The Crab-Flower Club Read online

  Admittedly the decision where to draw the line between what may and what may not be emended is a somewhat arbitrary one, and to a textual critic the subjective arguments and rule-of-thumb methods of the translator-editor may seem arrogant and unscientific. But a translator has divided loyalties. He has a duty to his author, a duty to his reader and a duty to the text. The three are by no means identical and are often hard to reconcile.

  Perhaps I should not dwell too long on these problems arising from blemishes in the text of the original, when it is all too probable that my translation will be found to contain a large number of blemishes of my own. I must entreat those Chinese friends who honoured my first volume with their attention to point them out to me so that they may be amended in some future edition.

  In preparing this second instalment of my translation I have been helped by a number of friends, both English and Chinese, with books, information or advice. I am particularly indebted to Dr Glen Dudbridge for a copy of the 1963 photolithographic facsimile of the manuscript which I elsewhere refer to as ‘Gao E’s draft’. But for his generosity it is unlikely that this invaluable tool would ever have come into my possession.

  The late Professor Zaehner, to whom this volume is dedicated, said after reading volume 1 that he ‘preferred homo lacrimans to homo ridens’. It is true that a great many tears are shed in this novel, but I hope that those who read this volume will find some laughter in it as well.

  DAVID HAWKES

  Chapter 27

  Beauty Perspiring sports with butterflies

  by the Raindrop Pavilion

  And Beauty Suspiring weeps for fallen blossoms

  by the Flowers’ Grave

  TO CONTINUE OUR STORY,

  As Dai-yu stood there weeping, there was a sudden creak of the courtyard gate and Bao-chai walked out, accompanied by Bao-yu with Aroma and a bevy of other maids who had come out to see her off. Dai-yu was on the point of stepping forward to question Bao-yu, but shrank from embarrassing him in front of so many people. Instead she slipped back into the shadows to let Bao-chai pass, emerging only when Bao-yu and the rest were back inside and the gate was once more barred. She stood for a while facing it, and shed a few silent tears; then, realizing that it was pointless to remain standing there, she turned and went back to her room and began, in a listless, mechanical manner, to take off her ornaments and prepare herself for the night.

  Nightingale and Snowgoose had long since become habituated to Dai-yu’s moody temperament; they were used to her unaccountable fits of depression, when she would sit, the picture of misery, in gloomy silence broken only by an occasional gusty sigh, and to her mysterious, perpetual weeping, that was occasioned by no observable cause. At first they had tried to reason with her, or, imagining that she must be grieving for her parents or that she was feeling homesick or had been upset by some unkindness, they would do their best to comfort her. But as the months lengthened into years and she still continued exactly the same as before, they gradually became accustomed and no longer sought reasons for her behaviour. That was why they ignored her on this occasion and left her alone to her misery, remaining where they were in the outer room and continuing to occupy themselves with their own affairs.

  She sat, motionless as a statue, leaning against the back of the bed, her hands clasped about her knees, her eyes full of tears. It had already been dark for some hours when she finally lay down to sleep.

  Our story passes over the rest of that night in silence.

  Next day was the twenty-sixth of the fourth month, the day on which, this year, the festival of Grain in Ear was due to fall. To be precise, the festival’s official commencement was on the twenty-sixth day of the fourth month at two o’clock in the afternoon. It has been the custom from time immemorial to make offerings to the flower fairies on this day. For Grain in Ear marks the beginning of summer; it is about this time that the blossom begins to fall; and tradition has it that the flower-spirits, their work now completed, go away on this day and do not return until the following year. The offerings are therefore thought of as a sort of farewell party for the flowers.

  This charming custom of ‘speeding the fairies’ is a special favourite with the fair sex, and in Prospect Garden all the girls were up betimes on this day making little coaches and palanquins out of willow-twigs and flowers and little banners and pennants from scraps of brocade and any other pretty material they could find, which they fastened with threads of coloured silk to the tops of flowering trees and shrubs. Soon every plant and tree was decorated and the whole garden had become a shimmering sea of nodding blossoms and fluttering coloured streamers. Moving about in the midst of it all, the girls in their brilliant summer dresses, beside which the most vivid hues of plant and plumage became faint with envy, added the final touch of brightness to a scene of indescribable gaiety and colour.

