The Warning Voice Read online

  A great deal has been made by those wishing to discredit Gao E and Cheng Weiyuan of the fact that the titles or subjects of the lost chapters mentioned by Odd Tablet do not correspond with any of the titles or contents of the last forty chapters of the Gao E-Cheng Weiyuan edition; but it must be remembered that these chapters were lost before Red Inkstone could copy them; and it is by no means obvious that so compulsive a reviser as Xueqin would have reacted to the loss by simply sitting down and rewriting them. In fact he cannot have done so if Red Inkstone and Odd Tablet are to be believed, because when Xueqin died, seven years after the recension of 1756, they were still waiting not only for the last forty chapters but even for the pages and the few odd poems that were still missing from the first eighty.

  What happened after the ‘five or six chapters’ were lost? The answer to that question can only be guessed, and before making the guess, it is necessary to guess the answers to several other questions. First of all, what was the method by which the fifth and ‘final’ version was being produced? My guess – it is nothing more – is that Cao Xueqin was rewriting his finished fourth version and sending the manuscript to Red Inkstone for copying in batches of ten chapters. Second question: which were the missing chapters? The titles or descriptions (whatever they are) suggest that they belonged to the section of the novel immediately following the confiscation of the Jia family’s estate. In the Cheng-Gao edition we read today the confiscation occurs in chapter 105. Assuming that it came in about the same place in the missing version, my guess would be that Red Inkstone had fair-copied all or most of the novel up to chapter 100 and had just received the manuscripts of 101–10 when the loss occurred. He and Odd Tablet had already read through all ten chapters and the anonymous friend had already read the first four. He was allowed to take away and read 105-10 while Red Inkstone was busy copying 101-4. After the loss Xueqin asked to have the manuscripts of 101-4 back, as well as everything that had been fair-copied from chapter 81 onwards, in order to help him reconstruct the missing section.

  It would of course be possible to imagine something much more sinister: for example that the anonymous borrower or one of his family or acquaintance actually destroyed the manuscripts and gave Red Inkstone to understand, when he informed him of their ‘loss’, that they were highly subversive and dangerous and that Xueqin must be urged in the strongest terms to alter that part of the novel.

  As for what Xueqin did or did not do during the years which followed: we can guess that he was so disgusted that he did nothing at all, or that he ‘dried up’, as authors sometimes will, or that he worked on the last part of the novel intermittently but was too busy scratching a living to do so effectively – there are a hundred compelling reasons for not completing a book. In this mass of guesswork only one thing seems certain: Red Inkstone and Odd Tablet got nothing more out of him until he died.

  And when he did die, what remained of that last third part of the book? Presumably all of the last forty chapters1 in their fourth version, some twenty of them (81–100) in the fifth version fair-copied by Red Inkstone, and a few chapters (101-4) of Xueqin’s autograph of the fifth version which had never been copied. All of this may have been worked on to some extent by Xueqin himself before his death, and it is reasonable to suppose that after his death Red Inkstone or Odd Tablet or someone else may have tried reworking them. The important thing to remember is that if anything emanating from Cao Xueqin – however much it had been tinkered with by others in the meantime – did ever find its way into Cheng Weiyuan’s hands (and one must not exclude the possibility that Cheng Weiyuan may himself have made an unsuccessful stab at editing it before handing it over to Gao E) a large part of it would still represent the obsolete fourth version and therefore be at odds in places with the text of the fifth version represented by the 80-chapter Red Inkstone manuscripts, particularly in cases involving the names of minor characters, which, as I attempted to demonstrate in the Preface to the last volume, appear to have remained unstable until a fairly late stage in the novel’s development. This in fact is what we seem to find.

