The Bitter Tea of General Yen (18 page)

“Mr. Shultz seems to me to be dedicated to himself, first, last and always.”

“That is just it. That is why he is loyal to me. He is a thoroughly reasonable man. I am his best chance. My interests are his interests. As long as that remains so I can count on him absolutely.”

“But you yourself told me it did not occur to Doctor Strike to betray you to the authorities to get his safe-conduct pass.”

“The motive was not strong enough. He would betray me to please his God any time. The difference is I can control the loyalty of Shultz. I can make it always to his advantage to serve me. When I cannot do that any longer I can expect to lose him. But how can I possibly foresee what Doctor Strike will do! On one occasion he actually tried to persuade me to save a young man’s life, at the expense of my own. When I would not do so he turned against me. No, no, Shultz has all I want of the West. Dr. Strike has nothing.”

The finality of these words silenced Megan. The General sat looking at her, and Megan, who was never self-conscious, looked back at him, thinking not of him but of the Jesuit church in the Chinese city, of the first attempt, simple, gracious and even courtly, to bring the word of God. Yet after several hundred years during which the attempt had increased in volume and complicated itself immeasurably, China, which had accepted so many other things, still felt no need of the Word. It accepted Mr. Shultz. It rejected Doctor Strike.

Megan sighed as if she herself had partaken in the long struggle. She looked at her watch. It was eleven-thirty.

“I must be going. I want to say just one more thing. You won’t be hard on little Mah-li, will you? Whatever Captain Li has done I am sure she is quite innocent. I am going to return these rings to her to-morrow. Unless you would return them yourself?” She held them out tentatively but the General did not answer. “Well, then I will. Good night, General Yen.”

The General stood up and bowed as she passed him.

“Good night, Miss Davis.”

Megan slept heavily and as she came slowly out of unconsciousness she checked off one by one the familiar sounds of the yamen, the farmyard crow of the roosters, the soft thud of barefooted soldiers drilling in the outer court, the ringing of the telephone and the voice of the young orderly. Already these sounds meant a routine of life. She lay in bed all morning and toward noon asked her amah for a hot bath. Presently she heard the coolie carrying pails of water and emptying them in a robin’s-egg blue Soochow tub that stood in a little bath closet off her room. She listened, thinking how much labor each intervaled splash had cost and wondering at the simplicity of Eastern life.

In this yamen of the General she had seen no sign of luxury or magnificence. It was a house obviously made for a life which began and ended with the rising and the setting of the sun. Early in the evening she had heard a click of tile from the kitchen court in the rear, where some of the servants played mah jong, but that had soon stopped and by ten o’clock the yamen became a collection of dimly lighted rooms where people slept. Even the group at the poker game had an air of enforced wakefulness, like children kept up at a railroad station.

After her bath Megan sat down before Mah-li’s little
dressing-case and brushed her hair into lacquered smoothness. Then she examined the case and the lipsticks and eyepencils it contained. She gave a slow experimental stroke to her lips and, daring further, touched her face with some of the pallid almond powder, put a faint touch of blue on her lids. Her eyes stood out startlingly in a face of luminous skin, of subtle transparent shadow; she saw that whatever the cause she was changed, something had heightened, intensified, she was once more beautiful.

Her eyes caught Mah-li’s rings lying where she had left them. She picked them up to examine the jade more closely. For all their high polish they gave back very little light, rather light sank in them and was lost; they retained obstinately their perfection of green. Megan put them on her thin fingers so that when she saw Mah-li she would have them ready to slip into her hand. While she waited for more food, for something, it did not matter much what, to happen, she stroked her lips fastidiously with the lipstick, looking at herself, gratified by her appearance and by her gesture, which was like a movement in a steady pantomime.

A tiffin came and was eaten, cleared away. She smoked five cigarettes watching the jade on her fingers as she smoked. Then there was nothing to do. She lay down again, her hands behind her head. How bewilderingly full a Western day is, how many things to do and what little time to do them in! What does a Chinese lady’s day consist of? Small duties no doubt, little rituals, talk about sewing, gardens, children, the everlasting preoccupations of women. Mah-li’s day,—what did she do, what did she think about? How could she ever understand what Mah-li would think about! Yet it must be simple too, if one only had the key. If there were only some way to grasp what it meant, this life murmuring around her, a monotonous melody, so widely spaced that years grew between the notes.

