“Now you’re talking,” said the Englishman. “He’s a celebrity, isn’t he? An author or what not? He’s borrowed the Worsley bungalow up in the hills. Want to go? I’ll talk to your chairmen for you.”
Four men carried each chair. They wore straw hats like the roofs of round pavilions and blue shirts and cotton short trousers rolled high above their knees.
The chairmen chanted intermittently as they walked; they kept time by means of a sort of retorting chant, each man speaking rhythmically in turn. When they wanted to change shoulders they uttered a series of small screams or jodels. As they bent their heads under the carrying poles during the change of shoulders, the chair dipped and canted alarmingly to one side. Edward each time made the change as difficult as he could for them. He shifted his weight; the chair leaned over; there was a little squall of startled chatter from the balancing chairmen. Edward resented the discomfort of the chair and, since it was bad, determined to make it worse. He tortured himself by craning out over the steep edges and watching the shining narrow rice-fields piercing the feet of the hills. The rice-fields were banked up below him ingeniously in a stairway of crescent-shaped dams.
Soldiers were everywhere. In long files they threaded the narrow mud dikes between the rice-fields. The steps on the mountain slopes, the tilted shady villages and the temples were crowded with them. They wore shabby uniforms of greenish-grey, red cap-bands, grey frayed puttees apparently wound about the fleshless bone, and bare angular ankles showing between the puttees and the straw sandals. The cobbled climbing street of one village was covered with a flat roof; every house lacked the wall on the street side; every house was like a little stage, a stage set with frightened silent groups watching the loitering and thronging soldiers. Some shopmen, with strings of perforated copper money like ornaments across their shoulders, were trying to conciliate the soldiers by selling them food. Flour sausages, coarse biscuits, dumplings, a few “Shao-ping,” sold at a loss, perhaps meant a daughter saved. The soldiers were small exhausted men; their jaws hung with fatigue; their panting mouths looked square; their knees knocked together. Two of them had strength enough to beat a country boy with his own carrying-pole.
Beside the road, head downward on a flowery slope, lay a dead man. The splayed yellow soles of his feet seemed to stare at passers on the road.
Here were woods in rain, pines with soft tufted grey needles ... here was a great view of the winding Yangtze between the wet trunks of trees. Here were safe and peaceful foreign houses.
And Lucy McTab, stiff and untidy, at the top of a steep flight of steps.
“Oh, I thought you were Tam coming. How do you do, Mr. Williams? How do you do, Stone?”
No sound of Emily running along the verandah to cry, “Edward—Edward—E-yee—E-yee—” That was her joyful noise. But there was no sound of it now. Lucy’s voice without that accompaniment seemed quite meaningless to Edward.