Shanghai

He was writing a letter home late that night when he heard a sudden shouting and screaming in the street below. There were men's voices, angry and harsh, and a woman's, shrieking wildly in protest. He raised his head, listened a moment with a frown, then lowered it again. Then he jumped up. The woman was calling his name, screaming between what seemed to be blows. And it sounded like Su-mei's voice. He pushed the veranda doors open and leant over the rail. It was Su-mei. She was cowering against the wall while two men struck at her with their fists and feet. People passed by on the other side of the street, gaping but indifferent.

Denton shouted out, but nobody heard - the men went on striking her at will. He dashed out the room, down the stairs, through the lobby. Mason and some others were coming out of the lounge, attracted by the noise.

'What's going on?' Mason asked.

'Quick, they're beating a girl!'

He rushed past them down the steps. Su-mei's hair was loose and she had fallen to her knees. One of her assailants, a vast heavy man, was slapping her face with his open hand, while the other, grabbing her hair, was swinging her into the blows. There was blood on her mouth. Denton felt an immense surge of anger carry him over the threshold of violence. He slipped his arm round the smaller man's neck and swung him round against his braced leg, flinging him to the ground. The fat man stopped, his hand raised to strike Su-mei, and stared at him with flat, expressionless eyes. It was like being stared at by a toad. Denton heard Mason and the others running up behind him, cheering loudly, hallooing like huntsmen. Su-mei raised her head slowly, whimpering. She put her hand up tentatively to touch the blood at her lip and looked down at her fingertip wonderingly, as though she couldn't believe it.

Denton glared at the fat man, panting heavily while the other scram-bled to his feet. It was the man he'd seen at the house with green shutters in rue Molière. He recognized him at once. The same small unwinking eyes stared like opaque beads into his.

'What's going on?' Mason shouted. 'Kick their teeth in!'

But the two groups merely stared at each other like two packs of dogs, the Chinese silent, the British, except for Denton laughing and threatening at the same time, secure in their colour and their numbers. Denton's heart was pumping wildly, his pulse thumping unsteadily in his ears. He'd never struck a man before, and he felt elated and fierce, as if he'd broken some barrier that had been hemming him in.

'Get out!' he said with jerky breathlessness to the toad-like fat one. 'Go on, get out!' He didn't even realise he was speaking in English.

The great bulk didn't move. He stared calmly at Denton a second longer, then spoke slowly, in the level, throaty voice that Denton immediately recalled from before. 'Cette fille,' he said slowly, 'Cette jeune fille … moi.'

'No!' Denton shouted fiercely. He stabbed his chest with his forefinger. 'Mine! Understand? Mine, you fat brute!'

The man stared back at him with a cold insolence that seemed almost dignified. His massive head shook slightly, the long queue quivering down his back.

'Hear what he said?' Mason swaggered forward. 'Go on, push off! Come round here again, you'll land in prison. Get it?'

The fat man's eyes flickered in his moonlike, immobile face as he glanced swiftly from Mason to Su-mei to Denton.

Denton dragged out his Chinese at last - he seemed to have lost it all at first, as though it didn't belong to this savage, elemental layer of his self. 'Go away or I will have you arrested,' he said distinctly, trying to control his heaving breath.

The man moved his eyes again, without turning his head, to watch his companion draw closer to him, then let them swivel back to Denton. 'This woman works for me,' he answered in Chinese, staring coolly into Denton's eyes. 'It is nothing to do with you.' He nodded faintly to the other man, who seized Su-mei's arm. She gave a shocked little yell, then stiffened, pursed her lips and spat deliberately into his face.

'Let her go or I kill you,' Denton said. His voice was under control now, low and level. He knew with the same elation as before that he would hit the smaller man if he didn't let go. He felt the violence throbbing up behind that broken barrier.

The man let go after a moment and slowly wiped the spit off his face.

'Good for you, Denton,' someone muttered behind him.

Su-mei was trembling and white-faced, though no longer whimpering. She touched the blood with her finger again and looked down at it with the same detached wonder.

'Proper little spitfire, isn't she?' Mason said admiringly. The others laughed.

'She owes me money,' the gross Chinese went on stolidly, as if nothing had happened since he last spoke. 'One hundred dollars.'

'You working for the Red Triangle?' Mason interrupted belligerently, first in English, then in broken Chinese.

