frequently he reached beneath his pillow for the plum-blossom, which was withered but otherwise unchanged, held it in his hand and gazed at it in rapture, as if the blossom itself was his beloved.

Days went by, and when Wu still did not return, Wang began to wonder what was going on. He wrote to his cousin several times, pleading with him to come. Each time Wu procrastinated, giving one pretext or another, which filled Wang with resentment, then provoked him to bouts of anger and depression. His mother was afraid that he might suffer a relapse, but when she suggested to him that perhaps he should consider marrying someone else, he shook his head, rejecting the idea out of hand and continuing to wait day after day for his cousin to return.

Then, one day, he finally said to himself that ten miles was really not such a very great distance after all, that he needed no one's help to go that far, and placing the plum-blossom in his sleeve, he set off impulsively, without even informing his own family.

He walked alone, encountering no one on the road from whom he could ask the way. All he knew was that he should head for the hills to the south-west. After walking for ten miles or so, he found himself climbing into an enchanted landscape, range upon range of green hills stretching as far as the eye could see, with not a soul in sight and nothing but a tiny, steep mountain trail to follow. As he continued on his way, far away down in the valley below, hidden in an overgrown tangle of flowers and trees, he caught sight of a little hamlet. He clambered down the hillside towards it and found a few simple buildings, nothing more than a cluster of rustic thatched cottages, but nonetheless a place with a certain refinement and charm. Before one of the cottages, situated towards the northern end of the hamlet, was a stand of weeping willows, while inside the cottage's garden walls could be seen a flourishing orchard of peach and apricot, interspersed with delicate fronds of bamboo. Birds sang in the branches. As this was clearly a private garden, Wang did not venture in but sat down for a moment's rest on a smooth boulder outside the house opposite. Presently he heard a girl's voice from within the garden calling out, 'Petal! Are you coming or not?'

It was a delicate voice, tender and vibrant with feeling. As he sat there listening, a young girl walked out of the gate in the wall opposite and began strolling along the road, with a sprig of apricot-blossom in her hand. She lowered her head to fasten it in her hair, but, chancing to look up and catch sight of him sitting there, she ceased what she was doing, smiled and went back inside with the blossom still in her hand. Wang recognized her at once as the girl he had seen at the Lantern Festival, and his heart leaped with joy. But what pretext could he find for entering her home? And how should he address her? As his cousin? They had never met before, and he was afraid of offending her in some way. There was no one at the door that he could speak to, so he remained where he was, waiting restlessly, now sitting on the stone, now lying down beside it, until the sun had sunk low in the western sky. He quite forgot to think whether he was hungry or thirsty, so desperate was he for another glimpse of the girl. Every now and then she peeped out through the door and seemed greatly surprised to find him still there. Then finally an old woman emerged, leaning on a stick, and addressed him. 'Where are you from, sir? I understand you have been here ever since morning. I wonder what you want. You must be hungry.'

He rose promptly to his feet and bowed. 'I was hoping to call on my relations.'

The old woman was extremely deaf, and he had to repeat himself much more loudly before she understood him. 'And what are they called, these relations of yours?' she asked.

He was unable to reply to this question.

'Strange!' replied the old woman with a smile. 'You say you were hoping to call on them, but you don't even know their names! I'd say by the look of you that you must be a bit absent-minded, a bookworm, a dreamer... Come on in with me. Eat some of our poor fare. We've a little spare bed you can sleep in. Tomorrow you can go home and find out what these relations of yours are called. Then you can come back another time and do things properly.'

Wang was just becoming aware of the pangs of hunger, and besides, this invitation to dinner was his perfect entree into the precincts of the fair one! Without further delay he followed the old woman, and found himself walking through the gate and down a little white cobbled path, lined with trees, whose deep pink blossoms lay scattered on the stones. He was in a transport of delight. The path then wound its way to the left and through another gateway, into a courtyard embellished with flower-covered trellises and exquisite potted plants on stands. Wang was invited inside, into a room whose brilliantly painted white walls shone with the dazzling brightness of a mirror. A branch of flowering crab-apple reached through a window from the courtyard outside. Cushions, tables, couch everything in the room was spotlessly clean. As he sat down, he became aware that someone was stealing a glance at him through the window.

