The Crab-Flower Club Page 10

  Prettikins fled.

  Bao-yu realized that he had once again given offence by speaking thoughtlessly; and as this time it was in front of a lot of people, his embarrassment was correspondingly greater. He turned aside in confusion and began talking nervously to someone else.

  Bao-yu’s rudeness to Bao-chai had given Dai-yu secret satisfaction. When Prettikins came in looking for her fan, she had been on the point of adding some facetiousness of her own at Bao-chai’s expense; but Bao-chai’s brief explosion caused her to drop the prepared witticism and ask instead what play the two acts were from that Bao-chai said she had just been watching.

  Bao-chai had observed the smirk on Dai-yu’s face and knew very well that Bao-yu’s rudeness must have pleased her. The smiling answer she gave to Dai-yu’s question was therefore not without a touch of malice.

  ‘The play I saw was Li Kui Abuses Song Jiang and Afterwards Has to Say He Is Sorry.’

  Bao-yu laughed.

  ‘What a mouthful! Surely, with all your learning, cousin, you must know the proper name of that play? It’s called The Abject Apology.’

  ‘The Abject Apology? said Bao-chai. ‘Well, no doubt you clever people know all there is to know about abject apology. I’m afraid it’s something I wouldn’t know about.’

  Her words touched Bao-yu and Dai-yu on a sensitive spot, and by the time she had finished, they were both blushing hotly with embarrassment.

  Xi-feng was insufficiently educated to have understood all these nuances, but by studying the speakers’ expressions she had formed a pretty good idea of what they were talking about.

  ‘Rather hot weather to be eating raw ginger, isn’t it?’ she asked.

  No one present could understand what she meant.

  ‘No one’s been eating raw ginger,’ they said.

  Xi-feng affected great surprise and rubbed her cheek meaningfully with her hand:

  ‘If no one’s been eating raw ginger, then why are they looking so hot and bothered?’

  At this Bao-yu and Dai-yu felt even more uncomfortable. Bao-chai was about to add something, but seeing the abject look on Bao-yu’s face, she laughed and held her tongue. None of the others present had understood what the four of them were talking about and treated these exchanges as a joke.

  Shortly after this, when Bao-chai and Xi-feng had gone out of the room, Dai-yu said to Bao-yu.

  ‘You see? There are people even more dangerous to trifle with than I. If I weren’t such a tongue-tied, slow-witted creature, you wouldn’t get away with it quite so often, my friend.’

  Bao-yu was still smarting from Bao-chai’s testiness. To be set upon now by Dai-yu as well seemed positively the last straw. But though he wanted to reply, he knew how easily she would take offence and controlled himself with an effort. Feeling in very low spirits, he left the room himself now and went off on his own.

  It was the hottest part of the day. Lunch had long been over, and in every apartment mistress and maids alike had succumbed to the lassitude of the hour. As he sauntered slowly by, hands clasped behind his back, everywhere he went was hushed in the breathless silence of noon. From the back of Grandmother Jia’s quarters he passed eastwards through the gallery that ended near the wall of Xi-feng’s courtyard. He went up to the gate, but it was closed, and remembering that it was her invariable custom when the weather was hot to take two whole hours off in the middle of the day for her siesta, he thought he had better not go in. He continued, instead, through the corner gate that led into his parents’ courtyard.

  On entering his mother’s apartment, he found several maids dozing over their embroidery. Lady Wang herself was lying on a summer-bed in the inner room, apparently fast asleep. Her maid Golden, who was sitting beside her gently pounding her legs, also seemed half asleep, for her head was nodding and her half-closed eyes were blinking drowsily. Bao-yu tiptoed up to her and tweaked an ear-ring. She opened her eyes wide and saw that it was Bao-yu.

  He smiled at her and whispered.

  ‘So sleepy?’

  Golden pursed her lips up in a smile, motioned to him with her hand to go away, and then closed her eyes again. But Bao-yu lingered, fascinated. Silently craning forward to make sure that Lady Wang’s eyes were closed, he took a Fragrant Snow ‘quencher’ from the embroidered pouch at his waist and popped it between Golden’s lips. Golden nibbled it dreamily without opening her eyes.

