by Cao Xueqin
‘Now,’ said Grandmother Jia when everybody was inside, ‘you must forget about seniority now and sit down where I put you.’
She made Mrs Li and Mrs Xue sit at one end, facing south, and placed herself close to them on the east side, with Xiang-yun squeezed in on one side of her and Dai-yu and Bao-qin on the other.
‘You must sit next to your mother,’ she told Bao-yu. So Lady Xing and Lady Wang came next on the east side with Bao-yu sandwiched between them.
She put Bao-chai on the west side at the end nearest to Mrs Li, then came the Three Springs, then Lou-shi with her little boy Jia Jun, then Li Wan and You-shi with little Jia Lan squeezed in between them, and finally Xi-feng.
Jia Rong’s wife, Hu-shi, sat on her own at the north end, round the corner from Xi-feng.
When they were all seated, Grandmother Jia called to Cousin Zhen and the menfolk to leave, saying that she herself would shortly be going off to bed. Hearing her call, Cousin Zhen came hurrying inside, bringing the others with him.
‘Go away, go away!’ said Grandmother Jia. ‘Don’t come in here! They’ve only just sat down, they don’t want to have to all get up again. Off to bed with you! You’ve got important things to do in the morning.’
‘Very good,’ said Cousin Zhen. ‘I’ll leave Rong behind then, to pour the drinks for you.’
‘Ah yes,’ said Grandmother Jia. ‘I’d forgotten him.’
Cousin Zhen and Jia Lian withdrew. Pleased to be so soon released, they arranged for Jia Cong and Jia Huan to be escorted back to their own apartments and went off, as they had planned to do if possible, to spend the rest of the night together on the town. But that is no part of our story.
‘I was just thinking,’ said Grandmother Jia when they had gone, ‘– all these people enjoying themselves here tonight: all we lacked was a young married couple to make it seem like a proper reunion. I was forgetting about Rong. Sit next to your wife, Rong. Let’s see you both together.’
Just then some of the women came in bringing a playbill with them. The players were preparing to resume.
‘Oh, just as we were beginning to enjoy a little conversation,’ said Grandmother Jia. ‘Now we shan’t be able to hear ourselves speak. And those poor children must be getting dreadfully cold after so many hours in the open. Why don’t we give them a rest? Call our own troupe over and let them do something on this stage. The other ones can stay here and watch them.’
With answering cries the women went out to make the necessary arrangements. Messengers were sent, some into Prospect Garden to summon the young actresses, others to the inner gate to requisition some pages. When the pages presented themselves at the green-room door they were told to take away all the grown-up members of the visiting troupe and entertain them elsewhere so that only the boy-actors should be present when the little actresses arrived. These last were to be observed shortly afterwards, issuing from the gallery at the corner entrance to the courtyard, preceded by their chief singing instructor and accompanied by a number of women carrying bundles. There had not been time to bring the wardrobe-boxes, so they had had to make a guess at the three or four plays that Grandmother Jia was likeliest to want to hear and hurriedly bundle together the costumes that would be needed for their performance.
Led by the women who had summoned them, Élégante and the rest entered the heated back room of the hall, made their curtsies to Grandmother Jia and the rest of the company, and then stood, arms held stiffly at their sides, awaiting instructions.
Grandmother Jia smiled at them benevolently:
‘Doesn’t your teacher give you a holiday even for First Moon? Dear, dear, dear! – Well now, what are you going to sing for us? We’ve just been listening to The Orphan’s Revenge, which was so noisy that it’s given us all headaches. We’d like to hear something a bit quieter now. I ought to tell you that we have a very discriminating audience here tonight. There’s Mrs Xue and Mrs Li here who both come from families which used to keep their own troupes of players and who have heard heaven knows how many good performances between them; there are some young ladies here who know much more than our own girls about plays and music; and the troupe you saw just now outside, though they are only children, belong to a famous connoisseur and are better than many commercial companies of grown-up players. So if we don’t want to disgrace ourselves, we shall have to be on our best. Now let’s see. Let’s try to think of something a bit different to show them. Suppose we get Parfumée to sing “The Dream Recalled” from The Return of the Soul with just a fiddle to accompany her – leaving out all the woodwind. How would that be for a start?’
