The Golden Days

by Cao Xueqin

  All you ever think about is how to win Bao-yu over to you. Thanks to you he won’t listen to me any more. He only does what you say. To think that a cheap bit of goods like you that they only paid a few taels of silver for should come along here and turn the whole place upside down! The best thing they could do with you would be to marry you off to one of the boys and send you packing. Then we’d see how you managed to play the siren and lead young gentlemen astray!’

  Aroma at first thought that Nannie Li’s anger arose solely on account of her failure to get up and welcome her, and had started to excuse herself on that supposition:

  ‘I’m ill, Mrs Li. I’ve just been sweating. I didn’t see you because I had my head under the clothes.’

  But when the old woman proceeded to go on about leading young men astray and marrying her off to a servant and what not, she felt wronged and humiliated, and in spite of her efforts to restrain them, burst into tears of sheer helplessness.

  Bao-yu had heard all this, and though too embarrassed to argue, could scarcely refrain from saying a word or two in Aroma’s defence:

  ‘She’s ill. She’s having to take medicine,’ he said. ‘If you don’t believe me, ask any of the maids.’

  This made the old woman even angrier.

  ‘Oh yes! You stick up for the little hussies! You don’t care about me any more! And which of them am I supposed to ask, pray ? They will all take your side against me. You are all under Aroma’s thumb, every one of you. I know what goes on here, don’t think I don’t! Well, you can come along with me to see Her Old Ladyship and Her Ladyship about this. Let them hear how you have cast me off – me that reared you at my own breast – now that you don’t need my milk any more, and how you encourage a pack of snotty-nosed little maidservants to amuse themselves at my expense !’

  She was in tears herself by now, and wept as she cursed.

  By this time Dai-yu and Bao-chai had also arrived on the scene and did their best to calm her:

  ‘Come, Nannie! Be a bit more forbearing with them! Try to forget about it !’

  Nannie Li turned towards this new audience and proceeded to pour out her troubles in an interminable gabble in which tea and Snowpink and drinking koumiss mingled incoherently.

  Xi-feng happened to be in Grandmother Jia’s room totting up the day’s scores for the final settlement when she heard this hubbub in the rear apartment. She identified it immediately as Nannie Li on the rampage once more, taking out on Bao-yu’s unfortunate maids some of the spleen occasioned by her recent gambling losses. At once she hurried over, seized Nannie Li by the hand, and admonished her with smiling briskness:

  ‘Now, Nannie, we mustn’t lose our tempers! This is the New Year holiday and Her Old Ladyship has been enjoying herself all day. A person of your years ought to be stopping other people from quarrelling, not upsetting Her Old Ladyship by quarrelling yourself. Surely you know better than that ? If anyone has been misbehaving, you have only to tell me and I’ll have them beaten for you. Now I’ve got a nice hot pheasant stew in my room. You just come along with me and you shall have some of that and a drink to go with it!’

  She proceeded to haul her off the premises, addressing a few words over her shoulder to her maid Felicity as she went:

  ‘Felicity, bring Nannie’s stick for her, there’s a good girl! And for goodness’ sake give her a handkerchief to wipe her eyes with!’

  Unable to hold her ground, the old Nannie was borne off in Xi-feng’s wake, muttering plaintively as she went:

  ‘I wish I was dead, I really do! But I’d sooner forget meself and make a scene like I have today and be shamed in front of you all than put up with the insolence of those shameless little baggages!’

  Watching this sudden exit, Bao-chai and Dai-yu laughed and clapped their hands:

  ‘How splendid! Just the sort of wind we needed to blow the old woman away!’

  But Bao-yu shook his head and sighed:

  ‘I wonder what had really upset her. Obviously she only picked on Aroma because she is weak and can’t defend herself. I wonder which of the girls had offended her to make her so…’

  He was interrupted by Skybright:

  ‘Why should any of us want to upset her? Do you think we’re mad ? And even if we had offended her, we should be perfectly capable of owning up to it and not letting someone else take the blame!’

  Aroma grasped Bao-yu’s hand and wept:

  ‘Because I offended one old nurse, you have to go offending a whole roomful of people. Don’t you think there’s been enough trouble already without dragging other people into it?’

