“Sure, go ahead,” said Stone.
Edward bought a cream-colored ready-made suit and saw in the mirror that he looked like an unsuccessful dentist. He walked hurriedly out of the store to escape this dreadful ghost.
“You look like thirty cents,” said Stone, who seemed to have inherited his mother’s frank callousness.
They embarked on a wide sunny little steamer for Ichang. Edward sat on the deck day after day and saw failure gathering like a cloud about his hope of Emily. He reminded himself industriously of his hopelessness and of the fact that he looked like thirty cents. Edward never, in the whole course of his life, forgot any derogatory personal remark made about himself in his hearing. He luxuriated too much in the criticism of others to forget it.
Edward noticed the bald leathery water buffaloes at work in the flat fields; he only noticed them because he thought their faces were like his, like his own face reduced—or magnified—to the absurd. This idea made him watch for the closer buffaloes with a morbid eagerness. On the tilted swaying back of one near the tail sat a little boy in a broad hat, playing the flute and drumming his heels. The buffalo went dismally past its fellows who were lying dismally in the mud; it had not enough strength of mind to defy the little boy and give itself up to its one dismal pleasure. Black trails worn by the tears of years streaked the buffalo’s face; its horns drooped awry.
The river ran so smoothly that it was like a broad road of polished golden glass. It seemed that the eyes were deceived—nothing so unruffled could pass so swiftly. It seemed to Edward that he was flashing above its still surface, the cords of the western sun had snared him and were snatching him from himself. Beneath him time and youth and the river—flowered and golden—stood still and were left behind.
A dull but hot sun laid shadeless light on the exact pyramid hills that stand about Ichang and the mouth of the Yangtze Gorges.
Edward and Stone carried their silver and Stone’s ukelele and golf-clubs on to a new boat. The new boat, battling against the terrible protest of the river, thrust herself into the yellow shadows of the mountains. One could feel the muscles of the strong ship wrestling with the river. The ship swung; it advanced, it bowed sideways, it reared, it faced the fearful cliffs, it seemed to save itself narrowly from disaster every minute. The river screamed about the ship. The hot sunlight was wild with noise; the shadow of the cliffs was impregnated with terrible deep echoing. The river was a maniac prisoner between the tense leaning golden cliffs.
Curious turbulent dreams haunted the water. The surface was flowered and starred with strange boiling shapes; ominous shadows—like hands and serpents and gaping faces—were half seen beneath it; scars of foam were scored across it. The water was too wild to conform to natural laws or to find its own level. There were fifty different levels between cliff and cliff. There were table-lands and canyons in the water, and glaciers of water tilted over hidden rocks. The whirlpools were like sunken golden glass bowls in the water. Or they were like great birds’ nests, great faery rocs’ nests with eggs of cream-gold foam spinning deep down in the nests.
Close to the cliffs, the water, in a frenzy of contradiction, flowed the wrong way. Junks could sometimes move upstream without difficulty there. All the upstream junks clung timorously to the red cliffs; they were towed by scores of coolies. Strings of coolies, like beads, tawny or blue, were looped along the bright cliffs. The ropes were tied to the masts of the junks. Women crouched under the hooped, humped matting that covered the junks. A down-stream junk span down the centre of the river. A dozen oarsmen stood on the lower deck and on the poop stood their leader beating time frantically like the leader of an orchestra. The chantey of the oarsmen was as thin as a hair of sound in the voluminous voice of the river. The oarsmen swung and dipped and bowed and fell back in time to the frenzied baton of their leader. The junk looked dark and nervous, dipping like a dark whale. Again it darted heavily like a bee at the whirlpools in the water; it made clumsy feints towards the shining sharp rocks and the cliffs; it twisted, plunged, heeled half over, shuddered, span round and round. Yellow waves washed the knees of the oarsmen but still they sang.