The Bitter Tea of General Yen (25 page)

“Boy, you catch whisky soda, chop chop.”

Megan, turning in her chair, saw his head nodding forward.

There had been little sleep for either of them on the junk.
When they climbed aboard the crew had stared at them stupid and insolent, paying no attention to Mr. Shultz’s demands to see the laodah. But Mr. Shultz had gone boldly aft, followed by Megan, and for long moments she had listened to his voice, now creamy with persuasion, now breaking into sharp spattering threats. Finally, under pressure of a roll of bills and a Mauser nestling against his ribs, the old Chinaman by the tiller had given in. Three or four of his crew manned the capstan to weigh anchor, singing a strange broken song, others sheeted home the sail that had been idly slatting in the wind. Presently Megan heard the slap of water against the blunt bow. When they were well under way, Mr. Shultz led Megan into the cabin so that she might stretch out on one of the bunks, but she only stood a moment inside the door, looking hopelessly through the thick air at the hostile eyes of the Chinese women, at the babies on the floor, the ducks and fish hung against the bulkhead, the shrine at one end, smelled the mixed odor of hot rancid grease, opium and incense, and staggered out again. Mr. Shultz rolled his coat up for her, and she lay cold and desperately seasick, flat on the deck near the tiller.

At last day broke underneath the world and light began slowly to flood the sky with ripples of light from below, crossed by flying wedges of birds. The sun came and tormented her all day, its direct fire searching under her eyelids. By mid-afternoon they reached the mouth of the shallow river, too late, Mr. Shultz told her, for the flood tide, so they hung for hours, swaying giddily between the two blazing mirrors of sea and sky. The women did their cooking, smoke curled from the vent hole in the cabin, and the laodah had a game of mah jong with two of the more decorative of them. Fish were caught. A baby wailed. The delay was of no importance. Gradually the two mirrors dimmed and burnished again into crimson. Night came. The world for Megan became the cycle of day and night. Endless.

Then out of emptiness she heard water under the bow again.
It was very early in the morning, still dark, when they came to the junk anchorage off the low-built city. Mr. Shultz called a sampan, that like an unsubstantial water insect carried them under the shadowy hulls of the junks to the Bund, where a small coast steamer lay waiting as squat and respectable as a boarding house.

In the basin-stand of the cabin was a cake of fresh pink soap. Megan, holding it to her nose, smelled Europe once more and fell over on the transom for a few hours of troubled sleep.

The jetty at Shanghai was crowded with passengers just off a tender from one of the big liners, such a crowd as Megan herself had landed with so short a time before. Now in her soiled Chinese robe she sat huddled on a bench while Mr. Shultz went to a near-by alley off Nanking Road, across from the Palace Hotel, to get a taxi. Megan could not endure to wait in the Palace while he got one, but here on the jetty no one particularly noticed her.

In the taxi they sat in silence, driven recklessly along the winding Avenue Foch between lines of tangled barbed wire. It seemed strange to see the barricades again, strange to them just risen out of China like drowned men from deep water. As they neared the Jacksons’ house, Megan said:

“Forgive my saying this, but I’ve been so dependent on you, you won’t mind. You must promise me that if you need any money now or any help, you’ll let me know.”

“Well, that is very kind of you, I am sure,” said Mr. Shultz. “But I sent some money to Shanghai a few days ago for safe-keeping. I sent it in my name. If it is safe I’m fixed. If it isn’t, I’ve got other lines out. You forget, Miss Davis, I’m a financial adviser!”

When they reached the house she said, “You will come in with me?”

“Not now. I’ll be around some time later.”

They shook hands lingeringly.

“You’ve been splendid,” said Megan.

“Thanks. You have too.”

“No, no, you were the one. You were splendid.”

Mr. Shultz repeated, “Well, thanks.”

They were friends now, not so much because they had shared danger, as because each had found something in the other to forgive and had forgiven it. He watched her up the steps and saw the door opened before he drove off.

The number one boy stood at the door glassy-eyed with amazement at the sight of Megan in her Chinese dress.

“Missie no have got,” he stammered. “Master no have got. Other master have got.”

“It must be Bob,” thought Megan, and at the door of the little drawing-room she paused, trying to control the sudden pounding of her heart.

But it was not Bob. Doctor Strike, his head wrapped in bandages, sat in a chair by the window. His eyes were closed, his mouth, relaxed from austere tightness, was slack, a little open. He was asleep, and his sleep exposed him to her; he was sick and old, and he had, to all appearances, failed. Megan now knew how much. She had herself measured the very depth of his failure. As she looked at him, his eyes opened. Dazed with sleep he looked at her unknowingly, and suddenly they lighted from within.

“Miss Davis!” he cried.

Megan went to him and took both his outstretched hands.

“Don’t get up, you are still ill. Were you badly hurt?”

“Yes, hurt,” he repeated.

A little red plush stool, with a book on it, stood by his feet. Megan pushed the book off and sat down. He still held her hand, gripping it with nervous bony force, not taking his eyes from hers.

“I’ve prayed for you, my child,” he said, “every hour since. I thank God.”

“It’s all right,” said Megan, “I’m quite safe.”

“And you saved me!” he cried. “Yes, I know that. I can’t forget it ever. You saved me.”

“Don’t,” said Megan, pained by his intensity. “Don’t. What does that kind of saving mean?”

“It means life,” said Doctor Strike roughly.

His eyes searched her up and down, seeing her Chinese dress, even the jade rings on her fingers.

“Did you get the General’s telegram?” she asked.

“Three days ago.”

“He picked me up at the station and took me on a train down to his capital. I was very kindly treated.”

“Good, good.” The Doctor’s eyes softened. “You were well treated. That’s good.”

“Yes, very. He meant to return me. But trouble broke out there. An uprising. We were trying to get away and just at the last moment he was killed. An American who was with him, a Mr. Shultz, brought me back.”

But Megan saw that at the word of General Yen’s death Doctor Strike had ceased to listen to her. His eyes looked beyond her to take in a greater perspective. She stopped and waited for him to speak.

“It is hard to believe,” he said at last, “hard to believe. I’ve known him to be in danger so often. But he has always got through. Now he is actually dead. Well, then it is all over. It is finished. That is what your gift of life means, my dear, it means we can still go on, that the final reckoning, when our successes and our failures are summed up, is not yet upon us.

“But he is dead and we can’t do anything more for him, we can’t help him, we can’t save him. It looks as though we had failed.” The Doctor stopped and his mouth of an old man trembled. “Perhaps we can’t be sure,” he said in a lower voice. “Perhaps we can’t be sure. He said, ‘I am the Way.’ The way may stretch farther than we think. It may not end here with the end of life. The General too believed in a Way, another Way. Perhaps they meet.”
Doctor Strike dropped his head in his hands. He had forgotten Megan. “We must trust to the mercy of God,” he said.

They sat in silence, both thinking of the General and of that mercy to which they at last so unwillingly relinquished him, both only fearful that since it must recognize justice, it might be less perfect than their own.

THE END