The fat man's eyes shifted slowly to Mason then back again. He didn't answer, except for a faint, scornful lowering of his lids.

'Because you'd better watch out if you're not. This is Red Triangle territory.' Mason said, again first in English then in Chinese. 'This town belong Red Triangle.'

Again the fat man's eyes shifted to Mason while his face remained motionless, still turned towards Denton. He looked back again, as though a fly had momentarily disturbed his concentration. 'One hun-dred dollars,' he repeated in his husky, even voice. 'She owes me one hundred dollars.'

Su-mei was winding up her hair, breathing heavily and unsteadily. 'I don't owe him anything,' she said sullenly. 'He's lying.'

Denton took a handful of change from his pocket and counted out ten silver dollars.

'Hey, don't give him anything!' Mason protested. 'He's just a pimp trying to make a bit out of the girl. Give him a kick and send him packing.'

But Denton held out the coins. The fat man's eyes moved a fraction, then he shook his head. 'One hundred dollars,' he said.

'Liar!' Su-mei muttered. The man's muscles hardened under his cheeks, but there was no other sign that he'd heard her. His eyes remained, flat and demanding, on Denton's. Denton recalled Mason's dropping the money in front of the peasant outside Soochow. He tilted his palm and let the coins slide off one by one. He was standing so close that several of them landed on the fat man's cloth slippers. But the man didn't flinch. His rigid baleful expression didn't change. The other man stooped, though, and rapidly gathered them up.

'Now leave her alone,' Denton warned the fat man. 'I know you, I'll send the police to get you if you touch her again. Or the French police. I know where you come from.'

For the first time the man's eyes changed. A different, darker light glimmered in them for a second, then they were flat and still again.

'And if the police do not have you, the Red Triangle will,' Mason sneered.

'Not enough,' the fat man said, ignoring Mason, 'She owes me one hundred dollars,' but then he turned suddenly with surprising speed for so ponderous a body, and walked swiftly away, gross in his swaying, waddling gait. The small man trotted after him.

'Christ, what a fatty!' Mason shouted. 'Be far quicker if he lay down and rolled!'

Denton led Su-mei back to the mess. A crowd of Chinese onlookers had collected and now, as they slowly dispersed, they followed them with their eyes, gawping silently.

'Nice-looking piece, though, isn't she?' Mason nudged Denton and leered. 'Where'd you find her? Didn't think you'd got it in you, frankly.'

Suddenly Denton's limbs were trembling. He felt he must be wobbling as he walked. 'What ... what was that about the Red Triangle?' he asked in an unsteady voice, passing over Mason's dig.

'Red Triangle? One of the big triad gangs.' Mason brushed up the ends of his moustache, eyeing Su-mei frankly across Denton's front. 'Anyone operates in the International Concession without their say so, he's likely to end up in the river in no time. I expect that's what scared old fatty off,' he added complacently. 'Not the police bit. They always reckon they can buy off the mashers. But the Red Triangle's different. Shouldn't think she'll have any more trouble from him.' He leant forward, eyeing Su-mei again. 'What's your name, dearie?'

Su-mei didn't answer, dabbing her mouth with her hand. Her eyes stiffened faintly as though she disliked the assuming familiarity of his tone.

'She doesn't speak English,' Denton said curtly.

Mason shrugged and nudged him again. 'You know old Ching's supposed to be something big in the Red Triangle. He didn't like the way you handled that business with the Alexander the First, so I've heard. I'd watch my step there if I were you.'

Denton recalled Lolly Kwai's enigmatic remark as they left the Alexander the First after discovering the contraband. Mr Ching big friend Mr Mason. 'I suppose you didn't like it either?' he asked pointedly.

'Me?' Mason glanced quickly away, his voice growing slightly hollow. 'Why should I care? It's no skin off my nose.'

They were climbing the steps now. The waiters and desk clerks who had been watching from the lobby whispered to each other and grinned.

'I'd better take her up to have a wash,' Denton murmured self- consciously.

Mason had recovered. He smirked round at the other. 'Oh yes, give her a wash,' he winked. 'And then it'll be bed-time, eh? Time to put her to bed.'

Denton led her up the stairs while the rest sauntered back to the bar, laughing and joking, ostentatiously calling out, 'Goodnight! Sleep well.'

