by Cao Xueqin
‘Well, why not?’ said Tan-chun bitterly. ‘Better be driven out now by me than by someone else later on. Kinsfolk are lucky. They don’t have to stay here. Not like the members of this happy family – all glaring at each other like angry fighting-cocks, wondering which will be the first one to strike!’
You-shi laughed.
‘I think today must be my unlucky day. I seem to have caught all you young ladies in a thoroughly unpleasant mood.’
‘If you don’t like the heat, you should stay away from the fire,’ said Tan-chun. ‘Who’s been upsetting you then?’ She thought for a bit. ‘It’s not likely to have been Cousin Feng. Not this time. So who was it?’
You-shi’s vague answer evaded the question. Tan-chun knew that she was afraid to speak openly for fear of causing trouble.
‘Come on!’ she said tauntingly. ‘Don’t act the innocent! It’s not high treason to tell us. No one’s going to chop your head off. Look at me. Last night I slapped Wang Shan-bao’s wife’s face. That’s an offence deserving hard labour at the very least, yet nothing’s happened so far, bar a bit of muttering. I don’t think anyone is going to give me a beating.’
‘Did you really slap her face?’ Bao-chai asked incredulously.
Tan-chun treated them all to a lively account of what had happened, after which You-shi, seeing that there was no longer any point in concealment, proceeded to tell them about her recent encounter with Xi-chun.
‘Oh, she’s always like that,’ said Tan-chun. ‘It’s her nature. Xi-chun is so peculiar, nothing the rest of us say or do is ever going to alter her. By the way’ – she returned to the subject that was uppermost in her mind – ‘I made some inquiries first thing this morning to find out why nothing was happening. Apparently it’s because Cousin Feng is ill again. I also sent someone to inquire about Wang Shan-bao’s wife. It seems that she has been given a beating. For interfering.’
‘Quite right, too!’ said You-shi and Li Wan. But Tan-chun took a more cynical view.
‘It would be a comparatively easy way of disarming suspicion. We must wait and see.’
You-shi and Li Wan looked thoughtful, but neither made any comment.
Shortly after this the maids came in to say that dinner was ready. Xiang-yun and Bao-chai went back to their apartment to pack, in preparation for their respective moves. Our narrative leaves them at this point.
You-shi and Tan-chun, after taking their leave of Li Wan, made their way to Grandmother Jia’s apartment. The old lady was reclining on her couch listening, while Lady Wang told her about the Zhens: the offences they had been charged with, the confiscation of their property and their coming up to the capital now for questioning. Grandmother Jia was obviously much shaken by what she heard, but brightened up somewhat when You-shi and Tan-chun arrived.
‘Where have you both come from?’ she asked them. ‘I suppose you know that Feng and Wan are both ill now? I wonder how they are today.’
‘They are both a little better,’ said You-shi.
Grandmother Jia nodded and sighed.
‘I think we’ve heard enough about other people’s troubles for the time being. It’s time we started thinking about the arrangements for our Mid-Autumn party.’
‘The catering arrangements have all been made,’ said Lady Wang. ‘It only remains for you to decide where you want it. I suppose the nights are getting too chilly now for us to have it out in the Garden.’
‘We can always put on a bit more clothing,’ said Grandmother Jia. ‘Of course we must have it in the Garden. That’s what the Garden is for.’
While they were speaking, some of the women came in carrying the dinner-table between them. Lady Wang and You-shi laid chopsticks and carried in the rice. When all was ready, Grandmother noticed that in addition to her own dishes there were two large food-boxes containing dishes from the other apartments. It was a long-established custom that the occupants of other apartments should send her samples of what they were planning to eat that day themselves as a way of showing her their respect.
‘I’ve told you all a number of times to stop doing this,’ she said. ‘Why won’t you ever do as I say?’
‘These are only very ordinary things here,’ said Lady Wang, referring to her own contribution. ‘It’s one of my fast-days today, so I have only vegetarian dishes. I know you don’t much like bean-curd fried in batter, which is one of the things I am having. The only thing of mine I think you might like is a salad pickle of chopped water-mallow in pepper sauce.’