  Take the case of Cook Liu’s consumptive daughter Fivey. In chapter 77 in the Red Inkstone manuscripts we learn from Lady Wang’s lips that Fivey is now dead, yet she appears again in chapter 109 of the novel alive and well. In accordance with the principle enunciated in his Prefatory Remarks, Gao E’s solution is to leave the relevant passage in chapter 109 untouched and remove the reference to Fivey’s death in chapter 77. In the manuscript I have elsewhere referred to as ‘Gao E’s draft’ we can actually see where he has crossed it out. In an appendix to this volume I have tried to show that something similar to this must have happened in the case of Lady Wang’s maid Suncloud, though in her case the confusion in the text was so complete that Gao E failed to spot it.

  As a matter of fact, though, the discrepancies between what is found in the last forty and what is found in the first eighty chapters which so exercised Gao E are probably not as numerous as those occurring inside the first eighty chapters themselves. They represent Xueqin and Red Inkstone’s failure, even in the ‘final’ version, to root out all obsolete survivors from the earlier version.

  Such survivals are easiest to spot in the poems. Verse is much harder to alter than prose and would tend to get copied out intact from one revision to another, preserving relics of the earlier versions inside it like flies in amber. The maid Sandal, evidently one of Bao-yu’s principal maids in an earlier version of the novel, gradually dwindles out of the prose narrative in various successive editions and in Gao E’s edition has all but vanished, yet we meet her several times as it were mummified inside the poems.

  Most of the textual problems of Volume Three occur in that section of the novel which centres on the story of the You sisters, chapters 63 to 69. Chapters 64 and 67 were missing from copies of the Red Inkstone manuscripts circulating in Xueqin’s lifetime, and even in Gao E’s day, thirty years later, manuscript copies of the first eighty chapters sometimes still lacked chapter 67. Two quite different versions of that chapter are now extant. It is generally assumed that the two chapters were omitted because, like the ‘five or six chapters’ from the latter part of the novel, they had been lost. I think myself that they were not lost but deliberately held back for recasting because of discrepancies caused by the insertion of new material. In my view the story of San-jie and her tragic betrothal was grafted on to the novel at a very late stage, and the insertion of this sub-plot into the narrative of Jia Lian and Er-jie’s secret marriage and Xi-feng’s revenge created problems of timing and consistency so great that no amount of tinkering was – or ever has been – able to remove them. It is a measure of Xueqin’s genius that he has been able to charm generations of readers into regarding this as one of the most moving and delightful parts of the novel while overlooking the quite extraordinary discrepancies which it contains. Only a spoil-sport, it might be thought – a ‘kill-view’, to use the eloquent Chinese expression – would want to break the enchantment by pedantically pointing them all out. I do so only because once or twice, in the interests of clarity and consistency, I have felt obliged to take some trifling liberties with the text (as for instance in the killing-off of Mrs You – not that she was ever very much alive, poor old lady) and hold myself honour bound not only to say what I have done – which I have tried to do in the Appendices – but also to explain, if I can, the circumstances in which I have felt obliged to do it.

  *

  While preparing this volume I have been greatly indebted to the generosity of that indefatigable Hong lou meng enthusiast Mr Stephen Soong, both for written encouragement and for several times supplying me with books or articles that I might otherwise have missed, and to Professor Chao Kang for sharing the fruits of his meticulous scholarship in several long and highly instructive letters. I am also deeply grateful to the following friends for having at one time or another – in some cases many times – during the past few years furnished me with books, articles or advice: Dr Chan Hing-h
o, Dr Cheng Te-k’un, Professor Chow Tse-tsung, Dr Glen Dudbridge, Mr Tony Hyder, Dr Bill Jenner, Dr Michael Lau, Professor Li Fu-ning, Mrs Dorothy Liu, Professor Piet van der Loon, Dr Joseph Needham, Professor P’an Ch’ung-kwei, Dr Laurence Picken and Miss Mary Tregear. And although I have never either met or corresponded with him, I feel bound to acknowledge my indebtedness to Professor Itō Sōhei, whose painstaking notes to his Japanese translation of this novel (Kōrōmu, Heibonsha, 1970) have saved me many an hour of wearisome research.

