Chapter 2920: The Gramophone Box (1)
Once Fang Zhenghua had been sent off, Chongzhen sat in stillness at his desk watching the eunuchs roll up the maps, and at last made up his mind. He took up the brush and wrote the vermilion rescript: Zhu Dajian, Governor-General of Grain Transport and Grand Coordinator of Fengyang, to be stripped of office, arrested and interrogated, brought to the capital and severely examined by the courts of justice. As for the routine memorials sent up after it, he glanced over their titles and could not be bothered to open a single one. Here it was, the year of the monkey and the month of the horse, and this tribe of court gentlemen were still yapping like curs over last year's selection examinations. Better by far Wang Yehao of the Ministry of War, who the moment the affair broke had memorialized asking to be punished — a man who at least knew when to advance and when to retire. As for Korea, it had now sunk into a mere cudgel for the ministers to beat one another's private vices with; hateful, that of all the court's civil and military ranks not one man gave his whole heart to the practical business of state.
Into the vacant hall rang suddenly a chime of crystalline notes: the Western self-sounding clock that Schall, the Western monk of the Directorate of Astronomy, had presented, struck its tenth stroke, tong after tong. He set down the vermilion brush, strengthless. "Let all these memorials be stayed in the palace." The Emperor's voice sank ever lower, till it was like talking to himself. "To Chengqian Palace—" and then, "Hold!" Chongzhen called back the junior eunuch already hurrying out of the hall; the boy was not to go ahead bearing the word.
Chengqian Palace drew nearer and nearer, and Chongzhen's party could already see the light glowing through the lozenge lattices — and, with it, a drifting strain of music. At first a man's voice singing; before long a woman's voice joined in accompaniment; a little after that the two gave way to a chorus of many voices together. A very strange business.
"Could there be some new conjuring trick?" Chongzhen rapped the pole of his shoulder chair and murmured a word or two to the junior eunuch who pressed close; the boy snatched up a ram's-horn lantern and went skimming ahead. By the time the Emperor had stepped down from the chair and walked to the palace gate, the eunuchs and palace maids of Chengqian Palace were all kneeling silently in wait under the corridors and to either side of the steps, not daring to breathe. In thick-soled felt boots, Chongzhen tiptoed to the palace door. Through the curtain a woman's singing came clear and distinct — not Consort Tian's voice; the words ran near to a capital cadence, yet wound through a hundred turnings with a Wu-dialect savor:
"Tonight there is wine, so tonight let us drink,
Tonight drink by the banks of the Jade Belt River;
Moonlight in the waves, lamps along the dikes,
And a beauty bright as blossoms leaning on the railing.
...
Some are singing, some are dancing.
Note on note, this longing — for whom does it cry?
Step by step, this fondness — for whom does it linger?
Honeyed thought and tender feeling — for whom do they spill over?
...
"The banks of the Jade Belt River — that is Guangzhou Prefecture's ground, is it not? If it is truly as the song says, it must be a place of thronging pleasures." Chongzhen recognized Consort Yuan's voice. Strange — whatever had brought her over from Yikun Palace to the Eastern Six Palaces at this hour of night? "Only Guangzhou has fallen into the Kun's snare, and cannot be gone to for the frolicking. A pity, a pity."
The song went on:
"...Light falls the sandalwood clapper, slow turn the strings,
Swallow-song and oriole-trill on every side;
Some are singing, some are dancing,
For whom are these cherry lips painted?
For whom these layer on layer of rouge?
The whispering brows, the glances like water — for whom do they pour forth their hearts?
...
"A Kun den of rouge and squandered gold — pearls and silks in plenty, I daresay, and short enough on letters and breeding; what is there worth the seeing?" Only now came Noble Consort Tian's voice. "Take this song we sisters have been listening to: high grade, admittedly, as Kun music goes — spun out like the thread of a spring silkworm, continuous without end. Yet set beside the Kun melody of our own dynasty, it loses, in the end, the savor of balance and classical elegance. Just attend to the opening line — 'Tonight there is wine, so tonight let us drink' — seven characters tossed out flat as a hawker's street cry, without a breath of the hundred turnings of tenderness that The Peony Pavilion pours into the three words of 'gossamer drifting through clear skies.' It copies the southern tune's method of the padding syllable, but like Dame East Shi imitating the famous frown, it never wins the eye-dotting magic by which the padding words in 'and to think — all this riot of purple and crimson' bring the whole dragon to life. Then take this Kun singing girl Lin Aili: she holds a candied plum somewhere in her throat, a sweetness cloying past all sense — nothing to the water-polished manner, which demands the voice rounded and ripe, the phrase brimmed to the full. The way this actress Lin carries her line — it is the languishing eye some courtesan of the houses tosses out over the wine cups, pressing you to drink. Vulgar voices singing vulgar tunes at the last: fit to raise a market-corner laugh, and not to be set before the stage."
