The Bitter Tea of General Yen (15 page)

Megan lay back, her hands clasped behind her head, and the Shanghai papers slipped one by one to the floor. Half asleep she dreamed of a golden province, a province of peace, order and universal happiness, ruled over by the heroic image of General Yen Tso-Chong.

The next morning she felt much better, and after her European breakfast she decided to go out into the garden. No one had told her to keep to her room. As she opened her door she saw Mah-li, in a little furred cape, crossing the outside room. Mah-li stopped.

“Good morning.”

“Good morning, Mah-li.”

“You are going out?”

“Yes, to the garden,” said Megan. “I feel I would like a breath of air.”

“Do you want to come with me then? I am going into the city to buy some things.”

“I would love to.”

Mah-li hesitated.

“Only I am not going to drive in the automobile, I am going in a chair, because the streets where I am going are so narrow. Perhaps you wouldn’t like that.”

“I would like it all the better.”

“Come along then and I will order another chair.”

Megan went with Mah-li across the flagged court she had seen from her window and through a room furnished with heavy
American metal office furniture, with calendars, Chinese and English, large wall-maps, and on one table a dark blue, glazed bowl with a twisted skein of yellow plum. A few officers sat about, and Megan saw the telephone she had heard ringing all during the day. A soldier sat before it with a pad on the table beside him, and when he was not engaged in telephoning, he drew pictures on the pad. They went on to an open space of bare dirt and a few trees, where platoons of soldiers were being drilled by a smart young gray-clad officer. They were of all ages, some, Megan was sure, no more than twelve or thirteen years old. She recognized the gate in the red stucco wall through which she had come. They passed around the spirit screen, through the gate, and stood in the roadway that followed the shore of the lake. Mah-li’s chair was waiting, and while the coolies in dark blue livery went off to get a second chair Megan looked about her.

The lake was so near that just across the road stone steps led down into it, under a great stone pailou with four columns. The sky was cloudy, the water of the lake milky white, darkened by fleets of little islands connected by shapely half-moons of bridges, or causeways, planted in trees; low mountains hemmed it in with delicate but firm curves of blue and fainter, smokier gray. At its far end Megan could see the town, and all around the shores a succession of gardens and groves from which rose low, tiled roofs of pleasure houses. Before the yamen a backwater formed by a bend of the shore was filled with drifts of lotus plants. She turned to look behind the yamen where the hills were very close. On one of them stood the trunk of a pagoda, shorn of all its roofs and bells, out of the top of which sprouted a ferny growth. Megan was overcome by beauty, for which nothing that Doctor Strike or the General had said had adequately prepared her, but she thought she recognized in it nevertheless a quality similar to that of the landscape seen from the train. The one line that drew the eye upward was that of
the pagoda trunk, which even without its upturned eaves struck a note of intended levity amid the great, flowing, earth-bound curves which circled and so completely enclosed the horizon.

When the chair came Megan climbed in and Mah-li recommended that she let down the small blinds before the windows on either side so that her appearance would create no comment in the streets. The coolies picked up the poles and started off with a peculiar jouncing motion that gave Megan a headache. Every now and then at a cry they stopped and shifted the poles to the other shoulder. She drew her blind back a little so as to look at the lake. As they crossed one of the causeways, planted in trees, they passed through more platoons of soldiers marching in goose step, absurdly unmilitary creatures, with ingenuous smiling faces. On the left side of the road were garden walls enclosing summerhouses and gardens, most of them of ox-blood red, with undulating dragon tops and odd-shaped windows elaborately latticed. They came to the outskirts of the town, to narrow lanes between small shops and whitewashed blank walls, sometimes with great black characters painted on them, lanes so narrow they jostled against the coolies with their carrying-poles. The streets grew more crowded and noisy. Megan held open only a crack of space between the blind and the window so that she saw in too quickly passing glimpses. The sun came out and the chair began to get uncomfortably warm.

