The Crab-Flower Club

by Cao Xueqin

  ‘I hope Bao-yu hasn’t been doing something dreadful with one of the girls?’

  ‘Oh no, Your Ladyship, please don’t suspect that!’ said Aroma hurriedly. ‘That wasn’t my meaning at all. It’s just that – if you’ll allow me to say so – Master Bao and the young ladies are beginning to grow up now, and though they are all cousins, there is the difference of sex between them, which makes it very awkward sometimes when they are all living together, especially in the case of Miss Lin and Miss Bao, who aren’t even of the same clan. One can’t help feeling uneasy. Even to outsiders it looks like a very strange sort of family. They say “where nothing happens, imagination is busiest”, and I’m sure lots of unaccountable misfortunes begin when some innocent little thing we did unthinkingly gets misconstrued in someone else’s imagination and reported as something terrible. We just have to be on our guard against that sort of thing happening – especially when Master Bao has such a peculiar character, as Your Ladyship knows, and spends all his time with girls. He only has to make the tiniest slip in an unguarded moment, and whether he really did anything or not, with so many people about – and some of them no better than they should be – there is sure to be scandal. For you know what some of these people are like, Your Ladyship. If they feel well-disposed towards you, they’ll make you out to be a saint; but if they’re not, then Heaven help you! If Master Bao lives to be spoken well of, we can count ourselves lucky; but the way things are, it only needs someone to breathe a word of scandal and – I say nothing of what will happen to us servants – it’s of no consequence if we’re all chopped up for mincemeat – but what’s more important, Master Bao’s reputation will be destroyed for life and all the care and worry Your Ladyship and Sir Zheng have had on his account will have been wasted. I know Your Ladyship is very busy and can’t be expected to think of everything, and I probably shouldn’t have thought of this myself, but once I had thought of it, it seemed to me that it would be wrong of me not to tell Your Ladyship, and it’s been preying on my mind ever since. The only reason I haven’t mentioned it before is because I was afraid Your Ladyship might be angry with me.’

  What Aroma had just been saying about misconstructions and scandals so exactly fitted what had in fact happened in the case of Golden that for a moment Lady Wang was quite taken aback. But on reflection she felt nothing but love and gratitude for this humble servant-girl who had shown so much solicitude on her behalf.

  ‘It is very perceptive of you, my dear, to have thought it all out so carefully,’ she said. ‘I have, of course, thought about this matter myself, but other things have put it from my mind, and what you have just said has reminded me. It is most thoughtful of you. You are a very, very good girl – Well, you may go now. I think I now know what to do. There is just one thing before you go, though. Now that you have spoken to me like this, I am going to place Bao-yu entirely in your hands. Be very careful with him, won’t you? Remember that anything you do for him you will be doing also for me. You will find that I am not ungrateful.’

  Aroma stood for a moment with bowed head, weighing the import of these words. Then she said:

  ‘I will do what Your Ladyship has asked me to the utmost of my ability.’

  She left the apartment slowly and made her way back to Green Delights, pondering as she went. When she arrived, Bao-yu had just woken up, so she told him about the flavourings. He was pleased and made her mix some for him straight away. It was quite delicious. He kept thinking about Dai-yu and wanted to send someone over to see her, but he was afraid that Aroma would disapprove, so, as a means of getting her out of the way, he sent her over to Bao-chai’s place to borrow a book. As soon as she had gone, he summoned Skybright.

  ‘I want you to go to Miss Lin’s for me,’ he said. ‘Just see what she’s doing, and if she asks about me, tell her I’m all right.’

  ‘I can’t go rushing in there bald-headed without a reason,’ said Skybright. ‘You’d better give me some kind of a message, just to give me an excuse for going there.’

  ‘I have none to give,’ said Bao-yu.

  ‘Well, give me something to take, then,’ said Skybright, ‘or think of something I can ask her for. Otherwise it will look so silly.’

  Bao-yu thought for a bit and then, reaching out and picking up two of his old handkerchiefs, he tossed them towards her with a smile.

  ‘All right. Tell her I said you were to give her these.’

  ‘That’s an odd sort of present!’ said Skybright. ‘What’s she going to do with a pair of your old handkerchiefs? Most likely she’ll think you’re making fun of her and get upset again.’

