The titter became a ribald laugh. Only the woman and her husband didn't join in. She was still wincing and massaging her back. Her husband stood and glared, as if he hadn't heard them laughing all round him. His eyes blinked - it might have been with tears of rage - and he shook his head sharply.
Henschel lit his pipe, sheltering the bowl with his cupped palm. 'I would believe there are at most twenty pellets in her,' he said between puffs, glancing with a sly, measuring look at the woman's body. 'That is worth two dollars. Give them two dollars.' He turned to the woman's husband. 'Twenty holes,' he said in Chinese, throwing up both hands twice with fingers outstretched. 'Two dollars.'
'Why me?' Mason asked sulkily. 'It might have been you that hit her.' But he fished in his pocket and held out two dollars in front of the man's face, as if he expected him to sit up and beg for it like a dog.
The man shook his head fiercely while the woman watched in silence, rubbing her back more gently as the pain apparently lessened. The peasants looked from the silver coins gleaming between Mason's thick, reddish fingers to the man refusing them.
'If she has more holes, let her show the marks,' Henschel said, breathing a wreath of blue smoke up into the air. 'Show more hole, give more money,' he offered negligently in Chinese.
The crowd grinned and muttered, repeating his words to each other. But the man shook his head sullenly. He knew he was defeated, but he wouldn't give in and take the money.
'She'll never show her bum,' Jones said with a relieved laugh.
'All a show for money,' Henschel said confidently.
'Give him a couple of dollars more and let's leave them to it,' Mason suggested. He swung his hand round to Henschel, who, after a noticeable pause, added two more dollars.
Mason held the four dollars out to the man, but again he shook his head obdurately, his eyes glowing. The coins were in the palm of Mason's hand. He tilted his hand slowly till the coins slid off one by one onto the cold earth. They lay there gleaming.
'He will pick them up when we have gone,' Henschel said, examining the smouldering tobacco in his pipe. 'Shall we go? Don't look round - ignore them.'
They turned and walked back towards the boat, followed at an increasing distance by the peasants. After a while, when he could no longer hear them, Denton covertly looked round in spite of Henschel's advice. The man and his wife were still standing there staring after them. As he turned back he saw some boys stooping to the ground at the man's feet, picking up something and then darting away. The man didn't seem to move an inch, as if his resentment had turned him to stone. Denton felt obscurely ashamed, sullied, as though it was he who had hit the woman and dealt with the man in that supercilious manner.
Taking a more direct way back, they followed a path that led them closer to the village. The huts were of mud and unpainted wood, patched here and there with sacking and tin. Some of the roofs seemed to have caved in and those huts were derelict. There was a smell of dirt and decay, a pungent odour of pigs and stale urine.
'Pfui!' Henschel turned aside onto another path, that skirted the village. 'It would not be surprising if they had every kind of disease here. Let us keep clear.' They passed rows of freshly planted cabbages, the roots of each one neatly plastered with human manure, and left the dogs and the children behind.
'I wouldn't keep a pig in that filth,' Mason growled with contemptuous distaste, 'Never mind human beings. Why don't they clean themselves up a bit?
'Do you think they are human beings?' Henschel asked lightly, rhetorically.
'That man didn't pick up the money,' Denton interjected with a faint, hard edge to his voice. For some reason, he felt he had to defend them. 'Some kids ran off with it.'
Mason grunted. 'More fool him.'
'I suppose it was a matter of principle for him.' Denton suggested weakly, yet not ready to give up completely. 'I mean losing face or something?'
'He'd never have let her show her bum to us,' Jones laughed gaily, swinging the partridge jauntily now, 'I knew he wouldn't.'
'You didn't look so sure of yourself at the time,' Mason muttered surlily. 'You were ready to run for it.'
Jones flushed, but didn't answer and Henschel smiled a sly complacent little smile.
That night Denton went to bed early while the others drank in the saloon. He lay in his narrow bunk reading by the light of the smelly paraffin lamp. The shadows flickered from the unsteady wick and he kept glancing up at the cabin walls and window as if somebody had moved across the light. When at last he turned down the lamp, he looked almost apprehensively out over the moonlit ricefields towards the darkened village, where not a single lamp was shining. He imagined he could still see the man standing there with his silent wife beside him, glaring fiercely across towards the houseboat. Denton was frowning as he closed his eyes to sleep. He wasn't enjoying this trip, he had to admit. It was a mistake, he wished he'd never come.
26
AFTER DUTY DENTON OFTEN DRANK TEA now at the Central Hotel, where Ephraim frequently joined him. Denton would drink the Russian tea with a slice of lemon in it that Ephraim had introduced him to, while Ephraim, if it was after five o'clock, would order nothing but vodka. For a time Ephraim was his only friend, for he had grown more solitary since his expedition with Mason and Jones on the houseboat. They had ended the journey coolly, Denton declining to shoot and reading instead in his cabin, while the other two drank and gossiped with Henschel after the day's slaughter of birds and sometimes rabbits. Back in Shanghai, he avoided both of them, as well as Johnson with his assiduous attempts to become his mentor. And he began to skip the Christian Youth Fellowship meetings, pleading special Customs duties as his excuse. He continued to sing in the choir, though, and attended every service punctually. The blending of the voices under the dark beams of the cathedral still filled him with a melancholy satisfaction in which he released the emotion of his loneliness and yearning for ... for something else, something more, he didn't know what. Since Emily's jilting of him he seemed to have been living in suspension, waiting, restless, discarding the ways of life he'd been brought up in and worn unthinkingly like his clothes, but putting nothing in their place.
He took to roaming the city at night, the long crowded streets of the international settlement, the seedier boulevards of the French settlement, the narrow canals and alleys of the Chinese city. Often he passed the entrance to the house on rue Molière where he'd seen the lady in grey with the little girl, and it seemed to him that somehow that was an emblem of what he was searching for. But equally often he would go on, towards the house on the other side with its green shutters and mysteriously enticing ever-open door. He would glance in and then saunter past, as though uninterested in what the doorway promised; yet his heart always beat faster. The fat man with the level voice was gone, but another, older, man sat in the same chair now, forever reading a Chinese news-paper, from which he would slowly raise his eyes at every passer-by. The lady with the little girl, elegant, serene, remote - he never saw again.
His feet seemed to carry him to places of temptation solely in order to allow him to turn away at the last moment. He was torn between half-acknowledged lust and half-abandoned chastity. Once, in the sailors' district by the docks, two young, effeminate-looking Chinese youths accosted him, smiling in a strange, uncontrolled manner, as if they were drunk - except that Denton had never seen a drunken Chinese.
'You wantee fuckee-fuckee?' one of them asked.
'What?'
'Fuckee-fuckee?' One took his arm familiarly while the other groped for his groin.
He shook them off violently, shocked. They shrugged and sauntered away indifferently, giggling to each other their gait unsteady. It was not until later, when he'd overcome his quivering repulsion, that he realised that they were intoxicated not by alcohol, but by opium.
Yet still he sought out the same places, and always alone, to see and yet avoid them, to titillate his desires and frustrate them. Faces peered provocatively at him from doorways, rickshaw boys called out invitations from their shafts - 'Very clea',