'Petal!' called the old woman. 'Put some millet on to cook at once!'

A maid's voice answered from outside.

Wang told the old woman a bit about his family.

'So your mother's father was a Wu, then?' said the old woman.

'Indeed he was.'

'Why then, you must be my nephew!' she exclaimed in amazement. 'Your mother must be my younger sister! Over the years, our branch of the family has come down in the world, I'm afraid, and besides I never had a son of my own, so as a result we've quite lost touch with the rest of the family. Here you are, a fully grown man, my own nephew, and I didn't even recognize you!'

'It must have been you I came to see, Auntie,' said Wang, 'but in my confusion I forgot your name.'

'I married into the Qin family,' replied the old lady. 'I've no children at all of my own. There's just a girl who was born to my late husband's concubine. When my husband, Mr Qin, died, the girl's mother, the concubine, remarried and left the girl here for me to bring up. She's a bright cheerful child, but hasn't had much schooling, I'm afraid. She's forever playing! I'll call her in shortly, to come and pay you her respects.'

Presently the maid served dinner, the principal dish being a plump little home-grown fowl. The old woman kept helping him to more, and when he had finished eating, the maid came back to clear away the dishes.

'Call in Miss Ning,' said the old woman, and the maid hurried off to do her bidding. Shortly afterwards there was the sound of muffled laughter outside.

'Yingning,' called out the old woman, 'a cousin of yours is here.'

More laughter and spluttering could be heard outside. Then the maid ushered in the young lady of the beaming smile, who was hiding her face with her hand and seemed quite incapable of staunching her ever-flowing stream of laughter. The old woman looked at her angrily.

'We have a guest! What do you mean by all this silly noise?'

The girl managed a straight face for a moment, and Wang made her a bow.

'This is young Mr Wang,' said the old lady. 'He's your cousin, but we've never met before isn't that strange?'

'And how old is the young lady my cousin?' asked Wang. The woman could not hear him, and Wang had to repeat the question, whereupon the girl started laughing again and looked down at the ground.

'I told you she lacked breeding,' commented the old woman. 'Now you can see for yourself. She is sixteen years old but silly as a child.'

'So she is one year younger than I am,' said Wang.

'If you are seventeen,' returned the old lady, 'then you must have been born in the Year of the Horse.'

'I was.'

'And who is your wife?'

'I am single.'

'I'm surprised that a good-looking young man of seventeen like yourself, with all your accomplishments, should still be single. Our Yingning is single too. Why, the two of you would make an excellent couple! It's a pity that you are cousins.'

Wang said nothing but kept staring at Yingning: he had eyes for nothing else.

The maid muttered to her young mistress, 'It's those burning burglar's eyes again!'

At this Yingning burst out laughing loudly. 'Come, let's go and look at the peach-blossom!' she said.

She rose at once and, hiding her mouth with her sleeve, made her way out with her maid, taking tiny little steps. Once outside the door, she immediately let out another of her loud laughs. The old lady now arose as well and gave orders for a second maid to prepare bedding and make sure the visitor was properly taken care of.

'This is such a rare honour for us,' she said. 'You must stay here for a few days and then we'll send you on your way home. If you are bored, there is a little garden at the back where you can take a walk, and there are books to read.'

The next day, he discovered the little garden it was no more than a tenth of an acre, with a neat lawn, paths strewn with catkins and a three-roomed rustic summer-house, surrounded on all four sides with shrubs and flowers. He had walked a few paces through the flowers when he heard a whispering sound coming from up in one of the trees, looked up, and there was Yingning. When she saw him, she burst out laughing and it looked for a moment as if she might come tumbling down from the tree.

'Take care!' cried Wang. 'You might fall!'

She clambered down from the tree, laughing uncontrollably all the while, and was almost on the ground when her hand Caption