Chongzhen heard a woman's voice he did not well know take up the thread: "Your instruction is just, Noble Consort. Of the Kun songs on these discs, it is the plain and simple ones that are pleasantest to the ear."
"And which song might Selected Attendant Xue be partial to?" Chongzhen was still turning over in his mind which of the ladies this Selected Attendant Xue might be, and which palace maid had put the question — when Selected Attendant Xue simply lifted her voice and sang: "Little swallow, little swallow, in your coat of flowers, every year when spring comes you fly back here..."
"Silence!" Noble Consort Tian's voice sprang up an octave. "Selected Attendant Xue! All this time studying music and zither with me, and not a scrap of sense in your head. That song you may hear and be done with. 'Little Swallow,' so called — it shadows forth old matters of the Chengzu Emperor and his Jingnan campaign. That the Kun should set it into a children's rhyme shows an ill heart at the bottom of it. How do you dare go on singing it?"
"Sing it, sing it — why should it not be sung?" With one hand the Emperor swept the door curtain aside and stepped in, frightening Consort Tian, Consort Yuan, Selected Attendants Xue and Zhang who studied music under Consort Tian, and the whole train of waiting maids into a flustered flurry of prostrations. "The mutiny at Jinchuan Gate the Kun wrote into their manifesto denouncing Me long ago, proclaimed it through the Two Guangs, and thrashed it abroad till every sea within the four shores knows it. What they have written, why should you not sing?"
Chongzhen chose for himself a carved jichimu armchair in the Suzhou manner and sat, his gaze converging on that "South Seas gramophone box," which stood upon the huanghuali painting table with its lingzhi motif that Consort Tian used every day. But for the crank arm sheathed in silver that projected at one side, and the great gilded trumpet coiled above it in the shape of a morning-glory, the object would have passed, on its face, for nothing more than a finely made and thoroughly unremarkable wooden box. He asked to see one of the discs as well: a black round plate in a painted paper sleeve, hard to the touch, yet neither metal nor wood, and no telling of what substance it was made. A round hole opened at its center, and around the hole one face carried a pasted label, printed in simplified vernacular characters with the words "Phonograph Records, General Company" — two more characters had once stood in front, but that part of the label had been torn away. Both faces were engraved full of grooves, ring upon ring, which, catching the halo flung from the glazed palace lantern at hand, bred a faint dizziness if you gazed at them overlong.
"So it truly is a Kun thing after all." At sight of the Emperor actually laughing aloud, Consort Tian, sorely startled, was dropping to her knees to beg offense — but Chongzhen, his choler and gloom from the day's governance swept off in a trice, was only urging them to set the disc box playing, for the watching and the hearing. Selected Attendant Zhang thereupon took up a disc and set it upon the box's top; a few turns of the crank, and the plate began to spin of itself. She next swung across the little iron arm set with a silver needle, and gently, precisely, laid the needle into the grooves of the disc's face. At once sound came from the great trumpet: first some strange instrument — a voice like a bell yet not a bell, a tone like a chime-stone yet not a chime-stone, limpid, soaring, long-drawn — and then human voices in chorus came winding out in its company:
"Mountain upon mountain, river upon river,
The rugged road of Shu is hardest of all to walk;
Now a rise, now a fall,
Just like the wrongs that will not lie level in the breast!
Looking back to Mawei Post — ten thousand mountains, and nothing more...
First women's voices, then men's, tier upon tier like ranks of waves, and — past all understanding — never one drowning out another:
"In haste we climb the Sword Gallery; the carved saddle must pause awhile,
The rain comes sighing down, dripping, dropping...
