The Ten Thousand Things by John Spurling

Author:John Spurling [SPURLING, JOHN]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: FIC000000; FIC051000; FIC014000; FIC019000; FIC008000;
ISBN: 9781468310030
Publisher: Overlook
Published: 2014-05-23T16:00:00+00:00

The invitation from Zhu came at the beginning of summer. The journey to the warlord’s temporary headquarters at Wuzhou took three days. Wang rode a donkey, while his new servant, Kong, walked behind with the travelling-bags slung on a pole over his shoulder. The days were gone when Wang could afford to keep more than one donkey or mule. They stopped the nights at inns.

Kong was a very different sort of person from Deng, older, coarser and lazier, somewhat greedy and overweight, less intelligent, but more worldly-wise. He came from the city not the country and had been recommended by one of the friends of Wang’s wife. His previous master, an elderly doctor in Quinsai, had recently died. At first Wang was irritated by Kong, who had virtually run the doctor’s life for him and did not much care to be instructed. Kong could see no point in standing for hours staring at trees and rocks and making sketches of them. He would have understood it better if Wang had ever sold his paintings, but to work without financial profit seemed to him foolish and self-indulgent. On the other hand, he always did what Wang told him to—if somewhat slowly and with a disagreeable grimace—and gradually learnt not to fidget, cough and spit during the hours they spent in front of nature. Many times, comparing him unfavourably to Deng, Wang made up his mind to get rid of Kong, but then relented, reflecting that, after all, he did not want a servant who reminded him too closely of Deng, and that in a way he liked Kong’s lack of comprehension. It put Wang on his mettle, spurred him to see in nature what his companion refused to see, made the whole enterprise more serious to him because he wanted to convince Kong to take it more seriously. It is probably impossible to teach materialistic people the value of spiritual things—and the other way round—but Wang felt challenged to try.

The country they passed through—foothills with orchards and a river-valley with rice-fields—had not been fought over, so there were no signs of disturbance. Indeed, the roads were probably safer than usual, since the small groups of robbers one might have met in more peaceful times had mostly now become soldiers in Zhu’s army, which was particularly well-disciplined and strictly forbidden to do any harm to the civilian population. The town itself was carefully guarded and Wang had to show his letter of invitation at the gate. He was then conducted to an inn specially requisitioned for the warlord’s visitors and told to present himself at the magistrate’s compound at sunset.

The weather had already turned very hot and it was a sunset of flaming red. Soldiers were camped in the magistrate’s outer hall. Wang and five fellow-scholars—none of whom he knew—showed their invitations, were searched for weapons and then led through to the inner hall, where Zhu was already seated with two of his generals and his chief adviser, Li Shan-chang, formerly a tutor in a country landlord’s household.

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