The Warning Voice

by Cao Xueqin

  The women were all smiles of pleasure:

  ‘You’re right, Miss Bao. Don’t worry, Mrs Zhu and young ladies both! We should be lost souls indeed if we didn’t show a bit of consideration for you after you have been so kind and thoughtful to us!’

  At that moment Lin Zhi-xiao’s wife came in:

  ‘The Zhen family from Nanking arrived in town yesterday. Today they have gone to the Palace to offer their felicitations. Some of their people have just arrived here to pay their respects. They have brought presents with them.’

  She held out the list of presents with both hands. Tan-chun took it from her and ran her eye over it:

  Imperial use decorated satins and mang satins

  12 lengths

  Imperial use satins, various

  12 lengths

  Imperial use gauzes, in different shades

  12 lengths

  Imperial use Palace taffetas

  12 lengths

  Official use satins, gauzes, taffetas and damasks in

  various colours

  24 lengths

  When Li Wan too had seen the list, she told Lin Zhi-xiao’s wife to use the largest size of gratuity packet for tipping the bearers with. She also sent someone to report to Grandmother Jia, who sent word back that Li Wan, Tan-chun and Bao-chai were to come over and inspect the presents. After they had done so, Li Wan told the women in charge of the store-room to wait until Lady Wang had got back and had a look at them before putting them into store.

  ‘The Zhens are rather special people,’ said Grandmother Jia. ‘You had better use one of the largest gratuity packets when you are tipping the bearers. And you’d better get some cloth-lengths ready: I expect we shall have some of their women arriving shortly, to pay their respects.’

  The words were scarcely out of her mouth when the arrival of four women from the Zhen household was announced. Grandmother Jia at once gave orders that they should be brought in. All four were sober matrons of forty years or more and so genteelly dressed that it would have been impossible to guess from their appearance that they were servants. When the formal salutations and the inquiries after Grandmother Jia’s health had been completed, the old lady called for footstools to be brought for them to sit on. They acknowledged the courtesy but waited until Bao-chai and the others were seated before they would sit down themselves. When Grandmother Jia asked them when they had arrived in town, they stood up again to reply:

  ‘We arrived yesterday. Today Her Ladyship has had to take our young lady to the Palace, so she has sent us to offer you her respects and ask after the young ladies.’

  ‘It’s many years since they have been to the capital,’ said Grandmother Jia. ‘It’s rather unexpected, that they should suddenly turn up like this.’

  The women smiled:

  ‘Yes, madam. They had an Imperial Summons to come this year.’

  ‘Have they all come?’ said Grandmother Jia.

  ‘No, madam. Her Old Ladyship and the young master and our fourth and fifth young ladies and the other ladies all stayed at home. Only Her Ladyship and our third young lady have accompanied the Master on this journey.’

  ‘Is your third young lady betrothed yet?’ said Grandmother Jia.

  ‘No, madam, not yet.’

  ‘Your first and second young ladies both married into families on very good terms with ours,’ said Grandmother Jia.

  ‘Yes, madam,’ said the spokeswoman. ‘Every year when they write home they tell us how much they are beholden to you for your kind concern.’

  Grandmother Jia laughed deprecatingly:

  ‘One could hardly call it that. Our families have known each other for so long and we are connected by marriage: it’s only right that we should take an interest in them. We are particularly fond of your second young lady. She is so unassuming, in spite of her rank. I think I could say, without offence, that we have grown quite attached to her.’

  The women laughed:

  ‘You are too polite, madam.’

  Grandmother Jia pursued her questioning:

  ‘Your young master lives with his grandmother, then?’

  ‘Yes, madam.’

  ‘How old is he? Has he started school yet?’

  ‘Thirteen this year,’ said the woman. ‘He has started school, but he is always playing truant. He has always been naughty, since he was little. He’s a good-looking boy, though, and his grandmother’s favourite, so there’s not much his father and mother can do about it.’

  Grandmother Jia was greatly diverted.

  ‘Just like us! And what is his name?’

  ‘Well, because she says he is her “treasure” and because he has such a milky-white complexion, his grandmother calls him “Bao-yu”. That means “Precious Jade”, you see.’

  Grandmother Jia turned to Li Wan, laughing:

  ‘Fancy that! He’s even called Bao-yu, too.’

  Li Wan inclined politely:

  ‘Coincidences over names have always been common, whether among contemporaries or among people of different periods.’

  ‘We did wonder, after he was given this name, whether there wasn’t some family of our acquaintance in the capital in which the name had already been used,’ said the woman; ‘but as it was ten or more years since we’d been there, we couldn’t remember for sure whether there was or not.’

  ‘It’s my grandson’s name,’ said Grandmother Jia. ‘Come here, someone.’

  ‘Hei!’ shouted the womenservants in attendance, and a few of them stepped forward.

