Old Feng of Guangping had one son, styled Xiangru. Father and son were both licentiates1. The old man was close on sixty, upright and unbending by nature, and the household often had nothing at all. Within a few years his wife and his son’s wife died one after the other, and he drew the water and pounded the grain himself. One night Xiangru was sitting in the moonlight when suddenly he saw the girl from next door to the east peeping at him over the wall. He looked at her: she was beautiful. He went closer: she smiled. He beckoned to her: she neither came nor went away. He begged her earnestly, and at last she came over on a ladder, and they slept together. When he asked her name, she said, “I am Hongyu, the girl next door.” Xiangru was enchanted with her and pledged to love her always, and she agreed. She came and went night after night for about half a year. One night the old man got up and heard laughter and talk in his son’s room. He peeped in and saw his son, and in a rage he called him out and cursed him. “You animal, what are you doing! We have come down so far in the world, and instead of working hard you take up loose ways? If people find out, your good name is lost; if no one finds out, it will shorten your life!” Xiangru knelt and threw himself down, weeping that he knew his fault and repented. The old man turned on the girl. “A girl who does not keep to the rules of the women’s quarters disgraces herself and disgraces others too. If this ever comes out, it will not be my poor house alone that is shamed!” When he had finished cursing, he went back to bed in a fury. The girl wept. “To be reproached by your father is shame enough! Our fate together is at an end.” “While my father lives I cannot decide things for myself,” said Xiangru. “If you care for me, you should bear the shame and stay with me.” But the girl spoke with finality. Xiangru shed tears. The girl stopped him. “We have no matchmaker’s word and no command from our parents. We climb over walls and creep through gaps2 — how could we ever grow old together? There is a good match near here. You could marry her.” He told her he was poor. “Wait for me tomorrow night,” she said. “I will find a way for you.” The next night she came as she had said, and gave him forty taels of silver. “Sixty li from here,” she said, “in Wu Village, there is a girl of the Wei family, eighteen years old. They have set a high price on her, so she has not been sold yet. If you tempt them with a large sum, they are sure to agree.” With that she said goodbye and left.

Xiangru found a moment to tell his father he wished to go and see the girl, but he kept the gift of silver hidden and dared not mention it. The old man, reckoning that they had no money, would not let him go for that reason. Xiangru said gently, “Let me just try. If it does not work, I will let it be.” The old man nodded. So Xiangru borrowed a servant and a horse and went to the Weis. Wei was an old farmer. Xiangru called him out and drew him aside for a private talk. Wei knew Xiangru came of a good family, and seeing how frank and handsome he looked, he agreed in his heart, but worried that he would be tight with money. Xiangru listened to him hemming and hawing, understood what he was after, and emptied his purse onto the table. Then Wei was pleased. He asked a young scholar from next door to act as go-between, and they wrote out the contract on red paper and pledged the match. Xiangru went in to pay his respects to the old woman. The room was cramped, and the girl hid behind her mother. He glanced at her from the corner of his eye: though she wore thorn hairpins and plain cloth, she was radiant, and secretly he was delighted. Wei borrowed a neighbour’s house to entertain his son-in-law, and said, “There is no need for you to come and fetch her yourself, young master. As soon as we have made her a few clothes, we will send her to you in a sedan chair.” Xiangru fixed a day with him and went home. He lied to his father, saying that Wei admired a family of scholars and asked for no money, and the old man too was pleased. On the day, Wei sent the girl as promised. She was hard-working and thrifty, gentle and obliging, and husband and wife were deeply devoted. After two years she bore a son, whom they named Fu’er. At the Qingming festival3 she carried the child up to the family graves, and there she met a gentleman of the county named Song. Song had been a censor4, but had been dismissed for bribery, and now lived in retirement, where he threw his weight about with great cruelty. That day he too was on his way back from the graves. He saw the young woman and was struck by her beauty. He asked the villagers and learned that she was Xiangru’s wife. Reckoning that Feng was a poor scholar who might be swayed by a large bribe, he sent a servant to hint at it. When Xiangru heard this, anger flared in his face; but then he thought that he was no match for Song’s power, so