The Crab-Flower Club

by Cao Xueqin

  While she was speaking, her eye fell on the sewing that Aroma had just put down. It was a pinafore of the kind children wear, with bib and apron in one. It was of white satin lined with red silk, and the pattern Aroma was embroidering on it was one of mandarin ducks disporting themselves in a background of lotuses. The ducks were in rainbow colours, and the lotuses had red flowers and green leaves.

  ‘Goodness, how beautiful!’ she exclaimed. ‘Who’s it for? It must be someone very special, to deserve work as fine as this.’

  Aroma turned her head and shot her lips out in the direction of the figure sleeping on the bed.

  ‘Him? He’s too big to wear that sort of thing, surely?’

  ‘He wouldn’t wear them to start with. That’s why I try to make them so nicely – so that when he sees them he can’t resist putting them on. I try to get him to wear them in this hot weather, so that if he uncovers himself in his sleep, there’s no risk of his getting chilled. If you think there’s a lot of work in this one, you ought to see the one he’s wearing!’

  ‘I wonder you can have the patience,’ said Bao-chai.

  ‘I’ve done such a lot of work on it today,’ said Aroma, ‘my neck is quite stiff from bending over.’ She smiled at Bao-chai entreatingly: ‘Do us a favour, Miss: sit here a bit in my place, will you, while I go off and stretch my legs? I’ll be back directly.’

  Saying this, she slipped quietly out, not waiting for a reply.

  So intent was Bao-chai on the embroidery that she sank down almost without realizing what she was doing into the place that Aroma had just vacated. It really was a most beautiful piece of work; in fact, she found it irresistible, and taking up the needle, began sewing it where Aroma had left off.

  Meanwhile Dai-yu, on her way back to have a bath, had run into Xiang-yun and agreed to the latter’s proposal that they should together call on Aroma to congratulate her on her promotion. They arrived in the courtyard of Green Delights to find everything plunged in silence. Xiang-yun went round to the side to see if Aroma was in any of the maids’ rooms. Dai-yu went up to the main building and peeped through the gauze window into Bao-yu’s bedroom. She saw Bao-yu, clothed in little else but a thin, rose-coloured shirt, sprawled out asleep on the bed and Bao-chai sitting beside him sewing, with a fly-whisk in readiness at her side.

  For some moments she goggled incredulously at this touching domestic scene, then, fearful of disturbing it, she tore herself away to stifle her mounting giggles. When she had somewhat subdued them, she beckoned to Xiang-yun to come over and look. Wondering what extraordinary spectacle could have put her in such a state, Xiang-yun hurried over for a peep. She, too, found the scene inside a comical one and would have burst out laughing; but in her case it was the consideration that Bao-chai had always been so kind to her that caused her to control her mirth. And knowing how merciless Dai-yu could be with her witticisms, she took her by the hand and dragged her away, explaining as she did so that she had just remembered that Aroma had said something about going at noon to wash some clothes in the lake.

  ‘I’m sure that’s where she will be,’ she said to Dai-yu. ‘Let’s go and look for her there.’

  Dai-yu was not in the least deceived, and showed as much by her sardonic laugh. But she followed her nonetheless.

  Bao-chai meanwhile continued her sewing undisturbed. She had just completed her second, or maybe it was her third petal, when Bao-yu, who appeared to be dreaming, cried out angrily in his sleep.

  ‘Why should I believe what those old monks and Taoists say? I don’t believe in the marriage of gold and jade. I believe in the marriage of stone and flower.’

  The words astounded her. She had still not recovered from the shock of hearing them when Aroma returned.

  ‘What, isn’t he awake yet?’

  Bao-chai shook her head.

  ‘I just now ran into Miss Lin and Miss Shi,’ said Aroma. ‘I suppose they didn’t come in here, did they?’

  ‘Not that I know of,’ said Bao-chai. She glanced up at Aroma with a sly smile: ‘Did they tell you anything?’

  Aroma coloured.

  ‘Oh, a lot of nonsense – as usual! They were only joking, though.’

