The Crab-Flower Club

by Cao Xueqin

  Mrs Lai hurriedly rose to her feet as Patience came up to pour tea for her.

  ‘You shouldn’t do that, miss. You should let one of the younger ones do it. ‘Tain’t right you should pour for me.’

  Sitting down again she continued to hold forth between sips.

  ‘You don’t know that boy, Mrs Lian. He’s like all young people: you have to be strict with them all the time. Even then if you’re not careful they’ll somehow find a way to raise the devil and grieve their parents’ hearts. This young chap of ours now: those that know him realize it’s just the mischief coming out, but those who don’t are liable to think that he’s taking advantage of the fact that he’s got more money and influence than other people to throw his weight about; and that reflects badly on the Master’s reputation as well. Oh, I get so angry about it sometimes, I don’t know what to do with myself. I have to call his Dad in and give him a good talking-to and then I feels a bit better. I hope you won’t mind my saying this’ – she pointed a finger at Bao-yu – ‘but I wouldn’t have thought that your father was strict enough with you. Look at the way Her Old Ladyship was out in front the moment he started when he gave you that beating a while ago. You should have seen the way your grandfather used to lay into him when he was a lad. And your father wasn’t the scapegrace that you are, either. Then there was your father’s elder brother, Master She. Now he was mischievous – though even so, he didn’t turn the whole household upsy-downsy the way you seem to. He was always getting beaten. Oh, and the way your Cousin Zhen’s grandfather over at the Ning-guo used to lay into his son! Oh, he had a fiery temper! Once it was up – well, you’d never have thought it was his son he was beating. Looked more like he was torturing a bandit. From what I’ve seen and heard, I should imagine that the way your Cousin Zhen at the Ning-guo disciplines his son is in his grandfather’s tradition. Only trouble is, he’s a bit too erratic. Can’t control himself, that’s his trouble. I don’t blame the young ones for not respecting him. If you’re sensible, young man, you’ll be glad to hear me say this; otherwise, though you may be too polite to say so, I expect you’ll think I’m an interfering old woman.’

  Just then Lai Da’s wife came in, followed almost immediately by the wives of Zhou Rui and Zhang Cai. The latter two had come to report to Xi-feng on various domestic matters. Xi-feng smilingly inquired of Lai Da’s wife whether she had come to collect her mother-in-law.

  Well, no, madam, not exactly,’ said Lai Da’s wife. ‘I really came to find out whether you and the young ladies will be favouring us with your presence or not.’

  ‘Oh, how silly of me!’ said old Mrs Lai when she heard this. ‘Here have I been talking a load of stale old sesame and all the time forgetting the one thing I came here to ask you about! On account of our young chap’s posting, all our friends and relations want to get together and celebrate, so we thought we’d better have a reception. Well, the way I saw it, if we only held it for one day, it would mean inviting some people and leaving out others, and that wouldn’t seem right. So I thought about it for a bit, and I thought to myself, well, it’s thanks to the Masters that this great honour has come our way, so we must do what we can to show our appreciation. Even if it means spending every penny we’ve got, we ought to be glad to do it. So I told the boy’s father to arrange a reception for three days running. On the first day we’ll have some tables and a stage in our little bit of garden at the back to entertain Her Old Ladyship and Their Ladyships and your good selves and the young ladies, and some more tables and a stage with another lot of players in the reception room at the front where we can entertain the gentlemen. The second day will be a reception for relations and friends of the family, and the third day will be for colleagues of the two mansions. I do hope you will honour us with a visit. It will be the highlight of our celebrations.’

  Li Wan and Xi-feng asked her when the reception would be, assuring her that they fully intended to come.

  ‘I’m sure Lady Jia would love to come too,’ they said, ‘but I wouldn’t bank on her being able to.’

  ‘The date we’ve chosen is the fourteenth,’ said Lai Da’s wife hurriedly, before her mother-in-law had a chance to get under way again. ‘We do hope you’ll come, for Mother’s sake.’

