But the date was all right.
E. L. Spring was the only woman with the initial E. There were dark horses all over the page, fiendishly concealing the most important part of their names... Miss Framlingham, Delhi, India ... Miss Wherry, London ... Miss Burnett, Canterbury ... Miss Something Illegible, San Francisco, Calif.... They all sounded like thin women with withered necks and little green veils hanging from the backs of their hats, not like Emily.
He returned to the chair beside his empty cocktail glass. His eyes had tears in them so he pretended there was a fly in one of them. His throat was compressed by distress. He could not have spoken aloud. “I thought I left myself behind,” he thought. “But I am still Edward Williams in China. Myself has caught me up. Look at me, crying now in a hot chair in Hongkong, I who used to cry in the cold draught that ran through my dreadful room in San Francisco.”
The heat was like stagnant steam. He felt sick and very deaf. The only sounds he could hear through the exasperating roaring of his ears were the sharp cries of the chair-bearers outside the open window, trying to attract patronage. The cool vacant faces of English women moved up and down in the shadow of the arcades outside. Edward could not hear the clicking of their high heels, they seemed to him to move subtly like ghosts.
It was terribly hot.
“I shall cry frankly unless I move about.” He hung his self-conscious head as he left the hotel. He tried to interest himself in the Chinese names above the shops. No—not China now; China was a horrible half-name now. The Peak leaned like a cloud over the houses. He could see a little train sliding up the mountain, like a fish which some giant fisherman was drawing up from the sea. He found the station. The train was full, but, as Edward approached it, an official, seeing him, turned out a Chinese clerk in order that Edward might find a place. Edward looked angrily at the patient alert face of the ousted Chinese on the platform. “I don’t care if his business is urgent,” thought Edward. “I hope his wife is dying. It isn’t fair that only I should be hurt.”
“Oh, my dear ...” screamed the hot English girl in front of Edward to her hot friend. All the women in the car were fanning themselves and talking in a frenzy of foolish energy about men.
The car lifted them all up the hill. Dense dull shrubs bordered the steep track. The houses seemed to lean against the hill. The harbour was unrolled at the foot of the mountain. A fringe of ships, like tentacles round a jellyfish, radiated from the shore. Kowloon, backed by crumpled hills, stretched out a corresponding fringe towards Hongkong. Edward’s ears cracked and clicked, affected by the change of level.
He walked on the neat paths of the Peak. The Peak seemed as hot as the seashore. “Must be nearer the sun,” thought Edward confusedly. But no, it seemed that he was above the sun; he had left the sun behind floating on a thin delicate sea. It was sinking in the sea. All the islands were blue imitative suns, sinking in the sea. The whole sky was the colour of fire. Edward could almost hear the roaring of the fire in the sky. The sea was suddenly sheathed in shadow; mists like snakes writhed between the islands. The islands were no longer sinking in the sea; they were buoyed up by encircling mists. Why was it still so hot? The sea closed and flowed over the sun. The fire in the sky burned no more.
Edward thought, “She must have gone to Peking.” At once it was cooler. “I will go to Peking tomorrow.” At once he began to enjoy the thought of China. A Chinese woman with a small gaunt face in a bright blue tunic and trousers neatly pressed, her sleek black hair in a spangled net, a neat white flower in her hair, tottered by on small compressed feet. He thought “Emily would have wanted to kiss that darling woman. Perhaps she would have kissed her. No, she would have stood and looked back at her, she would have jumped a little and all her body would have been electrified with pleasure. ‘Oh, look ... oh, look ... oh, look....’ The woman would have turned and laughed in delight.”