So it was an arranged marriage! I thought of the Old Big’s absolutely uniform behavior toward Su-ling—quiet, dogmatic, and curt; while she was always submissive to him, full of murmuring laughter and approval, and ready to act on his most wantonly frivolous wish. I had seen this as innocent, daughterly affection. Now I wondered what her inner feelings really were; I was more than ever curious about whatever it was she undoubtedly felt for the head tracker, and I went back to questioning her about him.

How could a poor man like Old Pebble who had not gone to school for a morning of his life know so many beautiful songs? It seemed to me that in all our days on the river he had never sung the same song twice.

“The river is a school,” Su-ling said. “The greatest scholars of Peking come to learn from the river.”

Was there anything Old Pebble could not do?

“Very little,” she said. “I’ll tell you another thing: He can bargain. He does business for the Old Big.” And she recounted how, bargaining in a boat-guild teahouse in Ichang for the cargo of this voyage, sitting at an old sleeve-polished table with his hand under a cloth clasping the hand of a seller and signaling his own offers with finger-squeezes, he had kept at the work so long, and had interrupted it so often with disgusted walkings-away and reluctant comings-back, that the merchant had at last broken into a sweat and become momentarily confused, and in that instant the cargo had been unexpectedly well bought.

This simple riverman could have been an engineer, I thought. If he had had a chance he could have learned all that I knew, and perhaps much more. But then would he have been the same man?

I asked Su-ling: Were all the Noise Suppressors on the river like this man? Could they all do almost anything?

“They are all different,” she said. “Some learn from the river and some do not.”

“And he has learned more than most?”

“More than most.”

I do not know what stirred in me when I heard the pride in her voice as she said that. At any rate, I blurted out, “What do you feel for our Noise Suppressor?”

Again she lowered her eyes, and, “I have no right to any feelings,” she demurely said.