he swallowed his anger and smiled, and went home and told his father. The old man flew into a rage. He rushed out to Song’s servant and, pointing at the sky and stabbing at the ground, cursed him every way he knew. The servant scurried off like a rat. Song was angry too, and actually sent several men into Xiangru’s house, who beat the old man and his son in an uproar like a boiling cauldron. When the young wife heard, she left the baby on the bed and, her hair flying loose, screamed for help. The gang seized her, carried her off and were gone in a clamour. Father and son lay hurt and maimed, groaning on the ground. The baby wailed in the room. The neighbours all pitied them and helped them onto their beds. After a day Xiangru could get up with a stick, but the old man, in his fury, would not eat, coughed up blood and soon died. Xiangru wept bitterly. With his son in his arms he brought suit, going all the way up to the provincial governors, pressing his case almost everywhere, but in the end he got no justice. Later he heard that his wife had refused to yield and had died, and he grieved all the more. The wrong choked his heart and throat, and there was no way to redress it. He often thought of lying in wait for Song on the road and stabbing him to death, but he worried about Song’s many attendants, and there was no one to leave the boy with. Day and night he brooded in grief, and his eyelashes never closed.

Suddenly a man came to his house to offer condolences, a man with a curly beard5 and a broad jaw, whom he had never known. Xiangru drew him to a seat and was about to ask where he came from, when the stranger said abruptly, “Your father was killed and your wife was stolen from you. Have you forgotten to take revenge?” Xiangru suspected he was a spy of Song’s and gave him a false answer. The stranger glared till the corners of his eyes seemed about to split, and at once he made for the door. “I took you for a man,” he said. “Now I see you are a lout not worth mentioning!” Seeing that he was no ordinary man, Xiangru knelt and held him back. “I truly was afraid that Song had sent you to draw me out,” he said. “Now I will open my heart to you. I have been sleeping on brushwood and tasting gall6 for a long time. But I pity this child in swaddling clothes; I fear the ancestral line will die out. You are a man of honour. Will you be my Chujiu7?” “That is work for women,” said the stranger. “It is not what I can do. What you would entrust to someone else, please take on yourself. What you would take on yourself, let me do it in your place.” At this Xiangru knocked his head on the ground. The stranger went out without looking back. Xiangru ran after him to ask his name. “If I fail, I will not take your blame. If I succeed, I will not take your thanks.” And he was gone. Xiangru, afraid the trouble would fall on him, fled with his son. That night, when the whole Song household was asleep, someone climbed over the double walls and killed the censor, his two sons, a daughter-in-law and a maid. The Song family brought a complaint to the authorities. The magistrate was badly shaken. The Songs insisted it was Xiangru, so he sent runners to arrest him; but Xiangru had fled, no one knew where, and that made the charge look all the truer. Song’s servants searched everywhere with the runners. At night they came to the southern hills, heard a child crying, followed the sound and found him, and led him off bound with ropes. The child cried harder and harder, so they snatched it from him and threw it away. Xiangru was so wronged and enraged he nearly died. He was brought before the county magistrate. “Why did you kill them?” the magistrate asked. “I am wronged!” said Xiangru. “They died at night, and I left by day — with a crying baby in my arms. How could I climb the walls and kill anyone?” “If you killed no one,” said the magistrate, “why did you run?” Xiangru had no answer and could not argue. So he was put in prison. Xiangru wept. “My death is nothing to regret, but what crime has my orphan son committed?” “You have killed plenty of other people’s sons,” said the magistrate. “If your son is killed, what have you to complain of?” Xiangru was stripped of his licentiate’s status and put to cruel torture again and again, but he never confessed. That night, just as the magistrate lay down, he heard something strike his bed with a thud that shook it. He howled in terror. The whole household woke in alarm and gathered with candles: a short knife, keen and bright as frost, had been driven into the bed more than an inch deep, so fast it could not be pulled out. At the sight of it the magistrate nearly lost his wits. Men took up spears and searched everywhere, but found no trace at all. Secretly his nerve failed him. Besides, now that Song was dead, there was no one left to fear. So he sent a full report to his superiors, pleading Xiangru’s case for him, and in the end Xiangru was set free.

