The Bitter Tea of General Yen (12 page)

She turned her head a little. The corridor behind the glass-topped door was crowded with soldiers in gray. One leaned with an air of privilege against the glass. Around his neck he wore a salmon-pink silk cord attached to a Mauser from which hung a salmon-pink silk tassel. The other soldiers carried small bath towels and tin cups. This grander one no doubt was the General’s orderly. Megan turned to the window, trying to raise her head a little, and the amah at once lifted her, supporting her against a cool linen shoulder.

The train was cutting across a land spread out in the greenness of young rice and mulberries beginning to leaf, a land webbed with canals bringing water to the endless fields, on whose muddy shallows fringed with water hyacinths the laden, unhurried processions of sampans wove great slow patterns of movement about the arrow-like flight of the train. The train passed relentlessly the small half-naked men carrying loads swung from their shoulders, who stepped with the jogging trot of the heavily burdened along stone trails already pressed deep into the sod by the weight and weariness of endless feet. A hill rose and disappeared, carrying on its crest a pagoda, an unstable shape of inverted bell-flowers stacked one on top of another, surely a deliberate note of the purest frivolity against the fatigue, the solemn fertility of the land.

Megan closed her eyes and the amah gently let her slip back
on the seat. She opened her eyes to be sure that nothing had changed, for already the train, the General, the lady, the door against which leaned the orderly with the pink-silk cord, the window opening into China, had become the accepted reality to which she clung. She tried to stay awake.

The General leaned back, blowing smoke rings, looking up meditatively at the ceiling; the lady sat beside him, silent because he did not wish to talk, but with an air of readiness as though her own possible meditations were held only at his pleasure, never quite losing, even when he was not looking at her, the slightly seductive smile with which she turned to him when he spoke or even made a movement.

Megan closed her eyes, opening them suddenly again. The General was handing his cigarette to the lady to extinguish for him. He leaned his head more firmly on the seat-back and closed his eyes. The lady watched him and, seeing he did not appear comfortable, slipped an embroidered satin pillow back of his head. He did not thank her, his eyes remained closed and his head slipped forward slightly. Apparently he was asleep. Megan watched him without restraint. His hair, growing in a peak from the well-modeled forehead, was smooth and black as a Spaniard’s; with his eyes closed, their prominence, the effect of the Mongolian slant, were exaggerated and some of the masculinity of the face was lost, so that he looked like one of those sculptured heads of androgynous Eastern deities. The lady also watched him for a time to be quite sure he slept. Then she put a smaller pillow behind her own head and closed her eyes.

Megan slept and awoke with the certainty that she had slept long.

“Oh, yes, that Chinese train.” She was for a moment even frightened. Some quality of the light had changed, it must be afternoon. Very close to the window and throwing its shadow into the compartment passed a great crenelated wall hung with tattered
vines. A towered water-gate made a fantastic opening in it. The lady had covered her satin coat with a darker one trimmed with fur. The General with her help was putting on a military overcoat. Then he bent down to look out the window, yawned copiously and smoothed back his hair before putting on his cap. The orderly came in to assemble the luggage. In the corridor the soldiers were standing at attention, flattened against the wall to make a passage. Seeing Megan was awake the lady leaned over her.

“We are here now,” she said. “Your tiresome trip is over. Do you feel well?”

“Not too well.”

The General spoke to her in Chinese and after a few words she turned again to Megan.

“The General thinks it will be better for you not to walk through the station. He will arrange to have you carried out in a chair. You must be very quiet.”

“Where are we going? What general?” Megan was suddenly angry. “Who is this general?”

The lady’s reply meant nothing until she had repeated it several times over. Finally she penetrated the unfamiliar pronunciation, “General Yen Tso-Chong.”

Doctor Strike’s General.

And the concubine.