Line upon line, tears of a wounded heart;
Drop upon drop, the very sound of heartbreak.
...
The heart turns like a well-windlass, sobbing till the light of dawn!"
The piano's last lengthened note faded slowly away, and with a click the disc stopped turning. "This song is vastly un-vulgar. In depth of feeling it stands a good three degrees above Bai Renfu's Rain on the Wutong Tree in Autumn." The Emperor had listened to the end rapt, and had even been keeping time with his fingers on the roundel armrest of his chair. "The Kun pleasure-bureaus have some real skill, then — able to make the sound of pine-billows in ten thousand ravines out of a few dozen human throats. And yet the Kun come from beyond the seas. Do they too know the everlasting regret of the Tianbao years, of Emperor Ming of Tang and his Lady Yang?"
"To answer Your Majesty: the disc Selected Attendant Zhang lighted on records the Kun's classical music, built upon old themes of Bai Letian — ten airs in all. The music is extraordinary of itself: at the high feast on the palace hill the song climbs into the very clouds; at the thunderclap of Yuyang the sound rends metal and cracks stone; and then, among the fairy mountains and the jeweled towers, mystic tones drift faint upon the air. The Kun's scales and instruments differ from ours in most particulars, yet who would have thought they could score out some true remaindered savor of the Rainbow Skirts and Feathered Robes. If it would please Your Majesty, allow your handmaid to play them for you one by one."
When Consort Tian had finished, Chongzhen smiled faintly and waved a hand. "No need to play them one by one. I shall choose for Myself." He considered, then added: "Enough of the classical airs. Pick Me out one that is common without losing its purity, and bring it here."
Consort Tian took the meaning at once, and hastened to order the maids to bear the mother-of-pearl case that held the discs before the throne. Two palace maids knelt and lifted the lid between them; other maids, on trays of vermilion lacquer traced in gold, bore the several discs with utmost reverence to the imperial desk and laid them out there, one by one, for the Sacred Perusal.
Chongzhen went over them in the lamplight, one after another. The discs were all of a size; on the red label at each center was written the song's name, in fly-head small regular script that seemed to come all from one hand. One was titled "Nine Looms," another "Wine at the Pass," another "The Swallow Without Rest" — names common enough out of the old verse and prose. He turned them over idly — and suddenly his fingertip stopped, his gaze settling on one disc.
On that disc's red label stood four characters:
"This Parting, Half a Life."
Chongzhen felt an unaccountable stirring at his heart. He could not have said what was remarkable in the four characters — no allusion, no tune-title from the old books, nothing out of the ordinary, only words such as fall from the mouth in passing. And yet these four characters precisely had touched some place within him. He was silent an instant; then his fingertip tapped the disc.
"This one, then."
The maid in attendance hastened to receive it and, with the greatest care, settled the disc upon the machine. Consort Tian herself stepped forward; her slender hand closed on the crank at the side, and turned it round, evenly, several times. The works revolved lightly, giving off a faint whisper — like spring silkworms nibbling mulberry leaves, like fine rain on distant hills.
Presently, from the mouth of that brass trumpet, a strain of melody came drifting forth, slow and soaring.
At first hearing there were two or three notes of a pipa, clear and cold as ice-water — like pearls dropped on a jade plate, like the water-clock's final spent drop falling into its bronze vessel as the fifth watch runs out. Close after, a thread of xiao-flute rose up out of the depths, low and murmurous — like a voice heard whispering beyond a curtain, like the sound of a great river borne faintly across a moonlit night. The tune had neither the stately splendor of the palace's classical music nor the blunt brightness of the common airs, but a flavor all its own that no words quite laid hold of — like standing alone in an emptied courtyard at autumn dusk, watching the wind take up the fallen leaves, with a hollow, drifting feeling at the bottom of the heart, and no telling why.
From the trumpet a woman's voice began slowly to sing — a voice neither fine and honeyed like a singing girl's, nor high and clarion like an operatic player's, but like an ordinary woman speaking alone beneath the moon; in the voice was a weariness past telling, as of one who has walked a very long road and at last sat down, to say what is on her heart, softly, to the night.
"This parting, half a life — too desolate; the falling flowers wring the heart. You and I, each at our far corner of the sky..."
(End of chapter)