by Cao Xueqin
‘When was this?’ Bao-yu asked him.
‘We left on the twenty-eighth of last month,’ said Feng Zi-ying. ‘Didn’t get back till a few days ago.’
‘Ah, that explains why I didn’t see you at Shen’s party earlier this month,’ said Bao-yu. ‘I meant at the time to ask why you weren’t there, but I forgot. Did you go alone on this expedition or was the General there with you?’
‘Fahver most certainly was there,’ said Feng Zi-ying. ‘I was practically dragged along in tow. Do you think I’m mad enough to go rushin’ off in pursuit of hideous hardships when I could be sittin’ comfortably at home eatin’ good food and drinkin’ good wine and listenin’ to the odd song or two ? Still, some good came of it. It was a lucky accident.’
As he had now finished his tea, Xue Pan urged him to join them at table and tell them his story at leisure, but Feng Zi-ying rose to his feet again and declined.
‘I ought by rights to stay and drink a few cups with you,’ he said, ‘but there’s somethin’ very important I’ve got to see Fahver about now, so I’m afraid I really must refuse.’
But Xue Pan, Bao-yu and the rest were by no means content to let him get away with this excuse and propelled him insistently towards the table.
‘Now look here, this is too bad!’ Feng Zi-ying good-hum-ouredly protested. ‘All the years we’ve been knockin’ around togevver we’ve never before insisted that a fellow should have to stay if he don’t want to. The fact is, I really can’t. Oh well, if I must have a drink, fetch some decent-sized cups and I’ll just put down a couple of quick ones!’
This was clearly the most he would concede and the others perforce acquiesced. Two sconce-cups were brought and ceremoniously filled, Bao-yu holding the cups and Xue Pan pouring from the wine-kettle. Feng Zi-ying drank them standing, one after the other, each in a single breath.
‘Now come on,’ said Bao-yu, ‘let’s hear about this “lucky accident” before you go!’
Feng Zi-ying laughed:
‘Couldn’t tell it properly just now,’ he said. ‘It’s somethin’ that needs a special party all to itself. I’ll invite you all round to my place another day and you shall have the details then. There’s a favour I want to ask too, by the bye, so we’ll be able to talk about that then as well.’
He made a determined movement towards the door.
‘Now you’ve got us all peeing ourselves with curiosity!’ said Xue Pan. ‘You might at least tell us when this party is going to be, to put us out of our suspense.’
‘Not more than ten days’ time and not less than eight,’ said Feng Zi-ying; and going out into the courtyard, he jumped on his horse and clattered away.
Having seen him off, the others went in again, reseated themselves at table, and resumed their potations. When the party finally broke up, Bao-yu returned to the Garden in a state of cheerful inebriation. Aroma, who had had no idea what the summons from Jia Zheng might portend and was still wondering anxiously what had become of him, at once demanded to know the cause of his condition. He gave her a full account of what had happened.
‘Well really!’ said Aroma. ‘Here were we practically beside ourselves with anxiety, and all the time you were there enjoying yourself! You might at least have sent word to let us know you were all right.’
‘I was going to send word,’ said Bao-yu. ‘Of course I was. But then old Feng arrived and it put it out of my mind.’
At that moment Bao-chai walked in, all smiles.
‘I hear you’ve made a start on the famous present,’ she said.
‘But surely you and your family must have had some already?’ said Bao-yu.
Bao-chai shook her head:
‘Pan was very pressing that I should have some, but I refused. I told him to save it for other people. I know I’m not really the right sort of person for such superior delicacies. If I were to eat any, I should be afraid of some frightful nemesis overtaking me.’
A maid poured tea for her as she spoke, and conversation of a desultory kind proceeded between sips.
Our narrative returns now to Dai-yu.
Having been present when Bao-yu received his summons, Dai-yu, too, was greatly worried about him – the more so as the day advanced and he had still not returned. Then in the evening, some time after dinner, she heard that he had just got back and resolved to go over and ask him exactly what had happened. She was sauntering along on the way there when she caught sight of Bao-chai some distance ahead of her, just entering Bao-yu’s courtyard. Continuing to amble on, she came presently to Drenched Blossoms Bridge, from which a large number of different kinds of fish were to be seen swimming about in the water below. Dai-yu did not know what kinds of fish they were, but they were so beautiful that she had to stop and admire them, and by the time she reached the House of Green Delights, the courtyard gate had been shut for the night and she was obliged to knock for admittance.