  DAVID HAWKES

  CHAPTER 54

  Lady Jia ridicules the clichés of romantic fiction And Wang Xi-feng emulates the filial antics of Lao Lai-zi

  TO CONTINUE OUR STORY:

  Cousin Zhen and Jia Lian had secretly instructed their pages to have a large flat-bottomed basket of largesse-money in readiness, and when they heard Grandmother Jia call out ‘Largesse!’, they told the pages to take this basket and empty it onto the stage. The money showered down on the boards with a tremendous ringing clatter, which greatly delighted the old lady.

  The two men now rose to their feet. A page hurried forward and handed Jia Lian a silver kettle of freshly-heated wine on a tray. Taking the kettle, Jia Lian followed his cousin into the hall. Cousin Zhen went first to Mrs Li, bowed, took her winecup and, turning back, handed it to Jia Lian to fill. Then he did the same for Aunt Xue. The two ladies stood up, meanwhile, politely demurring:

  ‘Please, gentlemen, go back to your seats! You are too polite!’

  With the exception of the four senior ladies – Aunt Xue, Mrs Li, Lady Xing and Lady Wang – all the females present now left their seats and stood, hands at their sides, while Cousin Zhen and Jia Lian went over to the couch on which Grandmother Jia reclined. As it was rather a low one, the two men knelt to serve her. The other males, who had followed them into the hall and were standing a little behind them drawn up in their order of seniority, with Jia Cong at their head, seeing Cousin Zhen and Jia Lian kneel, knelt down in a row behind them, whereupon Bao-yu hurriedly rose from his chair and knelt down as well. Xiang-yun nudged him, amused.

  ‘What do you want to kneel down with them for?’ she whispered. ‘If you’re feeling so polite all of a sudden, it would be more to the point to get up and serve everyone yourself.’

  ‘So I shall, presently,’ Bao-yu whispered back at her.

  The two men had now finished serving Grandmother Jia and gone on to serve Lady Xing and Lady Wang.

  ‘What about the young ladies?’ Cousin Zhen inquired when these last two had been attended to.

  ‘No, no, go and sit down now!’ Grandmother Jia and the senior ladies cried. ‘Spare them the formality.’

  At this Cousin Zhen and the other males withdrew.

  It was now about ten o’clock and the play being performed – the ‘Feast of Lanterns’ section from The Orphan’s Revenge – had reached a climax of noise and excitement. Bao-yu tried to slip out unnoticed under cover of the din, but his grandmother had spotted him.

  ‘Where are you going?’ she called. ‘There are a lot of fireworks about outside. Mind a piece of burning touch-paper doesn’t fall on you and set you alight!’

  ‘I’m not going very far,’ said Bao-yu. ‘I’ll be back directly.’

  Grandmother Jia ordered some of the old nannies present to go after him and see that he was all right. Observing that he had only Musk and Ripple and a couple of little junior maids in attendance, she asked what had become of Aroma.

  ‘That girl is getting above herself,’ she said. ‘Sending the younger maids to stand in for her! – What next?’

  Lady Wang rose hastily in Aroma’s defence.

  ‘It is only a few days since her mother died. She is still in mourning for her mother. It wouldn’t be right for her to go out in company yet.’

  Grandmother Jia nodded, but seemed to have second thoughts:

  ‘That’s all very well, but bereavement shouldn’t make any difference where a master or mistress is concerned. Suppose she had still been working for me: do you think she would have stayed away then? One doesn’t want this sort of thing to become a precedent.’

  Xi-feng came to her aunt’s assistance:

  ‘Even if she weren’t in mourning, she would still need to be keeping an eye on things. Tonight, with lanterns and fireworks everywhere, there is a terrible danger of fire. Whenever we have plays, the people from the Garden all come sneaking over here to watch. It’s just as well to have one careful person like Aroma left behind there who can go round making sure that everything is all right. Besides, she’ll be able to see that everything is ready for Bao-yu so that he can go straight to bed when he gets back. If she were here, you can be sure that no one else would bother. He would go back to find his bedding cold, and there would be no hot water for his tea or anything else ready for him. I’m afraid I took it for granted that you would prefer her not to come; but if you want her here, Grannie, I can easily go and fetch her for you.’

