bruise and the cut, which was still bleeding slightly, somehow made her even more appealing than before. He imagined his hand stretching out to brush her cheek. 'You will have to do something,' he said slowly, struggling to find the right Chinese words. 'Otherwise more bad will happen to you.'
She shook her head. 'It will be all right now. He will not touch me if I have foreign-devil friends. That is why I was coming to you tonight, after I saw you in the restaurant. But they caught up with me.' She paused and glanced up at him under puffy lids, her head slightly bowed. 'You did not want me any more? You never asked for me again.'
'No, not that,' he said quickly, evasively. He felt suddenly guilty, for all his pure resolution, before the submissive reproach of her voice. As though he had betrayed her by staying away.
'It does not matter,' she went on. 'So long as they think you are my friend. It does not matter if you do not want me.'
He felt his resolution melting and sat silent, chewing his lip uncertainly.
'Do you want me to go now?' she asked in a small voice.
He shook his head, still not trust himself to speak.
She was gazing at him inquiringly. 'You do not like me like this? My face is ugly now?'
'No, it's good,' he said, 'Good to look at.'
She smiled, and winced as she smiled. He imagined his lips on her bruise. He would be tender and gentle with her.... He forced the seductive dream away. 'What are these triads - the Green Triangle and the Red Triangle?' he asked quickly, in a stiff, brittle voice. He had heard of them, but only vaguely.
'People pay money to them for protection,' she said simply. 'If they do not - ' She shrugged.
'Who pays?'
'Who? Everyone. Shops, restaurants, businesses, opium divans, sing-song girls, even hawkers. Everyone.'
'And you pay the Red Triangle?'
'Of course. This is their territory.'
'They do not protect you very well against the Green Triangle, though.'
'The Green Triangle is getting stronger,' she admitted. 'But if I do not pay the Red Triangle - ' She shrugged. 'And how can I pay both? I wish they would fight it out and then everyone would know who to pay. As it is - that is why I came to you.' She glanced up at him with an appealing yet frankly practical look in her eyes. 'They will not hurt me if I am with a foreign devil.'
Denton was silent. Send her away now, keep clear, a prudent voice whispered insidiously in his mind. Remember your vow, a weaker one added faintly. Yet he thought of her erect brown nipples, of her body arching beneath his.
'I will go if you like.' She stood up suddenly, as if she'd read his thoughts in his downcast, irresolute eyes. He looked up. She was fumbling with her delicate fingers in a tiny silk purse. 'I will give you back the ten dollars,' she was saying in a small, defeated voice. A smooth jade bracelet, milky-green, trembled on her wrist. He remembered she'd worn it in bed with him that night. It was the only thing she hadn't taken off.
'No, I don't want the money,' he heard his voice say. His resolution and his vow dissolved. He stood up and held her hand, closing the purse. How small her hand was, how slim and vulnerable the fingers. She followed him unresistingly towards the bedroom.
29
HIS VOW ONCE BROKEN, Denton abandoned it for good. He became Su-mei's acknowledged protector and she spent several evenings a week with him - Ah Koo even agreed to accept a smaller tip from her because it was so regular. Denton stopped going to church from one day to the next, not even troubling to send any excuse for his absence. In the fires that Su-mei lit in him, his conscience and religion, all the weight of that unexamined childhood teaching which he'd carried so solemnly and unreflectingly throughout his life, burned to grey and powdery ash. Not that he deliberately rejected the old beliefs and myths - he merely ceased to have any use for them and let them fall away.
The formal break didn't come, though, until a month later, when the weather became suddenly warm and humid again, hurrying into spring. He was on his way to the mess one afternoon, when he saw Mr Eaton on the Bund. It was too late to avoid him, the Dean's eyes were glinting with recognition already. He had to lift his hat and smile.
'Ah, John, we haven't seen much of you lately.' His piercing, unsettling gaze fixed sternly on Denton's eyes.
'Er, no, I'm afraid I've been very busy,' Denton murmured, his voice trailing away, uncomfortable in its deceit.
Mr Eaton's face seemed to hang there waiting, his eyes slowly hardening with disbelief. Denton looked awkwardly away to the knotty tracery of a banyan tree's roots that gripped the stone wall beside them like grey twisting tentacles, 'I expect I'll be more free soon.' he said dully, his face flushing. 'I hope so.'
Still Mr Eaton's face loomed there, his eyes dark with censure.
Denton abandoned pretence, refusing to let himself be made to feel guilty. 'Well, I must be getting along.' he said breezily.
Mr Eaton inclined his head a fraction in cold, mute, condemning dignity.
I am corrupt, evil, degenerate, Denton said to himself, testing his conscience. But the words were like snowflakes, fluttering away without weight. He was thinking already of Su-mei's pale skin, the mole on her wrist, the milky green bracelet she never took off, the artful rocking and swaying of her hips. Soon he heard the tap, tap of her shoes coming along the corridor.
He grew more assured, as though Su-mei's influence extended beyond the erotic to the whole of his personality. He no longer hesitated or shrank back so much in his dealings with agents and ship's officers. He gave instructions with authority. He bore Mason's and Jones' chaffing patiently and indifferently - or even with pride when Jones admitted his envy, seeing Su-mei arrive in a sedan chair one sultry evening (she wouldn't travel in a rickshaw now - it would have made her lose face as his mistress). And he grew steadily more fluent in Chinese, the vivid Shanghainese of Su-mei which often shocked Wei with its crude vitality. 'Nothing like a sleeping dictionary for learning the language,' Mason said, hearing Denton bargaining with a rickshaw coolie by the docks - for whatever Su-mei might think, Denton didn't give up travelling by rickshaw himself. Not merely because it was cheaper. He found sedan chairs too luxurious, effeminate even, preferring the steady hard ride of the rickshaw to the soft undulation of the sedan chair.
Recognising the change in himself, Denton recognised the cause too. Sometimes he lay awake at night thinking of his life before he met Su-mei - so narrow, so tight, so drab and dry. And he would marvel that a woman could have worked such a change in him. And not even a woman really, but a mere girl of sixteen! He would turn to put his arm round her and fall asleep smiling on her shoulder.
Not only did he bear Mason's and Jones' chaffing patiently, he even began to listen to their stories of debauchery with a knowing look, as if to say I'm not shocked by all this, I'm a man of the world too. And it was in recognition of this change - 'By god, you really have grown up at last,' Mason said, wiping the beer froth off his moustache with the back of his hand, 'I thought you never would' - that Mason and Jones offered to take him to an opium divan. There was a challenging tone in Mason's voice when he casually asked, 'Like to come along with us to a place in Hongkew, smoke a pipe or two?' The challenge, Denton indistinctly recognised, was to his new, apparent manliness, to see if it wasn't only skin-deep after all.
They set off in two rickshaws, Mason and Jones leading while Denton followed alone in the second. His coolie was an older, stringy man, reminding him of the man who'd pulled Mason and himself on his first morning in Shanghai. That coolie had had grey threads in his queue too, and the knobs of his backbone had stood out under his worn shirt in the same way. But so many of the rickshaw coolies were thin and bony, especially the older ones. He recalled how squeamish he'd felt then at being pulled along by a human horse. Now he thought nothing of it. Had he grown callous, he wondered with a twinge of the earlier squeamishness, or simply more realistic? How would this man live, for instance, if he didn't pull a rickshaw? He imagined the thousands of rickshaw coolies in Shanghai lying starving by their empty