The Bitter Tea of General Yen Page 12

  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.

  XVI

  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.

  “My dear Miss Davis [she read], will you not join us in a little game of cards, with which we are trying to pass the evening hours”?

  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.

  Megan, a little dazed, murmured:

  “How do you do.”

  The General said:

  “Good evening, Miss Davis. We are playing poker; as it’s an American game I thought you might like to join us.”

  “No, thank you, I’ll look on,” said Megan. “I don’t play poker. And besides I have no money.”

  “I’ll be glad to carry you,” suggested Mr. Shultz. His voice was a fine tenor, marred by the looseness and indecision of his accent.

  “It’s just a little friendly game,” he added, “the kind of friendly game where you gotta lose to the General. Captain Li and I’ll be out a few thousand before the evening is over.”

  “I think I’ll watch.”

  Megan sat down in a vacant chair by Mah-li, who was delicately dealing the cards.

  “But do you play?” she asked her.

  Mr. Shultz had sat down opposite them.

  “Sure she plays,” he said. “All these girls play and Mah-li is a terror. She is the only one here dares get money off the General.”

  Megan watched them. Beside the delicate small-boned Chinese faces, with their shallow shadows, the face of Mr. Shultz was as unformed as a lump of baking-dough. There was a glass of whisky and soda beside him and he handled this and his cards with the clumsiness, the surety of a derrick hoisting a load of gravel. His stubby nails were highly manicured and he wore a large diamond ring. The game progressed, punctuated by a few ejaculations. Every now and then Mr. Shultz looked up at Megan with a cold curiosity, unquickened by any sympathy. It was obvious that he did not approve of her being here, and whatever the circumstances that brought her, she should certainly have managed to avoid them. Megan read this opinion definitely in one of his slow glances and she met his judgment with an equally visible scorn. She did not in her turn approve of his being here. The financial adviser to a Chinese general indeed! Perhaps he was one reason why the finances of the province were shrouded in such disrepute. It seemed to her a bitter irony that the General should have rejected a man like Doctor Strike only to fall into the hands of Mr. Shultz. She saw the General looking from one to the other of them with a faint smile. It had perhaps amused him to bring them together, capable of discerning, as he certainly was, some of the differences that must lie between them, in spite of their common tongue. His amusement became so apparent on his face that Mr. Shultz, looking up, saw it. His blue eyes hardened and for a moment this lump of flesh without having made a movement, became formidable. The General’s smile grew abstracted.

  “Well, Miss Davis,” said Mr. Shultz in a more friendly tone, “you’re a newcomer here I take it.”

  “Yes, indeed.”

  “How long you been in China?”

  “Several days only.”

  “Several days! Well, this is a strange situation, finding yourself in a place like this.”

  “Is it? Yet I’m sure plenty of missionaries have found themselves from time to time in Chinese families.”

  “Missionaries! Maybe. But then they do lots of things a lady like you wouldn’t think of.”

  “They are much more courageous than I, if that is what you mean.”

  “Well, that isn’t exactly what I mean. Sweeten up here everybody, sweeten up.”

  He began to deal the cards out heavily and surely. The General sat back in his chair watching him as if he had been a juggler hired for the evening.

  “I used to be in the Customs,” said Mr. Shultz, “the outdoor Customs. I was inspecting a ship once sailing for Amoy and way down in the hold, among all the Chinese passengers, was a black-haired girl, lying on a bunk, reading a Chinese book. She was the best-looking girl I ever saw anywhere in my life. Her hair was all slicked down and she had on trousers and a little coat. Her feet were large but I didn’t notice that then. I leaned against the bulkhead and looked hard at her, but she only went on turning the pages very carefully, till finally I couldn’t stand it any longer. I said, ‘Honey, who belong your master?’ Well, the moment she looked up I saw I was wrong, but before I could get away she said loud and clear, ‘Christ is my master,’ so I said, ‘Then I beg your pardon,’ and shoved off. But I certainly couldn’t approve of that girl, traveling in Chinese quarters in Chinese clothes and all. Missionary, of course. They always used to dress and live Chinese.”

  “What an extraordinary anecdote,” said the General, and not the hard look which Mr. Shultz gave him could quite banish the delighted smile from his face, “and it proves that in reality you are only capable of being attracted by what is familiar to you.”

  “Oh, I know what you mean,” said Mr. Shultz negligently. “But I am very broad-minded just the same. I know you’ve got your good points same as we have.”

  “I also am broad-minded,” said the General. “I also am willing to admire. For instance, just at present I am suffering from a toothache, so I admire in you a dazzling monument to the efficacy of your nation. I refer, Shultz, to your teeth.”

  Mr. Shultz smiled, revealed the teeth and said, “Well, have another whisky soda then. Scotch is the best thing I know for toothache.”

  “And you, Miss Davis,” said the General. “What do American ladies drink ordinarily? What would you like? May I offer you some champagne?”

  “Nothing, thank you. Unless perhaps a glass of cold water.”

 
; “Better not,” said Mr. Shultz. “I can have the boy bring some of my chow water if you like. But you’d better try White Rock or Perrier.”

  “Cold water! White Rock!” said the General. “Is that the stuff by which great civilizations are nourished!”

  But Megan interrupted him. His levity made her uneasy though she could not quite tell why. Perhaps it was because the presense of Mr. Shultz, far from simplifying her situation, seemed to have complicated it. She did not want Mr. Shultz to feel that he had to protect her from anything, because that would cast a cloud over her relations with the General. Mr. Shultz’s presence made an even more delicate balance necessary and the General’s boisterousness might inadvertently upset it.

  “Have you lived here long, Mr. Shultz?” she asked coolly.

  “Longer than you’ve lived anywhere,” he replied. Then he gave his attention to his hand for a moment. As the three cards he called for were dealt him he held them tightly against his vest, moving them only enough to see the edge of their marking. “Yes, longer than you’ve lived anywhere,” he repeated and laying them face down on the table he pushed a stack of chips forward. “I’ll raise that fifty,” he said, and after having called the General’s three Queens, he remarked, “Well, sometimes it pays to believe them. Yes, Miss Davis, I know China well. I guess I know all their bad points and their good points too.”

  “What are some of their good points?”

  “We’ve always known how to build walls,” said the General, raking in chips with his delicate fingers.

  “Ah, yes, walls. To keep people out, I suppose?”

  “A lot of good that did you,” said Mr. Shultz. “You never kept ’em out. What you ought to have done was to grow a little hair on your chests.”

  “Would that have kept them out!” exclaimed the General.