The Crab-Flower Club

by Cao Xueqin

  Going round to the front as he had said, he inclined his ear to the window and listened. He could hear Musk talking in a low voice to Patience inside:

  ‘How did you come to get it back again?’

  ‘It was when I was washing my hands in the Garden that day that I lost it,’ he heard Patience reply. ‘Mrs Lian made me keep quiet about it at the time, but as soon as we got back she sent word round to the nannies in the different apartments and told them to investigate. To tell the truth, we rather suspected Miss Xing’s maid. We thought being so poor and not used to seeing things like that lying around she might have been tempted. We never dreamed that it would turn out to be one of your people.

  ‘It was Trinket who stole it. She was seen by your Mamma Song. Fortunately, when Mamma Song came round with the bracelet to tell Mrs Lian, Mrs Lian was out, so I quickly took it from her and told her to keep quiet about it.

  ‘I couldn’t help thinking how considerate Bao-yu is to you girls and how proud of you all he is. It’s only two years since that girl Honesty stole the jade and there are some I could mention who are still gloating about it, and now here’s this girl stealing gold – not from him this time but from one of his neighbours, which is worse. I could just imagine the gloating there would be if that got around. It seemed so unjust that he, of all people, should be let down by his own girls in this way.

  ‘Anyway, I told Mamma Song that she was under no circumstances to let Bao-yu know about this. “In fact,” I said, “you’d better not tell anyone. Just behave as if nothing had happened.” Of course, it wasn’t only Bao-yu I was thinking about. I knew that Their Ladyships would be very angry if they got to hear of it and then it would be very unpleasant for Aroma and the rest of you.

  ‘The story I told Mrs Lian when she got back was that I’d been to see Mrs Zhu and picked the bracelet up on the way. I told her it must have slipped off into the grass that day while I was washing and got buried under the snow, which explains why nobody could find it. When the snow melted, there it was, shining in the sun for all to see. I think she believed me.

  ‘The reason I’m telling you this is so that you should be on your guard about that girl. Keep an eye on her and don’t send her on any errands. When Aroma gets back, have a word with her about it and see if you can’t cook up some excuse for dismissing her.’

  ‘Little wretch!’ said Musk. ‘It isn’t as if she hasn’t seen things like that before. How could she be so stupid?’

  ‘It wasn’t a particularly valuable bracelet,’ said Patience. ‘It’s one that Mrs Lian gave me. It’s what they call a “shrimp whisker” bracelet. I think the pearl on it might be quite valuable. That Skybright of yours is such a fire-brand that if I told her this, I’m sure she’d never be able to keep quiet about it. She’d blow up immediately and start hitting the girl or shouting at her, and then the whole thing would be out, in spite of all I had done to keep it dark. That’s why I’m telling you. I thought someone ought to be warned, so that you can keep an eye on her.’

  With these words Patience took her leave.

  Bao-yu had listened to what she said with conflicting emotions: pleasure at discovering that Patience understood him so well; anger that Trinket should be a thief; regret that so intelligent a person should be capable of so ugly an action. Going back to Skybright, he relayed to her everything he had just heard except what Patience had said about Skybright herself, which he emended somewhat for her benefit.

  ‘She said you’re such a worrier that if you were to hear this now, while you are ill, it would make you worse. She’s planning to tell you about it when you are better.’

  Skybright’s reaction was as fiery as Patience had foreseen it would be. Her eyebrows flew up and her eyes became round with anger. She wanted to summon Trinket immediately.

  ‘Isn’t it rather a poor return for Patience’s considerateness immediately to start making an outcry about it?’ said Bao-yu, restraining her. ‘Why not accept what she has done in the spirit in which it was intended and get rid of Trinket later on?’

  ‘That’s all very well,’ said Skybright, ‘but I feel so angry. If I don’t get it off my chest now, I shall burst.’

  ‘What have you got to be angry about?’ said Bao-yu, amused. ‘You just concentrate on getting better.’

  Skybright had already had one dose of her medicine. Towards evening she was given the second infusion. But although she perspired a bit during the night, it didn’t really seem to do much good. She still had a temperature, her head still ached, her nose was still blocked, and she was still just as hoarse. In the morning Dr Wang came again, and after taking her pulses, made a few alterations in the prescription; but although the revised dosage brought down her temperature a little, her head still ached as before.