  ‘They weren’t joking,’ said Bao-chai, ‘– not this time. I was going to tell you myself, but you went rushing off before I had a chance to.’

  Just at that moment a maid arrived from Xi-feng summoning Aroma to go and see her.

  ‘There you are!’ said Bao-chai. ‘That’ll be what she wants to see you about.’

  Aroma had to arouse two of the sleeping maids to take her place in the inner room; then she and Bao-chai left Green Delights together. They parted company outside, and Aroma went off to Xi-feng’s place on her own. When she got there she was, as Bao-chai had predicted, formally acquainted with the new arrangements concerning her pay and status that had just been made for her by Lady Wang. She was told that she should go over to Lady Wang’s to kotow her thanks, but that there was no need for her to see Grandmother Jia.

  She found this interview with Xi-feng acutely embarrassing. By the time she got back from Lady Wang’s, Bao-yu was already awake. She answered him evasively when he asked her where she had been and waited for the silence and darkness of the night to tell him of her unofficial promotion to his bed. Bao-yu was delighted.

  ‘I hope there’ll be no more talk of leaving me now!’ he said, smiling broadly at her. ‘Do you remember the time when you got back from visiting your family and tried to frighten me with all that talk about your brother wanting to buy you out of service and how there was no future for you here and no point in your staying permanently, and all those other heartless, unkind things you said? I’d like to see anyone trying to take you away from me now!’

  ‘Huh!’ Aroma sniffed scornfully. ‘That’s not at all the way it is. I belong to Her Ladyship now. Now if I want to leave you, I don’t have to talk to you about it at all. All I have to do is have a word with Her Ladyship, and off I go!’

  Bao-yu laughed.

  ‘Suppose I were at fault and you told Her Ladyship and asked her to let you go; don’t you think you’d feel just a tiny bit uncomfortable afterwards when it got about that you had left me because I wasn’t good enough for you?’

  ‘Why ever should I?’ said Aroma. ‘Of course, I wouldn’t go if it meant marrying a thief or a murderer. There’s always another way out. I could always take my own life. We all have to die some time or other; it’s just a question of when. All you’ve got to do is stop breathing, that’s all. After that you hear nothing, see nothing – it’s all over!’

  ‘Stop it, now! Stop it!’ said Bao-yu, covering her mouth with his hand. ‘You don’t have to say things like that.’

  All too familiar with the peculiarities of this master who condemned flattering ‘auspicious’ talk as false and hollow, but was upset and morose if you told him the truth, Aroma regretted her blunder in having too openly spoken her mind. Smilingly she turned the conversation on to topics which experience taught her were agreeable to him: the beauties of Nature, the beauties of girls, girls. But somehow from there the conversation imperceptibly found its way round to the subject of girls dying. Suddenly realizing this, Aroma – it was she who was talking at the time – broke off in alarm. Bao-yu, who up to that point had been listening to her enthralled, laughed at her sudden silence.

  ‘We all have to die, as you said yourself just now. The problem is how to die well. Those whiskered idiots who take quite literally the old saw that “a scholar dies protesting and a soldier dies fighting” and get themselves killed off on the assumption that those are the only two ways in which a man of spirit can die gloriously, would do better to die in their beds. For when you come to think of it, the only real occasion for protesting is when one’s ruler is misguided, and the only real occasion for fighting is when one’s country is at war. If the scholar is so greedy for martyrdom that he throws away his life at the earliest opportunity, what is to become of the poor misguided ruler in the absence of
good advisers? And if the soldier so hankers for a hero’s death that he gets himself killed off in the first encounter, what is to become of his country without soldiers to fight its battles –?’

  ‘But surely,’ Aroma interrupted, ‘those famous men in the olden days laid their lives down because they had to?’

