The Warning Voice

by Cao Xueqin

  He shot his foot up as he said this, by way of demonstration. The two boys scrambled to their feet in mock alarm. Each of them carried a long woman’s handkerchief of flowered silk. With mincing gestures, still holding their handkerchiefs in their hands, they guided the winecup towards his lips. Uncle Dumbo’s loud gurgles of delight were briefly interrupted while he threw his head back and drained the cup. Then, still laughing, he pinched their cheeks.

  ‘Little dears!’ he said. ‘How I loves them!’

  His mood changed abruptly as he remembered a grievance. He smote the table angrily and glared at Cousin Zhen.

  ‘I had a quarrel with your Uncle She’s wife yesterday, did you know that?’

  ‘With Aunt Xing?’ said Cousin Zhen. ‘No, I hadn’t heard that.’

  Uncle Dumbo sighed self-pityingly.

  ‘About damned money, as usual. You don’t know the history of our Xing family, dear boy. When my old mother died, I was still too young to know what was going on. I have three elder sisters. The eldest is your precious aunt. When your aunt married, she took everything we had with her. Everything. My second sister had to marry without a dowry. She and her husband are paupers. My third sister is still unmarried. She lives on a pittance paid out to her by that old bitch, Wang Shan-bao’s wife, who has charge of all our money. Well, I went along yesterday to ask her for a few coppers. Not Jia money, mind you: our Xing money is good enough for me. But would she give me any? Not she! And that’s the reason why I get treated by you lot like a poor relation.’

  Cousin Zhen knew that he was drunk, but as it was embarrassing that these unsavoury details of family history should be paraded in front of outsiders, he did his best to mollify Uncle Dumbo and get him onto another tack.

  All this was clearly audible to You-shi outside.

  ‘Did you hear that?’ she whispered to Butterfly, who was standing beside her. ‘That’s Lady Xing they’re talking about. If her own brother talks about her in that way, you can hardly wonder that other people complain about her.’

  She would have said more, but checked herself in order to attend to what was going on inside. The group playing Driving the Sheep had now broken off and were calling for wine.

  ‘Who was upsetting Uncle Dumbo just now?’ asked one of them. ‘We couldn’t quite catch what it was about. Tell us what happened, Uncle, and we’ll see you get fair play.’

  Uncle Dumbo proceeded to tell them how the two boys had forsaken him because he had no money.

  ‘Good grief!’ said the young man who had asked the question. ‘I don’t blame you for being angry. – What do you mean by it?’ he asked the boys. ‘He’s only lost a bit of money, hasn’t he? He hasn’t lost his prick!’

  The company roared with laughter. Uncle Dumbo’s mouthful of rice was spattered over half the floor.

  ‘You dirty bugger!’ he said. ‘Can’t you open your mouth without being crude?’

  You-shi gave a little snort of disgust.

  ‘Just listen to those animals! By the time they’ve swilled a few more cups of wine, heaven knows what filth they’ll be coming out with!’

  She moved on her way – having seen and heard quite as much as she wanted to – returned to her apartment, undressed, and went to bed. Cousin Zhen did not get to bed until after two. He spent what remained of the night in Lovey’s room.

  As soon as he was up next morning, someone came in with a message to say that the melons and mooncakes he had ordered were now ready and it only remained for him to say who they were to be sent to.

  ‘Ask your mistress to see to it,’ said Cousin Zhen. ‘I have got other business to attend to.’

  Lovey took this message to You-shi, who proceeded to go through the list deciding how much should go to whom and making arrangements for the delivery. She had barely finished doing this when Lovey came back again with another message.

  ‘The master wants to know if you are going out today, madam. He says we can’t keep Mid-Autumn properly on the fifteenth because we are in mourning still, but there would be no harm in having a little family party tonight.’

  ‘I don’t want to go out,’ said You-shi, ‘but with Mrs Zhu and Mrs Lian both ill in bed, I don’t see how I can refuse to go next door and lend a hand.’

  ‘The master says, if you have to go out, will you at any rate try to get back as early as you can?’ said Lovey.

  ‘Better hurry up with the lunch then,’ said You-shi. ‘The sooner I can get away, the sooner I’ll be back.’