‘That sounds rather nice,’ said Grandmother Jia. ‘I think I’d like to try some of that.’
Faithful quickly took the saucer containing it out of the box and put it down in front of her. Bao-qin, having first apologized to each of her seniors for sitting down in their presence, took her place at one side of the table. Grandmother Jia said that Tan-chun should eat with her as well, whereupon Tan-chun too made her apologies and sat down. She sat at the other side of the table opposite Bao-qin. Scribe quickly fetched her a bowl and chopsticks. Meanwhile Faithful was pointing out the other dishes to Grandmother Jia.
‘I can’t make out what these two here are. They are from Sir She. The stuff in this bowl is creamed chicken and bamboo. It’s from Mr Zhen.’
She brought the bowl of sliced bamboo-shoot over and put it down on the table. Grandmother Jia made a couple of dips into it with her chopsticks. She ordered all the other dishes to be taken back to their senders.
‘Tell them thank you very much I’ve tried some, but not to send things to me any more. If I ever want anything, I shall let them know.’
The women made some reply and went off with the boxes.
‘Now bring me my rice-gruel and I’ll have a bit of that,’ said Grandmother Jia.
You-shi stepped forward with a bowl of gruel. It was made with red ‘Emperor’ rice, she told her. After drinking about half of it, Grandmother Jia ordered the other half to be taken to Xi-feng. She pointed to one of the dishes.
‘And this is for Patience.’ She turned to You-shi. ‘I’ve finished. Now you can eat.’
‘Thank you,’ said You-shi, but waited all the same until the old lady had rinsed her mouth and washed her hands and was walking up and down on Lady Wang’s arm for her digestion before she ‘begged to be seated’. By this time Bao-qin and Tan-chun had finished eating. They got up as You-shi sat down, excusing themselves from keeping her company while she ate.
‘Oh,’ said You-shi, ‘I’m not used to eating at a big table like this all on my own.’
‘Faithful and Amber can eat with you for company,’ said Grandmother Jia.
‘Good!’ said You-shi. ‘I was about to suggest that.’
‘I like to see people eating together,’ said Grandmother Jia. She pointed to Butterfly. ‘Now here’s a good girl. Why shouldn’t she eat with you as well? Go on, child! Go and eat with your mistress. As long as you are here with me, it doesn’t matter if you break the rules for once.’
‘Come on!’ said You-shi to the maid encouragingly. ‘Don’t pretend to be bashful!’
Grandmother Jia stopped walking up and down and stood with her hands clasped behind her back to watch them eat. It suddenly struck her that the rice being served was the plain white rice normally eaten by the servants and that You-shi, too, was eating it.
‘Why are you giving Mrs Zhen this stuff?’ she asked them.
‘There isn’t any of Your Old Ladyship’s rice left,’ said the maids. ‘You had an extra young lady eating with you today, don’t forget.’
‘Meals are made to measure nowadays,’ said Faithful. ‘We can’t afford to be extravagant the way we used to be.’
‘There have been so many floods and droughts during the past few years,’ said Lady Wang. ‘Our farms haven’t been able to make up their quotas. These special kinds of rice are particularly hard to come by. We have had to start rationing them rather carefully.’
‘Even the cleverest housewife can’t make rice-gruel without rice.’ Grandmother Jia quo
ted the proverb amidst general laughter.
Faithful turned to address the women waiting outside the door.
‘If Her Old Ladyship’s rice is all finished, you can get the rice that Miss Tan would have eaten if she hadn’t been eating with us and bring it here for Mrs Zhen.’
‘No need,’ said You-shi. ‘What I’ve got here is quite enough for me.’
‘I dare say it is,’ said Faithful, ‘but what about me?’
The women hurried off to fetch the rice.
Presently Lady Wang went off to have dinner in her own apartment, leaving You-shi to entertain Grandmother Jia. The time passed quickly, with much good-humoured teasing and laughter, and the first watch had already begun before Grandmother Jia noticed how late it was getting.
‘You’d better be getting back now,’ she told You-shi.