  Seeing how ill she looked and realizing that distress of mind could only aggravate her condition, Bao-yu stifled his indignation and did his best to comfort her so that she might be able to settle down once more and continue sweating out the fever. Her skin was burning to the touch. He decided to stay with her for a while, and lying down beside her, spoke to her soothingly:

  ‘Just try to get better, now! Never mind all that other nonsense! It’s of no importance.’

  Aroma smiled bitterly.

  ‘If I had allowed myself to get upset about things like that, I shouldn’t have lasted in this room for five minutes! Still, if we’re always going to have this sort of trouble, I think in the long run I just shan’t be able to stand any more. You don’t seem to realize. You offend people on my account and the next moment you’ve forgotten all about it. But they haven’t. It’s all scored up against me; and as soon as something goes a bit wrong, they come out with all these horrible things about me. It makes it so unpleasant for all of us.’

  She cried weakly as she said this, but presently checked herself for fear of upsetting Bao-yu.

  Soon the odd-job woman came in with the second infusion of Aroma’s medicine. Bao-yu could see that she had started sweating again and told her not to get up, holding the medicine for her himself and supporting her while she drank it. Then he told one of the junior maids to make up a bed for her on the kang.

  ‘Whether you’re going to eat there or not,’ Aroma said to him, ‘you’d better go and sit with Her Old Ladyship and Her Ladyship for a bit and play a while with the young ladies before you come back here again. I shall be all right if I lie here quietly on my own.’

  Bao-yu thought he had better do as she said, and after waiting until she had taken off her ornaments and was lying tucked up in bed, he went to the front apartment and took his dinner with Grandmother Jia.

  After dinner Grandmother Jia wanted to go on playing cards with some of the old stewardesses. Bao-yu, still worrying about Aroma, returned to his own room, where he found her sleeping fitfully. He thought of going to bed himself, but it was still too early. Skybright, Mackerel, Ripple and Emerald had gone off in quest of livelier entertainment, hoping to persuade Grandmother Jia’s maids, Faithful and Amber, to join them in a game. Only Musk was left in the outer room, playing Patience under the lamp with a set of dominoes. Bao-yu smiled at her.

  ‘Why don’t you go off to join the others ?’

  ‘I haven’t got any money.’

  ‘There’s a great pile of money under the bed. Isn’t that enough for you to lose?’

  ‘If we all went off to play,’ said Musk, ‘who would look after this room ? There’s her sick inside. And lamps and stoves burning everywhere. The old women were practically dead on their feet after waiting on you all day; I had to let them go and rest. And the girls have been on duty all day, too. You could scarcely grudge them some time off now for amusement. -Which leaves only me to look after the place.’

  ‘Another Aroma,’ thought Bao-yu to himself and gave her another smile.

  ‘I’ll sit here while you’re away. There’s nothing to worry about here if you’d like to go.’

  ‘There’s even less excuse for going if you are here,’ said Musk. ‘Why can’t we both sit here and talk?’

  ‘What can we do ?’ said Bao-yu. ‘Just sitting here talking is going to be rather dull. I know! You were saying this
morning that your head was itchy. As you haven’t got anything else to do now, I’ll comb it for you.’

  ‘All right,’ said Musk, and fetching her toilet-box with the mirror on top she proceeded to take off her ornaments and shake her hair out. Bao-yu took a comb and began to comb it for her. But he had not drawn it more than four or five times through her hair, when Skybright came bursting in to get some more money. Seeing the two of them together, she smiled sarcastically:

  ‘Fancy! Doing her hair already – before you’ve even drunk the marriage-cup !’

  Bao-yu laughed.

  ‘Come here! I’ll do yours for you too, if you like!’

  ‘I wouldn’t presume, thanks all the same!’

  She took the money, and with a swish of the door-blind was gone.

  Bao-yu was standing behind Musk as she sat looking at herself in the mirror. Their eyes met in the glass and they both laughed.

  ‘Of all the girls in this room she has the sharpest tongue,’ said Bao-yu.

  Musk signalled to him agitatedly in the glass with her hand. Bao-yu took her meaning; but it was too late. With another swish of the door-blind, Skybright had already darted in again.