  ‘The master’s having lunch in the front today, madam. He says please have your lunch here without him.’

  ‘Who’s he got there?’ said You-shi.

  ‘Somebody told me it’s two people just arrived from Nanking,’ said Lovey, ‘but I don’t know who they are.’

  Jia Rong’s wife came in while Lovey was talking. Shortly after that lunch was served. After lunch, You-shi changed into her going-out clothes and went over to Rong-guo House. She did not return until evening.

  While she was away, Cousin Zhen went ahead with arrangements for an intimate family party. He had a whole pig boiled, a whole sheep roasted, and an infinite number of vegetable dishes and entremets prepared. When You-shi got back that evening, he conducted her and the little concubines and Jia Rong and Jia Rong’s wife to the Bosky Verdure Pavilion where it was all laid out. This was in the All-Scents Garden, as they continued to call the little remnant still left them after the main part was incorporated in Prospect Garden.

  They had dinner first. The wine was brought in after they had finished eating, so that they could apply themselves singlemindedly to games and mirth and the enjoyment of the Mid-Autumn moon, which now (for by this time it was already the beginning of the first watch) shone brightly in a clear, fresh sky, filling the world above and below with its silver light. Cousin-Zhen invited the four little concubines to sit at the same table as him and You-shi and join with them in games of Plumstones and Guess-fingers. Presently – for the drink was beginning to make him sentimental – he called to them for some music, and Flower sang for them in a clear, sweet voice, accompanied by Lovey on the vertical bamboo flute. Everyone was deeply moved by the performance. After it was over the games continued.

  The hours slipped by. Soon it was nearly midnight. Cousin Zhen was by now more than a little drunk. They had all just put on some extra clothes and had some hot tea; the wine-cups had been cleared and clean ones put in their place and a fresh lot of newly heated wine was just being poured, when suddenly a long-drawn-out sigh was heard from the foot of one of the garden walls. It was heard by all of them, quite clearly and unmistakably, and they could feel the hair on their scalps rise as they listened to it.

  ‘Who’s there?’ Cousin Zhen shouted in a voice that he tried to make fierce and challenging. But though he repeated the question several times, there was no reply.

  ‘It’s probably one of the servants,’ said You-shi.

  ‘Nonsense!’ snapped Cousin Zhen. ‘There are no servants living behind any of these walls. In any case, that’s the Hall of the Ancestors over there. What would anyone be doing behind that wall?’

  A rustle of wind passed, at that very moment, along the foot of it and a distant sound like the opening and closing of a door could be heard from inside the ancestral temple. An oppressive feeling of dread came over them; the night air seemed suddenly to have grown colder; the moon appeared less bright than it had been a few minutes before; and they could feel their skins crawling with terror.

  Shock had made Cousin Zhen almost sober; but though he managed to keep better control of himself than the others, he was very much shaken and had lost all appetite for enjoyment. Nevertheless he forced himself and the others to sit a little longer before retiring finally to bed.

  He rose quite early next morning. It was the fifteenth, one of the two days in each month on which offerings have to be made to the ancestors. Entering the ancestral temple with the other male members of the family, he took the opportunity of looking round inside it
very carefully; but everything was as it should be; there was no sign whatever of anything untoward having happened. He put down the previous night’s terror to the effects of drunkenness – a mild attack of the horrors – and resolved to make no further mention of it. When the service was over, he shut the temple up again and made sure that the doors were securely locked and barred.

  *

  After dinner that evening Cousin Zhen went over with You-shi to Rong-guo House. He found Jia She and Jia Zheng in Grandmother Jia’s room. The two of them were sitting on the kang, talking and laughing with the old lady, while Jia Lian, Bao-yu, Jian Huan and Jia Lan stood on the floor below. After greeting them and exchanging a word or two with each of them in turn, he sat, or rather half-sat, in polite discomfort, on a stool next to the door. Grandmother Jia vouchsafed a gracious smile in his direction.

  ‘How is your Cousin Bao’s archery these days?’

  Cousin Zhen jumped to his feet to reply.

  ‘Greatly improved, Lady Jia. It isn’t only his form that is better; he is beginning to handle the bow with much greater strength.’

