The owner, I saw, was easy. He was playing a game of little bamboo “stones” with a Chinese girl whom I took to be his daughter; later I learned that she was his wife.

As nine o’clock was left behind, the preposterousness of the delay overwhelmed me, and I went in a kind of temper to the owner and said that I thought he should sign on another cook and weigh spars and be off.

The owner had a haggard, fine-wrinkled face, which had been eroded, one could guess, not so much by weather as by fiercely running thoughts of profit and loss. From his chin hung a black, sparse beard of hardly more than a hundred hairs—a token of dignity and idleness. He turned this face up to me and mildly said, in a phrase I was to hear often spoken by the Chinese with a shrug and a look of resignation, “There is no way.”

So, frustrated in my Western hurry—I was in a hurry, with hundreds of miles of hydro-electric promises ahead of me—I lay down on the deck and tried to be patient, listening to the owner sucking at his teeth and to the low, sweet murmur of his young wife’s dutiful laughter when he spoke to her words I could not make out.

The time shuffled along. Bursts of conversation and sudden little arguments came from the clump of trackers forward, but they seemed content and laughed often. The hour came and went for the noonday meal, and because the cook had gone ashore it seemed evident that there would be no such lunch: for who would fix it?

At about two o’clock the owner’s young wife came, carrying a handleless cup and a pot with a quilted cover, to where I was still lying disconsolate. She poured me some tea without speaking; she looked at my face openly, but she seemed afraid of me. She went back to her husband then and their game went on.

I seemed to be held in a prison of others’ patience; I was wild, but I lay still.

It was nearly five in the evening when the cook came aboard. He did not have the cabbages. He did have, in one hand, holding them upside down by their bound legs, four live chickens, and in his other hand he had a big jug of vegetable oil. He was cheerful and possibly drunk; the owner, who was also cheerful, greeted him quietly; the owner’s wife acknowledged his slight bow with a slight bow; the crew welcomed him with jokes and friendly curses; and only I seethed. Needless to say, it was too late to set out on the river that night. We stayed at the mooring, and I slept badly among nocturnal cries, coughs, spittings, songs, and sounds of the loading of coal by hand into the bunkers of the Firefly out in the stream.

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