  ‘Oh! Sharp-tongued, am I? Perhaps you’d like to say a bit more on that subject?’

  ‘Get along with you!’ laughed Musk. ‘Don’t go starting any more arguments!’

  ‘And don’t you go sticking up for him!’ said Skybright gaily. ‘I know what you’re up to, you two. You don’t deceive me with your goings-on. I’ll have something to say to you about this when I get back later. Just wait until I’ve won some of my money back!’

  With that she darted off once more.

  When Bao-yu had finished combing her hair, he asked Musk to help him get to bed – very quietly, so as not to disturb Aroma.

  And that ends our account of that day.

  First thing next morning Aroma awoke to find that she had sweated heavily during the night and that her body felt very much lighter; but she would take only a little congee for breakfast in order not to tax her system too soon. Bao-yu saw that there was no further cause for concern, and after his meal drifted off to Aunt Xue’s apartment in search of amusement. Now this was the prime of the year, when the schoolroom is closed for the New Year holiday and the use of the needle is forbidden to maidenly fingers throughout the whole of the Lucky Month, so that boys and girls alike are all agreeably unemployed, and Bao-yu’s half-brother Jia Huan, on holiday like all the rest, had also drifted over to Aunt Xue’s place in search of amusement. He found Bao-chai, Caltrop and Oriole there playing a game of Racing Go, and after watching them for a bit, wanted to play too.

  Bao-chai had always behaved towards Jia Huan in exactly the same way as she did towards Bao-yu and made no distinctions between them. Consequently, when he asked to play, she at once made a place for him and invited him to join them on the kang. They played for stakes of ten cash each a game. Jia Huan won the first game and felt very pleased. But then, as luck would have it, he lost several times in a row and began to get somewhat rattled.

  It was now his turn to throw the dice. He needed seven to win, and if he threw anything less than seven, the dice would go next to Oriole, who needed only three. He hurled them from the pot with all his might. One of them rested at two. The other continued rather erratically to roll about. ‘Ace! Ace! Ace!’ cried Oriole, clapping her hands. ‘Six! Seven! Eight!’ shouted Jia Huan glaring at Oriole and commanding the die to perform the impossible. But the perverse wanderer finally came to rest with the ace uppermost, making a grand total of three. With the speed of desperation Jia Huan reached out and snatched it up, claiming, as he did so, that it was a six.

  ‘It was an ace,’ said Oriole, ‘as plain as anything!’

  Bao-chai could see that Jia Huan was rattled, and darting a sharp look at Oriole, commanded her to yield.

  ‘You grow more unmannerly every day,’ she told her. ‘Surely you don’t think one of the masters would cheat you? Come on! Put your money down!’

  Oriole smarted with the injustice of this, but her mistress had ordered it, so she had to pay up without arguing. She could not, however, forbear a few rebellious mutterings:

  ‘Huh! One of the masters! Cheating a maid out of a few coppers! Even I should be ashamed! Look how much money Bao-yu lost when he was playing with us the other day, yet he didn’t mind. Even when some of the maids took all he had left, he only laughed…’

  She would have gone on, but Bao-chai checked her angrily.

  ‘How can I hope to compete with Bao-yu?’ said Jia Huan, beginning to blubber. ‘You’re all afraid of him. You all take his part against me because I’m only a concubine’s son.’

  Bao-chai was shocked:

  ‘Please don’t say things like that, Cousin! You’ll make yourself ridiculous.’

  Once more she rebuked Oriole.

  Just at that moment Bao-yu walked in, and seeing the state that Jia Huan was in, asked him what was the matter. But Jia Huan dared not say anything.

  Bao-chai, familiar with the state of affairs, normal in other families, which places the younger brother in fearful subjection to the elder, assumed that Jia Huan was afraid of Bao-yu. She was unaware that Bao-yu positively disliked anyone being afraid of him. ‘We are both equally subject to our parents’ control,’ he would say of himself and Jia Huan. ‘Why should I create a greater distance between us by trying to control him myself – especially when I am the wife’s son and he is the concubine’s ? People already talk behind our backs, even when I do nothing. It would be ten times worse if I were to start bossing him about.’