  ‘That’s the point at which to stop then,’ said Grandmother Jia. ‘We don’t want him straining himself.’

  ‘No, no, certainly not,’ said Cousin Zhen. ‘I quite agree.’

  ‘Those mooncakes you sent yesterday were very good,’ said Grandmother Jia. ‘The melons looked all right, but there’s not much inside them when you cut them open.’

  ‘Those mooncakes are good, aren’t they?’ said Cousin Zhen. ‘They were made by our new pastry-cook. I tried them myself to make sure they were all right before venturing to send you any. As for the melons: we’ve been lucky in previous years, but for some reason none of them this year seem to be any good.’

  ‘I think we must blame the weather,’ said Jia Zheng. ‘The rains this year were excessive.’

  ‘The moon must be up by now,’ said Grandmother Jia. ‘Let’s go and make our Mid-Autumn offering.’

  She got up and, leaning on Bao-yu’s shoulder, led the way into the Garden. The main gate was wide open and hung with great horn lanterns. When they reached Prospect Hall, they found servants with lighted lamps waiting for them on the terrace and a table on which incense smoked in a square container and on which offerings of melons and other fruit and mooncakes had been set out on dishes. Lady Xing and all the other female members of the family were waiting inside the hall.

  Moonlight and lanterns gleaming pale

  Through a thin aromatic veil –

  it was indeed a scene of indescribable beauty. A carpet for kneeling on had been laid on the terrace at the foot of the table on the side nearest the hall. Grandmother Jia washed her hands, lit some sticks of incense, knelt down on the carpet, bowed down, and offered up the incense. The others followed her example.

  ‘The best place for enjoying the moon from is the top of a hill,’ she told them when they had finished. She suggested the pavilion on the summit of the ‘master mountain’ behind Reunion Palace (of which Prospect Hall was a part) as the place to have their party. The servants at once went off to make it ready. Meanwhile Grandmother Jia sat talking with the others inside Prospect Hall, resting and drinking tea. Presently the servants came back to report that the mountain-top pavilion was now ready. The old lady stood up again and, supported on either side by her maids, prepared to make the ascent.

  ‘I’m afraid the moss on the steps might make them rather slippery,’ said Lady Wang. ‘Wouldn’t it be better if you went up in a chair?’

  ‘The servants sweep them every day,’ said Grandmother Jia. ‘How can there be any moss? They are good, level steps and not too steep. The exercise will be good for me.’

  Jia She and Jia Zheng led the way, followed by a couple of old women with horn lanterns. Faithful, Amber and You-shi supported the old lady on either side, and Lady Xing, Lady Wang and all the others followed in a close procession behind. It was only a hundred or so steps up the zig-zag path to the summit.

  The pavilion was a rectangular building with one completely open side looking onto a terrace. Because it was situated on the convex grassy summit of the little ‘mountain’, it was called Convex Pavilion. Two tables with chairs round them had been set out on the terrace, separated from each other by a large screen. The tables and chairs, like the moon and melons and mooncakes, were all round, in honour of the occasion. Grandmother Jia sat at the head of one of the tables with Jia She, Cousin Zhen, Jia Lian and Jia Rong on her left hand and Jia Zheng, Bao-yu, Jia Huan and Jia Lan on her right. Between them they filled only about half the places round the table.

  ‘I never felt in the past on these occasions that we were a small family,’ Grandmother Jia commented. ‘Looking at us today, though, I must say we do make a very miserable turnout. I can remember Mid-Autumns when there were thirty or forty of us sitting down together. Ah, what times we had then! We shan’t ever have numbers like that again. Let’s have the girls to sit with us. See if we can’t fill up that gap!’

  Someone went over to the table presided over by Lady Xing on the other side of the screen to fetch Ying-chun, Tan-chun and Xi-chun. Jia Lian, Jia Rong, Bao-yu and the other boys got up while the chairs were rearranged and the girls were installed at the table. Then they reseated themselves in their proper order, Jia Lian and Jia Rong with Ying-chun and Xi-chun between them, and Bao-yu and Jia Huan on either side of Tan-chun.

