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tear up the brevet in front of everyone and proclaim in a stentorian voice: ‘We Rongs would rather die than betray our country!’
    As you might imagine, Young Lillie’s answer was very popular, but it guaranteed that he was not going to find himself with an official position. He had already been thinking for some time of avoiding the repulsive overtures of the puppet government (and the associated ferocious infighting in the university) by going into hiding in Tongzhen, but Mr Auslander’s letter unquestionably speeded his departure. Still mulling over the letter, he stepped off the paddle-steamer. At a glance he picked out the steward of the Rong mansion from the crowd huddled together against the rain and wind. The steward asked him politely if he had had a good journey. Instead of responding, he asked abruptly, ‘How is Mr Auslander?’
    ‘Mr Auslander is dead,’ the steward said. ‘He passed away some weeks ago.’
    Young Lillie felt his heart thump in his chest. Then he asked: ‘Where is the child?’
    ‘Who do you mean?’
    ‘Duckling.’
    ‘He is still at the Pear Garden.’
    He was living in the Pear Garden, that was right enough, but no one seemed to know what he was doing in there, since he hardly ever came out and very few people bothered to go in. Everyone knew that he was living in the mansion, but he seemed to move from place to place like a lost soul, with hardly anyone even catching a glimpse of him. According to the steward, Duckling was the next best thing to a mute.
    ‘I don’t understand a thing that he says to me,’ the steward said. ‘He doesn’t often speak, and when he does, he might as well not bother, because no one can understand it.’
    The steward also said that according to the servants in the main mansion, it was only because the old foreign gentleman got down on his hands and knees and kowtowed three times to the Third Master that he agreed to allow Duckling to carry on living at the Pear Garden after his death. Otherwise they would have thrown him out onto the street. He went on to say that Mr Auslander had left his savings of many decades to Duckling and that was what he was living on, since the Rong family couldn’t possibly afford to pay for his food.
    It was lunchtime the next day when Young Lillie walked into the Pear Garden. The rain had stopped by then, but having fallen continuously for several days, it had washed the buildings clean while creating a thick squelchy layer of mud underfoot. His footsteps left deep prints in the mud and in some places it was deep enough to cover his galoshes. As far as Young Lillie could see, there were no other footprints to be seen – the spider’s webs in the trees were empty, the spiders having retreated under the eaves to get out of the rain. Some of them were now busily occupied spinning a new web in front of the door. If it were not for the smoke rising from the chimney and the sound of something being chopped on a block, he would have believed the place to be deserted.
    Duckling was chopping up a sweet potato. There was boiling water in the pot on the stove, in which a few grains of rice were bobbing about. He did not seem alarmed at Young Lillie’s intrusion, nor was he angry. He just looked at him for a moment and then went back to his work, as if it was his grandfather who came in after a short absence – his grandfather or perhaps a dog? He was smaller than Young Lillie had been expecting, and his head was not as large as people said. His skull was dolichocephalic and oddly pointed on top; almost as if he were wearing a homburg hat – perhaps it was because of this that his head did not appear abnormally huge. Young Lillie did not find anything at all remarkable in his appearance; however, his cold, calm manner made a very deep impression; he was like a little old man. The only nice pieces of furniture in the room were the medicine chest (left over from the original use of the building), a table and a director’s chair.