  ‘No she won’t,’ said Bao-yu. ‘She’ll understand.’

  Skybright deemed it pointless to argue, so she picked up the handkerchiefs and went off to the Naiad’s House. Little Delicate, who was hanging some towels out to dry on the verandah railings, saw her enter the courtyard and attempted to wave her away.

  ‘She’s gone to bed.’

  Skybright ignored her and went on inside. The lamps had not been lit and the room was in almost total darkness. The voice of Dai-yu, lying awake in bed, spoke to her out of the shadows.

  ‘Who is it?’

  ‘Skybright.’

  ‘What do you want?’

  ‘Master Bao has sent me with some handkerchiefs, Miss.’

  Dai-yu seemed to hesitate. She found the gift puzzling and was wondering what it could mean.

  ‘I suppose they must be very good ones,’ she said. ‘Probably someone gave them to him. Tell him to keep them and give them to somebody else. I have no use for them just now myself.’

  Skybright laughed.

  ‘They’re not new ones, Miss. They’re two of his old, everyday ones.’

  This was even more puzzling. Dai-yu thought very hard for some moments. Then suddenly, in a flash, she understood.

  ‘Put them down. You may go now.’

  Skybright did as she was bid and withdrew. All the way back to Green Delights she tried to make sense of what had happened, but it continued to mystify her.

  Meanwhile the message that eluded Skybright had thrown Dai-yu into a turmoil of conflicting emotions.

  ‘I feel so happy,’ she thought, ‘that in the midst of his own affliction he has been able to grasp the cause of all my trouble.

  ‘And yet at the same time I am sad,’ she thought; ‘because how do I know that my trouble will end in the way I want it to?

  ‘Actually, I feel rather amused,’ she thought. ‘Fancy his sending a pair of old handkerchiefs like that! Suppose I hadn’t understood what he was getting at?

  ‘But I feel alarmed that he should be sending presents to me in secret.

  ‘Oh, and I feel so ashamed when I think how I am forever crying and quarrelling,’ she thought, ‘and all the time he has understood! …’

  And her thoughts carried her this way and that, until the ferment of excitement within her cried out to be expressed. Careless of what the maids might think, she called for a lamp, sat herself down at her desk, ground some ink, softened her brush, and proceeded to compose the following quatrains, using the handkerchiefs themselves to write on:

  1

  Seeing my idle tears, you ask me why

  These foolish drops fall from my teeming eye:

  Then know, your gift, being by the merfolk made,

  In merman’s currency must be repaid.

  2

  Jewelled drops by day in secret sorrow shed

  Or, in the night-time, in my wakeful bed,

  Lest sleeve or pillow they should spot or stain,

  Shall on these gifts shower down their salty rain.

  3

  Yet silk preserves but ill the Naiad’s tears:

  Each salty trace of them fast disappears.

  Only the speckled bamboo stems that grow

  Outside the window still her tear-marks show.

  She had only half-filled the second handkerchief and was preparing to write another quatrain, when she became aware th
at her whole body was burning hot all over and her cheeks were afire. Going over to the dressing-table, she removed the brocade cover from the mirror and peered into it.

  ‘Hmn! “Brighter than the peach-flower’s hue”,’ she murmured complacently to the flushed face that stared out at her from the glass, and, little imagining that what she had been witnessing was the first symptom of a serious illness, went back to bed, her mind full of handkerchiefs.

  From Dai-yu and her handkerchiefs let us return to Aroma, who, it will be remembered, had been sent off to Bao-chai’s for a book. When she got there, she found that Bao-chai was not in the Garden, having gone round to her mother’s place outside. Not liking to return empty-handed, she waited for Bao-chai to return. It was already the beginning of the first watch when she did so.

  Knowing her brother as she did, Bao-chai had already, even before hearing anything to that effect, suspected that he was in some way responsible for Bao-yu’s misfortune. What Aroma had earlier on told her had therefore been no more than confirmation of an already existing suspicion. Yet Aroma had only been echoing what Tealeaf had told her; and what Tealeaf had told her was pure guesswork without a shred of evidence to support it. Thus what started in everyone’s mind as a suspicion, repetition very soon compounded into a certainty. Yet the ironical fact was that he who by his past behaviour had so richly merited the reputation which had caused them to suspect him was totally innocent on the one occasion when everyone was most unshakeably convinced of his guilt.