Now it so happened that Skybright had just been having a quarrel with Emerald, and being thoroughly out of temper, was venting some of her ill-humour on the lately arrived Bao-chai, complaining sotto voce behind her back about ‘people who were always inventing excuses to come dropping in and who kept other people staying up half the night when they would like to be in bed’. A knock at the gate coming in the midst of these resentful mutterings was enough to make her really angry.
‘They’ve all gone to bed,’ she shouted, not even bothering to inquire who the caller was. ‘Come again tomorrow!’
Dai-yu was aware that Bao-yu’s maids often played tricks on one another, and it occurred to her that the girl in the courtyard, not recognizing her voice, might have mistaken her for another maid and be keeping her locked out for a joke. She therefore called out again, this time somewhat louder than before:
‘Come on! Open up, please! It’s me.’
Unfortunately Skybright had still not recognized the voice.
‘I don’t care who you are,’ she replied bad-temperedly. ‘Master Bao’s orders are that I’m not to let anyone in.’
Dumbfounded by her insolence, Dai-yu stood outside the gate in silence. She could not, however much she felt like it, give vent to her anger in noisy expostulation. ‘Although they are always telling me to treat my Uncle’s house as my own,’ she reflected, ‘I am still really an outsider. And now that Mother and Father are both dead and I am on my own, to make a fuss about a thing like this when I am living in someone else’s house could only lead to further unpleasantness.’
A big tear coursed, unregarded, down her cheek.
She was still standing there irresolute, unable to decide whether to go or stay, when a sudden volley of talk and laughter reached her from inside. It resolved itself, as she listened attentively, into the voices of Bao-yu and Bao-chai.
An even bitterer sense of chagrin took possession of her. Suddenly, as she hunted in her mind for some possible reason for her exclusion, she remembered the events of the morning and concluded that Bao-yu must think she had told on him to his parents and was punishing her for her betrayal.
‘But I would never betray you!’ she expostulated with him in her mind. ‘Why couldn’t you have asked first, before letting your resentment carry you to such lengths ? If you won’t see me today, does that mean that from now on we are going to stop seeing each other altogether?’
The more she thought about it the more distressed she became.
Chill was the green moss pearled with
dew And chill was the wind in the avenue;
but Dai-yu, all unmindful of the unwholesome damp, had withdrawn into the shadow of a flowering fruit-tree by the corner of the wall, and grieving now in real earnest, began to cry as though her heart would break. And as if Nature herself were affected by the grief of so beautiful a creature, the crows who had been roosting in the trees round about flew up with a great commotion and removed themselves to another part of the Garden, unable to endure the sorrow of her weeping.
Tears filled each flower and grief their hearts perturbed,
And silly birds were from their nests disturbed.
The author of the preceding couplet has given us a quatrain in much the same vein:
Few in this world fair Frowner’s looks surpassed,
None matched her store of sweetness unexpressed.
The first sob scarcely from her lips had passed
When blossoms fell and birds flew off distressed.
As Dai-yu continued weeping there alone, the courtyard door suddenly opened with a loud creak and someone came out.
But in order to find out who it was, you will have to wait for the next volume.
EXPLICIT PRIMA PARS LAPIDIS HISTORIAE
Appendix
The ‘Twelve Beauties of Jinling’ and the
‘Dream of Golden Days’ Song-cycle
We know from Red Inkstone’s Commentary that Xueqin’s final chapter would have contained Disenchantment’s Roster of hovers, a table in which the sixty names of the novel’s female characters would have been divided into five groups of twelve with the names inside each group arranged according to her own peculiar system of categorization. Thus the first place in each group would have been awarded for ‘pure love’, the second for ‘conscientious love’, and so on.
The pictures and verses in the three registers which Bao-yu looks at in chapter 5 contained cryptic indications of the fate in store for each of the thirty-six girls in the first three groups.
The first thing he looks at is the first page of the register for the third group. The picture, of a cloud-covered sky, and the verses ‘Seldom the moon shines in a cloudless sky, etc’ refer to the sad fate of Bao-yu’s maid Skybright – a simple play on the meaning of her name.
