The Crab-Flower Club

by Cao Xueqin

  Patience immediately understood what she was getting at and answered in the same vein.

  ‘No, Mrs Zhen, you keep it. If you find you have any left over, you can give it back to me afterwards.’

  ‘Take it,’ said You-shi. ‘Is your mistress the only one who’s allowed to break the rules? Mayn’t I do favours too, if I want to?’

  Patience was obliged to take the money from her.

  ‘Seeing your mistress so tight-fisted,’ said You-shi, ‘I often wonder what she’s going to do with all this money she saves. Take it with her in her coffin?’

  With that parting shot she went off to see Grandmother Jia. After greeting the old lady and exchanging a few generalities, she went into Faithful’s room for a more serious discussion of arrangements for the birthday party. The ‘discussion’ consisted quite simply in finding out what would give Grandmother Jia most pleasure and deciding that that was what they should do. When all had been settled between them and You-shi was rising to go, she took out the two taels that Faithful had contributed and handed them back to her.

  ‘Here you are. We shan’t be needing this.’

  From Grandmother Jia’s apartment she went over to have a few words with Lady Wang. When Lady Wang presently left her to go into her Buddhist chapel, You-shi took advantage of her absence to return Suncloud’s contribution; then, since Xi-feng was safely out of the way, she offered Aunt Zhou and Aunt Zhao their contributions as well. But the concubines were too scared to take them.

  ‘Go on!’ said You-shi encouragingly. ‘I know how hard-up you are. You can’t afford to give away money like this. If Feng finds out, I shall take full responsibility myself.’

  They took the money then, voluble in their gratitude.

  In a twinkling the second of the ninth was upon them. The denizens of the Garden had been informed that You-shi was planning an impressive variety of entertainment: not only the customary plays, but also juggling, acrobatics, story-telling by blind ballad-singers – in short, everything one could possibly think of that might contribute to the success of the occasion and the pleasure of the participants.

  Li Wan reminded the cousins that the second of the month was also one of the regular meeting-days of the poetry club. Xi-chun was, of course, excused.

  ‘But why hasn’t Bao-yu turned up?’ she asked. ‘I suppose he’s so intent on enjoying the fun that he has forgotten his former enthusiasm for these more civilized amusements! – Go and see what he’s doing,’ she said to one of the maids, ‘and tell him to come here immediately.’

  The maid was a long time gone.

  ‘Miss Aroma says he went out first thing this morning,’ she reported when she eventually returned.

  The others were incredulous.

  ‘That’s ridiculous. How could he possibly have gone out? The girl must have got the message wrong.’

  They sent Ebony over to ask again; but Ebony only confirmed what the first maid had said.

  ‘Yes, he really has gone out. It seems that one of his friends has died and he’s had to go out to condole.’

  ‘That’s absolutely absurd,’ said Tan-chun. ‘Whatever the reason, he can’t possibly have gone out today. Fetch Aroma here and I’ll speak to her myself.’

  As if anticipating a summons, Aroma herself walked in while she was saying this. Li Wan tackled her at once.

  ‘There’s absolutely no justification for his going out today, whatever the reason,’ she said. ‘In the first place it’s Mrs Lian’s birthday and Her Old Ladyship was particularly anxious that we should all join in celebrating it this year: it’s monstrous that he should go off on his own like this when everyone else from both houses is here for the celebration. And in the second place this is the first regular meeting of our poetry club and he hasn’t even asked leave to stay away.’

  Aroma sighed miserably.

  ‘Last night he told me that he had some important business to attend to first thing this morning. He said he had to go to the Prince of Bei-jing’s palace, but that he would be back again as soon as possible. I told him not to go, but he insisted. When he got up first thing this morning, he asked for a suit of mourning to wear. It looks as if some important person in the Prince of Bei-jing’s household must have died.’

  ‘If that’s really so,’ said Li Wan, ‘then he ought to have gone. But then, on the other hand, he ought to have got back by now.’