‘Just the thing, Your Old Ladyship,’ said Élégante drily. ‘We’re certainly not good enough for Mrs Xue and Mrs Li to want to see us in full performance. They just want an idea of what our diction and voice-production are like.’
‘Quite so,’ said Grandmother Jia.
The two ladies referred to were much diverted by Élégante’s reply.
‘I believe you and Her Old Ladyship are pulling our legs,’ they told her.
‘Not at all,’ said Grandmother Jia. ‘These girls are trained only for our own private amusement, not as an investment. We don’t hire them out, like some people. So they really aren’t up to commercial standards.’
She turned to Althée, the performer of ‘painted face’ parts:
‘You can do “Hui-ming Takes the Letter” from The Western Chamber. Don’t bother to make up for it, though. I think those two scenes should be enough to give our guests some idea of what you can do. Put all you’ve got into it, now, or I shall have something to say to you!’
The little actresses went out. Those who were to play had soon got into their costumes and the performance began: first ‘The Dream Recalled’ and then ‘Taking the Letter’. The audience listened throughout with rapt attention. When the performance had ended, Aunt Xue observed that, though she had seen hundreds of different companies in her time, she had never before heard a performance in which the woodwind in the orchestra was silent.
‘Oh yes,’ said Grandmother Jia. ‘Take that “Chu River” aria the heroine sings in The House in Ping-kang Lane that we were listening to earlier in the evening. Quite often you can see productions which leave out the woodwind parts in the orchestral accompaniment. Instead they have the male lead playing a flute accompaniment on the stage. I agree, a whole sequence with only string accompaniment is unusual, but there’s nothing very special about it. It depends entirely on the individual preference of the person who owns the troupe.’
She pointed to Xiang-yun:
‘When I was this child’s age her grandfather had a troupe of young actresses one of whom was a very good qin-player. She took a number of qin-playing scenes like the famous one from The Western Chamber and the scene in which Miao-chang plays the qin in The Jade Hairpin and the “Eighteen Stanzas for the Barbarian Pipe” from the modern sequel to The Story of the Lute, and arranged them in a single sequence with qin accompaniment. That was rather impressive. More what-shall-I-say than the things we have just been listening to.’
‘Yes,’ the others agreed, ‘that does sound most unusual.’
Grandmother Jia called the women over and told them that she would now like Élégante and the others to perform an instrumental piece called Lantern Festival Moon. The women went out again to transmit her order. Meanwhile Jia Rong and his wife went round replenishing the winecups.
Xi-feng observed that Grandmother Jia was in very good spirits.
‘While the ballad-singers are still here,’ she said, ‘why don’t we get them to play “Spring Joy on Every Brow” for us and we can have a game of “Pass the Plum”?’
‘Oh yes, that’s a good game,’ said Grandmother Jia. ‘Just right for this time of year, too.’
Orders were given for a pair of drums to be fetched – special ‘drinker’s drums’ whose black lacquered sides were studded with patterns of brass nails – and handed to the blind women. Someone produced a flowering spray of red plum
for the game.
‘Now,’ said Grandmother Jia, ‘whoever’s hand the branch is in when the drumming stops must first drink a cup of wine and then they have to say something: but what shall it be?’
‘You can turn your hand to anything, Grannie,’ said Xi-feng, ‘but for those of us who aren’t so clever it won’t be much fun if it’s something that we’re no good at. I think it should be something that all of us can enjoy. Why not say that whoever the branch stops with must tell a joke?’
Everyone present knew that Xi-feng was a wonderful raconteuse with a seemingly inexhaustible stock of new and funny stories. The servants standing below in attendance seemed quite as much delighted by this proposal as the members of the family sitting around the table on the kang, and several little maids went racing off to inform sisters or cousins outside:
‘Quick, come inside! Mrs Lian is going to tell a joke.’
