by Cao Xueqin
‘“And after three years there shall be no more famine nor hunger in the land”,’ Bao-chai intoned. (She had wandered off in the course of Tan-chun’s exposition and was examining some calligraphy on the wall.)
‘It’s a very good idea,’ said Li Wan. ‘If we could really do this, I’m sure Lady Wang would be pleased. It’s not so much the saving of money that’s important; but if there are going to be people whose special job is to look after the Garden and they are allowed to make a little money out of it as well, then what with “the allurement of status” on the one hand and “the incentive of gain” on the other, they are sure to make a good job of it.’
‘It needed you to suggest this, miss,’ said Patience. ‘My mistress has thought of something like this in the past, but she hasn’t liked to mention it to anyone, because she thought that now all you young ladies are living in the Garden you might feel that we ought to be spending more on it rather than less and if she had people snooping around in it making economies you might feel that that really was the last straw.’
Bao-chai walked over and began feeling Patience’s face:
‘Open your mouth, Patience: I want to see what your teeth are made of. Ever since early this morning you’ve been keeping up this tune. You never give Miss Tan credit for anything. You never admit that Mrs Lian is less than perfect and that there are things she may not have thought of. Whenever Miss Tan has finished saying something, you come back at her with the same refrain: your mistress has thought of that too, only for some compelling reason or other she hasn’t been able to do anything about it. This time you tell us that she didn’t like to save money by putting the Garden under supervision because of us living there.’
She turned to the others:
‘She’s right, of course. If you do hand this Garden over to a few of the old women to look after, they will naturally be unwilling that a single fruit or flower that they have charge over should be picked. Obviously where we are concerned they will not dare to say anything; but it is sure to prove a source of endless quarrelling with the maids. Patience is farseeing enough to realize this and, in her own inimitable way, without fear or flattery, she gives us warning. How tactful she is! Even if we weren’t on good terms with her mistress, I think after hearing Patience we should be shamed into making our peace with her!’
‘And I was so angry this morning,’ said Tan-chun. ‘When I heard that Patience had come, I suddenly thought of her mistress and the insufferable behaviour of those henchwomen of hers – which she, no doubt, encourages – and it made me even angrier. But Patience was so quiet and timid, like a poor little mouse that the cat has been after, and stood there all the time so meekly; and when she did speak, it was not to remind me of the many kindnesses that I owe her mistress, but to tell me that if I decided to make any changes, I should be doing her mistress a kindness which she was “sure she would appreciate”. It really wrung my heart when she said that. Not only did I stop feeling angry then; I felt ashamed. “Here am I,” I thought, “only a young girl, but behaving in such a way that nobody can ever like me or care what happens to me. When shall I ever be in a position to do anyone a kindness?”’
At this point her emotion got the better of her and she shed some tears. The others, moved by the sincerity with which she had spoken and remembering how Aunt Zhao was constantly maligning her and making things difficult for her with Lady Wang, were themselves moved to tears of sympathy; but they did their best to rally her.
‘What better return can we possibly make Lady Wang for placing her trust in us,’ said Li Wan, ‘than to take advantage of the fact that things are a little quieter now by discussing some much-needed economies? What do you want to go bringing in an unimportant matter like that for?’
‘I’ve got the gist of your plan, Miss,’ said Patience. ‘All you need do now is tell us which of the women you want to appoint and we can go straight ahead with it.’
‘That’s all very well,’ said Tan-chun, ‘but you ought to have a word with your mistress about it first. It was a bit presumptuous of us to go poking about and making these little economies in the first place – I should never have ventured to do so if I hadn’t known that your mistress was so understanding: if she’d been a stupid or touchy person, she might have suspected me of trying to shine at her expense – All the same, the very least we can do is to consult her first.’
‘Very well,’ said Patience pleasantly. ‘I’ll go and tell her, then.’
She was gone for some time, but returned eventually, full of smiles:
‘I knew it wasn’t necessary to go. Of course she agrees. A good idea like this: how could she do otherwise?’
