A gentle and pleasant measure of eternity passed over Edward. He lay on a chair alone upon the deck, flattened between the soft sea and sky. Flying fish rained upwards out of the sea. The flying fish made little scratches on the smooth sea. One evening the ship passed the mouth of the Yangtze River at sunset. An enormous plume of crimson cloud leaned away from the sea up the river. Thick polished plates of gold and crimson seemed laid upon the smooth waves of the sea to the west. The low hills at the mouth of the river were luminously purple....
For many days the ship followed the coast, followed it far off, like the timid disciple. There were high unreasonable islands, suddenly before the unsuspecting ship. The islands sustained an illusion of life on their shores; they sent their hopes out into the sea in little fishing boats. Once there was a boat quite near. In it one man smoothed his long unbound hair into a queue; another played on a stringed instrument and whined a song; another indolently directed the boat towards the bristling stockade of floating poles that marked their net. But it must all have been faery. No community could really live such a secret life, a life so full of things that would never be known.
One day passengers came on board in mid-sea, a great crowd of birds, land-birds who knew nothing of the dangerous skies over the sea. Hawks and woodpeckers, sparrows and doves and little tits and finches stood about the rigging pretending not to see one another. The seagulls laughed at them. The land-birds felt uneasy standing in these strange, black, even trees, they were too much puzzled to be very much afraid of men. A red and green bird walked about near Edward, hoping that it would find a worm somewhere. Whenever Edward spoke to it, it pulled itself self-consciously together but did not fly away. A Chinese sailor caught a sparrowhawk and tied it to the capstan by the leg. Wei-hai-wei seemed to be the arranged destination of these passengers. Like a Cook’s Conducted Tour they all disembarked together in the most businesslike way. Only the hawk, tied by the leg to the capstan, was left behind looking sullenly across at the sullen dark battleships that peered out of the harbour.
The three officers of the ship left Edward a great deal alone. The captain was an Irishman, a fat, fair man with great, serene, grey eyes. He had once been, he told Edward pointedly, a slave to drink; he had an idea that Edward was similarly bound. He thought he could haul Edward’s soul to safety on a thin string of sentimental reminders ... “mother, waiting at home ... grey hairs in sorrow to the grave ... England needs strong sane men now ... devil’s brew ... I know, me lad, I’ve been through hell on account of it....”
“Hell’s the word,” said Edward placidly, basking in the light of the captain’s earnest missionary interest.
The captain would not allow Edward to drink, either in the ship or at Chefoo—their only port of call. “You don’t know China,” said the captain. “You youngsters simply don’t know how to behave in China. In London now, two or three whiskies and sodas ... no harm at all. But in China—I tell you I’ve seen men arrive in Shanghai with babies’ complexions ... and five years after ... yellow as a daffodil, bent, malarial, only fit for nursing homes.”
Edward hoped that he would look only fit for a nursing home when he met Emily. Then she would think, “How he has suffered. How I have made him suffer.”
Much of the indigo disembarked at Chefoo. The ship seemed to have run aground on a brown island of barges. This island was peopled by brown coolies with vacant faces; their heads were half shaven and half covered with hair like cotton waste; sometimes they had bound their hair into chignons. Under their unresting but unhurrying hands, their island of barges became mountainous with sacks of indigo. Many of the sacks burst; indigo oozed down the slopes of the mountains; the coolies became bluer and bluer; there was indigo in their hair and indigo round their shoulders like shawls.
Edward and the captain walked austerely and thirstily about Chefoo. The Chinese of Chefoo seemed to be of a rougher race than those of Hongkong. They even grated on the eye, Edward thought. They were taller and hairier; their clothes were neither neat nor complete. Their houses were ragged and indecent. The houses of the missionaries looked to Edward even more impossible than those of the Chinese. Outside one of the mission gates a thin boy, quite naked, tortured a yellow lizard. There were yellow, scarred hills round the harbour. They trailed a silken hem of white sand into the sea and, behind the town, a green scarf of orchard land was thrown upon the shoulder of a low hill.
Between golden castled hills the ship left the harbour in the evening.