You-shi took her leave. Outside the inner gate she got into her waiting carriage. Her women pulled the blind down, then, taking all the maids with them except Butterfly, who was riding in the carriage with her mistress, hurried on ahead so that they could be waiting for You-shi when she arrived in the other mansion. The men from both gates walked some way along the street to keep it clear of pedestrians while six or seven pages pushed and pulled the carriage (it seemed too short a distance and too late an hour for mules) as far as the interior of the Ning-guo gateway. There the pages retired, old women came forward and raised the blind, and Butterfly dismounted and helped out her mistress. You-shi noticed that there were four or five large carriages waiting below the stone lions which flanked the gate and commented to Butterfly on their presence.
‘I wonder how many horses there are in the stables? If this number came by carriage, you may be sure that a much greater number will have come on horseback.’
As she and Butterfly entered the outer courtyard, Jia Rong’s wife at the head of a party of maids and older women carrying lanterns advanced to meet them.
‘I’ve been dying for I don’t know how long to have a look at the men while they are gambling,’ said You-shi, ‘but so far I haven’t had an opportunity. Tonight is the best chance I shall ever get. Let’s go along the wall in front of the windows so that we can peep in at them.’
The women with lanterns made a detour towards the building in which the men were congregated. One of them went ahead and warned the pages waiting outside not to announce their arrival to the men or make any other noise that would warn those inside of their coming. You-shi and her party were thus able to steal right up to the windows and could hear everything that was going on inside. Among the medley of sounds that met their ears, numbers seemed to predominate, some uttered exultantly and with raucous shouts of laughter, others angrily or despairingly and to the accompaniment of curses and profanities.
Cousin Zhen had found the ban on amusements during the seemingly interminable period of mourning for Jia Jing which convention imposed on him extremely irksome. Archery, for some reason, was permitted, and a few months previously he had hit on archery as a means of getting round the ban. A number of young men from the wealthy and aristocratic households of his acquaintance were invited round to the Ning-guo mansion to participate. Shooting was to be competitive.
‘Random shooting is quite useless,’ he explained to them. ‘You not only don’t make any progress; it actually spoils your form. You’ve got to have incentives of some kind to keep you on your toes, and the best way of doing that is to bet on something.’
Butts were set up in the shooting gallery below the Celestial Fragrance Pavilion and every day after lunch the young men came along to compete. Since, as Bereaved Son, it would have been unseemly for Cousin Zhen himself to have been named in this connection, the nominal convenor and organizer of these gatherings was Jia Rong. All those invited were rich, profligate, dashing young fellows, accustomed to spending their time in cock-fighting, dog-racing and even more questionable amusements. After some discussion it was decided that the responsibility for providing dinner after the day’s archery should fall to each one of them in turn. It became a point of honour to make these dinners as lavish as possible, so that the daily junketings at Ning-guo House came more and more to resemble the Diet of Lintong in the well-known play of that name, except that whereas Duke Mu’s princely guests competed in the bravery of their commanders and the magnificence of their regalia, it was in the skill of their chefs and in masterpieces of culinary art that the members of the Ning-guo archery club strove to outdo each other.
When this had been going on for a couple of weeks or so, Jia Zheng and Jia She got to hear about it. The report that reached them cannot have been a very accurate one, however, for, far from being critical of these goings-on, they spoke of them with approval.
‘Since Rong obviously has no aptitude for book-learning,’ Jia Zheng observed, ‘Cousin Zhen does right to encourage him in the martial arts. The boy does, after all, hold a military commission.’
They even made Bao-yu, Jia Huan, Jia Cong and Jia Lan participate. The four of them had to go over every day after lunch and not return until each of them had taken his turn at the butts.
But it was not of course in the archery that Cousin Zhen was interested. On the grounds that resting the muscles was an important part of one’s training, he was soon advocating a little cards or dice in the evenings as a means of relaxation. At first they played only for drinks, but soon they were playing more and more for money; the time spent on gaming gradually encroached on the time devoted to archery; betting became more open; and finally, with the formal opening of a ‘bank’ some three or four months previously, regular, organized gambling for heavy stakes had become a daily routine. The Ning-guo servants, who grew fat on the pickings, were delighted with these new arrangements and, anxious that they should go on, if possible, for ever, took very good care that no one outside the mansion should get to hear about them.