  ‘Nonsense!’ said Bao-yu. ‘The soldiers among them lacked generalship; as a consequence, they had nothing but their physical courage to rely on. They threw their lives away out of sheer incompetence. Do you call that dying because they had to? And the scholars were even worse. On the strength of having read a couple of books and got up a text or two by heart, they began to cry stinking fish as soon as they found the smallest thing at Court not as they thought it should be, in the hope of winning themselves an imperishable reputation for honesty; then, if the Court didn’t immediately change its policy, they would work themselves into a passion and promptly get themselves killed. You won‘t, surely, say that they died because they had to? What you have to remember is that Emperors hold their power from Heaven, and it’s unthinkable that Heaven should lay the huge responsibility of empire on any but the worthiest shoulders. So you can see that all those death-with-honour characters you have so high an opinion of were thinking only of their own personal fame and glory. They weren’t really thinking of their loyal duty to their sovereign at all.

  ‘Now my idea of a glorious death would be to die now, while you are all around me; then your tears could combine to make a great river that my corpse could float away on, far, far away to some remote place that no bird has ever flown to, and gently decompose there until the wind had picked my bones clean, and after that never, never to be reborn again as a human being – that would be a really good death.’

  ‘I’m sleepy,’ said Aroma, unwilling to reply, for she had observed that his mad fit was on him again. And Bao-yu at once closed his eyes and fell fast asleep.

  By next morning the subject appeared to have been quite forgotten.

  A day arrived when Bao-yu seemed to have exhausted the Garden’s possibilities, and its charms were beginning to weary him. The Return of the Soul was very much on his mind at this time. He had read it through twice without in any way abating his appetite for more. Having recently been told that the best singer among the twelve little actresses of Pear Tree Court was the soubrette called Charmante, he resolved, for a change of scene, to go over there and look her up, so that he could ask her to sing him some of the arias from it.

  The only girls he recognized when he arrived there were Trésor and Topaze, who greeted him with smiles and invited him to be seated. When he asked where Charmante was, the girls all answered him in chorus:

  ‘In her room.’

  Bao-yu at once went to the room indicated. Charmante was in there on her own. She was lying stretched out on her bed, but made no attempt to get up when she saw him enter. Nothing daunted, he sat himself down beside her and, in the familiar way he habitually adopted with girls, smilingly requested her to sing the section from the Return that begins with the words

  In these quiet courts the floating gossamer …

  But Charmante did not respond in the expected manner. She rose up quickly and drew away from him when he sat down beside her; and in answer to his request to sing, she informed him, with a cold, unsmiling expression, that she was ‘not in voice’.

  ‘I strained my voice the other day at a command performance for Her Grace,’ she said. ‘I am still resting it.’

  She was sitting opposite him as she said this, so that he had a full view of her face. He remembered now, as he studied it, where he had seen that face before. She was the girl he had seen scratching QIAN Gs on the ground that day under the rose pergola.

  And now here she was behaving as if his very presence was distasteful to her. Never in his life before had he experienced such instant rejection. Reduced to mumbling incoherence by his embarrassment, he coloured, and – since there was obviously no point in staying – left the room.

  Surprised to see him come out again so soon, the others asked him the reason. Trésor laughed when he told her what had happened.

  ‘Wait until Mr Qiang gets back,’ she said. ‘If he asks her to, she’ll sing for you.’

  Bao-yu did not know quite what to make of this.

  ‘Qiang?’ he said. ‘Where is he, anyway?’

  ‘He went out only a few minutes ago,’ said Tréso. ‘I expect Charmante said she wanted something and he’s gone out to try and get it for her.’

  Bao-yu seemed to find this of enormous interest and decided to stay a little longer and see what happened. Sure enough, Jia Qiang presently returned from his expedition. He was carrying a bird-cage with a bird inside. The cage had a miniature stage fastened to the top of it. Jia Qiang was on his way inside to look for Charmante, obviously feeling very pleased with himself, when he caught sight of Bao-yu and halted.

  ‘What’s that bird you’ve got there?’ Bao-yu asked him.

  ‘It’s a whitecap,’ said Jia Qiang, smiling proudly. ‘It can hold a flag in its beak and do a little turn on the stage.’

  ‘How much did you pay for it?’

  ‘One tael and sixteen pennyweights of silver.’

  He invited Bao-yu to be seated while he went into Charmante’s room to show off his purchase; but Bao-yu, whose desire to hear Charmante sing was now quite forgotten in his eagerness to find out exactly how things lay between her and Jia Qiang, joined the girls as they clustered round the doorway to watch.

