Seryozha, doubled up on the road, squealed and cracked with laughter. His dog, always glad of a chance to show itself amphibious, pursued the enemy into the water, shrieking with delight. A crowd of Korean and Chinese men and boys was instantly present, laughing, arguing, and wailing in vigorous tenor voices. “Eck-eck-eck!” they cried invitingly to the bullock, but the harassed beast, trying to escape the dog, swam outward, swam inward, and was caught by a strong current and carried downstream. It would have given one of its horns, now, to find firm ground under its feet and a firm burden behind its tail, but it did not know how. Staring eyes upcast, nose wide open, curving about foolishly in the current, it swam right and left, right and left, on the strong dragging current. All the villagers ran downstream after it. Only the driver remained, asleep in the basket. Seryozha stood over him, laughing still. His dog, rashly refusing to relinquish the chase, was now helpless, too, being snatched downriver like a hooked fish. Seryozha went on laughing; his dog was expected to look after itself, though by now it looked a mere flea on the great pale body of the river.
Wilfred Chew stared scornfully down at the sleeping Korean. “Ai!” shouted Wilfred in the man’s ear. “Ai—ai—ai!” He bowed himself down, almost pressing his nose to the small black horsehair top-hat of the sleeper and screamed “Ai!” It was alien to Wilfred’s Chinese instincts to slap or shake the man. But Seryozha knocked the poor fellow’s little hat off. This effected a slight movement of the eyelids of the carter. Communication was now held up, as usual, by the lack of a common language. But, gallant as ever, Wilfred wrote in large Chinese characters on a page in his notebook “Bullock—Floats—Away.” This composition was flaunted before the twitching eyelids of the semiconscious bereaved man.
Opposite the village, the bullock and the dog ran aground on the same sandbank. “Eck-eck-eck!” yawped the watchers in honeyed voices. Only a side strand of the river divided the sandbank from the mainland. The water flowed gently here, and both the marooned animals could have negotiated it easily. But the struggle and strangle of their arrival had frightened both; the bullock had too little imagination and the dog too much, to allow them to contemplate a new aquatic venture for the present. The bullock, still feebly shaking its horns at the silver emptiness round it, stood drooping, puffing, blowing its nose, splaying it legs, firmly rooted on all that seemed left of its old, obscurely known, obscurely trusted world. The dog, sobered and wet, squatted, panting, on the furthest possible promontory of the sandbank from the bullock. It was sick of bullocks. Obviously it was thinking, “Lord! what a companion to be marooned with on a desert island!”
“Come,” said Seryozha, after whistling indifferently to his dog and being interrupted by a new giggle—though his cheeks felt quite strained with giggling already. “Vot hotel? Let us enter.”
As they passed the crowd of men, women, and children on the shore—now some forty strong—all shouting, “Eck-eck-eck!” the bullock on the sandbank suddenly decided to settle down, a bovine imperialist claiming kingship over a newfound land, with only one subject—and that one a rebel. The bullock knelt down clumsily on its forelegs first, and remained for a few puzzled, uncomfortable seconds with its behind tilted up, feeling densely that something still remained undone. Then it remembered its hindlegs, and folded them awkwardly. It sat like a carpet bag on its wet bald island, looking through its thick eyes across the water at the crowd of yelping gods. The dog ran to and fro on the bank, wagging its tail winningly at the river, as if hoping to persuade the obliging stream to part its waters and leave a dry crossing for a poor dog’s exhausted feet.
Seryozha and Wilfred entered the inn and threw their bundles on the kang. The proprietor, with a gray stubble of hair on a thin head, sitting on his haunches in the middle of his mud floor, smoking a very slender pea-size-bowled pipe, bowed as they came in. His wife, tottering across from the fire on stiff bound feet, brought each of the guests a cup of tea. The door became entirely blocked by spectators, coming from the sight of a Bullock on a Sandbank to enjoy the finer spectacle of Strangers Drinking Tea. The smell was very thick, but smoke partly drowned it. It was not a very inviting end to a day’s journey, but Seryozha, it must be remembered, had never known a real hotel. He had never seen a bathtub, a bellboy, a real brass bed, a parquet floor, a poster advertising a seaside resort, a revolving doorway, a lift, or an Axminster carpet. He