  All the young people – Bao-chai, Ying-chun, Tan-chun, Xi-chun, Li Wan, Xi-feng and her little girl and Caltrop, and all the maids from all the different apartments – were outside in the Garden enjoying themselves – all, that is, except Dai-yu, whose absence, beginning to be noticed, was first commented on by Ying-chun:

  ‘What’s happened to Cousin Lin ? Lazy girl! Surely she can’t still be in bed at this hour?’

  Bao-chai volunteered to go and fetch her:

  ‘The rest of you wait here; I’ll go and rout her out for you,’ she said; and breaking away from the others, she made off in the direction of the Naiad’s House.

  While she was on her way, she caught sight of Élégante and the eleven other little actresses, evidently on their way to join in the fun. They came up and greeted her, and for a while she stood and chatted with them. As she was leaving them, she turned back and pointed in the direction from which she had just come:

  ‘You’ll find the others somewhere over there,’ she said. ‘I’m on my way to get Miss Lin. I’ll join the rest of you presently.’

  She continued, by the circuitous route that the garden’s contours obliged her to take, on her way to the Naiad’s House. Raising her eyes as she approached it, she suddenly became aware that the figure ahead of her just disappearing inside it was Bao-yu. She stopped and lowered her eyes pensively again to the ground.

  ‘Bao-yu and Dai-yu have known each other since they were little,’ she reflected. ‘They are used to behaving uninhibitedly when they are alone together. They don’t seem to care what they say to one another; and one is never quite sure what sort of mood one is going to find them in. And Dai-yu, at the best of times, is always so touchy and suspicious. If I go in now after him, he is sure to feel embarrassed and she is sure to start imagining things. It would be better to go back without seeing her.’

  Her mind made up, she turned round and began to retrace her steps, intending to go back to the other girls; but just at that moment she noticed two enormous turquoise-coloured butterflies a little way ahead of her, each as large as a child’s fan, fluttering and dancing on the breeze. She watched them fascinated and thought she would like to play a game with them. Taking a fan from inside her sleeve and holding it outspread in front of her, she followed them off the path and into the grass.

  To and fro fluttered the pair of butterflies, sometimes alighting for a moment, but always flying off again before she could reach them. Once they seemed on the point of flying across the little river that flowed through the midst of the garden and Bao-chai had to stalk them with bated breath for fear of startling them out on to the water. By the time she had reached the Raindrop Pavilion she was perspiring freely and her interest in the butterflies was beginning to evaporate. She was about to turn back when she became aware of a low murmur of voices coming from inside the pavilion.

  Raindrop Pavilion was built in such a way that it projected into the middle of the pool into which the little watercourse widened out at this point, so that on three of its sides it looked out on to the water. It was surrounded by a verandah, whose railing followed the many angles formed by the bays and projections of
the base. In each of its wooden walls there was a large paper-covered casement of elegantly patterned latticework.

  Hearing voices inside the pavilion, Bao-chai halted and inclined her ear to listen.

  ‘Are you sure this is your handkerchief?’ one of the voices was saying. ‘If it is, take it; but if it isn’t, I must return it to Mr Yun.’

  ‘Of course it’s mine,’ said the second voice. ‘Come on, let me have it!’

  ‘Are you going to give me a reward? I hope I haven’t taken all this trouble for nothing.’

  ‘I promised you I would give you a reward, and so I shall. Surely you don’t think I was deceiving you?’

  ‘All right, I get a reward for bringing it to you. But what about the person who picked it up? Doesn’t he get anything?’

  ‘Don’t talk nonsense,’ said the second voice. ‘He’s one of the masters. A master picking up something belonging to one of us should give it back as a matter of course. How can there be any question of rewarding him?’

  ‘If you don’t intend to reward him, what am I supposed to tell him when I see him? He was most insistent that I wasn’t to give you the handkerchief unless you gave him a reward.’

