Near the front of the crowd was a tall European wearing a green hat with a feather in it. 'There's Henschel!' Jones exclaimed. He shouted and waved to his friend while the people near them gaped and giggled at the foreign devils with their weird foreign voices. The tall figure turned, stared, and then waved back, taking off his hat, shouting unintelligibly over the tumult of the crowd. He seemed to be beckoning them forward, but it would be impossible to push their way through.
'Perhaps it's all over?' Denton asked hopefully.
But then the crowd in front of them began to part and they saw some Manchu bannermen roughly shouldering people aside to make an alley for them, beating them with their rifle butts if they were slow to move. The bannermen gestured the three Europeans to follow them and they walked as honoured guests through the wondering, murmuring crowd to where Jones' friend was standing.
'The captain here is a friend of mine,' Henschel said after shaking their hands with a formal little bow. He was very fair and sunburned, speaking in a voice that was nearly accentless, except that he clipped off every word before he started the next. 'They have caught some bandits who rob our mule trains and kill the escorts and so on. So he has asked me along to see justice done. Come and sit beside me.'
A batch of prisoners was being assembled for execution. They stood in a wretched cluster, each with a placard fixed to a pole that was tied to his back, on which his crimes were written in large characters. The soldiers were unfastening the placards and throwing them nonchalantly down in a heap on the ground, then ripping off the men's shirts. Some distance away, where the executioner was waiting, a man was setting up a wooden tripod. It took Denton some seconds to realise that he was a photographer. The man ducked under the black velvet cloth mantling the tripod, then marshalled the docile prisoners fussily in front of it, just like the annual Sunday School outing at Enfield.
'I must show you some of my pictures,' Mason was saying. 'Taken in Shanghai.' As if to compete with Henschel he brushed the ends of his ginger moustache up with his knuckle.
The captain wanted the bandits' crimes to be shown on the photo-graph, so the poles had to be collected and dealt out to the prisoners again. The placards wavered unsteadily above their heads. But now they had to be moved back several feet, the photographer pushing them again like a nervous schoolteacher. They shuffled obediently, their dull, lacklustre eyes fixed on the shiny lens. Denton could just make out some of the characters on the placards. Murder, Piracy, Abduction, and many others he couldn't read. But their shivering bodies looked so thin and weak - how could they possibly have robbed and murdered?
'Really these people are impossible,' Henschel laughed again. 'They are supposed to have started over an hour ago.'
At last the photographer was satisfied. He ducked under his cloth, peered out again, motioned the two men at each end closer in, then ducked under the cloth once more, holding his hand up beside the camera. Sheep-like, the prisoners stood still, blinking at the photo-grapher's raised hand.
'Watch the birdie!' Jones called out lightly.
The photographer pressed the bulb. The prisoners stood patiently, slack and shivering. How can they possibly be going to kill them, Denton wondered, after taking their pictures like on a Sunday School treat? But his swiftly thudding heart told him they would do it quite simply, without a moment's reflection on the monstrous irony of it all. After all, this is China, he told himself, as if that somehow lessened the horror of it.
At last the photographer emerged from his cloth, smiling contentedly and waving at the prisoners with a gesture that might have meant goodbye or thank you.
A low, excited mutter rose from the crowd as the guards began leading the first prisoner towards the executioner. The prisoner was limping and dragging his foot. One of the guards pushed him, not roughly, but as if to help him along, doing him a service. But the push, no more than a nudge really, was enough to make him stumble. He fell in front of the executioner, his face on the bare earth and with his hands tied behind his back he couldn't raise himself. A little titter ran through the crowd. Then the same guard helped him to his knees, in the same almost courteous manner. He knelt there dumbly, his head lowered as if he dared not raise his eyes to look at the executioner. Like a man kneeling in prayer before his god, it seemed to Denton, except that his hands weren't clasped in front, but bound behind him.
Henschel turned to Denton and spoke quietly into his ear. 'If they have not paid enough squeeze, he uses a blunter sword.' The sunburned skin round his eyes crinkled as he smiled, as if he thought it terribly amusing.
Denton turned away.
A man pulled the prisoner's head forward by his queue while the two soldiers heaved his bound arms backward. How pale his neck was at the exposed nape, where the sun never reached! The crowd hushed with that tense stillness he remembered from his first hour in Shanghai. Denton saw, or thought he saw the quick shadowy pulse of the man's blood at the side of his neck. The executioner hadn't lifted his sword yet, there were still seconds to go, seconds to live through. Beyond the kneeling victim he could see the waiting prisoners. Like him, they were looking on. Even they couldn't wrench their eyes away.