In no time at all the room was packed with maids.
The actresses had by now finished playing. Grandmother Jia, after first seeing to it that they were given some soup and a selection of the delicacies available, gave orders for the drumming to begin.
The blind women were practised performers in this game and deliberately varied the speed of the beat. Sometimes it would be as slow as the last drips of a water-clock, sometimes as fast as the rattle of dried beans poured from a bag, sometimes it would go galloping along like a runaway horse, sometimes it became a soft whisper interspersed with sudden bursts of sound to make you jump, like flashes of lightning in the darkness. When the beat was slow, the branch passed slowly from hand to hand; when it was hurried, the passing too grew faster. Then suddenly it stopped altogether while Grandmother Jia was holding it. This, in itself, was enough to make everyone laugh. Jia Rong quickly came round and filled up the old lady’s winecup.
‘Naturally Grandma is the lucky first,’ the others said. ‘You must let us share your luck, Grandma!’
‘The wine is no problem,’ said Grandmother Jia. ‘It’s the joke that’s worrying me.’
‘Come now, your jokes are better even than Feng’s, Grandma,’ they said. ‘Do tell us one. Make us all laugh.’
‘I don’t know any good new ones,’ said Grandmother Jia. ‘I’ll just have to put a bold face on it and do the best I can.’
She began her story.
‘In a certain family there were ten sons, all of whom were married, but of the girls they married only one, the youngest, was intelligent and nimble-witted and a good talker. The old couple doted on this clever daughter-in-law and day in day out found fault with the other nine. The other nine naturally resented this and took counsel together what they should do about it.
‘“At heart we are every bit as dutiful as she is,” they said, “but because the little wretch is so glib, father-in-law and mother-in-law only care for her. Isn’t there anything we can do about this injustice?”
‘Then one of the nine had an idea:
‘“Why don’t we go to the temple of Yama, the King of the Underworld, and ask him why, when our souls first went into human bodies, he gave that little horror a clever tongue and made all the rest of us so stupid?”
‘The others were delighted with this suggestion, and so next day they all went trooping off to the temple of King Yama and, after offering up incense, lay down on the steps of the altar and went to sleep. When they were asleep, the souls of the nine sisters-in-law waited and waited and waited, but King Yama didn’t come.
‘Presently, just as they were growing desperate, Monkey came bowling along on his cloud-trapeze, and seeing the nine souls there, lifted up his metal-clasped cudgel to strike them with. The souls knelt down in terror and begged him to spare them. Monkey asked them what they were doing there, so they told him their story. When they had finished, Monkey stamped his foot and sighed sympathetically.
‘“What a good job you met me here and not old Yama,” he said. “He wouldn’t have been able to help you at all.”
‘The nine souls implored him to tell them what they should do.
‘“Do but have compassion on us, Great Sage,” they said, “and our troubles will be over.”
‘“It’s quite simple,” said Monkey with a laugh. “The day that the ten of you were due to enter your human bodies, I happened to have been around at old Yama’s place and done a little piddle on the floor, and just before she was born, that little sister-in-law of yours drank it all up. That’s what gave her such a clever tongue. If clever tongues are all you want, I can do as much piddle for you as you like.”’
The story ended amidst laughter.
‘It’s a good job all of us are such stupid, tongue-tied creatures,’ said Xi-feng. ‘I should hate to think that any of us had drunk monkey’s piddle!’
You-shi and Lou-shi turned towards Li Wan, laughing:
‘I wonder who she thinks she’s fooling. It’s very clear which of us in this room is the one who drank monkey’s piddle!’
‘A joke is always the better for being apt,’ Aunt Xue observed.
While she was speaking, the drumming began again. The maids, who wanted only to hear Wang Xi-feng tell a joke, had come to a secret understanding with the blind women that if one of them coughed it would be a signal to stop, and when the branch had been round twice and had just reached Xi-feng for the second time, the maids all coughed and the drumming stopped. There was a shout of laughter from all present.