  After a brief discussion the cousins decided to proceed without him and to punish him in some way when he returned. Before they could begin, however, a summons arrived from Grandmother Jia to join her in the mansion. As soon as they had done so, Aroma reported Bao-yu’s absence. The old lady was displeased and sent someone to fetch him back.

  Bao-yu, evidently with some secret business on his mind, had spoken the day before to Tealeaf about this excursion.

  ‘I have to go out first thing tomorrow,’ he told him. ‘I want you to be waiting for me outside the back gate with two horses ready saddled. No one else is to accompany me but you. Tell Li Gui that I am going to the Prince of Bei-jing’s, and that he must stop anyone going out to look for me. He can tell them that the Prince is detaining me and that I shall come back as soon as I can get away.’

  Though somewhat mystified by these orders, Tealeaf felt he had no choice but to follow them out, and before dawn next morning was waiting with two horses ready saddled outside the rear gate of the Garden. As soon as it was light, Bao-yu, dressed in heavy mourning, emerged from the postern, leaped onto one of the waiting horses, and crouching down over the reins, set off at a brisk trot down the street – all without uttering a single word.

  Tealeaf leaped onto the second horse, gave it the whip, and did his best to catch up with Bao-yu, at the same time shouting after him to inquire where they were going.

  ‘Where does this road lead to?’ Bao-yu asked him.

  ‘This is the main road to the North Gate,’ said Tealeaf. ‘Outside the city it’s pretty deserted in that direction. You won’t find much to amuse you there.’

  ‘Good,’ said Bao-yu. ‘The more deserted the better.’

  And by applying the whip he made his horse shoot on ahead, and presently, after a couple of turns, had left the city gate behind him.

  Tealeaf, more mystified than ever, followed him as closely as he could. When they had galloped without stopping for two or three miles, in the course of which the signs of human habitation had gradually grown more and more sparse, Bao-yu finally reined to a halt and turned back to ask Tealeaf if there was anywhere where they could purchase some incense.

  ‘I dare say we could find somewhere,’ said Tealeaf without much conviction. ‘It depends what kind of incense you want.’

  Bao-yu reflected for some moments.

  ‘Honeybush, sandal and lakawood,’ he said. ‘It has to be those three.’

  ‘I doubt if you’ll be able to get them,’ said Tealeaf, smiling at the naïveté of one who could expect to make such purchases in such a place. But when he saw that Bao-yu was genuinely distressed, he added: ‘What’s it for? I’ve noticed that you often carry powdered incense in that sachet you wear. Why not see if you’ve got any in that?’

  Bao-yu, glad to be reminded, extracted the silk purse that he wore suspended from his neck underneath the front fold of his gown, felt inside it with his fingers, and was delighted to find that there was still a pinch or two of powdered agalloch in the bottom.

  ‘Seems a bit lacking in respect to use this though,’ he thought.

  ‘Still, it’s more respectful to use something I’ve carried all the way here myself than it would be to use something I’d just bought in a shop.’

  Having decided that the powdered incense would do, he asked Tealeaf where he could get hold of an incense-burner and some fire.

  ‘Now those we can’t get,’ said Tealeaf. ‘Where could we, out here in the middle of the wilds? If you knew you were going to need them, why didn’t you tell me beforehand, and we could have brought them with us?’

  �
��Stupid idiot!’ said Bao-yu. ‘Do you honestly think we could have ridden out at this break-neck pace if we’d been carrying an incense-burner full of hot coals with us?’

  Tealeaf, after some moments of reflection, smiled uncertainly:

  ‘I know what we could do, Master, though I don’t know what you’ll think of the idea. There’s little enough hope of our getting the things you’ve just asked for round here, and the chances are that even if we could, you’d only start thinking of something else you needed that was even harder to get. Now if we were to go on for about another two thirds of a mile in this direction, we should come to the Temple of the Water Spirit — ’

  Bao-yu pricked up his ears.

  ‘The Temple of the Water Spirit? Is that near here? Good. That will do even better. Let’s go there then.’

  With a touch of the whip he was away once more, still talking to Tealeaf over his shoulder as he rode ahead.