Now the executioner was ready. He raised his sword slowly higher and higher till it seemed to hang down his back from his clasped hands. Denton's heart pounded violently. His teeth were clenched. He felt his nails digging into his sweating palms and yet he could do nothing to loosen them. One, two, three seconds he counted, his body taut, unbearably taut, his teeth gritted, willing the man to strike and simultaneously wildly praying that some miracle would prevent him. Then the executioner's body seemed to relax faintly, a scarcely noticeable loosening of his muscles, and Denton thought for a brief, dizzy moment that the miracle really had happened. But no, it was only that he was looking at the photographer, who had now turned his camera towards the kneeling victim. The man pulling on his queue and the two soldiers holding his arms back had all turned like the executioner to face the camera, and even the victim himself was twisting his head slightly to stare up at the photographer's hand as it was slowly raised from behind the black cloth. The four faces, expressionless, staring, like amateur actors posing in a Band of Hope tableau such as he'd often seen with Emily on St George's Day, hung there in the silence; then, as the photographer's hand steadied, Denton saw the executioner's body grow tense again, the curved blade of the sword, which had wavered a little in his grip, grow firm and still. I'm going to be sick, he thought frantically, the blood pounding in his ears, the choking horror surging up his throat. He saw for an eternal moment the victim screwing up his eyes and wincing, the shadowy pulse throbbing in his half-turned neck; then the sword slashed down with a little whirr through the air and with a clean chopping sound sliced the head right off. It happened so quickly that for a fraction of a second the head still seemed to be there after the blade had passed through the neck; then it parted as the man holding the queue staggered back.
Denton wanted to scream, to run away, to escape this obscene ritual, but he couldn't move. The very thing he dreaded seeing held him to his seat. He waited for the next victim. He waited like the rest, breathless to see how he would die, whether he would plead or scream. His eyes were fastened to the man by invisible chains as the soldiers heaved and hauled him stolidly towards the headsman. Other soldiers were forcing back the people who had been dipping their cash in the blood of the first victim. The man's trunk lay still, the head a few feet away from it, blood still leaking from the wound onto the hard earth. Already it looked so still and small, he could hardly believe it had ever been alive. The young man stumbled past the corpse as if he hadn't noticed it. His eyes were wide and empty and the mouth was hanging open slackly, as though he were walking in a trance. Denton stared compelled; compelled by the elemental emotions of terror and awe.
Suddenly the man began to hang back, moaning and muttering, his eyeballs rolled up wide and white as if he were in a fit. The crowd seemed to hold its breath as the headsman's assistant stepped forward, grabbed his queue, and yanked him headlong forward, his feet trailing and flapping helplessly. The headsman raised his sword hurriedly while the soldiers hauled back on the man's bound hands. They seemed nervous now, tense and anxious because of the victim's panic. The photographer was under his cloth again, but the headsman wouldn't wait. The victim seemed to give up, kneeling tamely at last, and the headsman swung the sword down with a massive grunt. Yet just as the blade hurtled down-wards the man jerked spasmodically back, twitching his queue out of the assistant's hands. The blade swerved as the executioner tried to follow the movement, but it smashed into the back of the man's head. He fell to the ground screaming like a wounded animal - Denton thought of the abattoir at Enfield, where once, when he passed, he'd heard a pig screaming and squealing. The man's whole body quivered and shook uncontrollably and again the whole crowd seemed to catch its breath. The executioner shouted at his assistant and they both tried to drag the man up onto his knees while the two soldiers stood nervelessly by. But it was impossible, there was no strength left in the man's body, he collapsed as soon as they hauled him up. Then they began kicking him wildly, yelling and swearing at him. His faced was turned towards them and Denton thought that his neck must be broken, his head jerked and twisted so strangely at every kick, like a broken-stemmed flower. His eyes were popping, still turned up so that the pupils had almost vanished, and bubbles of blood frothed round his lips. His mouth seemed to be contorted into a wild impersonal sneer.
At last the headsman stopped kicking, his rage exhausted. He planted one foot on the man's shoulder, the other beside his head and swung the sword again. But the earth was in the way, he couldn't get a clean stroke and the blade clanged against a stone without severing the neck. He bent his knees then to get a flatter stroke, but it wasn't until the fourth or fifth blow that he got the head completely off.
When it was over, nobody spoke. The crowd remained still and uneasy. Nobody came forward to dip his cash in the blood. Nobody believed his blood could be lucky. At last the executioner called impatiently for the next victim.
There were eleven executions altogether, eleven loppings of eleven heads. Afterwards, while the crowd slowly dispersed, limp and exhausted, Henschel insisted on introducing them to the captain of the soldiers. The captain bowed and smiled, but said only 'Thank you for your coming,' in a thick, embarrassed voice before with another bow he left them.
