shafts, and then their wives and children clustering round them, starving too. He watched Mason and Jones' rickshaw turning into the sailors' area, sagging on Mason's side, the coolie straining with bowed head as he pulled them up a slight incline. It wasn't right, he thought, but like so much else in China, it couldn't be changed.
The open drains were smelling again in the warmer weather. The canals flowed sluggish with scum and stinking refuse. The rickshaws stopped outside a shabby stone house in an alley that Denton had often walked through struggling with unassuaged lust before Su-mei had become his mistress. Blue Heaven Tea-House the faded gold characters proclaimed over the porch. Beside the door, a small metal plaque announced that the premises were licensed by the Municipal Council for the sale and consumption of opium, licence number 178. Across the unpaved road, workmen were squatting on their heels, hammering sheets of glittering tin into long cylinders like drain-pipes. American, British and French sailors strolled in groups, boisterous and yet uncertain, up and down the alley, peering up the dark stairways of open doors or clustering dubiously round the painted old women who sat on little stools beside them. Mason surveyed them scornfully. 'Look at 'em, they're scared to go in,' he said loudly, brushing the tips of his bristly moustache up with that familiar gesture of his knuckles. 'Safety in numbers, I suppose, I sometimes wonder how sailors get their reputation.' He walked into the tea-house with an exaggerated swagger while the nearest sailors, a group of Americans, watched with the wary eyes of tourists suspicious of the natives.
Here there were no sailors, no foreign devils at all, except for the three of them. Despite its shabby facade, the tea-house was furnished richly with antique blackwood tables and tall inlaid screens. Spittoons of florid china stood by every table and waiters wandered in their soft shoes through a heavy atmosphere of silence. Scrolls hung down from the walls, faint, misty mountain scenes, bamboo branches, and over-life-size birds. The customers too were rich, to judge by their silk gowns, their lean, refined faces, their slim, pale hands with heavy rings, and the long, curved fingernails that confirmed their gentility. There was something strange and church-like about the silence. Denton had never been in a tea-house before that wasn't noisy and exuberant. But here there was a reflective, tranquil, almost religious silence. And the customers were all solitary, too. He'd never seen that before. Each one sat alone at his own table, not even glancing up at the three foreign devils, silently self-involved, as if at prayer. The steam from the teapots rose like incense before their immobile faces and hooded lids. At the back of the sombre room, by the stairs, some joss sticks burned before a red and gold altar. The banging of the hammers on the sheets of tin outside sounded through the doors like the regular muffled clanging of gongs.
Mason led the way up the staircase to the first floor. An attendant wafted them into a dark little room with a fluttering wave of his hand. Blackwood couches with hard porcelain pillows on them were arranged round the three walls. Mason and Jones lay down on their sides, their heads resting on the pillows. Denton took the empty couch.
'Why these people never invented soft pillows I cannot imagine,' Jones complained.
'They keep their money in them,' Denton said, glad of the chance to show off his knowledge. 'That's why they're hollow. Then they sleep with their hand in the hole and no one can get at their money without waking them up.
'Thanks for the lecture, professor,' Mason sneered.
'Take my hat off to anyone who can sleep with his head on this thing,' Jones went on grumbling. 'If you ask me it's a kind of torture.'
'You'll be comfortable enough in a few minutes,' Mason muttered peevishly. 'Don't make such a song and dance about it, for god's sake.'
Denton's heart was beginning to thud lightly in uncertain excitement. A little oil lamp was burning with a low flame in the middle of the room and a single joss stick was smouldering away beside it, dropping a long curling leaf of grey-white ash onto the floor. Its heavy smell mingled with a richer, greasier one, a smell that seemed to permeate the whole room, as if it was in the floors and walls, not just hanging in the air. Denton recognised it at once as the sweetish odour he'd smelt that day when Mason stuffed a shred of raw opium in his tunic pocket. Only here it was much stronger. The dulled clanging of the metal-workers hammering sounded through the closed window.