  ‘No, no, don’t fetch her,’ said Grandmother Jia hurriedly. ‘You have obviously given the matter more thought than I. There’s only one thing, though. When did her mother die? Why didn’t I get to hear about it?’

  ‘But Aroma came to tell you about it herself,’ said Xi-feng, smiling. ‘Surely you can’t have forgotten already?’

  Grandmother Jia thought for a bit.

  ‘Yes, I do seem to remember something about it. I’m afraid my memory isn’t up to much these days.’

  ‘You can’t remember everything,’ the others said reassuringly.

  Grandmother Jia sighed:

  ‘She served me all those years when she was a little girl, then she was with Yun for a while, and during these past few years she’s had that holy terror who left a moment ago to put up with. I remember thinking at the time that we owe the girl a bit of kindness – especially as she’s not one of our own home-reared servants but one who came to us from outside – and meaning to ask them to give her something towards the funeral when I heard that her mother had died, but I’m afraid that afterwards I forgot.’

  ‘It’s already been taken care of,’ said Xi-feng. ‘Lady Wang gave her forty taels for funeral expenses the other day.’

  Grandmother Jia nodded:

  ‘Ah well, that’s all right then. As a matter of fact Faithful lost her mother too, quite recently. I couldn’t let her go to the funeral because her parents were living in the South. Since she and Aroma are both in mourning, why don’t we let her go and join Aroma? The two of them can keep each other company.’

  She ordered some of the women in attendance to make a selection of the cakes and other delicacies they had been eating and take them for Faithful to eat with Aroma in Green Delights.

  ‘You’re a bit late with your suggestion,’ said Amber, laughing. ‘Faithful went over to Aroma’s place hours ago!’

  This remark concluded the discussion and the company’s briefly distracted attention returned now to the business of drinking and watching the play.

  *

  After leaving the party, Bao-yu made his way straight through to the Garden. The old women whom his grandmother had sent after him, realizing that he must be returning to his own apartment, did not accompany him inside but slipped into the tea-kitchen of the gatehouse to warm themselves at the stove and avail themselves of the opportunity for some surreptitious drinking and a hand or two of cards.

  On entering his courtyard Bao-yu found Green Delights ablaze with lights but silent as the grave.

  ‘Surely they can’t all have gone to bed?’ said Musk. ‘Let’s go in quietly and make them jump.’

  Bao-yu and the four girls tiptoed through the outer room and peeped through the apertures of the mirror-wall into the room within. Aroma and another girl were lying facing each other on the nearer side of the kang. At the further end two or three old women appeared to be taking a nap. Bao-yu was just about to push open the mirror-door and enter when the sound of a sigh came from the direction of the kang and he could hear the voice of Faithful
speaking:

  ‘You see, you can never be sure of anything in this life. Look at you, for example, on your own here with a free family living outside, never sure from one year to the next where they might move to: you never expected to be with your mother at the end, did you? Yet it just so happened that this year she was living near at hand and you were able to be a good daughter to her when she died.’

  ‘It’s true,’ said Aroma. ‘When I first came here, I didn’t think I’d ever see my mother again. And do you know, when I went to tell Her Ladyship that she’d passed away, she gave me forty taels for funeral expenses. She couldn’t have done more for me if I’d been her own daughter. It’s certainly more than I’d have dared hope for.’

  Bao-yu turned back and whispered to Musk and the others behind him:

  ‘It’s Faithful in there with her. I didn’t think she’d be here. If I go inside now, she’s sure to rush off in a huff – she always does nowadays when she sees me. We’d better go away again and leave the two of them in peace. Aroma must have been pretty miserable on her own. It’s nice that she’s got Faithful with her to talk to.’