They strolled back in a deep, drained silence towards Henschel's house. The crowd had thinned by now, and the streets were gradually reassuming the usual appearance of a Chinese city - hawkers squatting by their stalls, rickshaws and sedan chairs moving past, coolies bearing great loads at each end of their carrying poles, walking with that swinging, bouncing gait that seemed to lift them along.
Suddenly they came up behind a thin, stooping man who was walking more slowly with his bamboo carrying pole, as if he were carrying a delicate load. When they looked more closely, they saw that a swaying human head had been tied by the ears to each end of the pole, blood still dripping and splashing in thick congealing blobs onto the street. The spattered trail of dark red splotches followed the man as he walked with short careful steps, but none of the Chinese he passed seemed to notice him, except for a gaggle of children in rags and bare feet, who ran just behind him, gaping and giggling at the bobbing heads. The man himself seemed indifferent to them, his eyes set on the distance, his queue jerking rhythmically with each shuffling step.
'Christ, now I've seen everything,' Jones said with an uneasy laugh. 'Don't tell me he's going to boil them for soup.'
'No, he is taking them for burial,' Henschel answered, stepping fastidiously over a drying splash of blood. 'He must be a relative. I expect he has paid my friend some squeeze money; their heads are supposed to be stuck on poles at the city gates.'
Mason wrinkled his nose. 'You'd think he'd want to wrap them up or something,' he said. 'Hardly the kind of thing you'd want the neighbours to see, I would have thought.'
'Oh, they do not think like that,' Henschel replied carelessly. 'They are not like us. Death does not mean much to them, their lives are worth so little.'
They travelled further upstream the next day, past Soochow, and Henschel joined them, riding along the banks of the Imperial Canal, a shotgun strapped to the shoulder of his Mongolian pony. At midday they moored the boat and ate tiffin in the little saloon, the sun warming them through the windows. Denton watched the junks and barges moving slowly past, pulled by coolies whose back were bent almost parallel with the earth.
'Isn't this the canal that goes all the way to Peking?' he asked.
'No idea,' Mason said, finishing his beer. 'Let's see if we can get some birds for dinner.'
They followed Henschel across the dry, hard, rutted fields, past a squalid village to a wooded rise where he said there were plenty of partridges and pigeons. Jones had left his gun behind; there was something wrong with the trigger. Mason walked beside Henschel, carrying his. The peasants were digging and hoeing, working with long-handled hoes and mattocks. They turned and raised their heads to watch the foreign devils striding across their land, yet without altering the rhythm of their slow, patient digging. Denton listened to the clink of stones and the grate of hard earth as the mattocks came down on each downward swing. It reminded him for a moment, as the sun glinted on the shiny metal blade of a poised mattock, of the sound of the headsman's sword biting into the earth the day before.
A partridge lumbered up suddenly from a furrow behind a narrow grass verge, its wings beating loudly like a desperate heart. Henschel and Mason fired at the same time. The bird's wings folded and it plumped down to the earth. Simultaneously a woman yelled, and the peasants working the fields all round them began shouting and gesticulating, running towards them brandishing their tools.
'You must have winged one of them,' Jones said, licking his lips uneasily. He had picked up the dead bird and was holding it uncertainly by its feet.
They were soon surrounded by the peasants who muttered and scowled with a kind of jocular truculence that Denton couldn't make out. Were they really angry, or only pretending?
A woman was pushed forward, large-boned and tall, by a heavy, broad man with a set face and glaring, angry eyes. The man began shouting at Henschel and Mason, while the others growled behind him. The woman was massaging her back and wincing with pain, looking at them dumbly as if she had no other part to play.
Henschel smiled. 'I think he is her husband. He says we hit her.' He was undisturbed by all the threatening looks and accusations. 'It happens quite often,' he shrugged. 'Ten cents for each pellet is the rule. Sometimes they get in the way deliberately.'
'How can we tell how many pellets hit her?' Mason asked, relaxing his trigger finger slightly. 'They'll be asking for fifty dollars!'
'She has got to show us the marks.' Henschel took a hooked pipe out of his pocket and began filling it deliberately with tobacco. The crowd paused to watch him, even the woman's husband, whose face was stiff and flushed. Henschel put his tobacco pouch away slowly, then smiled round at the circle of faces, some of which were already starting to crease into grins. 'One hole, ten cents,' he said in broken Chinese, clenching his teeth down on the stem of his pipe and yet still managing to keep his smile. He held up the fingers of both hands. 'One hole, ten cents.'