  But there was another, zanier, notion which contributed to this attitude. Let us try to explain it. Bao-yu had from early youth grown up among girls. There were his sisters Yuan-chun and Tan-chun, his cousins of the same surname Ying-chun and Xi-chun, and his distaff-cousins Shi Xiang-yun, Lin Dai-yu and Xue Bao-chai. As a result of this upbringing, he had come to the conclusion that the pure essence of humanity was all concentrated in the female of the species and that males were its mere dregs and off-scourings. To him, therefore, all members of his own sex without distinction were brutes who might just as well not have existed. Only in the case of his father, uncles and brother, where rudeness and disobedience were expressly forbidden by the teachings of Confucius, did he make an exception – and even then the allowances he made in respect of the fraternal bond were extremely perfunctory. It certainly never occurred to him that his own maleness placed him under any obligation to set an. example to the younger males in his clan. The latter – Jia Huan included – reciprocated with a healthy disrespect only slightly tempered by their fear of his doting grandmother.

  But Bao-chai was ignorant of all this; and fearing that Bao-yu might embarrass them all by delivering a big brother’s telling-off, she hastened to Jia Huan’s defence.

  ‘What are you crying about in the middle of the New Year holidays?’ said Bao-yu to Jia Huan, ignoring Bao-chai’s excuses. ‘If you don’t like it here, why don’t you go somewhere else ? I think your brains must have been addled by too much study. Can’t you see that if there is something you don’t like, there must be something else you do like, and that all you’ve got to do is leave the one and go after the other? Not hang on to it and cry. Crying won’t make it any better. You came here to enjoy yourself, didn’t you ? And now you’re here you’re miserable, right ? Then the thing to do is to go somewhere else, isn’t it ?’

  In the face of such an argument Jia Huan could not very well remain.

  When he got back to his own apartment, his real mother, ‘Aunt’ Zhao (Lady Wang was his mother only in name) observed the dejected state he was in.

  ‘Who’s been making a doormat of you this time?’ she asked him, and, obtaining no immediate reply, asked again.

  ‘I’ve just been playing at Bao-chai’s. Oriole cheated me and Bao-yu turned me out.’

  Aunt Zhao spat contemptuously:

  ‘Nasty little brat! That’s what comes of getting
above yourself. Who asked you to go playing with that lot? You could have gone anywhere else to play. Asking for trouble 1’

  Just at that moment Xi-feng happened to be passing by outside, and hearing what she said, shouted back at her through the window:

  ‘What sort of language is that to be using in the middle of the New Year holiday? He’s only a child. He hasn’t done anything terrible. What do you want to go carrying on at him like that for ? No matter where he’s been, Sir Zheng and Lady Wang are quite capable of looking after him themselves. There’s no cause for you to go biting his head off! After all, he is one of the masters. If he’s misbehaved himself, you should leave the telling-off to those whose job it is. It’s no business of yours. Huan! Come out here! Come and play with me!’

  Jia Huan had always been afraid of Xi-feng – more even than he was of Lady Wang – and hearing her call him, came running out immediately. Aunt Zhao dared not say a word.

  ‘You’re a poor-spirited creature!’ Xi-feng said to him. ‘How many times have I told you that you can eat and drink and play with any of the boys and girls you like ? But instead of doing as I say, you hang about with these other people and let them warp your mind for you and fill it up with mischief. You’ve no self-respect, that’s your trouble. Can’t keep away from the gutter. You insist on making yourself disagreeable and then you complain that people are prejudiced against you! Fancy making a fuss like that about losing a few coppers! How much did you lose ?’

  ‘One or two hundred,’ Jia Huan muttered abjectly.

  ‘All this fuss about one or two hundred cash! And you one of the masters!’ She turned to Felicity.’ Go and get a string of cash for him, Felicity, and take him round to the back where Miss Ying and the girls are playing! And if I have any more of this nonsense from you in future, young man,’ she went on to Jia Huan, ‘I’ll first give you a good hiding myself and then send someone to tell the school about you and see if they can knock a bit of sense into you! It sets your Cousin Lian’s teeth on edge to see you so wanting in self-respect. He’d have disembowelled you by now I shouldn’t wonder, if I hadn’t kept his hands off you! Now be off with you!’