  ‘Fetch the snuff,’ Bao-yu commanded. ‘If sniffing it can make her give a few good sneezes, it will clear her head.’

  Musk went off to do his bidding and presently returned with a little oval box made of aventurine, edged and embellished with gold. Bao-yu took it from her and opened it. Inside the lid, in West Ocean enamel, was a picture of a naked, yellow-haired girl with wings of flesh. The box contained snuff of the very highest quality, which foreigners call uncia.

  ‘Sniff some,’ he told Skybright, who had taken the box and was gazing fascinatedly at the picture inside it. ‘If you leave it open too long, it will lose its fragrance and then it won’t be so good.’

  Skybright took a little of the snuff with her finger-nail and sniffed it up her nose. Nothing happened, so she scooped up a really large amount and sniffed again. A tingling sensation passed through the root of her nose, right up inside her cranium and she began to sneeze: four, five, six times in succession. Immediately her eyes and nose began to stream. She shut the box hurriedly with a laugh.

  ‘Goodness, how it burns! Give me some paper.’

  At once one of the younger maids handed her a wad of tissue. Skybright used sheet after sheet of it to blow her nose on.

  ‘How’s that?’ said Bao-yu.

  ‘Much clearer,’ she said. ‘But I still have this headache in the front of my head.’

  ‘Now that we’ve started using foreign medicine, we may as well go the whole hog,’ said Bao-yu. ‘I expect we’ll have you better again in no time. Musk, go to Mrs Lian’s and tell her I said please could she let me have some of that Western stuff she uses to make her headache plasters with. It’s called yi-fu-na.’

  Musk went off, returning after a goodish while with half a tablet. She hunted out a scrap of red satin and cut out two little circles each about the size of a finger-tip from it; then, having melted the yi-fu-na to an ointment-like consistency over the stove, she spread a little of it on each of them with a hairpin. Skybright stuck them on herself, one over each temple, with the aid of a hand-mirror. Musk laughed.

  ‘You already looked like a banshee to start with, with your ill face and your hair all over the place. Now, with those two things on you, you really do look a sight! Funny: one hardly notices them on Mrs Lian. I suppose it’s because she wears them so often. – By the way,’ she said, turning to Bao-yu, ‘Mrs Lian asked me to tell you that tomorrow is your Uncle Wang’s birthday and Her Ladyship wants you to go. Tell me what clothes you’ll be wearing tomorrow so that I can get them ready now and not have to rush around in the morning.’

  ‘Oh, anything,’ said Bao-yu. ‘Whatever comes first to hand. Birthdays! It’s nothing but birthdays from one year’s end to the next.’

  He got up and left the room, intending to go to Xi-chun’s place to see how she was getting on with the painting; but as he came out of the courtyard gate, he saw Bao-qin’s little maid Periwinkle hurrying across the pathway ahead of him and hurried forward to catch up with her.

  ‘Where are you going?’ he asked.

  ‘To Miss Lin’s,’ said Periwinkle. ‘Miss Xue and Miss Bao-qin are there already and I’m on my way to join them.’

  Bao-yu changed his mind about going to see Xi-chun and accompani
ed Periwinkle to the Naiad’s House. He found not only Bao-chai and Bao-qin there but Xing Xiu-yan as well. Dai-yu and her three visitors were sitting on the clothes-warmer gossiping, while Nightingale sat in the closet-bed alcove by the window, sewing. The girls laughed when they saw him enter.

  ‘Another one? There’s nowhere for you to sit.’

  ‘What a charming picture!’ said Bao-yu. ‘ “A Bevy of Beauties Keeping Warm in Winter.” I should have come earlier. Still, your room is so warm, I shall be perfectly all right on this chair.’

  He sat on the chair that Dai-yu normally occupied. On this occasion it was covered with a squirrel-skin rug. A marble jardinière in the closet-bed alcove where Nightingale was sitting caught his eye. It was full of single-petalled ‘water nymph’ narcissi growing in clumps of four or five flowers from each bulb.

  ‘What beautiful flowers!’ he said. ‘The warmth of the room makes their scent even richer. How is it I didn’t notice them yesterday?’

