The Crab-Flower Club

by Cao Xueqin

  Grandmother Jia looked at the tray. It was covered with jewellery. There were golden crescents, jade thumb-rings and a lot of ‘motto’ jewellery – a tiny sceptre and persimmons with the rebus-meaning ‘success in all things’, a little quail and a vase with corn-stalks meaning ‘peace throughout the years’, and many other designs – all in gold- or jade-work, and much of it inlaid with pearls and precious stones. Altogether there must have been about forty pieces.

  ‘What have you been up to, you naughty old man?’ she said. ‘Those men are all poor priests – they can’t afford to give things like this away. You really shouldn’t have done this. We can’t possibly accept them.’

  ‘It was their own idea, I do assure you,’ said the abbot. ‘There was nothing I could do to stop them. If you refuse to take these things, I am afraid you will destroy my credit with these people. They will say that I cannot really have the connection with your honoured family that I have always claimed to have.’

  After this Grandmother Jia could no longer decline. She told one of the servants to receive the tray.

  ‘We obviously can’t refuse, Grannie, after what Papa Zhang has just said,’ said Bao-yu; ‘but I really have no use for this stuff. Why not let one of the boys carry it outside for me and I’ll distribute it to the poor?’

  ‘I think that’s a very good idea,’ said Grandmother Jia.

  But Abbot Zhang thought otherwise and hastily intervened:

  ‘I’m sure it does our young friend credit, this charitable impulse. However. Although these things are, as I said, of no especial value, they are – what shall I say – objects of virtù, and if you give them to the poor, in the first place the poor won’t have much use for them, and in the second place the objects themselves will get spoiled. If you want to give something to the poor, a largesse of money would, I suggest, be far more appropriate.’

  ‘Very well, look after this stuff for me, then,’ said Bao-yu to the servant, ‘and this evening you will distribute a largesse.’

  This being now settled, Abbot Zhang withdrew, and Grandmother Jia and her party went up to the galleries. Grandmother Jia sat with Bao-yu and the girls in the gallery facing the stage and Xi-feng and Li Wan sat in the east gallery. The maids all sat in the west gallery and took it in turns to go off and wait on their mistresses.

  Not long after they were all seated, Cousin Zhen came upstairs to say that the gods had now chosen which plays were to be performed – by which was meant, of course, that the names had been shaken from a pot in front of the altar, since this was the only way in which the will of the gods could be known. The first play selected was The White Serpent.

  ‘What’s the story?’ said Grandmother Jia.

  Cousin Zhen explained that it was about the emperor Gao-zu, founder of the Han dynasty, who began his rise to greatness by decapitating a monstrous white snake.

  The second choice was A Heap of Honours, which shows the sixtieth birthday party of the great Tang general Guo Zi-yi, attended by his seven sons and eight sons-in-law, all of whom held high office, the ‘heap of honours’ of the title being a reference to the table in his reception-hall piled high with their insignia.

  ‘It seems a bit conceited to have this second one played,’ said Grandmother Jia. ‘Still, if that’s what the gods chose, I suppose we’d better have it. What’s the third one going to be?’

  ‘The South Branch,’ said Cousin Zhen.

  Grandmother Jia was silent. She knew that The South Branch likens the world to an ant-heap and tells a tale of power and glory which turns out in the end to have been a dream.

  Hearing no reply, Cousin Zhen went off downstairs again to see about the Offertory Scroll, which had to be ceremonially burnt in front of the holy images along with paper money and paper ingots before the theatrical performance could begin.

  Our record omits any description of that ceremony and moves back to Bao-yu, who was sitting in the central gallery beside his grandmother, and who now called for a maid to bring the tray up so that he could put on his Magic Jade again. When he had done so, he began to pick over the other trinkets with which the tray was covered and to hand them one by one to Grandmother Jia for her inspection. Her attention was taken by a little red-gold kylin with kingfisher-feather inlay. She stretched out her hand to take it.

  ‘Now where have I seen something like this before?’ she said. ‘I feel certain I’ve seen some girl wearing an ornament like this.’

