The woman wore a peasant's wide-brimmed dun straw hat. The man had slung his by its cord over his back. They were gazing at him with a solid, disconcerting stare, but it wasn't until the rickshaw had passed and he'd turned back to look at them again that Denton recognised them. It was the woman who'd been hit by buckshot that day they'd gone shooting with Henschel outside Soochow - she and her husband. They were still gazing after him with that disconcerting stare, neither hostile nor friendly. The memory of the shooting revived his obscure sense of shame about it and he turned away uncomfortably. What had brought them to Shanghai? he wondered. Had they lost their land, or sold it, as so many of the peasants flooding the city had done, and come in search of work? Their unnervingly dispassionate stare stayed in his mind while he fingered Su-mei's present in his pocket. Were they too blaming him for their fate whatever it was? But their gaze hadn't been accusing. It had been a curious one, rather, as if he were some brilliant exotic fish displayed in a tank, interesting but useless. And that too made him uneasy. Sometimes he felt he never knew where he was with these people. So many of them seemed to have the Great Wall in their eyes, even the humblest of them, from which they could look down at you with cool indifference as mere barbarians, foreign devils. Even Wei. And Su-mei? He pushed the question aside. He didn't want to think like that about her, especially not tonight.
Su-mei had brought an orange lantern with her for the festival. She lit the candle inside it and hung it from the veranda railing. Denton had ordered dinner in his room and they sat across the little table she had bought him, their knees touching, teaching each other new words in Chinese and English. When they had finished eating and were sipping the last of her favourite strong green tea, he laid her present on the table beside her.
'T'ank you,' she said in the high, level tone in which she spoke English, tilting her head and smiling faintly. If he hadn't known her better, he might have thought she was hardly pleased at all. But he understood now that she would have found it demeaning to be more effusive. She leant forward across the table to let him put them on her. 'If I wear them tonight, you will not dare bite my ears in case you swallow them,' she said simply, in Chinese now.
He smiled, but her face was still, as though she'd meant it seriously. She put her hands up to feel the earrings hanging from her small pink lobes. They looked like two little silver tears tugging gently at them. He took her hands as she leant back. 'Su-mei?' be began.
'I want to look at them in the glass.'
'Wait a minute.' He held her wrists tighter. His tanned hands, with the dark hair sprouting at the knuckles, seemed enormous on her smooth slender wrists. How odd, too, that her skin was actually paler than his. 'If I moved out of the mess, we could find a place to live together in.'
She glanced up him with a sly smile in her half-lidded eyes. 'You want to marry me?' she asked mockingly.
'You know what I mean.' Of course he hadn't thought of marriage. He too smiled at the idea.
She eased her wrists out of his slowly slackening grip and went to the mirror in the bathroom, turning her head from side to side. The silver gleamed, dangling in the shadowy hollows beneath her ears.
'Well?' he asked.
'Very beautiful.' She raised her hands to adjust the earrings.
'What do you say about finding a place to live together in? Several people here have done it.'
She held up the hand with the little dark mole on it. 'Do you know Chinese people think this is very good, this mole here? When my father sold me, he got a better price because of that.'
'Su-mei!'
She went back to the veranda and leant over the rail. Below, orange, red, blue and yellow lanterns jogged and swayed along the street as children carried them towards the little hill that was the highest point nearby. The children were shouting and laughing as though there were no such thing as poverty and starvation and the selling of children.
'Well?' he asked again.
'And still be a sing-song girl?'
'I would have enough money for both of us. You could give up your room in Hongkew.'
'I have given it up already. I have let it to someone.'
'Let it?' he glanced round at her frowning. 'Where do you sleep when you don't stay here?'
'With a friend.' She was looking steadily over the rail, avoiding his eyes. 'I pay her - '
'Him or her?'
'Her,' she repeated sharply. 'I pay her half what it costs her. So I make money out of the other place.'
He paused, trying to visualise this girl who was only sixteen by western reckoning, and who was such a child in some ways, hard-headedly devising profitable schemes that he would never have dreamt of. 'So we can move together,' he said uncertainly, feeling that she had gone suddenly out of focus, acquiring a new dimension. 'You have given up your room already.'
'But if I stop being a sing-song girl, I will lose all my customers,' she went on in a practical voice. 'Then one day you will go away. And what will I do without my customers?'
He felt a sudden doubt that seemed to make something crumble in his chest. 'Su-mei, your customers - you don't...? I mean you only sing for them, don't you?' he asked suspiciously.
'Since I have been with you, yes.' She spoke lightly, as if that was irrelevant. 'But what will I do when you go away? Besides - '
'I will not go away,' he said bravely, and felt he meant it.
'Of course you will,' she answered flatly. 'Foreign devils always go away. One day you will marry a foreign woman. You will have to.'
She was gazing directly at him now, challenging him to deny it. He looked away from her assured brown eyes, down into the street with its nodding lanterns. He wanted to deny it, to take up her challenge, but something cold and heavy blocked his voice. Living with a Chinese girl, a sing-song girl at that - of course it could only be temporary, no matter how much he liked her. He felt the chill hand of reason pulling him back, the same chill hand that was guiding her. It was like a cloud suddenly covering the sky, draining the colour out of everything. She was right. In the end he would go away. Of course she was right. She couldn't rely on him.
Her eyes were still on his face. He glanced up at the earrings glistening against the glossy jet of her hair. 'You could keep on with your customers and still live with me,' he said hesitantly.
She gave a definite little shake of her head that made the earrings quiver. 'You would want a place at least as big as this, and an amah to look after it - it would cost much more than you pay here.' She glanced back over his rooms with a remorseless practical eye. 'Too expensive,' she concluded. 'You would pay more to someone else and you would have to give me less. Then I could not pay for my singing lessons. Or else I would have to send less to my parents.'
'Your parents!' He stared at her. 'But they sold you!' He knew about her singing lessons, her ambition to become an opera singer, and he enjoyed the thought that he was helping her with his money in that, although the only Chinese opera he'd ever attended had seemed a gaudy, clashing cacophony to him. But sending some of his money to her parents - that was different. She'd never told him about that.
Yet she seemed amazed at his astonishment, gazing at him with wide, uncomprehending eyes. 'Of course I send them money, they are my parents!'
'And they sold you!'
'Otherwise I would have starved. And so would they. Now I can send them money.' She spoke slowly and patiently, as if explaining a simple problem to a little child.
He heard several voices laughing and talking suddenly in Mason's room. They sounded boisterous and exuberant, with the shrill, uncontrolled hilarity of drunkenness. 'Shall we go in?' he asked abruptly. He didn't want to see their leers or hear the gibes they'd be bound to make if they saw Su-mei.
She took the lantern in from the veranda and hung it on the wardrobe door in the bedroom. How little he knew about her, he thought, as they undressed. How little he understood. Her parents sold her, and yet she sent them money as a matter of course. She even made