Next comes the second girl of the third group: Aroma. The bunch of flowers in the picture stands for her surname Hua, which means ‘Flowers’. The mat, likewise, is a rebus for her Chinese name, Xi-ren. In the verses which follow, the ‘sweetest flower’ and the ‘rich perfume’ once more refer to her name,’ Flowers Aroma’, and ‘the player fortune favoured’ is the female impersonator Jiang Yu-han whom she eventually married, in spite of her earlier insistence that she would remain unwed.
Bao-yu then turns to the Supplementary Register No. 1, which concerns the girls in the second group. This time he looks only at the first picture. It stands for Caltrop. The rebus, however, represents not’ Caltrop’ but the name she was known by as a little girl before she was kidnapped: Ying-lian, which means ‘lotus’. Caltrop was persecuted and, in the dénouement originally planned by Xueqin, finally done to death by Xue Pan’s detestable wife Xia Jin-gui, whose name means ‘cassia’. The meaning of the picture is now self-evident. In the poem the mysterious ‘two earths’ and ‘single tree’ combine to make the Chinese character for gui ‘cassia’. The meaning of the second couplet, therefore, is that when Xia Jin-gui appears on the scene, Caltrop’s fate will be sealed.
The mysterious verses chanted by the monk in chapter 1 (p. 56) at a time when Caltrop was known only by the name of Ying-lian, refer to her, rather perversely, as ‘Caltrop’:
‘That caltrop-glass which shines on melting snow’.
The ‘melting snow’ refers to Xue Pan, whose surname, Xue, sounds the same as the Chinese word for ‘snow’. She is called ‘caltrop-glass’ because in ancient times the caltrop motif was used in the ornamentation of mirror-backs.
Bao-yu next turns to the Main Register, which contains the fates of the twelve female characters in the first group. The order is the same as in the song-cycle ‘A Dream of Golden Days’ which is performed for Bao-yu’s benefit on pp. 139-44, viz.:
1. and 2. Lin Dai-yu and Xue Bao-chai
3. Yuan-chun
4. Tan-chun
5. Shi Xiang-yun
6. Adamantina
7. Ying-chun
8. Xi-chun
9. Wang Xi-feng
10. Qiao-jie
11. Li Wan
12. Qin-shi
First ‘1 and 2’ needs explaining.
From various hints in the commentary we can deduce that Bao-chai and Dai-yu, unlike most of the book’s female characters, are not modelled on real persons but represent two complementary aspects of a single ideal woman. In other words, Dai-yu is all the things that Bao-chai is not, and vice-versa. The ideal woman they add up to appears briefly in the person of little Two-in-one towards the end of Bao-yu’s dream. This is probably the reason for the otherwise unaccountable fact that these two characters, the most important female characters in the book, have only a single picture and a single set of verses between them in the Register. In the song-cycle it is possible to say that the First Song is about Bao-chai and the Second Song about Dai-yu; but it would be equally possible to say that the first is about both and the second about Dai-yu only, or that the first and second are both mainly about Bao-yu; so even here there is a special treatment for which there must have been a special reason.
1. and 2. Lin Dai-yu and Xue Bao-chai
The picture is a simple rebus. Two trees make up the Chinese character for ‘Lin’, whilst ‘jade belt’ is an inversion of ‘Dai-yu ‘: the ‘Dai’ of Dai-yu’s name really means’ eye-black’, but it sounds the same as the word for ‘belt’, and yu means ‘jade’. The pile of snow is a rebus for Bao-chai’s surname Xue, which sounds the same as the Chinese word for ‘snow’. ‘Gold hairpin’ is her name Bao-chai, which means ‘precious hairpin’. The ‘greenwood’ in line three of the poem is Dai-yu’s surname again (Jin means ‘forest’).
In the First Song the ‘marriage rites of gold and jade’ refers to the marriage of Bao-chai (gold) and Bao-yu (jade). ‘Stone’ and ‘flower’ are, of course, the avatars of Bao-yu and Dai-yu. The ‘crystalline snow’ stands for Bao-chai’s surname Xue, and the ‘fairy wood forlorn’ for Dai-yu’s surname Lin.
The Second Song is self-explanatory.
3. Yuan-chun
I think the bow in the picture is intended to be a pun on the Chinese word for ‘palace’. The word for ‘citron’ is yuan, a rebus for Yuan-chun. The ‘three springs’ are, of course, Ying-chun, Tan-chun and Xi-chun. ‘Hare’ and ‘tiger’ are two of the animal equivalents of the astrological signs by which Chinese years ate named. Yuan-chun died at the end of a Tiger year and just before the beginning of a Rabbit one. If this were a real date it would have to mean 1735, but it is hardly likely to be.