  ‘They were given to Qin by your Chief Steward Lai Da’s wife,’ said Dai-yu: ‘two pots of narcissi and two of winter-sweet to Cousin gave these ones to me and one of the two pots of winter-sweet to Cousin Yun. I didn’t really want them, but as she was kind enough to offer them to me, I thought it would be churlish not to accept. If you’d like them, I’d be very happy to pass them on to you.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Bao-yu, ‘but I’ve got two pots of them already. Though mind you, they are not as good as these. In any case, if Cousin Qin gave them to you, you can’t possibly go handing them over to somebody else.’

  ‘There’s hardly a minute of the day when I haven’t got a medicine-skillet on the stove,’ said Dai-yu. ‘I seem practically to live on medicine nowadays. The smell of medicine is bad enough as it is, but this heavy flower-scent on top of it makes me feel quite faint. Besides, the smell of medicine spoils the smell of the flowers, which is a pity. Much better carry them off somewhere where they can regain their purity away from competing odours.’

  ‘I’ve got a sick person in my room today,’ said Bao-yu. ‘My room is full of medicine-smells too. How did you know?’

  ‘What an extraordinary question!’ said Dai-yu. ‘I know nothing about it. How should I know what goes on in your room? I don’t think you’ve been attending to a word I’ve been saying. You’re like someone who comes in half-way through a story and disturbs the rest of the audience by asking questions.’

  ‘At least we shan’t want for a theme at our next poetry meeting,’ said Bao-yu. ‘ “Narcissus” and “winter-sweet” will make splendid subjects.’

  ‘Oh no!’ wailed Dai-yu, burying her face in her hands. ‘What’s the point of having poetry meetings? Another meeting only means another lot of penalties. It’s so shaming.’

  ‘I suppose that’s meant for me,’ said Bao-yu, since I’m the one who’s always getting penalized. But if it doesn’t bother me, I don’t see what you have got to go burying your face in your hands about.’

  ‘I shall call the next meeting,’ said Bao-chai brightly. ‘There will be four themes for poems in Regular Verse and four for poems in other metres and everyone will have to do all eight of them. The first will be a three-hundred-line poem in pentasyllabics exhausting the rhyme “first”. It’s subject will be “On the Diagram of the Supreme Ultimate”.’

  Bao-qin laughed.

  ‘One can see that it isn’t really poetry you’re interested in but in making things difficult for others. It could be done, of course, if one really wanted to do it – it would simply be a question of selecting bits from the Book of Changes and torturing them into some sort of verse – but what would be the point?

  ‘When I was eight I went with my father on one of his trips to buy foreign merchandise to one of the Western sea-ports and while we were there we saw a girl from the country of Ebenash. She was just like the foreign girls you see in paintings: long, yellow hair done into plaits, and her head was smothered in jewels: carnelians, cat’s-eyes and emeralds. She was wearing a corslet of golden chain-mail and a dress of West Ocean brocade and she had a Japanese sword at her side covered all over with jewels and gold. Actually she was more beautiful than the foreign girls you see in paintings. They said that she had a perfect understanding of our literature and could expound the Five Classics and write poems in Chinese. My father asked her through an interpreter if she would write something for us in Chinese characters and she wrote out one of her own poems for him.

  The cousins were enthralled and Bao-yu eagerly begged her to show them the poem.

  ‘That’s not possible,’ said Bao-qin. ‘I left it behind in Nanking.’

  Bao-yu was very disappointed.

  ‘Just my luck!’ he said. ‘And I was hoping to broaden my experience.’

  ‘Don’t be a tease!’ said Dai-yu, giving Bao-qin a tug. ‘You didn’t leave anything behind in Nanking. Look at all the luggage you brought with you! I think you’re making it up. The others can believe you if they like, but I don’t.

  Bao-qin blushed and hung her head. She made no reply, but a little, secret smile was faintly discernible in her features.

  ‘How like you to say that, Frowner!’ said Bao-chai. ‘You really are too sharp.’

  ‘Well, if she’s brought it with her, she ought to let us have a look and satisfy our curiosity,’ said Dai-yu.