'Five dollars each,' Mason said gruffly. 'Better give it to me now.'
A young girl wearing a long gown came in. She was carrying a tray of pipes and some dark opium pellets which looked like molasses. She took the money silently from Mason and knelt to prepare the pipes, turning the wick higher in the lamp. Her child-like eyes were solemn and absorbed as she moulded the little pellets onto the long needle. Mason lazily reached under her gown and squeezed her calf. She went on moulding the pellets, with only a faint quiver of her lids. His hand slid further up her leg as she held the opium over the flame. Still she seemed to take no notice, until, when the opium was ready, she put it in the bowl of the pipe and, brushing his hand away as she turned, offered him the pipe first. Each of them inhaled three times, dragging the smoke deep into their lungs. Denton was last. As he inhaled, he looked up at the girl's face. She couldn't have been more than fourteen years old. Her grave, child's eyes seemed indifferent to him, concentrated on the bowl of the pipe. As he breathed in, he noticed how her own flat nostrils flared, as if willing him to breathe deeper - or was she imagining it was herself inhaling?
He felt nothing. He was just going to say, This stuff must be poor quality, it's not doing anything to me - he had the words in his head, waiting ready-formed - when suddenly he realised he was going after all. There was a slight giddiness and then he was gone.
All the time he knew where he was, he could even hear the dulled hammering of the metal-workers, but it was as though he was detached from his body, from his sensations, a waking spectator of his own dreams. As the room moved gently about him, taking on new, marvellous shapes and colours like a shaken kaleidoscope, he could still feel the sweet greasy smell in his nostrils and knew, or thought he knew, with startling clarity exactly what was happening. Strange, vivid colours swept over his eyes and his ears were full of harmonies he'd never heard before, and yet it was the same dark room with the burning oil lamp and the glowing joss stick - he could see them clearly. And the same clanging of the gong-like hammers drifted up from the street, which he knew perfectly well was outside the window. His mind remained as still and clear as a mountain pool while all the varied colours and sounds danced across its surface. And his eye was in the pool, looking up at the dancing colours through the cool, heavy, lucid waters. The young girl with the grave, attentive eyes and the flaring nostrils became Su-mei, although she was still herself, and he was looking at Su-mei in her. Yet though her face gave him much pleasure, he had no desire for her, no desire at all except for his serenity to continue while her face smiled down over the pool and the colours and sounds danced across it. And even that desire was muted, passionless. The girl was offering him the pipe again. He wondered whether it was a few minutes or several hours that had passed. The pool grew slowly darker....
The lamps were being lit in the tea-house below when they walked down the dark stairs out into the early evening. The metal workers were eating their rice, squatting in a circle in the shade of their workshop. Red lanterns glowed over the bloody carcases in a butcher's stall further down the alley. Groups of sailors - the same sailors, it might have been - were peering up the same stairways and haggling indecisively with the same old women. The western sky was stained with all the fading lights of sunset, orange and green and silver-blue. The cries of the food hawkers, raucous and coaxing, rose all round them. Yet the whole world seemed unbearably drab and dull to Denton, as if all the sounds and colours of life had been coated with grey mud.
They hailed rickshaws, and this time it was Mason who travelled alone while Jones and Denton followed together. Jones' eyes were slightly glassy still. 'Ah, I sometimes think that's better than a woman,' he murmured drowsily, his voice scarcely audible above the hubbub of the streets. 'Only you mustn't do it too often, you know. Once a week maximum, or you'll end up like those addicts over there.' He nodded at several men squatting on their haunches against a wall. Their faces were sunken and deeply scored, with shadowy caverns for eye-sockets, from which their red-rimmed eyes looked apathetically out, shiny and bloodshot. Their hunched bodies looked emaciated, their arms and legs like fragile, brown sticks. They seemed unaware of what passed in front of their eyes. A filthy mongrel dog