  ‘I can’t answer for the others,’ said Xi-feng amiably, ‘but I shall definitely be coming. I’d better warn you, though: I haven’t got any present to bring, and you mustn’t expect me to offer largesse – I wouldn’t know how to go about it. You mustn’t laugh if I just eat up and go.’

  ‘Get along with you, madam!’ said Lai Da’s wife, laughing. ‘If you feel like bringing a largesse, twenty or thirty thousand taels would do very nicely!’

  Old Mrs Lai laughed.

  ‘I been to see Her Old Ladyship already and she says she’ll come. Reckon I ought to feel pretty pleased with myself.’

  After further exhortations to attend the party and various other admonishments, the old woman was at last getting up to go when her eye chanced to fall on Zhou Rui’s wife and she seemed to remember something.

  ‘There’s something else I wanted to ask you about, Mrs Lian. What’s all this about Zhou’s boy being dismissed? What did he do wrong?’

  ‘Ah yes, I’ve been meaning to speak to your daughter-in-law about it,’ said Xi-feng, ‘but there were so many other things to think about that they drove it from my mind. Lai, dear,’ – she turned to Lai Da’s wife – ‘when you get back, will you tell your husband that neither of our households will be employing Zhou Rui’s son any longer and that he is to send him packing?’

  Lai Da’s wife could only agree, but the unhappy mother fell on her knees in supplication.

  ‘What did he do?’ old Mrs Lai repeated. ‘Tell me what he did, and I’ll be judge for you.’

  ‘Yesterday on my birthday,’ said Xi-feng, ‘before the rest of us had even started drinking, he was already drunk, and when my grandmother sent her women round with some presents, instead of going out and being nice to them, he sat where he was swearing at everybody and made no attempt to receive the presents or take them inside. Eventually the two women came in by themselves and he did at last go with a couple of the pages to take in what they had brought. But though the pages made no trouble, this young Zhou dropped the box he was carrying and scattered wheat-cakes all over the courtyard. After the women had gone, I sent Sunshine out to give him a talking-to, but it ended up with him shouting and swearing at Sunshine. Faced with a young hooligan like that who is so utterly and completely uncontrollable, I don’t see that one has any choice but to dismiss him.’

  ‘Is that all it was?’ said Grannie Lai. ‘And I was thinking it must have been something serious! Take my advice, Mrs Lian. If that boy’s done wrong, beat him and curse him and tell him to mend his ways, but dismiss him? – no, that would never do. He’s not like one of your house-born servants. The Zhous came with Her Ladyship from her old home when she was married. If you insist on dismissing him, it will look like an affront to Her Ladyship. Give him a few whacks to learn him and tell him not to do it again; but keep him on, whatever you do. If you won’t do it for his ma’s sake, do it for Her Ladyship’s.’

  Xi-feng turned to Lai Da’s wife.

  ‘Very well then. Let him be called for tomorrow and given forty strokes with the heavy bamboo. And tell him he’s not to drink any more.’

  Lai Da’s wife said she would see that done. After that Zhou Rui’s wife kotowed to Xi-feng in gratitude. She wanted to kotow to Mrs Lai as well, but the old woman reached forward and prevented her. The four women then left, and Li Wan and the girls went back into the Garden.

  Towards evening Xi-feng sent someone to the store-room, as promised, to hunt out any old painting gear that had been stored there and take it round for Bao-chai and the others to look over. On doing so the girls found only about half the things they wanted, and made a list of the other half which they gave to Xi-feng to have bought. But these are matters about which it is not necessary to go into detail.

>   Suffice it to say that the freshly-sized pongee arrived back from outside in due course together with a rough draft of the projected painting, and that Bao-yu began to spend a part of each day at Xi-chun’s place helping her. Tan-chun, Li Wan, Ying-chun and Bao-chai developed the habit of dropping in to sit with them while they worked, partly to watch the painting and partly because it made a convenient rendezvous.