He leant against the bathroom door, watching Su-mei wash her face and dab her swollen eyes. She explained what had happened in short emotionless sentences, examining her face in the mirror while she spoke. The fat man was Pock-mark Chen, one of the leaders of the Green Triangle triad in the French Settlement. The Green Triangle were challenging the Red Triangle on the borders of what had always been their territory - the International Settlement. She used to pay protection money to the Green Triangle when she lived in the French Settlement, but since she'd moved into the International Settlement, she'd been paying the Red Triangle. Now Pock-mark Chen was trying to make her pay the Green Triangle as well. How could she pay both? At first he'd just demanded money and she'd kept putting him off. Recently he'd threatened to disfigure her if she didn't pay. She touched the cut on her lip gingerly and felt the bruise on her cheekbone.

He took her into the living room and sat her down opposite him.

'Why don't you go to the police?' he asked.

She pouted and smiled simultaneously. 'What good would that do? They'd only laugh.'

'Well, what are you going to do, then?' He felt elated and pleased with himself. He had saved her from being disfigured, he would protect and advise her. His sleeping with her - that was done with. He was atoning for it now. And yet his nerves tingled when he looked at her. The bruise and the cut, which was still bleeding slightly, somehow made her even more appealing than before. He imagined his hand stretching out to brush her cheek. 'You will have to do something,' he said slowly, struggling to find the right Chinese words. 'Otherwise more bad will happen to you.'

She shook her head. 'It will be all right now. He will not touch me if I have foreign-devil friends. That is why I was coming to you tonight, after I saw you in the restaurant. But they caught up with me.' She paused and glanced up at him under puffy lids, her head slightly bowed. 'You did not want me any more? You never asked for me again.'

'No, not that,' he said quickly, evasively. He felt suddenly guilty, for all his pure resolution, before the submissive reproach of her voice. As though he had betrayed her by staying away.

'It does not matter,' she went on. 'So long as they think you are my friend. It does not matter if you do not want me.'

He felt his resolution melting and sat silent, chewing his lip uncertainly.

'Do you want me to go now?' she asked in a small voice.

He shook his head, still not trust himself to speak.

She was gazing at him inquiringly. 'You do not like me like this? My face is ugly now?'

'No, it's good,' he said, 'Good to look at.'

She smiled, and winced as she smiled. He imagined his lips on her bruise. He would be tender and gentle with her.... He forced the seductive dream away. 'What are these triads - the Green Triangle and the Red Triangle?' he asked quickly, in a stiff, brittle voice. He had heard of them, but only vaguely.

'People pay money to them for protection,' she said simply. 'If they do not - ' She shrugged.

'Who pays?'

'Who? Everyone. Shops, restaurants, businesses, opium divans, sing-song girls, even hawkers. Everyone.'

'And you pay the Red Triangle?'

'Of course. This is their territory.'

'They do not protect you very well against the Green Triangle, though.'

'The Green Triangle is getting stronger,' she admitted. 'But if I do not pay the Red Triangle - ' She shrugged. 'And how can I pay both? I wish they would fight it out and then everyone would know who to pay. As it is - that is why I came to you.' She glanced up at him with an appealing yet frankly practical look in her eyes. 'They will not hurt me if I am with a foreign devil.'

Denton was silent. Send her away now, keep clear, a prudent voice whispered insidiously in his mind. Remember your vow, a weaker one added faintly. Yet he thought of her erect brown nipples, of her body arching beneath his.

'I will go if you like.' She stood up suddenly, as if she'd read his thoughts in his downcast, irresolute eyes. He looked up. She was fumbling with her delicate fingers in a tiny silk purse. 'I will give you back the ten dollars,' she was saying in a small, defeated voice. A smooth jade bracelet, milky-green, trembled on her wrist. He remembered she'd worn it in bed with him that night. It was the only thing she hadn't taken off.

'No, I don't want the money,' he heard his voice say. His resolution and his vow dissolved. He stood up and held her hand, closing the purse. How small her hand was, how slim and vulnerable the fingers. She followed him unresistingly towards the bedroom.

29

HIS VOW ONCE BROKEN, Denton abandoned it for good. He became Su-mei's acknowledged protector and she spent several evenings a week with him - Ah Koo even agreed to accept a smaller tip from her because it was so regular. Denton stopped going to church from one day to the next, not even troubling to send any excuse for his absence. In the fires that Su-mei lit in him, his conscience and religion, all the weight of that unexamined childhood teaching which he'd carried so solemnly and unreflectingly throughout his life, burned to grey and powdery ash. Not that he deliberately rejected the old beliefs and myths - he merely ceased to have any use for them and let them fall away.