  ‘Cousin Shi’s got one,’ said Bao-chai. ‘It’s the same as this one only a little smaller.’

  ‘Funny!’ said Bao-yu. ‘All the times she’s been to our house, I don’t remember ever having seen it.’

  ‘Cousin Bao is observant,’ said Tan-chun. ‘No matter what it is, she remembers everything.’

  ‘Well, perhaps not quite everything,’ said Dai-yu wryly. ‘But she’s certainly very observant where things like this are concerned.’

  Bao-chai turned her head away and pretended not to have heard.

  Now that he knew the kylin on the tray was like one that Shi Xiang-yun wore, Bao-yu hurriedly picked it up and thrust it inside his jacket. But no sooner had he done so than it occurred to him that his action might be misconstrued; so instead of dropping it into his inside pocket, he continued to hold it there, at the same time glancing about him furtively to see if he had been observed. None of the others seemed to have noticed except Dai-yu, who was staring at him fixedly and nodding her head in mock approval

  Bao-yu felt suddenly embarrassed. Drawing his hand out again with the ornament still in it, he returned her look and laughed sheepishly:

  ‘It’s rather nice, isn’t it? I thought I’d keep it for you,’ he said. ‘When we get home we can thread it on a ribbon and you’ll be able to wear it.’

  Dai-yu tossed her head.

  ‘I don’t want it!’

  ‘If you don’t want it, I’ll keep it for myself, then,’ said Bao-yu, and popped it once more inside his jacket.

  He was about to add something, but just at that moment Cousin Zhen’s wife, You-shi, and his new daughter-in-law, Hu-shi, arrived and came upstairs to pay their respects to Grandmother Jia.

  ‘Now why have you come here? You really shouldn’t have bothered,’ said Grandmother Jia. ‘We only came to amuse ourselves. It isn’t a formal visit.’

  No sooner had she said this than it was announced that representatives from General Feng’s household had arrived. It appeared that Feng Zi-ying’s mother, hearing that the Jia ladies were having a Pro Viventibus performed at the Taoist temple, had immediately prepared an offering of pork, mutton, incense, tea and cakes and sent it post-haste to the temple with her compliments. Xi-feng, hearing the announcement, came hurrying round to the central gallery. She clapped her hands and laughed.

  ‘Dear oh dear! This is something I hadn’t bargained for. My idea was a quiet little outing for us girls; but here is everyone sending offerings and behaving as if we’d come here for a high mass or something. It’s all your fault, Grannie! And we haven’t even got any vails ready to give to the bearers.’

  Even as she said this, two stewardesses from the Feng household were already mounting the stairs. And before they had gone, other messengers arrived with offerings from Vice-president Zhao’s lady. From then on it was a steady stream: friends, kinsmen, family connections, business associates – all who had heard that the Jia ladies were holding a Pro Viventibus sent their representatives along with offerings and complimentary messages. Grandmother Jia began to regret that she had ever come.

  ‘It isn’t as if we’d come here for the ceremony,’ she grumbled. ‘We only wanted to enjoy ourselves. But all we seem to have done is to have stirred up a lot of fuss.’

  Consequently, although she stayed and watched the plays for that day, she returned home fairly early in the afternoon and next day professed herself too lacking in energy to go again. Xi-feng reacted differently. ‘In for a penny, in for a pound’ was her motto. They had already had the fuss; and since the players
were there anyway, they might as well go again today and enjoy themselves in peace.

  For Bao-yu the whole of the previous day had been spoilt by Abbot Zhang’s proposal to Grandmother Jia to arrange a match for him. He came home in a thoroughly bad temper and kept telling everyone that he would ‘never see Abbot Zhang again as long as he lived’. Not associating his ill-humour with the abbot’s proposal, the others were mystified.

  Grandmother Jia’s unwillingness was further reinforced by the fact that Dai-yu, since her return home yesterday, had been suffering from mild sunstroke. What with one thing and another, the old lady declined absolutely to go again, and Xi-feng had to make up her own party and go by herself.

