his moustache upwards with his knuckle. 'Couldn't you get tropical kit before you left?'
'They said it would be cheaper here?' Denton turned 'their' statement into a hesitant, mild inquiry.
'Did they now?' Mason asked indifferently. 'Well, they were right about that at least.'
The lascar cabin steward appeared in the doorway, a towel over his arm, smiling and nodding at Denton.
Denton gazed at him inquiringly.
'Wants his tip,' Mason muttered. 'Slip him a quid.'
'Oh,' He gave the man a pound note. Now he'd only got nine left.
The steward stared down at the note without moving. 'You are not liking my service?' he asked in a sullen, injured voice.
'What?'
'Only one pound?'
'Isn't that enough?' Denton asked meekly.
''Course it is!' Mason answered for him roughly. 'More than enough!'
'Other passengers are giving more.'
'Other passengers are bloody fools, then.' Mason pushed past the lascar. 'Come on, let's go. Just leave him to whine and snivel here. He'll soon get fed up with it.'
But as he followed Mason out, Denton added five shillings surreptitiously to the pound note. The steward took it ungraciously, still muttering his dissatisfaction.
On deck, Mason made his way through the waiting passengers commandingly, his uniform giving him licence. As they crossed the gangway down to the landing stage, Denton looked down at the beggar boats that had swarmed round the vessel's side. They were bare, dirty sampans rowed by women or children, who held up deformed infants, filthy, naked, covered with sores, while they wailed and clamoured against each other. 'Dollar, master! Baby hungry! Baby hungry!'
'Beggars!' Mason glanced at them contemptuously. 'I suppose you've seen enough of them on the way out?'
Denton nodded. Malta, Port Said, Suez, Aden, Bombay, Colombo, Singapore, Hong Kong - everywhere there had been beggars, smelly, sore, mutilated, emaciated and importunate. And everywhere they'd made him feel obscurely guilty. 'Yes,' he answered. 'Not so many as here, though. There must be a lot of poverty.'
'Brought it to a fine art,' Mason sniffed disdainfully. 'Don't give 'em a cent, you'll never shake 'em off if you do.'
'The children look very sick,' Denton protested uneasily, remembering the missionaries' slide shows in the church hall at Enfield, the blurry pictures of starving children that their weekly threepences would feed.
'Sick?' Mason scoffed, either at Denton or at the beggars. 'They're probably dead. They steal corpses to beg with. Dead babies their parents have chucked out. Begin to pong by midday, too.'
Denton stared at him incredulously, but he had gone on ahead to shout at the Chinese, who was patiently waiting with the battered trunk.
Already gangs of coolies were trotting up and down the gangways to the holds, chanting deep rhythmic cries as they lolloped along, giant loads swaying at each end of the springy bamboo poles they balanced on their shoulders. Denton sniffed the air of the quayside. It was rich and heavy, smelling of the muddy water, of dirt, sweat, greasy smoke, of incense and the food cooking on nearby charcoal braziers. All around him there was the din of shouting coolies, bustling hawkers, grinding cranes and squealing pulleys. Only a few ship's officers and a bearded Sikh policeman were aloof and quiet, surveying the tumult with detached superiority. And another Customs officer, dressed like Mason, whom Mason nodded casually to, brushing his moustache upward with his knuckle again.
A hand touched Denton's shoulder. It was Everett again. 'Cheerio,' he smiled amiably. 'Might run into each other some time, eh?'
'Yes. All the best.'
'Friend of yours?' Mason asked, or demanded rather, as if he had a right to know.
'He was in my cabin. He's with the police here.'
'Oh, with the slops, eh?' His voice seemed to drop a tone in disparagement. He strode on through the gangs of coolies towards a brick arch with an iron gate, guarded by another Sikh policeman. 'We'll take a rickshaw.'
'Is it far?'
'Nowhere's far here.' He brushed past the policeman. 'Customs,' he said brusquely.
The policeman saluted.
Mason's puffy, florid face was sweating copiously. He mopped it with a silk handkerchief. Denton noticed dark stains of sweat under his raised arm and round the high collar of his uniform, which his neck bulged over, red and irascible.
'It's very hot,' he said peaceably.
'Hot?' Mason gave a short, ill-tempered laugh. 'That's not the trouble. It's the humidity that's killing.' He turned away to shout something at the man carrying Denton's trunk.
Outside the gate they were surrounded by an insistent mob of rickshaw coolies, all calling out and beckoning, lowering the shafts of their rickshaws invitingly so that the two Englishmen almost tripped over them. Mason kicked out sullenly at several, before he chose one. 'Here, this'll do. Hop in. The trunk can go in the one behind. Suppose you've seen these things before, Hong Kong and so on?'
'Yes. And Singapore. But what's that?' Denton pointed to a large wheelbarrow on which three Chinese women were sitting, chirping noisily, while a single coolie pushed it along. 'I haven't seen that before. What is it?'
'That? A wheelbarrow. What's it look like?'
Denton gazed at the coolie's arms, stretched wide to grip the wheelbarrow shafts. A strip of cloth, fastened to each shaft, passed over his shoulders to help him take the weight. It was about three times the size of an English wheelbarrow. 'They carry people in them?'
'Unless my eyes deceive me,' Mason said with weighty sarcasm. 'I've seen the big ones carrying twelve people.' He laughed sardonically, derisively. 'It's their idea of an omnibus.' But then, 'After all,' he added with a note of sulky concession, 'You couldn't run a team of horses through these little streets.'
They climbed into the rickshaw, Mason's bulk squashing Denton to the side. The rickshaw coolie was small and stringy, grey hairs glinting among the black in his queue. Surely he was too frail to carry them both? But he lifted the shafts and, leaning against the cross-piece, with a sigh and a grunt tugged them into motion. Denton watched his calves, nothing but skin and corded muscles, jogging along at a trot. The coolie had the cart so finely balanced that his bare, calloused feet seemed scarcely to touch the ground as he lifted himself at each stride.
They jolted down a crowded, unpaved alley, lined on each side by barbers, fruit and vegetable hawkers and sweet-meat sellers, each squatting in the shade of a make-shift awning or large wax-paper parasol. All round them men and women bargained, jostled, shouted, spat and ate. The coolie's feet splashed into a pile of rounded, steaming dung.
'Pooh!' Mason covered his nose. 'Filthy devil! Why doesn't he look where he's going? Now we'll have that in our noses all the way! Good mind to get out and take another one.' But he didn't move. Indeed, he actually seemed to be growing better-humoured.
The coolie raced up a steep wooden bridge that spanned a stagnant, dirty canal. As the brow approached, he began to lose speed. Watching the man's knobbly back bent almost double as he strained against the shafts, listening to his breath wheezing harsher and harsher, Denton felt that same obscure twinge of guilt that he'd felt throughout the voyage whenever he was approached by beggars. For a giddy moment he thought of - he saw himself - getting out and helping the old man to pull. But Mason's white-shod foot rested so negligently on the shaft and his corpulent body was lolling there in such indolent unconcern, that Denton felt almost ashamed of the impulse, as if it had been a breach of etiquette. He leaned back again with a show of ease and indifference.
At last they cleared the hump and ran down the other side, the coolie taking long, flying strides. Mason called out imperious directions and the coolie grunted, swinging them round into one narrow alley after another. They seemed to be passing through a poorer part of the city