Ding of Zhenzhou was seventeen. He had been betrothed to a girl of the Wei family, who died before the wedding; and when his family began negotiating with a great house, he went to a calculator of destinies to have it checked.
The man said: “Your fate is not fitted to mate with humankind. You will marry a beast-woman.”
Ding was furious. “However worthless I am, I have a human face. How should I marry down into the hairy tribes?”
“Judged by the fate, it will not miss.”
He tried every way to find a bride, and not one match came off.
Later he was travelling in Chu and moored his boat in the middle gorge. Suddenly several dozen young apes came down the cliff face and jumped aboard the prow. The boatmen shouted and drove them off, and they went scrambling up the bank again, shouldering bags and boxes they had taken.
While they were still wondering at it, several old apes came carrying a basket-sedan, and pulled and pushed and shoved Ding into the seat. The boatmen tried to pull him out and could not. The chair was hoisted to their shoulders, and they flew up the sheer cliff.
They came to a cave dwelling: stones piled for a gate, mud smeared for pointing. Ding had no choice; he got out and went in. An old man stood waiting for him with his hands folded, not particularly strange to look at.
“You are the son of Ding Qingyun?”
“I am.”
“Your father and I were friends from the days of our hair-tufts. Eighteen years ago I drifted to this place, married into the Yuan clan as a resident son-in-law, and had a daughter, who has not met a good match. Now, by luck, your banner has halted far from home, and I have sent the boys to invite you respectfully. If you do not despise us as another kind of being, I would like to make a marriage.”
Ding was shaking and did not dare agree.
Then an old woman came out.
“This is my poor wife,” said the old man. Ding glanced at her: green eyes, red flesh, and the hair on her cheeks curling like an inverted hedgehog. She muttered into her husband’s ear, chattering, and Ding could not tell what she said.
The daughter was dressed and veiled and led out; they were made to bow to each other, and she was taken to a separate cave. Ding lifted the veil a little: below the brow the hair grew thick and matted, and there was no telling where the face was.
He lay down in a rage.
At midnight the girl came quietly to him. Ding shouted at her: “If you want the way of human marriage, wait until the hair and hide have dropped off you!”
She withdrew, ashamed.
The next day she looked at herself in the stream, as though she hated her own ugliness, and flung herself into the pool below. Ding cried out for help; the household came running, the apes were set to work, and with an effort they got her out. They carried her back to the cave and put her to bed under the quilt, and she lay rigid — and then her whole body began to ache, and after the aching came an itching.
She scratched, and scratched, and the hair fell away under her hands, and lay piled like tangled silk. In a few days she was up; and her face was white as jade, and more than beautiful besides.
To look at her, she was a very goddess.
Ding laughed and said: “Now I know that the turning-point between a human and a beast is nothing but one scrubbing and cutting away.”
That night they lay down together.
In the morning he went to his father-in-law, who was wild with joy.
But when the mother saw her she flew into a great rage.
“The daughter I bore is worthless. This old slave has disordered my seed!”
She reviled her husband, and drove the girl out with him. The old man hurriedly had two sedans made ready and sent the girl and her husband back to the place they had come from.
The boatmen, after losing Ding, had waited nearly a month; when they saw him coming back with a beautiful woman, they were delighted, and took them aboard and went.
Later, travelling home from Chu, Ding went back to that country. His wife wanted to pay her respects to her father. But the cliffs were sheer and the crags dangerous, and there was no way in; and she turned and went home in tears.
The Duo comment: One day of scraping away the hair, and a hundred years of beautiful marriage. Let us simply say that what the fortune-teller said did not come true.