In a street in the heart of the town they stopped and got out. Megan followed Mah-li into a shop through a wide portal of profusely carved and gilded wood. In the gloom hundreds of jars on shelves around the wall looked down at them like great glaucous eyes.

“This is a medicine shop,” Mah-li told her. “One of the famous medicine shops of China. I take Chinese medicines always. I am afraid of foreign doctors.”

“I hope you are not ill.”

“I have a pain here that comes and goes, especially after I have eaten a big meal.” And Mah-li, opening her cape, laid her hand wistfully over a section of her green satin coat.

“Dear me, I hope it is not serious.”

The place was full of a pungent but stale medicinal odor as unfamiliar as the flavor of Chinese dishes; it suggested roots and herbs brewed a long time in ancient pots. In the close air of the place it was overpowering. They crossed an open court where Megan stopped to admire the intricate carving of the woodwork, angles of temples and pavilions, all smothered in dense foliage, from which peered tiny faces of men and animals, smiling from a serene secret world. Inside the next building a clerk brought her a high blackwood stool, where she sat while Mah-li made her purchases. For the pain that came after a large dinner she was apparently buying all the drugs in China. A clerk figured up her account on an abacus.

“Would you like to see more of the shop?” asked Mah-li.

Megan said yes, though she was giddy and tired. She followed Mah-li into more rooms and across more courts, where unexpected sunlight cut through the gloom in blue smoky shafts. At the end of a tunnel-like passage Megan sniffed amid all the dead odors a sudden drift of musk, savage and alive. In the court beyond were wooden barred cages along the walls, in which large deer stood amid heaps of dirty straw, looking out with beautiful eyes full of fear and a certain disdain.

“Oh, I love them!” She leaned against the bars, but they were quite wild, they would not come to her hand stretched confidingly toward them.

“I hope they are not going to kill them.”

But no one answered her and turning she saw Mah-li had left. She looked across the open court where coolies, naked to the waist, pounded someting in a mortar, and saw in the dusk behind them the satin gleam of Mah-li’s collar. Megan did not know
whether to join her or not. She made several further attempts to attract the deer and turning was about to follow Mah-li when she saw that a man was with her. They were so absorbed in what they said to each other that distance condensed heavily between her and them and they seemed to stand unattainably far. She stopped abruptly, and waiting, listened to the low murmur of their unknown words. Presently they separated and their heads bowed in the repeated noddings of a ceremonious farewell, were caught for a moment and illumined by a common shaft of sunlight. Their delicate faces, their narrow eyes fixed on each other in a locked and grave attention, glowed like those of marionette lovers in a fairy play. Mah-li’s companion was the exquisite apparition who had brought Megan the cigarettes and Shanghai papers.

Mah-li returned to her slowly, her eyes fixed on the ground. She lifted her head and her look collided sharply with Megan’s curious gaze. “That was Captain Li,” she said, “the General’s aide.”

Her eyes reminded Megan of the deer’s eyes, holding a little of fear and a great deal of scorn, the scorn of a simple organism for a more complicated one. Megan felt a slight uneasiness.

“Oh, yes,” she replied vaguely. “Tell me, do they kill these deer?”

“No,” said Mah-li, after a slight pause in which she turned to look negligently at the deer, “they use the horns only.”

They left the medicine shop and once more got into their chairs. Megan wondered if the shopping tour had been entirely for the sake of that meeting. Having seen them together she could not doubt that Mah-li and Captain Li were lovers, and yet she was not entirely shocked. The relation of the General and Mah-li seemed to her quite as irregular. She knew that this relation was only the outgrowth of a patriarchal state of society, but she was inclined to look on the man’s side of it as tyrannical and an abuse of privilege. As to its romantic importance she felt that it could not measure up in any way to what she had read in the attentive
faces of Mah-li and Captain Li. But she realized her inability to weigh values with any such scales, she knew that from a lack of experience she looked on all such relations in a literary, a decorative, an unbrutal sense.