Xiangru went home. There was not a pint of grain in the jar, and his lonely shadow faced four bare walls. Happily the neighbours pitied him and brought him food and drink, and he scraped by. When he thought that his great enemy had been paid back, he would brighten and smile. When he thought of the cruel disaster that had all but wiped out his family, the tears would stream down. And when he thought how he had been poor to the bone half his life, and his line would not go on, he would weep aloud where no one could see him, unable to stop himself. After half a year of this, the hunt for the killer slackened. Then he begged the county magistrate to order his wife’s remains returned. When he had buried her and come home, he was so grief-stricken he wished to die. He tossed and turned on his empty bed and could see no way to go on living. Suddenly someone knocked at the door. He listened intently and heard a person outside murmuring to a small child. He got up quickly and peeped out: it looked like a woman. As soon as the door opened, she asked, “Your great wrong has been righted — are you well?” The voice was very familiar, but in his haste he could not place it. He held up a light: it was Hongyu. She had a little boy by the hand, laughing and playing about her legs. Xiangru had no time for questions; he took her in his arms and sobbed. She too was full of sorrow. Then she pushed the boy forward: “Have you forgotten your father?” The boy clung to her clothes and stared at Xiangru with bright eyes. Looking closely, he saw it was Fu’er. He was astounded, and asked through his tears, “How did the boy come here?” “I will tell you the truth,” she said. “When I said I was the girl next door, it was a lie. I am really a fox8. I happened to be out at night and saw the child crying at the mouth of a valley, so I took him and raised him in Qin9. When I heard your great trouble was over, I brought him to be with you again.” Xiangru wiped away his tears and bowed his thanks. The boy clung to her as to his own mother, and no longer even knew his father. Before it was light she got up in haste. When he asked why, she said, “I want to go.” Xiangru knelt naked at the head of the bed, weeping so that he could not lift his face. She laughed. “I was only teasing you. Now the household is starting anew, and we must be up early and late to bed.” Then she cut back the weeds and swept with a broom, working like a man. Xiangru worried that they were too poor to support themselves. “Just draw your curtain and study,” she said. “Never mind whether we have too much or too little. I dare say we will not starve to death.” She brought out money and set up a loom, rented several dozen mu of land and hired men to farm it. She shouldered a hoe to clear the thatch-grass and pulled down creepers to patch the roof, and this was her daily round. When the neighbours heard what a good wife she was, they were all the readier to help. In about half a year the house was full of life and thriving, like that of a rich family without office or rank. Xiangru said, “From the ashes you have built it all again with your bare hands. But there is one thing still not settled. What can we do?” When she asked what he meant, he said, “The examinations are close, and I still have not got back my scholar’s cap and gown.” She laughed. “Some time ago I sent four taels to the director of studies10, and your name is back on the rolls already. If I had waited for you to speak, it would have been too late long ago.” Xiangru thought her more wonderful than ever. That year he passed the provincial examination. He was thirty-six then, with rich fields stretching far and wide and a great, lofty house. She was so slender and willowy she seemed about to float away on the wind, yet she worked harder than any farmer’s wife. Though she toiled through the bitter winters, her hands stayed smooth as cream. She said she was twenty-eight, but to anyone who saw her she always looked about twenty.

The Historian of the Strange11 says: The son was worthy and the father virtuous, and so the help that repaid them was a knight-errant’s. And it was not only the man who was a knight-errant; the fox was one too. A strange meeting indeed! But that magistrate, so careless of justice — it makes one’s hair stand on end. The knife thudded into the wood: why grudge moving it half a foot or so further up the bed? Had Su Zimei12 read this, he would surely have drained a cup and said, “What a pity the blow missed!”