Shanghai. Christopher New
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.'