And there seemed to be three notes dominating: simplicity, sameness, security. How long ago did they irrevocably decide,
these people, just what and how much to extract from the world about them, from the jewels of the earth and growing things, from rivers, the seasons, men and women? How long ago did they gather together ceremonials and establish the relations of a man among men into a stylized routine, in which the dignity of each is preserved intact like a fly in amber?

How did they unerringly know what fragile crystallizations of verse, what massive undulations of form and color, would satisfy their palates? How did they render their palates once and for all incapable of satiety? Perhaps by turning every effort toward the establishment of peace, peace in the land and in the heart, by refusing action for the sake of decorum, by placing propriety above love, by ignoring equality and freedom that the best may be cultivated, and by refusing to be lured from their submissive contemplation of life to the perils of ecstasy and aspiration.

“I wonder if I am right about them,” thought Megan, “and should one consider any group so enormous as a homogeneous unit? There is surely room among them for greater variety than this. And so many of them have already been assailed by contacts from another world, the circle has already been broken in places. The General has spent years in Europe. He speaks English perfectly, and it should be impossible for him to speak a language so different in all its forms from his own without experiencing certain modifications of thought. One would imagine the language, even taken by itself, to be as active as a cake of yeast. And he is troubled. That is just what is the matter with him, he is disturbed as I could never even conceive of being disturbed. No wonder he instinctively resists as best he can, striking blindly, making foolish gestures, taking refuge in any formula that presents itself. Poor General!

“And how very charming he is!”

A sharp whistle sounded outside her window, a sound as unmistakably European as Caruso’s voice. Megan knew it must be Mr. Shultz. She waited until it came again, with greater urgency, then got up reluctantly. She looked down on Mr. Shultz from the window and saw him standing below in plus fours with pale checked golf hose and elaborate brogues. As he looked up at her the expression of his eyes softened perceptibly, and she realized that she was still decorated with Mah-li’s make-up and that Mr. Shultz, unconscious of the cause, found her more attractive than he had the night before, that he was impressed by the change. Although she believed his admiration to be a matter of complete indifference to her, she felt a certain amiability toward him, a tolerance that she could not account for.

“Good morning, Miss Davis.”

“Good morning, Mr. Shultz. Where are you off to?”

“I’m going away to attend to some urgent business of the General’s, and I don’t like to leave you here alone all day. Not that you can’t take care of yourself in most circumstances, but things aren’t going so well over in town. If Mah-li, for instance, should want to take you on any more shopping tours, like she did yesterday, you’d better not go.”

“They aren’t fighting in the town, are they?”

“No, not fighting, but maybe getting ready to. It is a funny thing, Miss Davis, but I seem to have a kind of sixth sense where money is concerned. And I can just tell by hundreds of small indications, that no one else might hardly notice, that there has been an awful lot of money let loose in the last day or so in that town. It didn’t come from the General, so that means the Communists have got it and if they’ve got it the probabilities are it is Russian money. No one hands out money just for the improvement of the race, Miss Davis. It is for value received, and that looks bad.”

“I suppose you mean the Communists are being paid to throw the General out.”

“It looks as if they were going to try.”

“Can’t you pay them more not to?”

“Good Lord, Miss Davis, you sound Chinese!” Mr. Shultz laughed.

“Oh, I didn’t mean it seriously,” said Megan, smiling. “It just slipped out. Still it does seem reasonable, doesn’t it?”

“Reasonable, except that there is no end to it. No, that is what our army and our arsenal are supposed to be for, so we don’t have to spend so much on bribes. We find the army is cheaper in the end. The only trouble is they can bribe the army too, if they want to blow that much.”

“But haven’t the army any loyalty?”

“Oh, you mustn’t think of them like our army, Miss Davis. They haven’t any convictions, they are mercenaries. They don’t care who has them, so long as they get their rice and a little loot.”

