做了軟梯 A Rope Ladder Down the City Wall
眾賊得了手，走出寇家，順城腳做了軟梯，漫城牆一一繫出，冒著雨連夜奔西而去。那寇家僮僕見賊退了，方才出頭。及看時，老員外已死在地下。放聲哭道：「天呀！主人公已打死了！」眾皆伏屍而哭，悲悲啼啼。众贼得了手，走出寇家，顺城脚做了软梯，漫城墙一一系出，冒着雨连夜奔西而去。那寇家僮仆见贼退了，方才出头。及看时，老员外已死在地下。放声哭道：「天呀！主人公已打死了！」众皆伏尸而哭，悲悲啼啼。
逐句解 Line by line
The thieves, having got what they came for, went out of the Kou house, made a rope ladder at the foot of the wall, and let themselves down over the battlements one after another. Braving the rain, they made west through the night.
軟梯, a soft ladder — rope, because you cannot carry a wooden one through a town at night. They go over the wall rather than out of a gate, since the gates are shut and watched after dark. 繫出, to let oneself out on a rope, appears twice in the whole novel and both times in this chapter — here, and again in a few hundred characters when the story doubles back to explain how they got ahead of the pilgrims on the same road.
When the Kou servants saw that the thieves had gone, they finally showed themselves. Going to look, they found the old squire already dead on the ground.
方才出頭 — only then put their heads out. The servants had hidden with everyone else, and they are the ones who find the body, which tells you the family were still scattered. The plainness here is deliberate. Two short clauses, no adjectives, and the sentence stops. Compare the elaborate three-souls formula that closed the previous passage: that one was the narrator speaking over the scene, this is what the household actually saw.
They raised a cry. "Heaven! The master has been beaten to death!" And they all threw themselves down over the body and wept, sobbing and wailing together.
伏屍而哭 — to lie over the corpse and weep — is a formal phrase out of the old histories, and it is the correct thing to do. Mourning in this period was prescribed behaviour, not free expression, and the servants get it right. Notice the verb they use: 打死, beaten to death. Nobody saw it. One man kicked him once. The first account of the death is already wrong in a small way, and the wrongness will grow with every retelling until it reaches a courtroom.
This passage is the seam between the crime and everything that follows, and the book crosses it in seventy-nine characters. The thieves get clean away — over the wall, west along the road, which is the direction the pilgrims are also travelling. That coincidence is the engine of the next hour of story.
The narration is deliberately flat here: they went, they made a ladder, they climbed down, the servants came out, he was dead. No commentary, no poem. The book has just used its most elaborate formula for Kou Hong's death and now refuses to use anything at all, which throws the weight onto the servants' one shouted line.
That line is where the trouble starts. The servants say the master was beaten to death. What happened was a single kick from a single man in a crowd of thirty. Nobody is lying — they simply came out afterwards and drew a conclusion. Over the next few pages the same event will be retold by a widow who did see it, in words that are a deliberate invention, and the two kinds of wrongness are worth keeping apart in your mind.