‘Ha!’ they said. ‘Now we’ve got you! Hurry up with your wine and tell us a good one – only don’t make us laugh so much that we get stomach-ache!’
Xi-feng thought for a few moments and then started:
‘A family was celebrating the First Moon festival, just as we are doing, admiring the lanterns and drinking wine together. It was a very lively party and everyone in the family was there: the grandmother, the great-grandmother, the daughters-in-law, the granddaughters-in-law, the great-granddaughters-in-law, the grandsons, the great-nephews, the great-grandsons, the great-great-grandsons, the great-little-medium-grandsons, the granddaughters, the great-nieces, the first cousins once removed, the first cousins twice removed, the second cousins two-and-a-half times removed – oh, goodness gracious me, it was a really lively party! –’
Her audience were already laughing.
‘She’s a caution!’ they said. ‘I wonder which of us she’s got it in for this time.’
‘Don’t you bring me into it,’ said You-shi, laughing: ‘I’ll tear your mouth for you!’
Xi-feng stood up and struck her hands together in mock despair:
‘Here am I going to all this trouble to entertain you and all you do is keep interrupting. All right then, I won’t go on.’
‘Go on, go on! Take no notice of them!’ said Grandmother Jia. ‘What happened then?’
‘What happened then?’ said Xi-feng. ‘Oh, there they all sat, and after drinking together all night long, they went to bed.’
She said this straight-faced and in a very matter-of-fact tone of voice. Her audience waited open-mouthed for her to continue, but nothing was forthcoming, and at last they realized, with a chill of disappointment, that that was all they were going to hear. After a long, old-fashioned look from Shi Xiang-yun she relented, however.
‘All right, let me tell you another story about people celebrating the First Moon festival.
‘Some men were taking an enormous rocket outside the city and a crowd of thousands had collected behind them to see them let it off. While they were still on their way, some impatient character who couldn’t bear to wait any longer put a lighted incense-stick to the touch-paper and lit the fuse. There was a great WHOOSH! and the rocket went off. Everyone burst out laughing and went off home – all except the man who had been underneath, carrying the rocket on his back. He just stood there all on his own, complaining what a rotten job the firework-maker had made of the rocket. He’d put it together so badly, he said, that all the gunpowder had trickled away before they’d had a chance to let it off.’
&nb
sp; ‘But surely he’d have heard it go off?’ said Xiang-yun.
‘He was stone deaf,’ said Xi-feng.
There was a burst of laughter from her audience. But they were still worried about her earlier story.
‘What about the other one you were telling? What did happen then? You really ought to finish it, you know.’
‘Oh how you do pester one!’ said Xi-feng, thumping the table in pretended annoyance. ‘Next day was the sixteenth; the party was over; the festival had ended. If you ask me, I think they were too busy clearing up and putting things away to know what had happened then.’
This brought another burst of laughter.
‘That’s two o’clock sounding outside,’ said Xi-feng. ‘I’m sure Grannie must be tired. If you ask me, I think we all ought to be like the deaf man’s firework and “trickle away”.’
You-shi, who in the vehemence of her mirth was rocking back and forth with a handkerchief stuffed in her mouth, stopped for a moment to point a minatory finger at Xi-feng:
‘She really is a caution, this one!’
‘She’s a caution all right, and no mistake!’ said Grandmother Jia. ‘By the way, talking of fireworks, why don’t we let ours off now? They will help us to overcome the effects of all that wine.’
At once Jia Rong jumped up and hurried out. Under his supervision a team of pages set up a number of framework stands in the courtyard on which fireworks were then fastened or hung. Though none of them particularly large ones, they were all imported tribute fireworks of the very highest quality. There were fireworks of all sorts, including a number of bangers. Dai-yu, being of a nervous disposition, was terrified of pops and bangs. Knowing this, Grandmother Jia hugged her to her bosom to comfort her. Aunt Xue offered the same protection to Xiang-yun, but Xiang-yun laughed and said that she didn’t mind the fireworks.
‘There’s nothing she likes better than letting them off herself,’ said Bao-chai. ‘She’s not afraid of fireworks!’