  Reminded by the first nip in the air that the hours of darkness were gradually lengthening, Bao-chai went round for a long consultation with her mother from which she came away with quantities of extra sewing to occupy herself with in the evenings; but since, when making her morning and evening calls on Lady Wang and Grandmother Jia, she would often, if they seemed desirous of her company, spend a considerable while sitting and talking with them, and since she was also in the habit of dropping in from time to time to gossip with one or another of her cousins in the Garden, she had very little leisure for sewing in the daytime and as a consequence was invariably plying her needle under the lamp until eleven or twelve o’clock at night.

  As for Dai-yu, twice every year, following the spring and autumn equinoxes, she suffered from a recurrence of her old sickness. This autumn the repeated junketings occasioned by Grandmother Jia’s enthusiastic excursions into the Garden had drained her of energy. Recently she had begun coughing again; and as this year it seemed to be considerably worse than usual, she had stopped going out altogether and stayed at home nursing herself in her room. Sometimes when she was feeling depressed she would long for a visit from one of the girls and the distraction of someone to talk to. But when Bao-chai or one of the others did in fact look in to ask how she was, she would grow fidgety after only a few sentences had been exchanged between them and begin to wish that they would go. The others realized that it was being ill that made her like this; and knowing from past experience how hypersensitive she was, they were never sharp with her, even if she was somewhat remiss as a hostess and often lacking in courtesy.

  Once when Bao-chai called in to see her, the nature of her illness became the subject of their conversation.

  ‘I suppose the doctors in attendance on this family aren’t too bad as doctors go,’ said Bao-chai, ‘but the medicines they prescribe for you don’t seem to make you any better. Don’t you think it’s time they called in someone really first-rate who could cure this sickness once and for all? Every year all through the spring and summer you have this trouble; yet you’re not an old lady, and you’re not a little girl any longer. You can’t go on in this way indefinitely.’

  ‘It’s no good,’ said Dai-yu. ‘This illness will never go away completely. Look what I’m like ordinarily, even when I’m not ill.’

  Bao-chai nodded.

  ‘Exactly! You know the old saying: “He that eats shall live”? What you ordinarily eat, when you’re not ill, doesn’t seem to nourish you or build up your resistance. That’s one of your troubles.’

  Dai-yu sighed.

  ‘Life and death are as Heaven decrees; and rank

  and riches are as Heaven bestows them.

  These things are not in human power to command. I seem to be worse this year than I have been in previous years.’

  She coughed several times while she was saying this.

  ‘I was looking the other day at that prescription of yours,’ said Bao-chai. ‘I should have said myself that there was too much cinnamon and ginseng in it. I know they are supposed to build you up; but you don’t want to go overheating yourself. If you ask me, I think the first, most important thing to do is to calm your liver and strengthen your stomach a bit. If you could reduce the inflamed, over-active state of your liver so that it was no longer harming the earthy humour of your spleen, your stomach would begin functioning normally again and then the food you ate could begin to nourish you properly. First thing every morning you ought to take an ounce of the best quality bird’s nest and five drams of sugar-candy and heat them up in a silver skillet until they make a sort of syrup. If you were to take that regularly, it would do you more good than medicine. There’s nothing like it for building you up if you have low vitality.’

  Dai-yu sighed again.

  ‘You’re such a kind person,’ she said, ‘but I’ve got such a suspicious nature that in the past I always suspected that your kindness was a cloak for something and rejected it. It wasn’t until the other day, when you told me off for reading forbidden books and offered me all that good advice, that I ever felt really grateful to you. I realized then that I had all along been wrong about you – right from the very start. I suddenly realized: I’m fifteen this year and have no brothers or sisters: ever since my mother died there has been no one – literally no one – who has ever spoken to me in that sort of way. I’m not surprised Cousin Yun speaks so highly of you. I used to hate it when I heard her praise your kindness, but since experiencing it myself, I know what she means. If it had been you who’d said those things in the drinking game, I should have been quite merciless. I should never have kept quiet about it at the time and gently remonstrated about it later, when we were alone together, as you did. I knew from that that I had been wrong about you, and that you must really care for me. If my eyes hadn’t been opened for me then, I should never be talking to you like this today.