It was an elaborate, brass bed enclosed on three sides and heaped with bright satin quilts. Megan had been in it all the afternoon of her arrival and all the next day. Now it was morning again. She had wakened to a tumult of birds but they had quieted now and in spite of certain small noises about the house the underlying stillness struck her as remarkable. She moved her arms and legs tentatively and as she held up one arm the white-silk sleeve of a Chinese coat fell back from it, showing an ugly green bruise reaching almost from shoulder to elbow. She examined her hands. They looked veined and tired.

She could not distinctly remember how she had got here. Only a vague impression of a station in which throngs of clamoring Chinese were pushed aside to make way for her chair, a closed car with the curtains down where she leaned her head on the shoulder of the lady with the green coat. And they had driven perhaps half an hour, perhaps less. Then she had stepped out before a gate in a red stucco wall, had insisted she could walk and fainted. Since then she had dozed or slept, waking to sip tea brought her by the amah and sometimes by the lady. Now for the first time her head felt clear and the pain in it was almost gone.

She turned on one side and looked curiously at the room she
was in. It was rather bare. There were a few pieces of blackwood furniture, differing at once from the blackwood pieces of the missionaries by an air of unmistakable sophistication. By the octagon-shaped window, in a dark blue bowl, bloomed a twisted miniature tree bearing translucent yellow Chinese plum flowers. On the wall across from her bed was a hanging painting on brownish silk of two dark, furry monkeys eating orange-red persimmons. Megan looked at this a long time. It was impossible not to feel in sympathy with these monkeys; they pecked at the fruit so absently, they were so distrait, unable to concentrate on anything, forever vaguely and obstinately pursued by some great, mysterious sadness in all things, a sadness that not caperings, malice, nor a full stomach could quite take away. It was a true portrait, delicately executed, precise but summary; it gave character to the whole room, making unimportant the offense of the brass bed, the phonograph and records piled on a table, a gilt clock and candlesticks empty of candles, such as one sees on the mantels of cheaper French hotels. Yes, in spite of these things the room had an appearance of style in the sense that a defective work of art may still have style because whoever created it has been able to set on it the seal of a superior personality.

Megan liked the room, her father she thought would like it. And suddenly she realized that her father at this very moment must be believing her dead. Her parents’ grief, Bob’s grief, struck her too vividly, with too strong an implication of reproach, to be endured. Her headlong rush into this disaster blazed itself like a trail from the moment when she had sat with Bob’s letter on her knee and told her parents that she had to go to China come what might, down to the moment when she had demanded a miracle from God. The miracle had come but already it had lost its sheen, as though it had been tossed to her carelessly by One who knew that miracles are not always of very great account. A depression began to settle over her because she felt that she had been
humiliated by something more profound even than fear. Then she thought, “Well, perhaps it is all of no importance, I am not dead. I will let them know it in the quickest way possible. As soon as I can get a paper and pencil, write a note, have a telegram sent. And after all, I am in China, where I felt I had to be, and maybe I was even right.”

She thought of the General and his concubine, of all Doctor Strike had told her about the General. Apparently for all the Doctor’s ardor, his knowledge, he had never been able really to touch the General. And how much he had wanted to! All the time he had been talking of him Megan felt she must have been half aware that she herself had already touched the General’s life by the mere brushing of a wing and that she would inevitably touch it again more deeply. Perhaps this was to be the miracle.

She was too recently humbled to be willing to dwell much on this, but in spite of herself vague and glorious pictures began slowly to flood her mind. A Chinese man. A Chinese woman. Truly that was all of China. Her pictures merged into sleep and she awoke again, determined at once to get up. She sat on the edge of the bed and waited until the dizziness and slight pain in her head passed. She sat there wondering if the house she was in could possibly be in the midst of a city. It was so quiet. In the early morning there had been so many birds and even now the air coming in the open octagon-shaped window was fresh and there was about it some indefinite coolness, an aroma, as of water near by. Occasionally she heard soft slippered feet cross a tiled or brick pavement outside her window, and there was a telephone somewhere in the house that rang at intervals, answered by a Chinese voice, monotonous and persistent. But the telephone was not ringing just now. From a greater distance she heard on a soft road the march of feet, then a staccato command. The footsteps halted and at another command she heard the muffled clatter of rifles as the company came to rest. Bugles sounded and the notes
dissolved instantly like bubbles in the tranquillity of the air. And from somewhere a cock crowed.