As soon as Tan-chun had received this confirmation, she and Li Wan sent for the list of women employed in the Garden. Bao-chai joined them in scrutinizing it and in making a provisional selection of those most likely to be suitable. These were summoned forthwith and Li Wan, addressing them in a group, outlined the scheme to them in general terms. The women were enthusiastic.
‘Let me have the bamboo,’ said one of them. ‘I’ll have double the amount growing within a year. I can keep you in bamboo-shoots for the kitchen and pay you an annual rent for it as well.’
‘Let me have that bit of rice-paddy,’ said another. ‘I’ll keep you in grain for your cage-birds so that you don’t have to spend money on feed, and I’ll pay you annual rent.’
Before Tan-chun could say anything, someone arrived with a message:
‘The doctor’s arrived. He’s waiting to come into the Garden to have a look at Miss Shi.’
‘Just a moment!’ said Patience as the women went scurrying off to escort the doctor. ‘There’s no point in a hundred people going if there isn’t anyone responsible to receive him.’
‘Wu Xin-deng’s wife and Mrs Shan are already waiting for him at the Painted Gate on the south-west corner of the Garden,’ said the woman who had brought the message.
When Patience heard that, she made no further objection.
After the women had gone, Tan-chun looked at Bao-chai inquiringly:
‘Well?’
Bao-chai laughed:
“‘He who shows most enthusiasm in the beginning proves often to be a sluggard in the end; and he who promises the fairest is often thinking more of his profit than of his performance.”’
Tan-chun nodded in agreement and praised the aptness of the quotation. She turned to the register once more and pointed out a few more names for the other two to consider. Patience fetched a brush and inkstone for her to write with.
‘Mamma Zhu is a very reliable body,’ said the others of one of these. ‘Her old man used to be a bamboo specialist and her son still is; it’s in the family. She’s the one we should put in charge of all the bamboos in the Garden. And Mamma Tian comes from a farming family. The farm at Sweet-rice Village may be only a plaything and not meant for serious cultivation, but if she were in charge of all those vegetable and paddy strips and doing the things that needed doing at the proper times, we should probably get a lot more out of it.’
‘When you think of the amount of land that goes with them, it seems a pity that All-spice Court and Green Delights don’t produce anything marketable,’ said Tan-chun.
‘Oh, but they do!’ said Li Wan. ‘Especially All-spice Court. Half the aromatics sold in perfumers’ shops and on the herb stalls at markets and temple fairs come from plants like the ones grown in All-spice. I wouldn’t be surprised if there were more profit to be had out of them than out of anything else that this Garden produces. And as for Green Delights: to mention nothing else, just look at all the flowers produced by that rosa rugosa during the spring and summer months! And all the rambler roses and monthly roses and rosa glabra and honeysuckle and wistaria on the pergolas: think how much you could make out of them if the flowers were dried properly and sold to tea-merchants for flavouring!’
Tan-chun nodded enthusiastically.
‘But,’ she reflected, ‘we haven’t got anyone who knows the
art of flower-drying, have we?’
‘The mother of Miss Bao’s maid Oriole knows all about that sort of thing,’ said Patience. ‘Don’t you remember her drying a lot of flowers once and filling little baskets and gourds with them to make us presents?’
‘Is this the thanks I get for praising you?’ Bao-chai asked Patience.
‘What can you mean?’ said the others, in some surprise.
‘You can’t possibly give the job to her,’ said Bao-chai. ‘You have so many able and willing women of your own who won’t be getting any of these jobs: they are going to think very poorly of me if they know that I am responsible for bringing in an outsider. I can think of someone that you could give this job to, though: Old Mamma Ye at Green Delights – Tealeaf’s mother. She’s a very honest old woman; and what’s more, she is on very good terms with Oriole’s mother. You’d much better give the job to her. She will probably consult Oriole’s mother whenever there is anything she is not sure about in any case. She may even elect to hand over to her altogether. But that would be entirely a private matter between the two of them. The other servants might resent it, but at least they couldn’t blame us. The advantage of this arrangement is that it would look fair as well as being effective.’
Li Wan and Patience agreed. Tan-chun was more sceptical:
‘That may be; but what if cupidity proves stronger than friendship?’