  But Xi-feng’s play-going does not concern us.

  Bao-yu, believing that Dai-yu’s sunstroke was serious and that she might even be in danger of her life, was so worried that he could not eat, and rushed round in the middle of the lunch-hour to see how she was. He found her neither as ill as he had feared nor as responsive as he might have hoped.

  ‘Why don’t you go and watch your plays?’ she asked him. ‘What are you mooning about at home for?’

  Abbot Zhang’s recent attempt at match-making had profoundly distressed Bao-yu and he was shocked by her seeming indifference.

  ‘I can forgive the others for not understanding what has upset me,’ he thought; ‘but that she should want to trifle with me at a time like this …!’

  The sense that she had failed him made the annoyance he now felt with her a hundred times greater than it had been on any previous occasion. Never could any other person have stirred him to such depths of atrabilious rage. Coming from other lips, her words would scarcely have touched him. Coming from hers, they put him in a passion. His face darkened.

  ‘It’s all along been a mistake, then,’ he said. ‘You’re not what I took you for.’

  Dai-yu gave an unnatural little laugh.

  ‘Not what you took me for? That’s hardly surprising, is it? I haven’t got that little something which would have made me worthy of you.’

  Bao-yu came right up to her and held his face close to hers:

  ‘You do realize, don’t you, that you are deliberately willing my death?’

  Dai-yu could not for the moment understand what he was talking about.

  ‘I swore an oath to you yesterday,’ he went on. ‘I said that I hoped Heaven might strike me dead if this “gold and jade” business meant anything to me. Since you have now brought it up again, it’s clear to me that you want me to die. Though what you hope to gain by my death I find it hard to imagine.’

  Dai-yu now remembered what had passed between them on the previous day. She knew that she was wrong to have spoken as she did, and felt both ashamed and a little frightened. Her shoulders started shaking and she began to cry.

  ‘May Heaven strike me dead if I ever willed your death!’ she said. ‘But I don’t see what you have to get so worked up about. It’s only because of what Abbot Zhang said about arranging a match for you. You’re afraid he might interfere with your precious “gold and jade” plans; and because you’re angry about that, you have to come along and take it out on me – That’s all it is, isn’t it?’

  Bao-yu had from early childhood manifested a streak of morbid sensibility, which being brought up in close proximity with a nature so closely in harmony with his own had done little to improve. Now that he had reached an age when both his experience and the reading of forbidden books had taught him something about ‘worldly matters’, he had begun to take a rather more grown-up interest in girls. But although there were plenty of young ladies of outstanding beauty and breeding among the Jia family’s numerous acquaintance, none of them, in his view, could remotely compare with Dai-yu. For some time now his feeling for her had been a very special one; but precisely because of this same morbid sensibility, he had shrunk from telling her about it. Instead, whenever he was feeling particularly happy or particularly cross, he would invent all sorts of ways of probing her to find out if this feeling for her was reciprocated. It was unfortunate for him that Dai-yu herself possessed a similar streak of morbid sensibility and disguised her real feelings, as he did his, while attempting to discover what he felt about her.

  Here was a situation, then, in which both parties concealed their real emotions and assumed counterfeit ones in an endeavour to find out what the real feelings of the other party were. And because

  When false meets false the truth will oft-times out,

  there was the constant possibility that the innumerable little frustrations that were engendered by all this concealment would eventually erupt into a quarrel.

  Take the present instance. What Bao-yu was actually thinking at this moment was something like this:

  ‘In my eyes and in my thoughts there is no one else but you. I can forgive the others for not knowing this, but surely you ought to realize? If at a time like this you can’t share my anxiety – if you can think of nothing better to do than provoke me with that sort of silly talk, it shows that the concern I feel for you every waking minute of the day is wasted: that you just don’t care about me at all.’