  There was a long pause, after which the second voice replied:

  ‘Oh, all right. Let him have this other handkerchief of mine then. That will have to do as his reward – But you must swear a solemn oath not to tell anyone else about this.’

  ‘May my mouth rot and may I die a horrible death if I ever tell anyone else about this, amen!’ said the first voice.

  ‘Goodness!’ said the second voice again. ‘Here we are talking away, and all the time someone could be creeping up outside and listening to every word we say. We had better open these casements; then even if anyone outside sees us, they’ll think we are having an ordinary conversation; and we shall be able to see them and know in time when to stop.’

  Bao-chai, listening outside, gave a start.

  ‘No wonder they say “venery and thievery sharpen the wits”,’ she thought. ‘If they open those windows and see me here, they are going to feel terribly embarrassed. And one of those voices sounds like that proud, peculiar girl Crimson who works in Bao-yu’s room. If a girl like that knows that I have overheard her doing something she shouldn’t be doing, it will be a case of the desperate dog will jump a wall, the desperate man will hazard all”: there’ll be a great deal of trouble and I shall be involved in it. There isn’t time to hide. I shall have to do as the cicada does when he jumps out of his skin: give them something to put them off the scent –’

  There was a loud creak as the casement yielded. Bao-chai advanced with deliberately noisy tread.

  ‘Frowner!’ she called out gaily. ‘I know where you’re hiding.’

  Inside the pavilion Crimson and Trinket, who heard her say this and saw her advancing towards them just as they were opening the casement, were speechless with amazement; but Bao-chai ignored their confusion and addressed them genially:

  ‘Have you two got Miss Lin hidden away in there?’

  ‘I haven’t seen Miss Lin,’ said Trinket.

  ‘I saw her just now from the river-bank,’ said Bao-chai. ‘She was squatting down over here playing with something in the water. I was going to creep up and surprise her, but she spotted me before I could get up to her and disappeared round this corner. Are you sure she’s not hiding in there?’

  She made a point of going inside the pavilion and searching; then, coming out again, she said in a voice loud enough for them to hear:

  ‘If she’s not in the pavilion, she must have crept into that grotto. Oh well, if she’s not afraid of being bitten by a snake – !’

  As she walked away she laughed inwardly at the ease with which she had extricated herself from a difficult situation.

  ‘I think I’m fairly safely out of that one,’ she thought. ‘I wonder what those two will make of it.’

  What indeed! Crimson believed every word that Bao-chai had said, and as soon as the latter was at a distance, she seized hold of Trinket in alarm:

  ‘Oh, how terrible! If Miss Lin was squatting there, she must have heard what we said before she went away.’

  Her companion was silent.

  ‘Oh dear! What do you think she’ll do?’ said Crimson.

  ‘Well, suppose she did hear,’ said Trinket, ‘it’s not her backache. If we mind our business and she minds hers, there’s no reason why anything should come of it.’

  ‘If it were Miss Bao that had heard us, I don’t suppose anything would,’ said Crimson; ‘but Miss Lin is so critical and so intolerant. If she heard it and it gets about – oh dear!’

  But just at that moment Caltrop, Advent, Chess and Scribe were seen approaching the pavilion, and Crimson and Trinket had to drop the subject in a hurry and join in a general conversation. Crimson noticed Xi-feng standing half-way up the rockery above the little grotto, beckoning. Breaking away from the others, she bounded up to her with a smiling face:

  ‘What can I do for you, madam?’

  Xi-feng ran an appraising eye over her. A neat, pretty, pleasantly-spoken girl, she decided, and smiled at her graciously:

  ‘I have come here without my maids and need someone to take a message back to my apartment. I wonder if you are clever enough to get it right.’

  ‘Tell me the message, madam. If I don’t get it right and make a mess of it, it will be up to you to punish me.’

  ‘Which of the young ladies do you work for?’ said Xi-feng. ‘I’d better know, so that I can explain to her if she asks for you while you are doing my errand.’

  ‘I work for Master Bao,’ said Crimson.

  Xi-feng laughed.