‘Not likely in this case,’ said Patience. ‘Only the other day Mamma Ye was invited to become Oriole’s godmother. The three of them had a little party to celebrate. The two families are very close.’
Tan-chun dropped her objection and proceeded, with the others, to deliberate on the rest of their choices – all of them women whom the four of them had mentally noted in the past for their dependability. As each one’s selection was confirmed, she made a little circle with her writing-brush against the corresponding name in the register.
Shortly after this the women arrived back again to report that the doctor had gone and to hand in the prescription he had left. After studying it, Li Wan, Tan-chun and Bao-chai sent one of the women to obtain the drugs from outside and to supervise the making-up and administering of the medicine. Then Li Wan and Tan-chun told the women which of them were to have the cultivation of which parts of the Garden and what the conditions of their tenure were to be:
‘You will be expected to give us, in due season, a fixed amount of your crops for our own use; but apart from that it will be up to you to make whatever profit from them you can. Accounts will be submitted and dues paid at the end of the year.’
‘I’ve been having second thoughts about that,’ said Tan-chun. ‘If you are submitting annual accounts and paying dues, presumably it will be to the Office. But that means another lot of people with control over you and another layer skimmed off your profits. Now in thinking up this new arrangement and appointing you ourselves, we are already in a sense going above their heads, which is sure to anger them. They probably won’t dare to say anything about it now, but there will be nothing to stop them getting their own back later on when you go round to settle accounts with them at the end of the year. And there’s another thing. If they are going to be in on this, they are sure to expect a share of the produce. Whatever you agree to give us in the course of each year, they will expect the equivalent of half the amount for themselves. That’s an old, established rule. Everyone knows that. But since the new arrangement is our creation, I say let’s keep it out of their hands altogether. If there’s to be an annual settling of accounts, let it be done here, internally.’
‘If you ask me,’ said Bao-chai, ‘I don’t think there should be any settling of accounts at all. You’d always be finding that this one had too much and that one too little. It would only be a lot of extra trouble. Why not get each of them to take over some regular item of your expenditure and pay for it out of their profits? That will keep it all inside the Garden. I’ve just been running over in my mind what your regular expenses are. They aren’t very many. There’s hair-oil, cosmetics, incense, paper: every mistress and her maids get a fixed amount of those every month. Then there are brushes, dust-pans, feather-dusters and food for the livestock (birds, rabbits, deer and so forth). That’s really all. Now suppose instead of drawing money from Accounts for all those things we gave these women the responsibility of paying for them: how much do you reckon the saving would be?’
‘They’re small items in themselves,’ said Patience, ‘but I should think if you added them all together the total annual saving would be well over four hundred taels.’
‘There you are!’ said Bao-chai. ‘Four hundred a year, eight hundred in two years: you could buy a small house for letting with that or add half an acre of poor farm-land to your land-holdings. But though there should be quite a lot left over after they have covered the expenses we are assigning to them, we want them to have a little something to spend on themselves after working hard all through the year; and though, from our point of view, the main object of these operations is economy, we don’t want to overdo it. There would be no point in saving an extra two or three hundred taels if it meant resorting to undignified methods in order to do so. What we are now proposing means that Accounts will be paying out four or five hundred taels a year less than they do now without anyone outside feeling the pinch. And as for inside, the women doing these jobs will be getting a little extra for themselves, the ones not doing them will be able to relax a bit, the Garden’s stock of trees and flowers will thrive and increase through being better cared for, and we shall be better off when we have this regular supply of the produce for our own use – all this without any loss of dignity. Whereas if we went all out to economize with no other consideration but making money in mind, no doubt we should have little difficulty in squeezing more out, but the effect of paying everything back into the common account would be wails of protest from everyone, both inside the Garden and out, and a consequent loss of dignity that in a household like yours would be quite unacceptable.