  ‘Go over to the Garden and tell our Bao-yu to come here so that our visitors can have a look at him and tell us how he compares with their Bao-yu.’

  The women hurried off in obedience to her order and returned after ten minutes or so with Bao-yu in their midst. When the four women from the Zhen household saw him enter, they hurriedly rose to their feet.

  ‘You gave us quite a turn,’ they said. ‘If we hadn’t been here and had met you in some other place, we’d have thought that our own Bao-yu must have followed after to join us!’

  They took him by the hand and made much of him, plying him with all sorts of questions. Bao-yu smiled back at them and greeted them politely.

  ‘Well, how does he compare with yours?’ Grandmother Jia asked them.

  ‘It would appear that the two Bao-yus are very like each other from what they have already said,’ Li Wan remarked.

  ‘I doubt such a coincidence is possible,’ said Grandmother Jia. ‘Children of the upper classes, especially if they are reared delicately and provided they are not pock-marked or illfavoured, are all much of a muchness as far as good looks are concerned. There would be nothing remarkable in a slight resemblance between them.’

  ‘In appearance he is exactly like our Bao-yu,’ said the women; ‘but though Your Ladyship was saying just now that he is mischievous, I think your Bao-yu must be better-tempered than ours.’

  ‘Oh?’ said Grandmother Jia, immediately interested. ‘Why do you think that?’

  ‘Because he let us hold his hand just now when we talked to him. If it had been our young gentleman, he would have called us “old fools”. We are not allowed to lay a finger on any of his things even, let alone take him by the hand. The only servants he will have about him are young girls –’

  Before they could go on, Li Wan, Tan-chun and Bao-chai had burst out laughing. Grandmother Jia was laughing too:

  ‘I’m sure that if I were to send some of my women to see your Bao-yu now and they took him by the hand, he would somehow or other contrive to put up with it. Children brought up in families like ours, no matter how odd or eccentric they may be, will always conduct themselves in a courteous, well-bred manner in the presence of strangers. Otherwise their eccentricity would not be tolerated. In fact, the reason why grown-ups are so fond of them, though partly because of their good looks, is mainly because their beautiful manners – much better than many a grown-up’s – make it such a pleasure to be with them. No one meeting them can help likin
g them, and that makes us more tolerant of what they do on their own, when they are out of sight. But if they were to carry on in exactly the same way all the time, never allowing the grownups to get a word in edgeways, they would be fit for nothing but a whipping.’

  ‘That’s true, madam,’ said the women, smiling. ‘Although our Bao-yu is so odd and mischievous, he can at times, when he is with visitors, behave himself better than a grown-up, so that it’s a pleasure to watch him. No one who meets him can help liking him. Often they ask us what his father should want to beat him for, not realizing what a holy terror he can be inside the family. Sir Zhen and Lady Zhen are driven half distracted by him. If it were just his wilfulness, which is fairly normal in a child, it could be cured in time; so could his extravagance, which is normal in the sons of well-to-do people; and so could his hatred of study, which again is fairly normal in a young person. But this weird perverseness of his seems to be inbred: there seems to be no cure for it.’

  Just then Lady Wang’s return was announced. She went straight up to Grandmother Jia on entering and saluted her, after which she received the salutations of the four visitors and exchanged a few words with them.

  ‘You are tired,’ said Grandmother Jia. ‘Go and rest.’

  Lady Wang served her mother-in-law with some tea before withdrawing to her own apartment. Shortly after she had gone, the four women took their leave of Grandmother Jia and went to join her. Lady Wang chatted with them for a while about family affairs before sending them on their way – suitably primed, of course, with messages and gratuities: but those are details which need not concern us.

  *

  Greatly tickled by what the women had told her, Grandmother Jia, for some time after their visit, would announce to anyone who came to see her:

  ‘There is another Bao-yu, you know, exactly like our Bao-yu in every particular.’

  The other members of the family, bearing in mind that the world was a large place and instances of the same name among its innumerable upper-class families probably of not very rare occurrence, and that a grandmother who doted on her grandson was a fairly unremarkable phenomenon, were unimpressed by the coincidence and gave little thought to it. But Bao-yu, convinced, like many another young gentleman, of his own uniqueness, dismissed what the four women had said as a fabrication designed to give pleasure to his grandmother. He was taunted about it by Xiang-yun when he visited her in her sick-room in the Garden to see how she was getting on.

  ‘You’ll be able to get up to all sorts of mischief now,’ she said. ‘Previously it was a case of

  The single strand makes not a thread

  Nor the single tree a wood.

  We thought there was only one of you. But now you know you are a pair, there will be no stopping you. If your father beats you really badly, you can always run off to Nanking and get this other Bao-yu to stand in for you!’

  ‘You don’t believe that rubbish, do you?’ said Bao-yu. ‘How could there be another Bao-yu?’