Certainly she was not in a city.

Beside her bed on a small table was a wicker basket. She opened it and found silver tea things kept warm by the wadded lining. She poured herself a cup and drank it. When she put her feet to the floor she had another moment of dizziness, but she was stronger than she expected. She had to wait a moment until her head grew steadier. Then she moved slowly and with shaking knees but she managed to reach the window.

It opened on a courtyard where flower-beds were set in patterns among tiled walks. Willow trees, fragile and green, posed with an air of artifice against the opposite wall, and there were three gray boulders fretted by water into curious hollows and contours that were placed like statues on gray stone pedestals. Over a low wall curving like a dragon’s back Megan could see another garden with a pine tree in the center, growing in dark scaly strata, and beyond more tiles and ornamented roofs of buildings. A round moon doorway led from her court into the next and Megan decided it was all one estate, a series of small houses connected by courts and gardens. Over one more distant roof rose the bold, smoky blue outline of a low mountain, giving a final secretiveness and intricacy to the small hidden gardens. Megan leaned her elbows against the window and looked as far around as she could.

A servant crossing the court looked up and saw her, turned and ran back into the house. In a moment the door behind her opened and the lady who was the concubine of the General came in. She stood on the threshold, holding her hands in a little conventional gesture of surprise at seeing Megan up and about.

“But you feel so well?” she asked.

Megan said that she did.

“Then you must have something to eat. You must be very weak. And please sit down. Don’t tire yourself.”

Megan sat down by the center table and the lady rang a bell near the door. A servant appeared.

“What would you like to eat?” the lady asked. “We can give you some foreign food. Would you like ham and eggs and some fried potatoes and toast? We can give you coffee too, if you prefer it to tea.”

“I’ll have it all, please. I do feel rather desperately hungry.”

“Perhaps you would like to dress. I can only offer you my clothes. Yours are very nearly ruined, though I have had amah mend them as well as she can.”

“I believe I would feel better if I dressed. It is very kind of you to offer me something of yours.”

The lady rang again and spoke to her amah. Presently the amah returned with clothes and a toilet box which she and the lady set on the table. They opened it and arranged its folding-mirror. There were foreign brushes inside with silver backs.

“You must use this box,” said the lady. “I will leave it here with you. And I will send you some soap. When you feel stronger and want a bath, amah will help you, though we have only a Soochow tub. But the coolie will bring all the hot water you want. You must ask for anything you want.”

She stood behind her and watched attentively while Megan brushed her hair into shape till it fitted her head like a thin dark cap. Then she and the amah dressed her in a stiff coat of sulphur-yellow brocade with a little Chinese collar and loose sleeves, the hybrid dress of the treaty port. The amah put silk stockings on her feet and slippers of satin, very pointed, with soft felt soles, a little too small for comfort. The lady offered her the use of various powders, eye pencils and lipsticks of French make, in all colors—almond, rose, blue lilac and geranium—but Megan refused. When they had finished with her she looked at herself, and the amah and the lady peered over her shoulder into the glass. The long white face and eyes heavily shadowed, the body
enclosed in a rigid tube of shining yellow, gave her a hieratic, Byzantine look.

When the food came she ate ravenously, and the lady sat beside her, her shell-like hands crossed neatly in her lap.

“That is very good, that will make you strong again,” she said.

“Yes, it is delicious. I feel strong already.”

“I am so glad you are well again,” and she added, “The General wants to know when you are feeling well enough to receive him. He wants to talk to you.”

The faint chill she felt at these words surprised Megan. She looked about her. This room with the old painting, the blossoming plum, the garden outside, herself in a costume for a fantastic portrait, these were all still vaguely dreamlike. The General would instantly introduce the note of reality and of struggle. She felt a reluctance to take up life again. But she forced a little enthusiasm, because the whole significance of things now lay in the General’s being, in a sense, delivered into her hands.