The door closed behind Trent. He was in a hall where a dong, swinging from brass chains, kindled an orange flame against the semi-darkness, where a stale-sweet scent clung to the air and gloom varnished everything.
The house-boy took his shoes and gave him straw sandals, afterward leading him through a series of doors to a corridor where the rich, stupefying odor of opium saturated the atmosphere. A sliding door was pushed back—a black door inlaid with characters in glistening nacre—and Trent stepped into a dimly illuminated area.
A lamp with a yellow shade hung by invisible means from an invisible ceiling, casting a pyramid of ochre light upon a figure that squatted on silken cushions beneath it—a figure arrayed in a loose yellow garment and the embroidered boots of a mandarin's undress. He was grossly obese, with drooping gray mustaches and oblique, beady eyes—a grotesque effigy made more unreal by the incense that floated up from a brazier at his side and wreathed bluish spirals on the dead air around him. Trent received an impression of sheeny hangings beyond the radius of the lamp; vases and gold-embroidered screens—a web of shadows, with, in its center, this gorged yellow spider.
His Excellency rose with visible effort, smiled blandly and shook his own hands within his brocaded sleeves.
"You will do me the honor to be seated?" he enquired, gesturing toward a pile of cushions opposite him. "My house is flattered that one of such fame should lighten it with his presence."
Trent waited for his host to be seated, knowing this to be a custom, then dropped cross-legged on the cushions. Followed the usual exchange of lilied words, of felicitations and compliments. Afterward, Li Kwai Kung struck a gong and a little rice-powdered, red-lipped girl appeared from behind the dusky screens, like a figure out of one of Pan Chih Yu's poems, and set a brass basin filled with scented water before Trent. When he had washed his hands the basin was removed. More lilied words, more felicitations and compliments. Then, a few minutes later, the first course of the meal was served.
"Ch'ing chih fan," said the mandarin graciously—by which he invited Trent to eat.
Bamboo shoots, rice-cakes and honey; roast duck flavored with soy, seeds of lotus in syrup; prawns, sweetmeats, nuts and tea made fragrant with petals of jasmine. A very celestial meal. They talked as they ate, and if his Excellency clung to the custom of balancing food on his chop sticks and thrusting it unexpectedly into his guest's mouth, as an act of courtesy, he refrained from doing so on this occasion. Trent grew anxious to have the formalities over with. He knew he was undergoing a test; upon the success of this interview, he imagined, depended his future safety.
When the meal was finished, Li Kwai Kung asked:
"Will you join me with a pipe?... No?"