  The object of this misunderstanding had on this particular evening returned home having had a good deal to drink outside. He greeted his mother and then, observing that his sister, too, was sitting there, addressed a few desultory remarks to her. Suddenly he seemed to remember something.

  ‘I hear young Bao-yu’s been in trouble,’ he said. ‘What was it about?’

  This was too much for Aunt Xue, who had been seething inwardly and now broke out in a fury.

  ‘Shameless villain! How can you have the face to ask such a question? You know very well it was all your doing.’

  Xue Pan stared at her in astonishment.

  ‘What do you mean, “all my doing”? ’

  ‘Don’t act the injured innocent with me!’ said his mother. ‘Everyone knows it was you who told.’

  ‘Oh, and I suppose if everyone said I’d killed somebody, you’d believe that too!’

  ‘Even your sister knows it was you. I suppose you’re not going to call her a liar?’

  Bao-chai hurriedly intervened.

  ‘Don’t shout so, both of you! If you’d be a bit more calm and collected, you might have some chance of getting at the truth.’ She turned to Xue Pan: ‘Anyway, whether it was you or wasn’t you, the damage is done now. There doesn’t seem much point in raking it over or making an issue of it. My advice to you is to keep out of mischief from now on and stop interfering in other people’s affairs. When you spend day after day fooling around outside, sooner or later something is bound to happen; and you are such a thoughtless creature, that when it does, people naturally suspect that you are the one to blame, even if you aren’t. I know I do!’

  Xue Pan, for all his faults, was a forthright, outspoken sort of fellow, unused to such ostrich-like avoidance of the issue. Bao-chai’s strictures about ‘fooling around’ and his mother’s insistence that he had brought about Bao-yu’s beating by means of a deliberate indiscretion had exasperated him beyond endurance. He jumped about excitedly, protesting with the most solemn and desperate oaths that he was innocent.

  ‘I’d like to find the comedian who’s been making up these stories about me,’ he shouted, turning in anger upon the domestics. ‘I’ll smash his rotten face in if I do. Of course, I know what this is all about: you all want to show how concerned you are for poor, darling Bao-yu, so you’ve decided to do it at my expense. What is he, anyway? a Deva King? Every time his dad gives him a few whacks on the bum, the whole household is in a state of uproar about it for days on end. I remember that time Uncle Zheng beat him for doing something he shouldn’t have and old Lady Jia decided that Cousin Zhen was at the bottom of it. She had the poor so-and-so hauled up in front of her and there was hell to pay. Now, this time, you want to drag me into it. All right then: I don’t care. A life for a life. I’ll go in there and kill the little blighter – then you can all do what you like to me.’

  In the midst of this bawling he had picked up a door-bar and was evidently going off to execute his threat; but his distraught mother clung to him and prevented him from going.

  ‘You stupid creature!’ she said. ‘Who do you think you’re going to hit with that? If you’re going to hit anyone, you’d better begin with me!’

  Xue Pan’s exasperation had now reached such a pitch that his eyes stood out in his head like a pair of copper bells.

  ‘This is rich!’ he shouted. ‘You won’t let me go and finish him off, yet you won’t stop provoking me by making up all these lies. Every day that fellow stays alive means one more day of nagging and lies for me to put up with. We’d much better die, the pair of us, and make an end of it!’

  ‘Have a little self-control!’ said Bao-chai, joining in her mother’s efforts to restrain him. ‘Can’t you see how upset poor Mamma is? You ought to be trying to calm her, not making things worse with this uproar.’

  ‘Oh yes! you can say that now,’ said Xue Pan, ‘but it was you who started all this by telling her about me, wasn’t it?’

  ‘It’s all very well to blame me for telling Mamma,’ said Bao-chai. ‘Why don’t you blame yourself for being so careless, you great blabber-mouth?’