  ‘Shall I ask Her Ladyship to let me have you, so that we can be together?’ he whispered jokingly.

  Golden made no reply.

  ‘When she wakes up, I’ll talk to her about it,’ he said.

  Golden opened her eyes wide and gave him a little push.

  ‘What’s the hurry?’ she said playfully. ‘ “Yours is yours, wherever it be”, as they said to the lady when she dropped her gold comb in the well. Haven’t you ever heard that saying? – I’ll tell you something to do, if you want a bit of fun. Go into the little east courtyard and you’ll be able to catch Sunset and Huan together.’

  ‘Who cares about them?’ said Bao-yu. ‘Let’s talk about us.’

  At this point Lady Wang sat bolt upright and dealt Golden a slap in the face.

  ‘Shameless little harlot!’ she cried, pointing at her wrath-fully. ‘It’s you and your like who corrupt our innocent young boys.’

  Bao-yu had slipped silently away as soon as his mother sat up. Golden, one of whose cheeks was now burning a fiery red, was left without a word to say. The other maids, hearing that their mistress was awake, came hurrying into the room.

  ‘Silver!’ said Lady Wang. ‘Go and fetch your mother. I want her to take your sister Golden away.’

  Golden threw herself, weeping, upon her knees:

  ‘No, Your Ladyship, please! Beat me and revile me as much as you like, but please, for pity’s sake, don’t send me away. I’ve been with Your Ladyship nigh on ten years now. How can I ever hold up my head again if you dismiss me?’

  Lady Wang was not naturally unkind. On the contrary, she was an exceptionally lenient mistress. This was, in fact, the first time in her life that she had ever struck a maid. But the kind of ‘shamelessness’ of which – in her view – Golden had just been guilty was the one thing she had always most abhorred. It was the uncontrollable anger of the morally outraged that had caused her to strike Golden and call her names; and though Golden now begged and pleaded, she refused to retract her dismissal. When Golden’s mother, old Mrs Bai, had eventually been fetched, the wretched girl, utterly crushed by her shame and humiliation, was led away.

  But of her no more.

  Embarrassed by his mother’s awakening, Bao-yu had slipped hurriedly into the Garden.

  The burning sun was now in the height of heaven, the contracted shadows were concentrated darkly beneath the trees, and the stillness of noon, filled with the harsh trilling of cicadas, was broken by no human voice; but as he approached the bamboo trellises of the rose-garden, a sound like a suppressed sob seemed to come from inside the pergola. Uncertain what it was that he had heard, he stopped to listen. Undoubtedly there was someone there.

  This was the fifth month of the year, when the rambler roses are in fullest bloom. Peeping through the fragrant panicles with which the pergola was smothered, he saw a girl crouching down on the other side of the trellis, scratching at the ground with one of those long, blunt pins that girls use for fastening their back hair with.

  ‘Can this be some silly maid come here to bury flowers like Frowner?’ he wondered.

  He was reminded of Zhuang-zi’s story of the beautiful Xi-shi’s ugly neighbour, whose endeavours to imitate the little frown that made Xi-shi captivating produced an aspect so hideous that people ran from her in terror. The recollection of it made him smile.

  ‘This is “imitating the Frowner” with a vengeance,’ he thought, ‘– if that is really what she is doing. Not merely unoriginal, but downright disgusting!’

  ‘Don’t imitate Miss Lin,’ he was about to shout; but a glimpse of the girl’s face revealed t
o him just in time that this was no maid, but one of the twelve little actresses from Pear-tree Court – though which of them, since he had seen them only in their make-up on the stage, he was unable to make out. He stuck out his tongue in a grimace and clapped a hand to his mouth.

  ‘Good job I didn’t speak too soon,’ he thought. ‘I’ve been in trouble twice already today for doing that, once with Frowner and once with Chai. It only needs me to go and upset these twelve actresses as well and I shall be well and truly in the cart!’

  His efforts to identify the girl made him study her more closely. It was curious that he should have thought her an imitator of Dai-yu, for she had much of Dai-yu’s ethereal grace in her looks: the same delicate face and frail, slender body; the same

  … brows like hills in spring,

  And eyes like autumn’s limpid pools;

  – even the same little frown that had often made him compare Dai-yu with Xi-shi of the legend.

