Su-ling stood at a disadvantage before a delicate Coromandel screen; her wrists looked thick, and greasy strings of hair dangled over her cheek. The boatmen glanced around with wide, unsophisticated eyes. They talked and laughed very loudly. I yearned for my now lost illusion of the simple beauty my friends had seemed to have at home on the junk.

We sat at a table in a private room. The boatmen ate noisily. Su-ling beside me spoke not a word and ate little.

I ordered a bottle of rice wine and would have started some toasts, in an effort to break our sad reserve, but not having experienced the local way of exchanging toasts, man to man, I proposed a general drinking, to the Great River. The junkmen did not understand my intention, and they stared rather fearfully at me, as if I had uttered some kind of curse. The cook eventually found the means of drinking more than his share of the bottle.

Later in the difficult meal I blurted out a question. Could not Old Pebble have been spared?

“Finished,” the half-drunk cook said. “He was finished.”

Was it simply, then, that Old Pebble had done the work of his days and was exhausted, his heart spent? Was it simply that he had come to his time of “enough” on the Great River? I was an engineer; this concept angered me. “There should have been some way to save him,” I said.

“Ayah, he was greedy,” the cook said, with a hateful expression. “He wanted to own the junk. He wanted to be in charge of everybody.”

I shrugged my shoulders. I thought the cook was really talking about himself. I tried to get some comment from Su-ling, but her eyes remained fixed on her nearly full plate, and she was silent.

The teapot went around and around the table, but we never attained anything like ease.

Then there was a fuss in the inn, and the owner of our junk rushed into our room. He was even filthier than the rest of his people, and he looked terribly gaunt and soul-burnt; his stringy muscles all seemed knotted and stretched, and his eyes were fierce within reddened lids.

I saw the cook’s face fall in an almost comical way when he saw the Old Big, even though he had declared himself certain that the owner would rejoin us.

The owner was in a rage. What was the idea of leaving the junk, fully loaded, in the power of a handful of turtles? What were his specialists doing in this place?

I tried to ask him to sit down and join us.

He ignored me. He shouted to the cook that the junk was moored in a very bad place, that unloading from that place would be impossible; the junk would have to be moved; they must all come away at once and move the junk to a place nearer the tax scales.