  ‘Ah ha! You work for Master Bao. No wonder. Very well, then, if he asks for you while you are away, I shall explain. I want you to go to my apartment and tell Patience that there is a roll of money under the stand of the Ru-ware dish on the table in the outside room. There are a hundred and twenty taels of silver in it to pay the embroiderers with. Tell her that when Zhang Cai’s wife comes for it, she is to weigh it out in front of her before handing it over. And there’s one other thing. There’s a little purse at the head of the bed in my inside room. I want you to bring it to me.’

  ‘Yes madam,’ said Crimson, and hurried off.

  Returning shortly afterwards, she found that Xi-feng was no longer on the rockery; but Chess had just emerged from the little grotto beneath it and was standing there doing up her sash. Crimson ran down to speak to her:

  ‘Excuse me, did you see where Mrs Lian went to?’

  ‘’Fraid I didn’t notice,’ said Chess.

  Crimson looked around her. Bao-chai and Tan-chun were standing at the edge of the pool looking at the fish. She went up to them:

  ‘Excuse me, does either of you young ladies happen to know where Mrs Lian went to just now, please?’

  ‘Try Mrs Zhu’s place,’ said Tan-chun.

  Crimson hurried off in the direction of Sweet-rice Village. On her way she ran head-on into a party of maids consisting of Skybright, Mackerel, Emerald, Ripple, Musk, Scribe, Picture and Oriole.

  ‘Here, what are you gadding about like this for?’ said Skybright as soon as she saw who it was. ‘The flowers want watering; the birds need feeding; the stove for the tea-water needs seeing to. You’ve no business to go wandering around outside!’

  ‘Master Bao gave orders yesterday that the flowers were only to be watered every other day,’ said Crimson. ‘I fed the birds when you were still fast asleep in bed.’

  ‘What about the stove?’ said Emerald.

  ‘It isn’t my day for the stove,’ said Crimson. ‘The tea-water today has nothing to do with me.’

  ‘Listen to Miss Pert!’ said Mackerel. ‘I wouldn’t bother about her, if I were you – just leave her to wander about as she pleases.’

  ‘I’m not “wandering about”, if you really want to know,’ said Crimson. ‘If you really want to know, Mrs Lian sent me outside to take a message and to fetch s
omething for her.’

  She held up the purse for them to see; at which they were silent. But when they had passed each other, Skybright laughed sneeringly:

  ‘You can see why she’s so uppity. She’s on the climb again. Look at her – all cock-a-hoop because someone’s given her a little message to carry! And she probably doesn’t even know who it’s about. Well, one little message isn’t going to get her very far. It’s what happens in the long run that counts. Now if she were clever enough to climb her way right out of this Garden and stay there, that would be really something!’

  These words were spoken for Crimson to hear, but in such a way that she was unable to answer them. She had to swallow her anger and hurry on to look for Xi-feng.

  Xi-feng was in Li Wan’s room, as Tan-chun had predicted, and Crimson found the two of them in conversation. She went up to Xi-feng and delivered her message:

  ‘Patience says that she found the silver just after you had gone and took care of it; and she says that when Zhang Cai’s wife came for it she did weigh it out in front of her before giving it to her to take away.’

  Crimson now produced the purse and handed it to Xi-feng.

  Then she added:

  ‘Patience told me to tell you that Brightie has just been in to inquire what your instructions were for his visit, and she said that she gave him a message to take based on the things she thought you would want him to say.’

  ‘Oh?’ said Xi-feng, amused. ‘And what was this message “based on the things she thought I would want him to say”?’

  ‘She said he was to tell them: “Our lady hopes your lady is well and she says that the Master is away at present and may not be back for another day or two, but your lady is not to worry; and when the lady from West Lane is better, our lady will come with their lady to see your lady. And our lady says that the lady from West Lane sent someone the other day with a message from the elder Lady Wang saying that she hopes our lady is well and will she please see if our Lady Wang can let her have a few of her Golden Myriad Macrobiotic Pills; and if she can, will our lady please send someone with them to her, because someone will be going from there to the elder Lady Wang’s in a few days’ time and they will be able to take them for her –” ’