The formal break didn't come, though, until a month later, when the weather became suddenly warm and humid again, hurrying into spring. He was on his way to the mess one afternoon, when he saw Mr Eaton on the Bund. It was too late to avoid him, the Dean's eyes were glinting with recognition already. He had to lift his hat and smile.

'Ah, John, we haven't seen much of you lately.' His piercing, unsettling gaze fixed sternly on Denton's eyes.

'Er, no, I'm afraid I've been very busy,' Denton murmured, his voice trailing away, uncomfortable in its deceit.

Mr Eaton's face seemed to hang there waiting, his eyes slowly hardening with disbelief. Denton looked awkwardly away to the knotty tracery of a banyan tree's roots that gripped the stone wall beside them like grey twisting tentacles, 'I expect I'll be more free soon.' he said dully, his face flushing. 'I hope so.'

Still Mr Eaton's face loomed there, his eyes dark with censure.

Denton abandoned pretence, refusing to let himself be made to feel guilty. 'Well, I must be getting along.' he said breezily.

Mr Eaton inclined his head a fraction in cold, mute, condemning dignity.

I am corrupt, evil, degenerate, Denton said to himself, testing his conscience. But the words were like snowflakes, fluttering away without weight. He was thinking already of Su-mei's pale skin, the mole on her wrist, the milky green bracelet she never took off, the artful rocking and swaying of her hips. Soon he heard the tap, tap of her shoes coming along the corridor.

He grew more assured, as though Su-mei's influence extended beyond the erotic to the whole of his personality. He no longer hesitated or shrank back so much in his dealings with agents and ship's officers. He gave instructions with authority. He bore Mason's and Jones' chaffing patiently and indifferently - or even with pride when Jones admitted his envy, seeing Su-mei arrive in a sedan chair one sultry evening (she wouldn't travel in a rickshaw now - it would have made her lose face as his mistress). And he grew steadily more fluent in Chinese, the vivid Shanghainese of Su-mei which often shocked Wei with its crude vitality. 'Nothing like a sleeping dictionary for learning the language,' Mason said, hearing Denton bargaining with a rickshaw coolie by the docks - for whatever Su-mei might think, Denton didn't give up travelling by rickshaw himself. Not merely because it was cheaper. He found sedan chairs too luxurious, effeminate even, preferring the steady hard ride of the rickshaw to the soft undulation of the sedan chair.

Recognising the change in himself, Denton recognised the cause too. Sometimes he lay awake at night thinking of his life before he met Su-mei - so narrow, so tight, so drab and dry. And he would marvel that a woman could have worked such a change in him. And not even a woman really, but a mere girl of sixteen! He would turn to put his arm round her and fall asleep smiling on her shoulder.

Not only did he bear Mason's and Jones' chaffing patiently, he even began to listen to their stories of debauchery with a knowing look, as if to say I'm not shocked by all this, I'm a man of the world too. And it was in recognition of this change - 'By god, you really have grown up at last,' Mason said, wiping the beer froth off his moustache with the back of his hand, 'I thought you never would' - that Mason and Jones offered to take him to an opium divan. There was a challenging tone in Mason's voice when he casually asked, 'Like to come along with us to a place in Hongkew, smoke a pipe or two?' The challenge, Denton indistinctly recognised, was to his new, apparent manliness, to see if it wasn't only skin-deep after all.

They set off in two rickshaws, Mason and Jones leading while Denton followed alone in the second. His coolie was an older, stringy man, reminding him of the man who'd pulled Mason and himself on his first morning in Shanghai. That coolie had had grey threads in his queue too, and the knobs of his backbone had stood out under his worn shirt in the same way. But so many of the rickshaw coolies were thin and bony, especially the older ones. He recalled how squeamish he'd felt then at being pulled along by a human horse. Now he thought nothing of it. Had he grown callous, he wondered with a twinge of the earlier squeamishness, or simply more realistic? How would this man live, for instance, if he didn't pull a rickshaw? He imagined the thousands of rickshaw coolies in Shanghai lying starving by their empty shafts, and then their wives and children clustering round them, starving too. He watched Mason and Jones' rickshaw turning into the sailors' area, sagging on Mason's side, the coolie straining with bowed head as he pulled them up a slight incline. It wasn't right, he thought, but like so much else in China, it couldn't be changed.