Some of the peasants began to titter, nudging each other and glancing at the injured woman and her husband.
'First see, then pay,' Henschel gestured to the woman. 'First see, then pay.' Then he added quietly in English, 'And I hope she has had a wash recently.'
The titter became a ribald laugh. Only the woman and her husband didn't join in. She was still wincing and massaging her back. Her husband stood and glared, as if he hadn't heard them laughing all round him. His eyes blinked - it might have been with tears of rage - and he shook his head sharply.
Henschel lit his pipe, sheltering the bowl with his cupped palm. 'I would believe there are at most twenty pellets in her,' he said between puffs, glancing with a sly, measuring look at the woman's body. 'That is worth two dollars. Give them two dollars.' He turned to the woman's husband. 'Twenty holes,' he said in Chinese, throwing up both hands twice with fingers outstretched. 'Two dollars.'
'Why me?' Mason asked sulkily. 'It might have been you that hit her.' But he fished in his pocket and held out two dollars in front of the man's face, as if he expected him to sit up and beg for it like a dog.
The man shook his head fiercely while the woman watched in silence, rubbing her back more gently as the pain apparently lessened. The peasants looked from the silver coins gleaming between Mason's thick, reddish fingers to the man refusing them.
'If she has more holes, let her show the marks,' Henschel said, breathing a wreath of blue smoke up into the air. 'Show more hole, give more money,' he offered negligently in Chinese.
The crowd grinned and muttered, repeating his words to each other. But the man shook his head sullenly. He knew he was defeated, but he wouldn't give in and take the money.
'She'll never show her bum,' Jones said with a relieved laugh.
'All a show for money,' Henschel said confidently.
'Give him a couple of dollars more and let's leave them to it,' Mason suggested. He swung his hand round to Henschel, who, after a noticeable pause, added two more dollars.
Mason held the four dollars out to the man, but again he shook his head obdurately, his eyes glowing. The coins were in the palm of Mason's hand. He tilted his hand slowly till the coins slid off one by one onto the cold earth. They lay there gleaming.
'He will pick them up when we have gone,' Henschel said, examining the smouldering tobacco in his pipe. 'Shall we go? Don't look round - ignore them.'
They turned and walked back towards the boat, followed at an increasing distance by the peasants. After a while, when he could no longer hear them, Denton covertly looked round in spite of Henschel's advice. The man and his wife were still standing there staring after them. As he turned back he saw some boys stooping to the ground at the man's feet, picking up something and then darting away. The man didn't seem to move an inch, as if his resentment had turned him to stone. Denton felt obscurely ashamed, sullied, as though it was he who had hit the woman and dealt with the man in that supercilious manner.
Taking a more direct way back, they followed a path that led them closer to the village. The huts were of mud and unpainted wood, patched here and there with sacking and tin. Some of the roofs seemed to have caved in and those huts were derelict. There was a smell of dirt and decay, a pungent odour of pigs and stale urine.
'Pfui!' Henschel turned aside onto another path, that skirted the village. 'It would not be surprising if they had every kind of disease here. Let us keep clear.' They passed rows of freshly planted cabbages, the roots of each one neatly plastered with human manure, and left the dogs and the children behind.
'I wouldn't keep a pig in that filth,' Mason growled with contemptuous distaste, 'Never mind human beings. Why don't they clean themselves up a bit?
'Do you think they are human beings?' Henschel asked lightly, rhetorically.
'That man didn't pick up the money,' Denton interjected with a faint, hard edge to his voice. For some reason, he felt he had to defend them. 'Some kids ran off with it.'
Mason grunted. 'More fool him.'
'I suppose it was a matter of principle for him.' Denton suggested weakly, yet not ready to give up completely. 'I mean losing face or something?'
'He'd never have let her show her bum to us,' Jones laughed gaily, swinging the partridge jauntily now, 'I knew he wouldn't.'
'You didn't look so sure of yourself at the time,' Mason muttered surlily. 'You were ready to run for it.'
Jones flushed, but didn't answer and Henschel smiled a sly complacent little smile.
That night Denton went to bed early while the others drank in the saloon. He lay in his narrow bunk reading by the light of the smelly paraffin lamp. The shadows flickered from the unsteady wick and he kept glancing up at the cabin walls and window as if somebody had moved across the light. When at last he turned down the lamp, he looked almost apprehensively out over the moonlit ricefields towards the darkened village, where not a single lamp was shining. He imagined he could still see the man standing there with his silent wife beside him, glaring fiercely across towards the houseboat. Denton was frowning as he closed his eyes to sleep. He wasn't enjoying this trip, he had to admit. It was a mistake, he wished he'd never come.