The Third Song is puzzling in terms of what we are told about Yuan-chun elsewhere in the novel. The Imperial Concubine lives (and in the 40-chapter Supplement dies) not ‘far from home’ but in the Imperial Palace at Peking a few streets away. Xueqin evidently wrote the song-cycle at a stage in the novel’s evolution when he was still sticking fairly closely to historical facts. For example, the whole of chapter 5 seems to assume that the place where Bao-yu’s family lives is Jinling (i.e. Nanking). If we remember that the character of Yuan-chun is modelled on a daughter of Cao Yin who married the Manchu prince Nersu, it at once becomes clear why ‘So far the road back home did seem’. The Caos lived in Nanking and Prince Nersu and his consort lived in Peking, a thousand miles away. There is nothing in Gao E’s version about Yuan-chun appearing to her parents at the time of her death in a warning dream. Possibly Xueqin transferred the passage which contained this to fill out the rewritten account of Qin-shi’s death. There is certainly something rather unconvincing about the words of the apparition that Xi-feng sees in chapter 13 coming from the mouth of a person like Qin-shi.
4. Tan-chun
Throughout the novel Tan-chun is repeatedly associated with the image of a kite. It is her leitmotiv. Thus in chapter 22 of this volume ‘a kite’ is the answer to the riddle she makes up for Grandmother Jia’s party.
Tan-chun was the ablest and most intelligent of the Three Springs – a sort of junior version of Xi-feng without the crookedness and venom. Her fate was to be married off to a young man holding a post in a distant province, where she would have no hope of ever seeing her family again. The Fourth Song simply repeats the imagery of the boat carrying the weeping
bride away to her remote matrimonial exile.
5. Shi Xiang-yun
The picture is a rebus of Xiang-yun’s name. Xiang is the river which flows northwards through the province of Hunan jnto Lake Dongting. Yun means ‘cloud’. Chu was the ancient name of the Hunan-Hupeh area of which Lake Dongting is the centre.
Shi Xiang-yun was Grandmother Jia’s little great-niece. Orphaned in her infancy, she was brought up by a harsh and unloving uncle and aunt. Her fate was to be blissfully happy in her marriage (almost the only young woman in the novel who was) but to lose her young husband a short time after it.
In the Fifth Song ‘the clouds of Gao-tang’ and ‘the waters of the Xiang’ allude once more to her name Xiang-yun. Gao-tang was the name of a mountain in the ancient kingdom of Chu which was believed to be the seat of a goddess. She was the patroness of lovers’ embraces and of the nuptial couch. The lines about the Xiang’s waters and the clouds of Gao-tang therefore refer also to the fleetingness of Xiang-yun’s marital bliss.
6. Adamantina
Strictly speaking, the nun Adamantina’s Chinese name means not ‘diamond’ but ‘jade’. Hence the jade in the picture. She is the only one of the twelve not related in any way to the Jia family, though she lived for several years with Bao-yu and the others in Prospect Garden.
Adamantina had a mania for cleanliness and a morbid obsession with purity, but ended up in a brothel after being kidnapped and ravished by robbers. Neither the verses in the Register nor the words of the Sixth Song present any difficulties.
7. Ying-chun
Ying-chun, the eldest of the Three Springs, was married by her callous parents, despite protests from the rest of the family, to the unspeakable Sun Shao-zu, a drunkard, gambler and libertine who maltreated her. The ‘old fable’ refers to the well-known tale of Master Dong-guo and the wolf of Zhong-shan. The story appears in many versions and was even made into an opera by the sixteenth century playwright Kang Hai. It tells of a simple-minded Mohist scholar who saves a wolf∗ from the huntsmen, only to be informed, when the huntsmen have gone, that the wolf is feeling hungry and intends to eat him for its dinner. The ‘wolf of Zhong-shan’ is therefore a symbol not only of ferocity but also of ingratitude. The implication is that Sun and his family were in some way indebted to the Jias. A family called Sun was in fact related to the Caos by marriage and the Caos had connections of some sort in Shansi, of which Zhong-shan is a part, so perhaps there is more in this riddle than meets the eye.