  It was now quite impossible for him to tear himself away. He watched her fascinated. As he watched, he began to see that what she was doing with the pin was not scratching a hole to bury flowers in, but writing. He followed the movements of her hand, and each vertical and horizontal stroke, each dot and hook that she made he copied with a finger on the palm of his hand. Altogether there were eighteen strokes. He thought for a moment. The character he had just written in his hand was QIANG. The name of the roses which covered the pergola contained the same character: ‘Qiang-wei’.

  ‘The sight of the roses has inspired her to write a poem,’ he thought. ‘Probably she’s just thought of a good couplet and wants to write it down before she forgets it; or perhaps she has already composed several lines and wants to work on them a bit. Let’s see what she writes next.’

  The girl went on writing, and he followed the movements of her hand as before. It was another QIANG. Again she wrote, and again he followed, and again it was a Q I A N G. It was as though she were under some sort of spell. As soon as she had finished writing one QIANG she began writing another.

  QIANG QIANG QIANG QIANG QIANG QIANG QIANG …

  He must have watched her write several dozen QIANG’S in succession. He seemed to be as much affected by the spell on his side of the pergola as the girl herself was on hers, for his eyeballs continued to follow her pin long after he had learned to anticipate its movements.

  ‘This girl must have something on her mind that she cannot tell anyone about to make her behave in this way,’ he thought. ‘One can see from her outward behaviour how much she must be suffering inwardly. And she looks so frail. Too frail for suffering. I wish I could bear some of it for you, my dear!’

  In the stifling dog-days of summer the transition from clear to overcast is often sudden, and a little cloudlet can sometimes be the harbinger of a heavy shower. As Bao-yu watched the girl, a sudden gust of cool wind blew by, followed, within moments, by the hissing downpour of rain. He could see the water running off her head in streams and soaking into her clothes.

  ‘Oh, it’s raining! With her delicate constitution she ought not to be outside in a downpour like this.’

  In his anxiety he cried out to her involuntarily:

  ‘Don’t write any more. Look! You’re getting soaked.’

  The girl looked up, startled, when she heard the voice. She could see someone amidst the roses saying ‘Don’t write’; but partly because of Bao-yu’s almost girlishly beautiful features, and partly because she could in any case only see about half of his face, everything above and below being hidden by flowers and foliage, she took him for a maid; so instead of rushing from his presence as she would have done if she had known that it was Bao-yu, she smiled up at him gratefully:

  ‘Thank you for reminding me. But what about you? You must be getting wet too, surely?’

  ‘Aiyo!’ – her words made him suddenly aware that the whole of his body was icy cold, and when he looked down, he saw that he was soaked.

  ‘Oh lord!’

  He rushed off in the direction of Green Delights; but all the time he was worrying about the girl, who had nowhere where she could shelter from the rain.

  As this was the day before the Double Fifth festival, Élégante and the other little actresses – including the one whom Bao-yu had just been watching – had already started their holiday and had gone into the Garden to amuse themselves. Two of them, Trésor – one of the two members of the company who played Principal Boy parts – and Topaze – one of the company’s two soubrettes – happened to be in the House of Green Delights playing with Aroma when the rain started and prevented their leaving. They and the maids amused themselves by blocking up the gutters and letting the water collect in the courtyard. When it was nicely flooded, they rounded up a number of mallards, sheldrakes, mandarin ducks and other waterfowl, tied their wings together, and having first closed the courtyard gate, set them down in the water to swim about. Aroma and the girls were all in the outside gallery enjoying this spectacle when Bao-yu arrived at the gate. Finding it shut, he knocked on it for someone to come and open up for him. But there was little chance of a knock being heard above the excited laughter of the maids. He had to shout for some minutes and pound the gate till it shook before anyone heard him inside.

  Aroma was not expecting him back so soon.

  ‘I wonder who it can be at this time,’ she said. ‘Won’t someone go and answer it?’

  ‘It’s me!’ shouted Bao-yu.