  ‘Look! Look what I’ve brought for you,’ said Jia Qiang, full of smiles.

  ‘What is it?’

  Charmante had been lying down again, but sat up when he entered.

  ‘I’ve got a little bird to keep you company, to stop you getting so depressed. You watch! I’ll make him perform for you.’

  He took a few grains from his pocket and coaxed the bird out on to the stage, where it picked up a diminutive mask and flag and hopped and pirouetted about like an actor playing the warrior’s part in a play. The girls all laughed delightedly and said it was ‘sweet’. All except Charmante. She merely gave a scornful ‘huh!’ or two and lay back on the bed again in disgust.

  Jia Qiang smiled – almost beseechingly.

  ‘How do you like it?’

  ‘You and your family!’ said Charmante bitterly. ‘It isn’t enough to take decent girls from their homes and shut them up in this prison to learn beastly opera all day. Now you have to bring a bird along to do it as well. I suppose it’s to keep me reminded of my misery. And you have the audacity to ask me “do I like it?”!’

  Her words appeared to make Jia Qiang quite frantic, for he uttered a string of the most violent and passionate oaths in reply.

  ‘I’m a stupid fool and I should have known better,’ he said. ‘I spent all that money on the thing because I thought it might cheer you up. It never occurred to me that you might take it like this. Well, let the thing go then! It’s an “act of merit” to free living creatures, so at least you’ll get some good from it. Either it will help you in the next life or free you from sickness in this one.’

  With that he released the bird, which promptly flew away, and stamped on the cage until it was smashed to pieces.

  ‘Maybe birds aren’t as important as human beings,’ said Charmante, ‘but they have mothers and fathers just the same. Can’t you see how cruel it is to take them away from their nests and make them perform for people’s amusement? I coughed up two mouthfuls of blood today. Her Ladyship sent someone to look for you. She wanted you to get me a doctor so that we could find out what to do, but instead of a doctor you bring this thing back with you, to make a mock of me. It’s just my luck to fall ill when I’ve got no one to care for me or take any notice.’

  She began to cry.

  ‘But I asked the doctor about you yesterday evening and he said it wasn’t serious,’ Jia Qiang protested. ‘He said you were to take a couple of doses of that medicine and he’d come and look at you again in two days�
�� time. I’d no idea that you’d been spitting blood. Well, I’d better go and get him straight away.’

  He began to go, but Charmante called him back.

  ‘Stay where you are! Don’t go rushing off in this burning heat. You’re only going to fetch him because you’re in a temper, anyway. I wouldn’t see him now if he came!’

  Hearing her say this, Jia Qiang halted.

  Bao-yu had been watching this scene with open-mouthed fascination. At last he understood the real meaning of all those QIAN GS. There was obviously no place for him here, so he slipped away. Jia Qiang was so absorbed in his concern for Charmante that he did not even notice him go and it was left to the little actresses to see him out.

  It was a reflective, self-critical Bao-yu who made his way back to Green Delights, so bemused that he scarcely noticed where he was going. When he arrived, Dai-yu and Aroma were sitting in conversation together. He looked at Aroma and sighed heavily.

  ‘What I told you the other night was wrong,’ he said. ‘I’m not surprised that Father tells me I have a “small capacity but a great self-conceit”. I mean, that stuff about all of you making a river of tears for me when I die: I realize now that it’s not possible. I realize now that we each have our own allotted share of tears and must be content with what we’ve got.’

  Aroma was surprised to hear him bring this up again. She had assumed that what he said that night was in jest and must long since have been forgotten. She laughed.

  ‘You know, sometimes I think you really are a bit touched!’

  Bao-yu was silent.

  From the curious way in which he was behaving Dai-yu could see that something had got into him, but judged it not her business to inquire what. To change the subject she asked him about something of a more practical nature.

  ‘When I was with your Mother just now she told me that it is Mrs Xue’s birthday tomorrow. She told me to ask you whether you intend going or not. When you’ve decided, she’d like you to send someone round and let her know.’