The open drains were smelling again in the warmer weather. The canals flowed sluggish with scum and stinking refuse. The rickshaws stopped outside a shabby stone house in an alley that Denton had often walked through struggling with unassuaged lust before Su-mei had become his mistress. Blue Heaven Tea-House the faded gold characters proclaimed over the porch. Beside the door, a small metal plaque announced that the premises were licensed by the Municipal Council for the sale and consumption of opium, licence number 178. Across the unpaved road, workmen were squatting on their heels, hammering sheets of glittering tin into long cylinders like drain-pipes. American, British and French sailors strolled in groups, boisterous and yet uncertain, up and down the alley, peering up the dark stairways of open doors or clustering dubiously round the painted old women who sat on little stools beside them. Mason surveyed them scornfully. 'Look at 'em, they're scared to go in,' he said loudly, brushing the tips of his bristly moustache up with that familiar gesture of his knuckles. 'Safety in numbers, I suppose, I sometimes wonder how sailors get their reputation.' He walked into the tea-house with an exaggerated swagger while the nearest sailors, a group of Americans, watched with the wary eyes of tourists suspicious of the natives.

Here there were no sailors, no foreign devils at all, except for the three of them. Despite its shabby facade, the tea-house was furnished richly with antique blackwood tables and tall inlaid screens. Spittoons of florid china stood by every table and waiters wandered in their soft shoes through a heavy atmosphere of silence. Scrolls hung down from the walls, faint, misty mountain scenes, bamboo branches, and over-life-size birds. The customers too were rich, to judge by their silk gowns, their lean, refined faces, their slim, pale hands with heavy rings, and the long, curved fingernails that confirmed their gentility. There was something strange and church-like about the silence. Denton had never been in a tea-house before that wasn't noisy and exuberant. But here there was a reflective, tranquil, almost religious silence. And the customers were all solitary, too. He'd never seen that before. Each one sat alone at his own table, not even glancing up at the three foreign devils, silently self-involved, as if at prayer. The steam from the teapots rose like incense before their immobile faces and hooded lids. At the back of the sombre room, by the stairs, some joss sticks burned before a red and gold altar. The banging of the hammers on the sheets of tin outside sounded through the doors like the regular muffled clanging of gongs.

Mason led the way up the staircase to the first floor. An attendant wafted them into a dark little room with a fluttering wave of his hand. Blackwood couches with hard porcelain pillows on them were arranged round the three walls. Mason and Jones lay down on their sides, their heads resting on the pillows. Denton took the empty couch.

'Why these people never invented soft pillows I cannot imagine,' Jones complained.

'They keep their money in them,' Denton said, glad of the chance to show off his knowledge. 'That's why they're hollow. Then they sleep with their hand in the hole and no one can get at their money without waking them up.

'Thanks for the lecture, professor,' Mason sneered.

'Take my hat off to anyone who can sleep with his head on this thing,' Jones went on grumbling. 'If you ask me it's a kind of torture.'

'You'll be comfortable enough in a few minutes,' Mason muttered peevishly. 'Don't make such a song and dance about it, for god's sake.'

Denton's heart was beginning to thud lightly in uncertain excitement. A little oil lamp was burning with a low flame in the middle of the room and a single joss stick was smouldering away beside it, dropping a long curling leaf of grey-white ash onto the floor. Its heavy smell mingled with a richer, greasier one, a smell that seemed to permeate the whole room, as if it was in the floors and walls, not just hanging in the air. Denton recognised it at once as the sweetish odour he'd smelt that day when Mason stuffed a shred of raw opium in his tunic pocket. Only here it was much stronger. The dulled clanging of the metal-workers hammering sounded through the closed window.

'Five dollars each,' Mason said gruffly. 'Better give it to me now.'

A young girl wearing a long gown came in. She was carrying a tray of pipes and some dark opium pellets which looked like molasses. She took the money silently from Mason and knelt to prepare the pipes, turning the wick higher in the lamp. Her child-like eyes were solemn and absorbed as she moulded the little pellets onto the long needle. Mason lazily reached under her gown and squeezed her calf. She went on moulding the pellets, with only a faint quiver of her lids. His hand slid further up her leg as she held the opium over the flame. Still she seemed to take no notice, until, when the opium was ready, she put it in the bowl of the pipe and, brushing his hand away as she turned, offered him the pipe first. Each of them inhaled three times, dragging the smoke deep into their lungs. Denton was last. As he inhaled, he looked up at the girl's face. She couldn't have been more than fourteen years old. Her grave, child's eyes seemed indifferent to him, concentrated on the bowl of the pipe. As he breathed in, he noticed how her own flat nostrils flared, as if willing him to breathe deeper - or was she imagining it was herself inhaling?