  ‘Now about this bird’s nest syrup you want me to take. I know bird’s nest is fairly easy to come by, but this illness of mine is something I suffer from every year because of my weak constitution. There’s nothing particularly serious about it, it’s just something that I always get. Yet already everyone’s put to a huge amount of inconvenience because of it, fetching doctors, brewing medicines, buying ginseng for me and Saigon cinnamon. If I now come up with some fancy new idea like asking to have bird’s nest syrup made for me every day, then even though Grandmother and Aunt Wang and Cousin Feng may not say anything, the old nannies and maids on the staff are sure to resent the extra work. Cousin Bao and Cousin Feng are Grandma’s favourites, yet you should see the looks these people give them sometimes – and you should hear the things they say about them behind their backs! So you can imagine what they must be like about me. I’m not even a proper member of the family: I’m just a refugee, with no family of my own, living here as a hanger-on. That in itself is enough to make them resent me. It’s difficult enough for me as it is, without deliberately thinking up new ways to make them hate me.’

  ‘I’m just as much an outsider as you are,’ said Bao-chai.

  ‘There’s no comparison between us,’ said Dai-yu. ‘You’ve got your mother and your brother for a start. You’ve got property and businesses. You’ve still got land and a home of your own back in Nanking. It’s true that as marriage-relations they allow you to live here free of charge, but you provide everything for yourselves apart from the accommodation. You don’t cost them a penny. And any time you feel like it, you can just get up and go. I’ve got nothing at all of my own, absolutely nothing. Yet everything they give me – food, clothing, pocket-money, even the flowers and trees in my garden – are the same as they give their own girls. Can you wonder that the servants are so resentful?’

  ‘Your being here only means one more dowry for them to find,’ said Bao-chai. ‘Surely so small an extra expense as that is hardly going to bother them?’

  Dai-yu coloured.

  ‘I’ve been telling you my troubles because I thought you really cared, but you turn them into a joke.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ said Bao-chai, smiling. ‘But it’s true, all the same. However, don’t you worry: as long as I’m here, I promise to do my best to make it easier for you. If you will promise always to let me know when anything is bothering you, I will promise to deal with it if it is in my power to do so. I have a brother, it’s true; but you know as well as I do what he’s like. It’s really only in having a mother that I can count myself a bit luckier than you. In other respects we have enough in common to think of ourselves as fellow-sufferers. If you can see this – as with your intelligence I am sure you must – you ha
ve no cause to go echoing Si-ma Niu’s complaint: “All men have brothers, only I have none.” Now, you have suggested that “the less trouble the better” ought to be your motto here, and I take your point. I shall have a word with Mother next time I see her about this. I’ll be surprised if we haven’t got some bird’s nest of our own at home. If we have, I shall tell them to send you a few ounces, so that you can get your own maids to prepare it for you every morning. That way will be handier for you and will also avoid the risk of any alarms and excursions with the staff.’

  Dai-yu smiled at her gratefully.

  ‘It may be only a little thing, but it is very kind indeed of you to have thought of it.’

  ‘Nonsense!’ said Bao-chai. ‘It’s not worth speaking of. I’m only afraid that by spending so much time with other people I may have been neglecting you rather. Well, I’d better be going now. I’m afraid I’m tiring you.’

  ‘Come again this evening and talk to me for a bit,’ said Dai-yu.

  Bao-chai promised to do so and departed.

  And at this point she departs for a little while from our narrative.

  Left alone, Dai-yu ate a few mouthfuls of congee and then lay down on her bed.

  Towards sundown a change of weather came, bringing the whisper and rustle of rain. It was the pulsing, steady rain of autumn, so constant that you sometimes wonder if it has stopped. The afternoon slid imperceptibly into a sombre evening, blackened by lowering rainclouds and made yet more melancholy for Dai-yu by the persistent drip of the rain on her bamboos. Reflecting that Bao-chai would now be unable to come, she picked up a book at random to read beneath the lamp.