“The thing to do then would be to give them the convictions, wouldn’t it? Make them feel the General is the man to bring them prosperity and order and justice, and that he can only do that through their loyalty.”

“Propaganda? Yes, we do that too. But it is terribly hard, Miss Davis, to fix anything new in the minds of people who haven’t had a new idea for five thousand years.”

“I suppose it is.”

The spring air had an enervating softness. Megan leaned her head against a side of the window and looked up at rifts of blue that opened occasionally in the misty sky. Mr. Shultz leaned against the wall looking up at Megan. “Isn’t Captain Li one of the Communist party?” she asked.

“We think he is. We think he has been betraying the General all along.”

“Then why keep him?”

“Sort of hostage, I guess. His family are very powerful, they are supposed to be friends of the General, but you never can tell. And then he can’t do much harm here.”

Megan was about to say, “And Mah-li?” but she did not. Though she found Mr. Shultz quite bearable when he was not being an obvious and direct influence on the General, she did not wish to discuss Mah-li with him. She felt bound by a mysterious loyalty to Mah-li and the General. Mr. Shultz, the General had said, was bound by reason and interest. It did not seem fitting that she should discuss either of them with him. “Well, don’t worry about me,” she said. “I’ll take good care to keep out of harm all day!”

“Right-o,” said Mr. Shultz, “and don’t you worry any. I’ve got it all fixed to get you back to Shanghai if anything happens suddenly. And if it don’t, I’ve still got it fixed to get you back in a few days. I don’t like your being here with these people. The General is a good scout, but after all, he is Chinese, and his reputation with women is none too good. As for Mah-li, she isn’t the sort a lady like you should associate with.”

Megan laughed. “So you have ideas of decorum too!”

“Sure I have,” said Mr. Shultz rather indignantly. He put on his cap. “Well, I have to hustle on now,” he said, “but I’ll be back by dark. So long, Miss Davis.”

“So long, Mr. Shultz.”

He had scarcely gone when Megan heard a timid knock on her door. She called but as no one came in she went to open it herself. Mah-li stood outside wearing her little fur-collared coat and carrying a blue embroidered bag in her hands. She stood quite stiffly, holding her bag and looking at Megan with such a strained, empty smile of politeness that Megan put her arm comfortingly about her shoulders and drew her into the room. Mah-li shrank from her a little, and when Megan closed the door behind her and turned to her again she did not renew her gesture but invited Mah-li by a wave of the hand to sit down by the table.

“I am so glad you came,” she said. “I have been hoping all morning you would, but I did not know how to get any word to you.”

Mah-li sat on the edge of her chair and her eyes fixed themselves on a corner of the room.

“Yes,” she said, “I came to say good-by to you. I am leaving in a few moments.”

“Leaving! My dear child, it isn’t possible, is it?” She did not like to ask if the General was sending her away.

Mah-li nodded.

Megan sat considering her. She felt only indulgence for
Mah-li, and her imagination returned to the glimpse of two delicate painted faces seen for a moment in one shaft of sunlight. She could not blame her for a lapse from so problematic a duty. A feeling that this kind of love, anti-social as it is, has in it something too sacred to be bound by law is strong in the West, where the rights of the individual are of such transcendent importance and where society seems to be created for the good of man, rather than man for the good of society. There was nothing in Megan’s tradition nor in her experience to make her capable of censoring Mah-li, the rebel, too severely.

“Well,” she said, “it may be the best thing in the end. You could not have been happy here. I have wanted to tell you from the first that if I could help you in any way I would. And now I am sure I can. You must come to me when I get back to Shanghai. We can plan then what is best for you and what will make you happy.”

Mah-li looked up and a little puzzled frown gathered between her perfect eyebrows.

“Yes, I told you I would be married in Shanghai and perhaps now I shall have a home there. But wherever I am, it will be the same. I will look out for you. You mustn’t worry about that at all. You can stay with me until you choose the sort of life you want to lead. There are so many occupations for women these days, even in China. They don’t have to be the slaves of fantastic customs any longer, and you mustn’t feel that this one experience has ended things for you. Not at all. You will start out all fresh in a new world and with a real friend to help you. For I want you to consider me your friend, Mah-li. Will you?”