Lady Xing’s brother, Xing De-quan, himself a keen gambler, had lately become a frequenter of this establishment; so, inevitably, had Xue Pan, who was never so happy as when he was throwing away his money.
Xing De-quan was very unlike his sister. Drinking, gambling and debauchery were his only interests; consequently whenever any money came into his hands, he spent it like water. The singular obtuseness he showed in all his dealings had earned him the nickname of ‘Uncle Dumbo’. And since Xue Pan was already known to all and sundry as ‘the Oaf King’, the two of them when they were together were referred to by the young men as ‘Uncle Dumbo and Cousin Oaf’.
The situation when You-shi peeped inside was as follows. Cousin Oaf and Uncle Dumbo, each with a partner, were playing six-dice Grabs on the kang in the outer room. Simultaneously another dicing game, Driving the Sheep, was being played by several players sitting round a large table on the floor below. The inner room, where a slightly more intellectual group were playing Tin Kau, was devoted to dominoes. The servants were all pages of fifteen or under. There was also a pair of male prostitutes, powdered, overdressed youths of seventeen or eighteen, whose duty was to ply the guests with drink. It was this pair who first caught You-shi’s eye when she looked in.
Xue Pan had been having the sulks earlier on because he was losing, but then his luck had changed: he had not only recouped his losses but made a lot of extra money. He was therefore in a very good mood indeed. Cousin Zhen suggested that this might be a good point at which to stop and have dinner. They could go on playing afterwards if they wanted to.
‘What about the two other lots?’ he inquired.
It transpired that the Tin Kau players in the next room were in process of settling up after finishing the game and were in fact beginning to think about their dinner, but that the group at the big table playing Driving the Sheep had not yet reached a suitable point at which to break off. Cousin Zhen ordered dinner to be served for all those, himself included, who were ready. Jia Rong was to wait and have dinner with the other players when they had finished.
Xue Pan, elated by his success, sat with a cup of wine in one han
d and his arm round the shoulders of one of the pretty pot-boys. With a victor’s expansive generosity he ordered the other boy to pour some wine ‘with his compliments’ for Uncle Dumbo. But Uncle Dumbo was thoroughly out of temper at having lost the game, and the two cupfuls he drank now in rapid succession served merely to make him tipsily aggressive. He vented his anger on the two young ganymedes, who, he claimed, had treacherously withdrawn their favours from him and transferred them to the winner.
‘Heartless brood of unnatural little whore’s gits!’ he grumbled. ‘You’ve had plenty of favours off me in the past – and off everyone else here. Now, just because I’ve lost a few taels, I’m not good enough for you. What makes you so certain you won’t ever need my help again in the future?’
The other guests all knew that he was drunk. Those of them who were losers themselves smiled wryly and said nothing, but one or two of the winners magnanimously expressed their sympathy.
‘That’s right, Uncle. Rotten little bastards! That’s just the way they do behave.’
‘Why don’t you pour Uncle a drink and tell him you’re sorry?’ said another of them.
The two young ganymedes, practised professionals in every trick of the trade, were on their knees at Uncle Dumbo’s side in a moment, offering him wine, fondling his thigh, and gazing with simpering archness into his eyes.
‘Don’t be angry with us, dear old friend. We are only children. We have to do as we are told. Our teacher always tells us, “It doesn’t matter what they are like or what your own feelings are, the person who at any moment has the most money is the one you must be nice to.” Just win a lot of money later on this evening, old friend, and you’ll see how nice we shall be to you!’
The disarming frankness of this made everyone laugh. Even Uncle Dumbo, though he tried hard not to, was forced to join in.
‘All right, I forgive you,’ he growled as he took the proffered winecup. ‘Though I don’t mind telling you, if I hadn’t been so fond of you two, I’d have kicked the stuffing out of your little tum-tums!’