He felt nothing. He was just going to say, This stuff must be poor quality, it's not doing anything to me - he had the words in his head, waiting ready-formed - when suddenly he realised he was going after all. There was a slight giddiness and then he was gone.

All the time he knew where he was, he could even hear the dulled hammering of the metal-workers, but it was as though he was detached from his body, from his sensations, a waking spectator of his own dreams. As the room moved gently about him, taking on new, marvellous shapes and colours like a shaken kaleidoscope, he could still feel the sweet greasy smell in his nostrils and knew, or thought he knew, with startling clarity exactly what was happening. Strange, vivid colours swept over his eyes and his ears were full of harmonies he'd never heard before, and yet it was the same dark room with the burning oil lamp and the glowing joss stick - he could see them clearly. And the same clanging of the gong-like hammers drifted up from the street, which he knew perfectly well was outside the window. His mind remained as still and clear as a mountain pool while all the varied colours and sounds danced across its surface. And his eye was in the pool, looking up at the dancing colours through the cool, heavy, lucid waters. The young girl with the grave, attentive eyes and the flaring nostrils became Su-mei, although she was still herself, and he was looking at Su-mei in her. Yet though her face gave him much pleasure, he had no desire for her, no desire at all except for his serenity to continue while her face smiled down over the pool and the colours and sounds danced across it. And even that desire was muted, passionless. The girl was offering him the pipe again. He wondered whether it was a few minutes or several hours that had passed. The pool grew slowly darker....

The lamps were being lit in the tea-house below when they walked down the dark stairs out into the early evening. The metal workers were eating their rice, squatting in a circle in the shade of their workshop. Red lanterns glowed over the bloody carcases in a butcher's stall further down the alley. Groups of sailors - the same sailors, it might have been - were peering up the same stairways and haggling indecisively with the same old women. The western sky was stained with all the fading lights of sunset, orange and green and silver-blue. The cries of the food hawkers, raucous and coaxing, rose all round them. Yet the whole world seemed unbearably drab and dull to Denton, as if all the sounds and colours of life had been coated with grey mud.

They hailed rickshaws, and this time it was Mason who travelled alone while Jones and Denton followed together. Jones' eyes were slightly glassy still. 'Ah, I sometimes think that's better than a woman,' he murmured drowsily, his voice scarcely audible above the hubbub of the streets. 'Only you mustn't do it too often, you know. Once a week maximum, or you'll end up like those addicts over there.' He nodded at several men squatting on their haunches against a wall. Their faces were sunken and deeply scored, with shadowy caverns for eye-sockets, from which their red-rimmed eyes looked apathetically out, shiny and bloodshot. Their hunched bodies looked emaciated, their arms and legs like fragile, brown sticks. They seemed unaware of what passed in front of their eyes. A filthy mongrel dog with a wagging curly brush of a tail sniffed at one of the men's folded, bony hands, but there was no change in his liquid expressionless eyes, no movement in his skeletal fingers.

'They might as well be dead,' Jones said, pityingly and contemptuously at the same time. 'They don't know where they are any more.'

But perhaps their real gaze was inward, Denton thought on colours and sounds like those he'd just been seeing, on that absolute serenity, No wonder they didn't want to return.

Mason looked back over his shoulder. 'You know I dreamt I was having that girl,' he called out. 'It came from feeling her up before we sniffed, I suppose.'

'She was young enough to be your daughter,' Jones laughed.

'They mature early out here. Look at John's girl. Only a year or two older, isn't she?

'She's sixteen,' Denton acknowledged curtly, foreseeing a gibe.

But Mason's rickshaw lurched suddenly to avoid a palanquin escorted by four bannermen, and Mason turned back hastily to grab the side. Denton glimpsed the long straggly beard of a mandarin and two almond eyes glancing incuriously out at him beneath an elaborate hat, then the official had gone, the bannermen calling imperiously out for people to make way.