CHAPTER XXIII. Page 3 _The Dream of the Red Chamber
"Cousin, tell me is it nice or not?" Pao-yue grinned.
"It is indeed full of zest!" Lin Tai-yue replied exultingly.
"I'm that very sad and very sickly person," Pao-yue explained laughing, "while you are that beauty who could subvert the empire and overthrow the city."
Lin Tai-yue became, at these words, unconsciously crimson all over her cheeks, even up to her very ears; and raising, at the same moment, her two eyebrows, which seemed to knit and yet not to knit, and opening wide those eyes, which seemed to stare and yet not to stare, while her peach-like cheeks bore an angry look and on her thin-skinned face lurked displeasure, she pointed at Pao-yue and exclaimed: "You do deserve death, for the rubbish you talk! without any provocation you bring up these licentious expressions and wanton ballads to give vent to all this insolent rot, in order to insult me; but I'll go and tell uncle and aunt."
As soon as she pronounced the two words "insult me," her eyeballs at once were suffused with purple, and turning herself round she there and then walked away; which filled Pao-yue with so much distress that he jumped forward to impede her progress, as he pleaded: "My dear cousin, I earnestly entreat you to spare me this time! I've indeed said what I shouldn't; but if I had any intention to insult you, I'll throw myself to-morrow into the pond, and let the scabby-headed turtle eat me up, so that I become transformed into a large tortoise. And when you shall have by and by become the consort of an officer of the first degree, and you shall have fallen ill from old age and returned to the west, I'll come to your tomb and bear your stone tablet for ever on my back!"
As he uttered these words, Lin Tai-yue burst out laughing with a sound of "pu ch'ih," and rubbing her eyes, she sneeringly remarked: "I too can come out with this same tune; but will you now still go on talking nonsense? Pshaw! you're, in very truth, like a spear-head, (which looks) like silver, (but is really soft as) wax!"
"Go on, go on!" Pao-yue smiled after this remark; "and what you've said, I too will go and tell!"
"You maintain," Lin Tai-yue rejoined sarcastically, "that after glancing at anything you're able to recite it; and do you mean to say that I can't even do so much as take in ten lines with one gaze?"
Pao-yue smiled and put his book away, urging: "Let's do what's right and proper, and at once take the flowers and bury them; and don't let us allude to these things!"
Forthwith the two of them gathered the fallen blossoms; but no sooner had they interred them properly than they espied Hsi Jen coming, who went on to observe: "Where haven't I looked for you? What! have you found your way as far as this! But our senior master, Mr. Chia She, over there isn't well; and the young ladies have all gone over to pay their respects, and our old lady has asked that you should be sent over; so go back at once and change your clothes!"
When Pao-yue heard what she said, he hastily picked up his books, and saying good bye to Tai-yue, he came along with Hsi Jen, back into his room, where we will leave him to effect the necessary change in his costume. But during this while, Lin Tai-yue was, after having seen Pao-yue walk away, and heard that all her cousins were likewise not in their rooms, wending her way back alone, in a dull and dejected mood, towards her apartment, when upon reaching the outside corner of the wall of the Pear Fragrance court, she caught, issuing from inside the walls, the harmonious strains of the fife and the melodious modulations of voices singing. Lin Tai-yue readily knew that it was the twelve singing-girls rehearsing a play; and though she did not give her mind to go and listen, yet a couple of lines were of a sudden blown into her ears, and with such clearness, that even one word did not escape. Their burden was this:
These troth are beauteous purple and fine carmine flowers, which in this way all round do bloom, And all together lie ensconced along the broken well, and the dilapidated wall!
But the moment Lin Tai-yue heard these lines, she was, in fact, so intensely affected and agitated that she at once halted and lending an ear listened attentively to what they went on to sing, which ran thus:
A glorious day this is, and pretty scene, but sad I feel at heart! Contentment and pleasure are to be found in whose family courts?
After overhearing these two lines, she unconsciously nodded her head, and sighed, and mused in her own mind. "Really," she thought, "there is fine diction even in plays! but unfortunately what men in this world simply know is to see a play, and they don't seem to be able to enjoy the beauties contained in them."
At the conclusion of this train of thought, she experienced again a sting of regret, (as she fancied) she should not have given way to such idle thoughts and missed attending to the ballads; but when she once more came to listen, the song, by some coincidence, went on thus:
It's all because thy loveliness is like a flower and like the comely spring, That years roll swiftly by just like a running stream.
When this couplet struck Tai-yu's ear, her heart felt suddenly a prey to excitement and her soul to emotion; and upon further hearing the words:
Alone you sit in the secluded inner rooms to self-compassion giving way.
--and other such lines, she became still more as if inebriated, and like as if out of her head, and unable to stand on her feet, she speedily stooped her body, and, taking a seat on a block of stone, she minutely pondered over the rich beauty of the eight characters:
It's all because thy loveliness is like a flower and like the comely spring, That years roll swiftly by just like a running stream.
Of a sudden, she likewise bethought herself of the line:
Water flows away and flowers decay, for both no feelings have.
--which she had read some days back in a poem of an ancient writer, and also of the passage:
When on the running stream the flowers do fall, spring then is past and gone;
--and of:
Heaven (differs from) the human race,
--which also appeared in that work; and besides these, the lines, which she had a short while back read in the Hsi Hiang Chi:
The flowers, lo, fall, and on their course the waters red do flow! Petty misfortunes of ten thousand kinds (my heart assail!)
both simultaneously flashed through her memory; and, collating them all together, she meditated on them minutely, until suddenly her heart was stricken with pain and her soul fleeted away, while from her eyes trickled down drops of tears. But while nothing could dispel her present state of mind, she unexpectedly realised that some one from behind gave her a tap; and, turning her head round to look, she found that it was a young girl; but who it was, the next chapter will make known.