  Grandmother Jia asked someone to fetch a spray of cassia and made one of the women sit behind the screen and drum for them, so that they could play Passing the Branch. Anyone whose hand the branch was in when the drumming stopped had first to drink a cup of wine and then tell a funny story. The drumming started and the branch passed from Grandmother Jia to Jia She and so on round the table. It stopped just as the branch had reached Jia Zheng’s hand on its second time round. He raised the winecup to his lips to the accompaniment of much secret nudging and pinching among the younger folk, to whom the notion of Jia Zheng telling a joke was in itself unbelievably funny.

  Jia Zheng could see how much the old lady was enjoying herself and was anxious not to spoil her pleasure. Before he could begin his story, however, she saw fit to give him notice that he must expect to be punished if he did not make her laugh.

  ‘I can only think of one joke,’ said Jia Zheng. ‘If you don’t find it amusing, you will just have to punish me.’

  ‘Very well, tell us your one joke then,’ said Grandmother Jia.

  ‘It is about a hen-pecked husband,’ said Jia Zheng.

  He got no further. Already his audience were convulsed. It was not that what he had said was the least bit funny, simply that they had never heard him talking about such things before.

  ‘This is sure to be good,’ said Grandmother Jia.

  ‘In that case,’ said Jia Zheng, laughing himself, ‘let me persuade you to drink a cup of wine.’

  ‘Very well,’ said Grandmother Jia.

  At once Jia She and Jia Zheng rose to their feet. Jia She held a winecup in both his hands while Jia Zheng poured wine into it from a wine-kettle. Then Jia Zheng took the cup from Jia She and ceremoniously set it down in front of Grandmother Jia. The two men stood in stiffly deferential attitudes beside her while she drank some, then, having completed their little pantomime, resumed their places.

  Jia Zheng proceeded with his story.

  ‘This hen-pecked husband was so afraid of his wife that he never dared stay long away from the house. But one Mid-Autumn Festival he chanced to be out shopping in the street when a friend caught sight of him and insisted on dragging him off to his house for a drink. Without meaning to, the husband became very drunk – so much so that he had to stay at his friend’s house for the night. When he woke up the next morning, he was full of remorse. However, there was nothing for it but to hurry back home and apologize. When he got back, his wife was washing her feet.

  ‘“Very well,” she said when he had finished apologizing, “if you will lick my feet clean, I will forgive you.”
/>   ‘The man began to lick, but a feeling of nausea overcame him and he showed signs of wanting to be sick. When his wife saw this, she was furious.

  ‘“How dare you?” she screamed, and looked as if she was about to give him a beating.

  ‘The husband knelt down in terror and begged to be forgiven.

  ‘“Please, my dear! It isn’t that I find your feet in the least distasteful. It’s just that I drank rather a lot of yellow wine last night and ate lots of very rich mooncakes, so today I am feeling a little queasy.”’

  Grandmother Jia and the rest all laughed and Jia Zheng poured Grandmother Jia another cup of wine.

  ‘Someone had better change this yellow wine for samshoo,’ she said. ‘We don’t want you husbands having this sort of trouble with your wives tomorrow!’

  This produced another laugh.

  The drumming recommenced and the branch, starting from Jia Zheng, began circulating again. This time it stopped with Bao-yu. Bao-yu had been feeling uncomfortable to start with because of Jia Zheng’s presence, but became ten times more so when he found himself stuck with the branch.

  ‘If I tell a joke and it’s no good,’ he thought, ‘he will say I’ve no invention. But if I tell a good one, he’ll say I have no aptitude for serious things, only frivolous ones, and that will be even worse. I’d much better not tell one at all.’

  Having reached this decision, he stood up and asked his father to excuse him.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘I can’t tell jokes. May I do something else, please?’

  ‘You may compose a poem on the theme of “Mid-Autumn Moon”,’ said Jia Zheng. ‘If it is good, I shall reward you; if it is not – I shall deal with you tomorrow.’

  ‘This is a game we are playing,’ said Grandmother Jia testily. ‘Do you have to make the boy write poetry?’

  ‘He can do it if he wants to,’ said Jia Zheng. He was smiling.

  ‘Very well, let him do it then,’ said Grandmother Jia. ‘Fetch him a brush and paper somebody.’