  ‘The nun at the Water Spirit is one of our regular callers. If I see her when we get there and tell her we want to use one of her burners, she’s sure to let us.’

  ‘Even if this wasn’t one of the temples we subscribe to,’ said Tealeaf, ‘I’m sure they wouldn’t dare refuse if you asked them. But why is it that today you are so willing to go to the Temple of the Water Spirit when normally you can scarcely abide to hear it mentioned?’

  ‘The reason I normally feel that way about it,’ said Bao-yu, ‘is because I hate the silly, senseless way in which vulgar people offer worship and build temples to gods they know nothing about. Ignorant old men and women with too much money to spend hear the name of some god or other – they’ve no idea who it is, but the mere fact that they’ve heard it from the lips of some ballad-singer or story-teller seems to them incontrovertible proof of the god’s existence – and go founding temples in which these fictitious deities can be worshipped.

  ‘Take this Temple of the Water Spirit. The reason it’s called that is because the divinity worshipped in it is supposed to be the goddess of the river Luo. Now in point of fact no Goddess of the Luo ever existed. She was an invention of the poet Cao Zhi. But that didn’t stop a lot of people making an image of her and worshipping it.

  ‘The only reason I feel differently about this temple today is because the idea of a water-goddess just happens to fit in with the thing that is at the moment uppermost in my mind; so I’m glad to make use of it for my own purpose.’

  By this time they had reached the gate of the temple. The old nun who kept it, hardly less surprised to hear of Bao-yu’s arrival than she would have been if she had been told that a dragon had just fallen, alive and kicking, out of the sky, hurried out to greet him, and ordered the old temple-servant who did duty as a porter to take care of the horses.

  Bao-yu went on inside. Instead of bowing down before the image, however, he stood and contemplated it appraisingly. Though the goddess was only a thing of wood and plaster and paint, the sculptor who made her had succeeded in capturing some of the spirit of Cao Zhi’s famous description. To Bao-yu’s gazing eyes she did indeed appear as the poet portrayed her:

  Fluttering like the wing-beats of a startled swan,

  Swaying with the lissome curves of a water-dragon …

  Cao Zhi’s beautiful images came crowding into his mind:

  Like a lotus flower emerging from the green water,

  Like the morning sun rising above the mist-bank …

  And as he gazed and remembered, the tears coursed down his cheeks.

  The old nun now appeared with some tea. While he sipped it, Bao-yu took the opportunity of asking her if he might borrow an incense-burner. At this she disappeared once more, to reappear, after considerable delay, carrying not only a burner but also a whole portion of incense and a set of garishly-printed ‘picture-offerings’. Refusing all but the burner, Bao-yu made Tealeaf carry it outside into the rear courtyard of the temple, where he set about choosing a suitably clean spot on which to make his offering. Nowhere would do, however, until Tealeaf suggested placing the burner on the stone platform of the well. To this suggestion Bao-yu assented with a nod, and when Tealeaf had set down the burner and retired to a respectful distance, he took out his pinch of agalloch and dropped it on the burning charcoal; then, with tears in his eyes, he knelt down and made, not a kotow, but the sort of half-obeisance one makes to the spirit of a junior or a servant.

  Having concluded his little ceremony, Bao-yu got up and ordered Tealeaf to take the burner back into the temple. But Tealeaf, though saying that he would, did nothing of the kind. Instead he threw himself on his knees, kotowed several times, and began praying aloud in the direction of the well:

  ‘O spirit, in all the years I have served Master Bao this is the first time he has ever kept anything from me. But though I don’t know who you are, O spirit, and don’t like to ask, one thing I do know, and that is that you are sure to be some wondrously beautiful, clever, refined young female. And since Master Bao isn’t able to tell you out loud what he wants of you, I, Tealeaf, am praying to you on his behalf.

  ‘I beseech you, if you still have feelings as you used to when you were on earth, watch over my master from time to time, O spirit. I know you belong to a different world now, but being as it’s for a special friend of yours that I’m asking this, please do it if you can, spirit, for old time’s sake.