  ‘That’s Miss Bao’s voice,’ said Musk.

  ‘Nonsense!’ said Skybright. ‘What would she be doing visiting us at this time of day?’

  ‘Let me just take a peep through the crack,’ said Aroma. ‘If I think it’s all right, I’ll let them in. We don’t want to turn anyone away in the pouring rain.’

  Keeping under cover of the gallery, she made her way round to the gate and peered through the chink between the double doors. The sight of Bao-yu standing there like a bedraggled hen with the water running off him in streamlets was both alarming and – she could not help but feel – very funny. She opened the gate as quickly as she could, then, when she saw him fully, clapped her hands and doubled up with laughter.

  ‘Master Bao! I never thought it would be you. What did you want to come running back in the pouring rain for?’

  Bao-yu was by now in a thoroughly evil temper and had fully resolved to give whoever opened the gate a few kicks. As soon as it was open, therefore, he lashed out with his foot, not bothering to see who it was – for he assumed that the person answering it would be one of the younger maids – and dealt Aroma a mighty kick in the ribs that caused her to cry out in pain.

  ‘Worthless lot!’ he shouted. ‘Because I always treat you decently, you think you can get away with anything. I’m just your laughing-stock.’

  It was not until he looked down and saw Aroma crying that he realized he had kicked the wrong person.

  ‘Aiyo! It’s you! Where did I kick you?’

  Up to this moment Aroma had never had so much as a harsh word from Bao-yu, and the combination of shame, anger and pain she now felt on being kicked and shouted at by him in front of so many people was well-nigh insupportable. Nevertheless she forced herself to bear it, reflecting that to have made an outcry would be like admitting that it was her he had meant to kick, which she knew was almost certainly not the case.

  ‘You didn’t; you missed me,’ she said. ‘Come in and get changed.’

  When Bao-yu had gone indoors and was changing his clothes, he said to her jokingly:

  ‘In all these years this is the first time I’ve ever struck anyone in anger. Too bad that you should have been the one to get in the way of the blow!’

  In spite of the pain, which it cost her some effort to master, Aroma was helping him with his changing. She smiled when he said this.

  ‘I’m the person you always begin things with,’ she said. ‘Whether it’s big things or little things or pleasant ones or unpleasant ones, it’s only natural that you should try them out first on m
e. Only in this instance I hope that now you’ve hit me you won’t from now on go around hitting other people.’

  ‘I didn’t mean to kick you, you know,’ said Bao-yu.

  ‘Who said you did?’ said Aroma. ‘It’s the younger ones who normally see to the gate; and they’ve grown so insolent nowadays, it’s enough to put anyone in a rage. If you’d given one of them a few kicks and put the fear of God into them, it would have been a very good thing. No, it was my own silly fault. I should have made them open the gate and not gone to open it myself.’

  While they were speaking, the rain had stopped and Trésor and Topaze had left. The pain in Aroma’s side was such that it was giving her a feeling of nausea and she could eat no dinner. At bedtime, when she took off her clothes, she saw a great black bruise the size of a rice-bowl spreading over the side of her chest. The extent of it frightened her, but she forbore to cry out. Nevertheless even her dreams that night were full of pain and she several times uttered an ‘Aiyo’ in the midst of her sleep.

  Although it was understood that he had not kicked her deliberately, Bao-yu had felt a little uneasy when he saw how sluggish Aroma seemed in her movements; and when, during the night, he heard her groaning in her sleep, he knew that he must have kicked her really hard. Getting out of bed, he picked up a lamp and tiptoed over to have a look. Just as he reached the foot of her bed, he heard her cough a couple of times and spit out a mouthful of something.

  ‘Aiyo!’

  She opened her eyes wide and saw Bao-yu. Startled, she asked him what he was doing there.

  ‘You’ve been groaning in your sleep,’ he said. ‘I must have hurt you badly. Let me have a look.’

  ‘My head feels giddy,’ said Aroma, ‘and I’ve got a sweet, sickly taste in my throat. Have a look on the floor.’

  Bao-yu shone his lamp on the floor. Beside the bed, where she had spat, there was a mouthful of bright red blood. He was horrified.

  ‘Oh, help!’