‘Altogether there must be several dozen old women working in this Garden. If you give the money-making jobs to these few here and leave the others out in the cold, the others are going to complain that it isn’t fair. Now as I said, there’s still going to be quite a lot of money left over when they’ve finished paying these various expenses for you, and I think we should be letting them off a bit too lightly if we let them keep all of it. Why don’t we say that every year, no matter how much or how little they have made, they are to pay so many strings of cash into a common pool which will be shared out among all the other women? Although those others won’t any longer have anything to do with the upkeep of the Garden, they are responsible, day and night, for keeping an eye on the other servants; they have the responsibility of opening and closing the gates, which means that they have to get up earlier and go to bed later than everyone else; and whenever any of us go out, whatever the weather, even if it is raining or snowing heavily, they have to carry sedans, punt boats, draw sledges – in fact do any heavy work that needs to be done. Since they work so hard in the Garden from one year’s end to the next, it seems only fair that if any money is going to be made out of the Garden, they should have a share in it. And there’s another reason for this, if it doesn’t seem too petty-minded to mention it’ – Bao-chai turned to the women to explain – ‘If you think only of how much you can make out of this for yourselves and don’t let the others have a share, they are sure to feel resentful even if they don’t like to say anything and will try to make up for it by misappropriating what they can for their own use – filching a fruit here and a flower there whenever they have the opportunity. Whereas if they know in advance that they are going to get a share of whatever you make from your produce, they will be as anxious as you are that none of it is stolen and will even keep an eye on it for you when you aren’t able to watch over it yourselves.’
The women were quick to see the force of this argument – no control by the Office, no settling of accounts with X
i-feng, only a few strings of cash to pay out every year. They were all of them delighted and accepted these conditions unanimously.
‘Better than being pushed around by Accounts,’ they said. ‘If we were paying them anything, they’d want a dash on top of it for themselves.’
Those of the women present who were not getting one of the gardening jobs, when they heard that they were going to be given money at the end of every year without having to do anything to earn it, were, if anything, even more delighted – though for politeness’ sake they pretended to demur:
‘After all the hard work they’ll be putting into it they ought to have a bit extra for themselves. Doesn’t seem right that we should sit back and collect the jackpot without having to do anything for it!’
‘Don’t refuse the offer,’ said Bao-chai, smiling. ‘It’s no less than you deserve. As long as you continue to keep a close watch on things and don’t get slack and allow people to drink and gamble. Otherwise it puts me in such an awkward position. This isn’t really my business, of course; but as you have no doubt heard, my aunt has repeatedly urged me to take over responsibility for it on the grounds that Mrs Zhu is too busy and the other young ladies are too young to attend to it. I can’t refuse her, knowing that to do so would be deliberately adding to her worries. She has such indifferent health and so many household cares and I have so little to do myself that even if she were only a neighbour and not my aunt, I could scarcely refuse to help her. It’s no good worrying that I shall make myself unpopular. If I care only about being popular and allow people to drink and gamble as much as they like, sooner or later someone who has drunk too much will start a quarrel. If an incident like that were to happen, how should I be able to look my aunt in the face? And think what it would be like for you. You would have forfeited your reputation as responsible seniors that you have taken so many years to build up. After all, the reason all these dozens of maids and the whole of this great Garden have been placed under your supervision is because you have served here under three or four generations of masters and are considered more dependable than any of the other servants. At a time when we all ought to be doing our best to keep up appearances, you will have allowed other people to drink and gamble. It will be bad enough if my aunt gets to hear of it and gives you a talking-to; but what if you are found out by the stewardesses and they decide to discipline you themselves without bothering to tell my aunt? What a disgrace, that people of your years should be punished by servants younger than yourselves! They would be within their rights, of course. As stewardesses they have power over all other members of the staff. But how much better if you conducted yourselves in such a way that you could keep your self-respect and not be in a position where they had you at their mercy! That is why I have thought of this plan for bringing you in a little extra money. I am hoping that everyone will now collaborate to make this Garden such a model of discipline and good management that those who have the power to intervene, when they see how tight a discipline you are able to keep by yourselves, will decide that there is nothing for them to worry about and will respect you and leave you alone. Then we shall feel that the trouble we have taken in planning this little extra income for you was justified. Think about it!’