  This was what he thought; but of course he didn’t say it. On her side Dai-yu’s thoughts were somewhat as follows:

  ‘I know you must care for me a little bit, and I’m sure you don’t take this ridiculous “gold and jade” talk seriously. But if you cared only for me and had absolutely no inclination at all in another direction, then every time I mentioned “gold and jade” you would behave quite naturally and let it pass almost as if you hadn’t noticed. How is it, then, that when I do refer to it you get so excited? It shows that it must be on your mind. You pretend to be upset in order to allay my suspicions.’

  Meanwhile a quite different thought was running through Bao-yu’s mind:

  ‘I would do anything – absolutely anything,’ he was thinking, ‘if only you would be nice to me. If you would be nice to me, I would gladly die for you this moment. It doesn’t really matter whether you know what I feel for you or not. Just be nice to me, then at least we shall be a little closer to each other, instead of so horribly far apart.’

  At the same time Dai-yu was thinking:

  ‘Never mind me. Just be your own natural self. If you were all right, I should be all right too. All these manoeuvrings to try and anticipate my feelings don’t bring us any closer together; they merely draw us farther apart.’

  The percipient reader will no doubt observe that these two young people were already of one mind, but that the complicated procedures by which they sought to draw together were in fact having precisely the opposite effect. Complacent reader! Permit us to remind you that your correct understanding of the situation is due solely to the fact that we have been revealing to you the secret, innermost thoughts of those two young persons, which neither of them had so far ever felt able to express.

  Let us now return from the contemplation of inner thoughts to the recording of outward appearances.

  When Dai-yu, far from saying something nice to him, once more made reference to the ‘gold and jade’, Bao-yu became so choked with rage that for a moment he was quite literally bereft of speech. Frenziedly snatching the ‘Magic Jade’ from his neck and holding it by the end of its silken cord he gritted his teeth and dashed it against the floor with all the strength in his body.

  ‘Beastly thing!’ he shouted. ‘I’ll smash you to pieces and put an end to this once and for all.’

  But the jade, being exceptionally hard and resistant, was not the tiniest bit damaged. Seeing that he had not broken it, Bao-yu began to look around for something to smash it with. Dai-yu, still crying, saw what he was going to do.

  ‘Why smash a dumb, lifeless object?’ she said. ‘If you want to smash something, let it be me.’

  The sound of their quarrelling brought Nightingale and Snowgoose hurrying in to keep the peace. They found Bao-yu apparently bent on destroying his jade and tried to wrest it from him. Failing to do so, and sensing that th
e quarrel was of more than usual dimensions, they went off to fetch Aroma. Aroma came back with them as fast as she could run and eventually succeeded in prising the jade from his hand. He glared at her scornfully.

  ‘It’s my own thing I’m smashing,’ he said. ‘What business is it of yours to interfere?’

  Aroma saw that his face was white with anger and his eyes wild and dangerous. Never had she seen him in so terrible a rage. She took him gently by the hand:

  ‘You shouldn’t smash the jade just because of a disagreement with your cousin,’ she said. ‘What do you think she would feel like and what sort of position would it put her in if you really were to break it?’

  Dai-yu heard these words through her sobs. They struck a responsive chord in her breast, and she wept all the harder to think that even Aroma seemed to understand her better than Bao-yu did. So much emotion was too much for her weak stomach. Suddenly there was a horrible retching noise and up came the tisane of elsholtzia leaves she had taken only a short while before. Nightingale quickly held out her handkerchief to receive it and, while Snowgoose rubbed and pounded her back, Dai-yu continued to retch up wave upon wave of watery vomit, until the whole handkerchief was soaked with it.

  ‘However cross you may be, Miss, you ought to have more regard for your health,’ said Nightingale. ‘You’d only just taken that medicine and you were beginning to feel a little bit better for it, and now because of your argument with Master Bao you’ve gone and brought it all up again. Suppose you were to be really ill as a consequence. How do you think Master Bao would feel?’

  When Bao-yu heard these words they struck a responsive chord in his breast, and he reflected bitterly that even Nightingale seemed to understand him better than Dai-yu. But then he looked again at Dai-yu, who was sobbing and panting by turns, and whose red and swollen face was wet with perspiration and tears, and seeing how pitiably frail and ill she looked, his heart misgave him.