  ‘She’s got such a great pile of stuff,’ said Bao-chai, ‘she simply hasn’t had time to go through it all yet. How does she know which of all those trunks and boxes she put it in? Wait until she’s had time to sort her things out: no doubt she will come across the poem and let you see it then.’ She turned to Bao-qin. ‘Or perhaps you can remember it? If so, why don’t you recite it for us now?’

  ‘It was in Regular Pentameter,’ said Bao-qin. ‘I can remember that. For a foreigner it was really quite a good poem.’

  ‘Hold on!’ said Bao-chai. ‘If you are going to recite it, let me first send for Yun, so that she can hear it as well.’

  She gave instructions to Periwinkle.

  ‘Go back to my room and tell Miss Shi that we’ve got a beautiful foreigner here who can write poems in Chinese. Tell her that as she’s so crazy about poetry, we thought she’d like to meet her. And tell her to bring that other poetry maniac with her when she comes.’

  Periwinkle went off laughing to deliver the message. Presently Xiang-yun’s voice, loudly inquiring ‘Where’s this beautiful foreigner?’ could be heard outside, and a moment later she and Caltrop walked into the room.

  ‘Ere yet the shape was seen, the voice was heard’

  said the others, laughing. When Xiang-yun and Caltrop were seated, Bao-qin repeated for their benefit what she had just been telling the others. Xiang-yun pressed her to recite the poem, and this she now proceeded to do:

  The Land of Ebenash

  Last night I dreamt I dwelt in marble halls;

  Tonight beside the watery waste I sing.

  The island’s cloud-cap drifts above the sea,

  And mists about its mountain forests cling.

  Our pasts and presents to the moon are one;

  Our lives and loves beyond our reckoning.

  Yet still my heart yearns for that distant South,

  Where time is lost in one eternal spring.

  ‘Fancy a foreigner being able to write that!’ said the cousins admiringly. ‘It’s better than we Chinese could do ourselves.’

  While they were still enthusing over the poem, Musk arrived to report that someone had just been round with a message for Master Bao from Lady Wang.

  ‘Her Ladyship says, when you go to your Uncle Wang’s first thing tomorrow, will you tell them that she’s sorry she can’t go herself, but she’s not feeling very well?’

  Bao-yu stood up, out of respect for his mother, to reply. He asked Bao-chai and Bao-qin if they would be going too. No, said Bao-chai, they had sent a present yesterday, and that was all they would be doing.

  Conversation continued a little longer and then the company broke up.
As Bao-yu politely insisted on the others going out before him, he would have been the last to leave, but just as he was about to do so, Dai-yu called him back.

  ‘Tell me,’ she said, ‘just how long will Aroma be away?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Bao-yu, ‘but she certainly won’t come back until after the funeral.’

  Dai-yu evidently had something on her mind that she wanted to say but was finding difficulty in expressing. Whatever it was, she must have abandoned it, for, after reflecting for a few moments in silence, all she said was:

  ‘You’d better go.’

  Bao-yu, too, had a feeling that there were a lot of things he ought to be asking her, but he could not for the moment recollect what any of them were. After trying unsuccessfully to remember, he left her with a cheerful ‘See you tomorrow’ and went down the steps outside, his head bent low as he continued ruminating. Just as he was about to set out across the forecourt, something occurred to him and he remounted the steps and went in again.

  ‘The nights are getting so much longer now. How many times do you cough in the night? Do you wake up very often?’

  ‘I’m much better at night than I was,’ said Dai-yu. ‘Last night I only coughed twice. But I still don’t sleep very well. Last night I only slept between about two and four in the morning. After that I couldn’t get back to sleep again.’

  ‘Ah, I knew there was something important I wanted to ask you about,’ said Bao-yu. ‘I’ve just remembered what it was.’ He drew closer to her ear and went on in a lower voice. ‘You know that bird’s nest that Cousin Bao sent you, –’

  But before he could finish, Aunt Zhao called in to inquire if Dai-yu was feeling better. Dai-yu knew that she had dropped in on her way back from seeing Tan-chun, and that the kindness, if kindness it were, was of a somewhat tangential nature; nevertheless she begged her with eager politeness to be seated and thanked her warmly for the visit.

  ‘How kind of you to think of me, Mrs Zhao – and to come here yourself in such bitter weather!’