  ‘There was a Lin Xiang-ru in the Warring States period and a Si-ma Xiang-ru under the Former Han,’ said Xiang-yun.

  ‘Yes, but this one’s supposed to look the same as well,’ said Bao-yu. ‘That’s not something you can find precedents for, surely?’

  ‘What about when the men of Kuang mistook Confucius for Yang Huo?’ said Xiang-yun.

  ‘Confucius and Yang Huo may have looked the same,’ said Bao-yu, ‘but they didn’t have the same name. Lin Xiang-ru and Si-ma Xiang-ru had the same name but they didn’t look alike. We are supposed both to have the same name and to look the same. It isn’t possible.

  Xiang-yun, unable to think of a reply, took the easy way out.

  ‘Pleathe yourthelf. Whether it is or whether it isn’t, it’s of no concern to me.’

  And she lay back on the bed and closed her eyes.

  But Bao-yu’s confidence was shaken. Had he a double? When he told himself that he couldn’t possibly, he now began to feel that perhaps after all he had. On the other hand how could he be sure that he had when he had never seen him? Brooding on this uncertainty, he went back to his room and lay down on his bed to ponder it in silence. Soon he had drifted into sleep.

  He was in a garden, which, he remarked with surprise, bore some resemblance to Prospect Garden. While he was still puzzling over the similarity, he became aware that some girls were coming towards him, all of them maids. Again he was surprised:

  ‘Strange that there should be another lot of maids here like Faithful and Aroma and Patience!’

  He observed that they were laughing at him:

  ‘Bao-yu, what are you doing here?’

  Bao-yu, naturally supposing that they meant him, smiled back at them:

  ‘I’ve strayed in here by accident. I think this garden must belong to some friend or other of my family. Won’t you take me with you and show me round it?’

  ‘It isn’t our Bao-yu after all,’ said the girls. ‘He’s not bad-looking, though, and he sounds reasonably intelligent.’

  ‘Tell me,’ said Bao-yu eagerly, ‘is there another Bao-yu here then?’

  ‘Bao-yu?’ rejoined one of the girls sharply. ‘We have Her Old Ladyship’s and Her Ladyship’s orders to use that name as much as possible as a means of bringing him luck and Bao-yu likes to hear us use it; but what business has a boy like you from some remote place outside to be making free with it? Don’t let them catch you doing that here, boy, or they’ll flay your backside for you!’

  ‘Come, let’s be going,’ said another. ‘We don’t want Bao-yu to see him.’

  ‘Don’t let’s stand here talking to the nasty creature,’ said a third. ‘We shall be contaminated!’

  And they hurried off.

  Bao-yu was nonplussed:

  ‘No one has ever been as horrid as that to me before. I wonder why they are? And I wonder if there really is another person exactly like me here.’

  As he mused on the unaccountable hostility of the maids, his feet were carrying him along in no particular direction and presently he found himself inside a courtyard. He looked around him in some surprise:

  ‘Strange! There’s even a place like Green Delights here.’

  He mounted the steps of the verandah and walked inside the building. Someone was lying there on a bed. On the other side of the room were some maids, some of them sewing, some of them giggling over a game they were playing. Presently the person on the bed – it was a youth – could be heard to sigh and one of the maids laughingly inquired what he was sighing for.

  ‘Aren’t you asleep, Bao-yu? I suppose you are worried about your cousin’s illness again and imagining all sorts of foolish things about her.’

  Bao-yu heard this with some astonishment. He listened while the youth on the bed replied:

  ‘I heard Grandmother say that there is another Bao-yu in the capital who is exactly like me, but I didn’t believe her. I’ve just been having a dream in which I went into a large garden and met some girls there who called me a “nasty creature” and wouldn’t have anything to do with me. I managed to find this Bao-yu’s room, but he was asleep. What I saw was only an empty shell lying there on the bed. I was wondering where the real person could have got to.’

  ‘I came here looking for Bao-yu. Are you Bao-yu then?’ Bao-yu could not help blurting out.

  The youth leaped down from the bed and seized Bao-yu by the hands:

  ‘So you are Bao-yu, and this isn’t a dream after all?’

  ‘Of course it isn’t a dream,’ said Bao-yu. ‘It couldn’t be more reall’

  Just then someone arrived with a summons:

  ‘The Master wants to see Bao-yu.’

  For a moment the two Bao-yus were stunned; and then one Bao-yu hurried off and the other Bao-yu was left calling after him:

  ‘Come back, Bao-yu! Come back, Bao-yu!’

  Aroma heard him calling his own name in his sleep and shook him awake.

  ‘Where’s Bao-yu?’ she asked him jokingly.

  Though awake,
Bao-yu had not yet regained consciousness of his surroundings. He pointed to the doorway:

  ‘He’s only just left. He can’t have got very far.’