  ‘And please use what influence you can to see that Master Bao is reborn in his next life as a girl, so that he can spend all his time with you; and don’t let him be reborn as one of those horrible Whiskered Males he is always on about.’

  At this point he knocked his head several more times on the ground. Bao-yu, who had been listening, could no longer hold back his laughter. Observing that Tealeaf had raised himself once more on all fours and appeared to be about to go on, he kicked him and told him to get up.

  ‘Stop this nonsense! If anyone hears you, I shall become a laughing-stock.’

  Tealeaf scrambled to his feet, picked up the burner and followed Bao-yu inside.

  ‘I’ve already spoken to the nun about getting you some food,’ he told Bao-yu as they were going in together. ‘I told her you hadn’t eaten yet. You ought to get something inside you. I realize that you came out here because there’s a big party and lots of racket at home today and you wanted some-where peaceful where you could do this. But I think just staying out here in the quiet all day is showing all the respect you need to this person you’ve just made the offering to. You don’t need to fast all day as well. That’s out of the question.’

  ‘That seems reasonable,’ said Bao-yu. ‘As I’m missing the party all the time that I’m here, I am in a way abstaining already; so I suppose there can be no harm in my taking a bit of vegetarian stuff.’

  ‘I’m glad to hear you say so,’ said Tealeaf. ‘Of course, there is another way of looking at it. Your going off like this is sure to cause others at home to worry. Now if no one at home was likely to worry, there’d be no harm in our not going back until evening. But since they are going to worry, I really think you ought to be getting back soon. For one thing it will set Their Ladyships’ minds at rest, and for another, it will, in the long run, be more respectful to this person you’ve just made the offering to. Because if you go home, even if you drink and watch plays, it won’t be because you want to, but out of duty to Their Ladyships. Whereas if you stay out here thinking only about the spirit and not caring how worried you make Their Ladyships, you’ll in fact be making the spirit herself uneasy to think of all the anxiety that’s being caused on her behalf. Think it over, Master Bao, and see if you don’t agree with me.’

  ‘I can see what’s on your mind without much difficulty,’ said Bao-yu, laughing. ‘You’re afraid that as you are the only one who came out here with me, you will bear all the blame for this outing when we get back. That’s the real reason why I’m being treated to all this high-minded advice, isn’t it? Well, don’t worry! It was all along my intention to go back to the party when I had made the offering. I neve
r said anything about staying out here all day. I’ve discharged my vow. If I hurry home now so that the others aren’t too worried, it seems to me that my obligations to the dead and the living will both be met.’

  Tealeaf expressed his relief. Still talking, they made their way to the old nun’s parlour, or ‘hall of meditation’, where they found she had set out a very presentable (though, of course, vegetarian) repast for them. After briefly sampling it, the two of them mounted and set off again along the road by which they had come – Bao-yu at such a pace that Tealeaf was obliged to call out after him to slacken it.

  ‘Go easy on that horse, Master Bao! He hasn’t been ridden very much; you need to keep a pretty tight rein on him.’

  Soon they had entered the city gate, and not long afterwards might have been seen slipping into the back gate of the Garden. Bao-yu hurried straight to Green Delights, which he found deserted except for a few old nannies left behind as caretakers.

  ‘Holy name!’ they said, their old faces lighting up with pleasure when they saw who it was. ‘You’ve come at last! You’ve had Miss Aroma nigh out of her mind with worry. They’re sitting at table in the front now, Master. Better hurry up and join them.’

  Bao-yu quickly took off his mourning clothes and went off to look for something more colourful to change into.

  ‘Where is the party?’ he asked the old women as soon as he had dressed.

  ‘In the new reception room.’

  He hurried, by the shortest route, towards the faint sounds of fluting and singing that could soon be heard coming from the so-called ‘new’ reception hall that the old women had referred to. As he approached the gallery through which he must pass to reach it, he came upon Silver, sitting under the eaves of the covered way and crying. She left off hurriedly when she saw him coming.