Mah-li stopped at one other shop where they sold fans. She bought a black one with a multitude of tiny brilliant figures on one side and gold characters on the other. In selecting it she had them bring out quantities of fans while Megan sat beside her looking on. Mah-li did not speak to her, she was very much occupied with the fans. She carried an elaborate French purse, from one of the Russian shops of Shanghai, one of green spangles with a marcasite clasp. She was very proud of this and left it lying under piles of fans, so that she lost sight of it and then had it searched for and finally recovered after some confusion.

When the fan had been wrapped in cottony paper she stood looking at it, then suddenly handed it to Megan. “I would like to give this to you,” she said. “Will you please accept it?”

Megan was not expecting this and said rather briefly: “Thank you.” When she got into her chair she looked at the fan thoughtfully.

Megan grew tired and very giddy as they made their way along in the enclosed chairs, and an emanation a little sickening began to steam up from the close-packed crowd about her. It struck her immediately and instinctively as a certain cruelty, though she could not place it very definitely unless it was in the overcrowding of any confined city, where the relentless fecundity of the population continues to turn out more human beings than there is need for. She felt it strongly however in the straining back muscles of her bearers, in the heads of the little scrambling children dusted with powder and plastered with paper seals over deep ulcers, and finally she heard it in the music of a wedding procession, in the midst of which rode the bride in her sealed, red satin chair, music that was acrid, irritating, aphrodisian. It was a great relief when
they left the city and came out on the open shore of the lake. The sun was streaming through openings in the clouds and breaking into light and shadow the sustained lines of the mountains and the curving shore. Megan drew up the blind so that the cooler, cleaner air bathed her head.

At the yamen Mah-li took her into one of the gardens a little way up the hillside, where in a stone pavilion were benches and a center table.

“I know you would like tea,” she said. “They will bring it here to us.”

Megan leaned her head against a pillar and closed her eyes. The air was full of the watery smell of the lake, and fatigue that was almost an appeasement flowed over her. She heard the General’s voice and opened her eyes. He stood just outside the pavilion as if he had stopped on his way through the garden.

“Have you been to the city?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“You must not tire yourself. Remember, you are very important to me, I cannot return you in anything but good condition.”

“I suppose you mean I am now a sort of demonstration of your good behavior.”

“Just about that. By the way, you got the Shanghai papers?”

“Yes. Thanks very much.”

“I suppose you enjoyed the experience of reading about yourself all those extravagant things that are only said when one is dead?”

“I don’t believe I enjoyed it. I kept thinking how dreadful it must be for my family to have to read these things. And then, it wasn’t right somehow.”

“When I was a child,” said Mah-li, “I was very sick once and everyone thought I would die. So everyone at the Mission was very kind to me, especially people that had never been kind to me before. Even the very cruel embroidery mistress brought me a
large peony and laid it on my pillow. But when I got better they were all just as they had always been and the embroidery mistress made me work harder than ever.”

Megan watched Mah-li with a smile, as we watch children whose gestures are so pretty, whose motives are so helplessly transparent, that even their vanity, greed and deceit have the charm of being reduced in scale and harmless. It seemed to her that her smile was shared by the General.

Megan slept out the rest of the afternoon until well after dark. At about nine o’clock she ate again and while she was eating the General’s orderly brought her a note.

She was about to refuse but thought that perhaps over the friendly relaxation of cards she might go far toward winning the confidence of the General and Mah-li.

She followed the orderly into the outer room and across the court into a room where at a table under a light sat the General, Captain Li, Mah-li and a man she had not seen before. He got up as Megan came in and walked around the table to shake hands with her. He was a stout man, with a red face merging into a bald head; his eyes were clear, childlike, blue, and when he smiled at her his teeth were the most dazzling and regular she had ever seen. His smile gave a sudden ingenuousness to a face gross and inexpressive. His clothes of an American business man were light gray, lately pressed and foppish.

“I am very pleased to meet you, Miss Davis. I am the General’s financial adviser, Mr. Shultz. I’ve already heard a lot about you from the General.” He looked steadily at her as he spoke and there was a not too faint insolence in his look.