  ‘Me careless?’ said Xue Pan. ‘What about the way Bao-yu stirs up trouble for himself then? Let me just give you an example. Let me tell you what happened between him and Bijou the other day. I’d met Bijou ten times, near enough, and never had so much as a kind word out of him, yet Bao-yu, that didn’t even know him by sight, meets him for the first time the other day, and before you know where you are, he’s given him his sash! I hope you’re not going to say that that got about because of me?’

  His mother and sister were indignant.

  ‘That’s a fine example, isn’t it? It’s precisely because of that that he was beaten. Now we know it must have been you who told.’

  ‘This is enough to drive a fellow mad!’ said Xue Pan. ‘It’s not so much the lies you keep telling about me. What really gets my goat is the almighty fuss you make about this fellow Bao-yu.’

  ‘Almighty fuss?’ said Bao-chai. ‘You’ve just been waving a door-bar at us, and you say that we have been making a fuss?’

  Xue Pan could see that Bao-chai had reason on her side and that she was much harder to argue with than his mother. He was therefore eager to find something that would stop her mouth, so that he could say what he wanted to without contradiction. This, coupled with the fact that he was by now far too angry to weigh the seriousness of what he was saying, was responsible for the unpardonable innuendo that followed.

  ‘All right, sis,’ he said, ‘you don’t need to quarrel with me. I know what your trouble is. Mamma told me long ago that Mr Right would be someone with a jade to match your locket, so naturally, now you’ve seen that blasted thing that Bao-yu wears round his neck, you do all you can to stick up for him.’

  Anger at first made Bao-chai speechless; then, clinging to Aunt Xue, she burst into tears.

  ‘Mamma, listen to what Pan is saying to me!’

  Realizing, when he saw his sister’s tears, that he had gone too far, Xue Pan retired sulkily to his own room and went to bed. Bao-chai was left bursting with injury and outrage which she dared not express for fear of further upsetting her mother. She was obliged to bid the latter a tearful goodnight and go back to her own room in the Garden, where she spent the rest of the night weeping.

  She was up early next morning. Too dispirited to make a proper toilet, she stopped only to tidy herself a little before setting off for her mother’s. On the way she met, of all people, Dai-yu,
standing on her own beneath a flowering tree.

  ‘Where are you going?’ said Dai-yu.

  ‘To my mother’s.’ She answered without stopping.

  Dai-yu noticed how dispirited she looked and saw that her eyes were swollen as if she had been weeping.

  ‘Don’t make yourself ill, coz,’ she called out, almost gleefully, to the retreating back. ‘Even a cistern-full of tears won’t heal the smart of a beating!’

  The nature of Bao-chai’s reply will be revealed in the following chapter.

  Chapter 35

  Sulky Silver tastes some lotus-leaf soup

  And Golden Oriole knots a flower-patterned fringe

  BAO-CHAI heard Dai-yu’s sarcasm quite clearly, but her mind was too taken up with her own family affairs to pay much attention, and she continued on her way without looking back.

  As Dai-yu gazed towards the House of Green Delights, which was at some distance from the flowering tree in whose shade she was standing, she presently observed Li Wan, Ying-chun, Tan-chun and Xi-chun, attended by numerous maids, going into the gate of its courtyard. Then, as she continued to watch, she saw them one by one come out again and go their separate ways. It struck her that Xi-feng had not been with them, and she wondered why.

  ‘It’s not like her not to visit him,’ she thought. ‘Even if she’s otherwise engaged, you’d expect her to find some means of getting over and doing her little turn, if only to keep in with Grandma and Auntie Wang. There must be some very pressing reason to keep her away.’

  She lowered her head to reflect. Raising it again and looking once more in the direction of Green Delights, she observed a colourful throng of females just about to enter, and when she looked a little harder, she could make out Wang Xi-feng with Grandmother Jia leaning on her arm. Lady Wang and Lady Xing walked behind them, followed by Aunt Zhou and a large bevy of maids and womenservants. As the last of these disappeared inside the gate, Dai-yu nodded wistfully, thinking how good it must be to have a family, and soon her face was once more wet with tears. Presently she saw Aunt Xue and Bao-chai arrive. Not long after she had watched them enter the gate, Nightingale suddenly walked up behind her.