The Bitter Tea of General Yen Page 17

  “Don’t worry!” murmured Mr. Shultz and leaning across the chair back patted her arm. “Don’t worry,” he repeated as he turned and went out.

  XXII

  The amah came in, turned on the light, and a moment later her supper arrived. Megan ate it, conscious that she was tired now mentally and physically. The food brought a warmth to her body and a soothing dulness to her mind. It occurred to her that Mr. Shultz in spite of his vulgarity reminded her faintly of Bob. She could not put her finger on the resemblance, unless (she chose the best traits) it might be a certain efficient and unimaginative acceptance of difficult situations. Almost as casually it struck her that she would probably never marry Bob. It seemed that she had just heard those words spoken lightly by some one, not as though she herself had formulated them. A pang so deep that it touched some raw inner root shot through her. Megan dropped her spoon and rested her head in her hands. It was better not to think when thinking produced only unexpected and unhappy thoughts, dangerous thoughts. She resolved to put Bob and the General out of her mind, to let their relations slide past her for the time being, and of course take them up again to-morrow. She managed to keep her mind blank by eating, with great attention to the soothing effects of warm food. She looked at the objects around the room once more, the gaudy quilts on the bed, the painting of the monkeys, the dark blue bowl of plum, a replica of which was in every room in the yamen, like an intimate personal signature. Whose, she wondered, Mah-li’s or the General’s?

  Megan did not wait to smoke a cigarette, she dropped over on the bed and lay inviting fatigue to overcome her. She fell asleep.

  She heard a knocking at her door that grew into pounding before she could rouse herself to answer it.

  “Come in,” she said sleepily.

  The General’s orderly opened the door and brought her a note. It was from the General and suggested she join the poker game. Megan’s watch said ten-forty. Rather late. But in view of what Mr. Shultz had said it might be better to stay awake and spend the evening in their company. She rather gingerly examined her mental condition, as lately she had been examining her bruised body on awakening. It seemed to be once more sound, empty, untroubled.

  Megan got up and brushed her hair carefully before Mah-li’s mirror. She powdered her face and added a touch of lipstick because she did not want to look at all afraid or even anxious. Then she followed the orderly across the court.

  As they passed the room with the telephone, she saw through the open window that it was brightly lighted and four officers sat there around a table playing mah jong. It was unusual for them to be up so late, or at any rate when she had passed this room the night before it had been darkened. She paused to look at the effect of the bright window square in the darkness of the court: the four Chinese heads seemed to be set in low relief against a shining wall, depth and perspective were wiped out by the too strong contrast of light and dark, the window square was flat like a picture hung on the night. She looked curiously at the Chinese officers. They were playing absently, not with the usual lightning quickness of a mah jong game, and they talked in their low, teasing Chinese voices, their heads close together over the table. The telephone rang, and one of them pushed back his chair and got up. While he answered it the others listened with an intensity that was like a heavy weight. Megan turned and saw the face of the orderly beside her. He also was puckered between the eyes by a childish bewilderment. When he saw Megan looking at him, he turned and rather hurriedly crossed the court to the room where the General held his poker games. She followed him.

  As she came in the door she saw the same group about the table, with the exception of Mah-li. Mr. Shultz got up, the General also, and it was he who held out a chair for her, saying:

  “Come here, Miss Davis, and sit facing the south. That is the place for the most honored guest.”

  She sat down beside him in the chair he indicated, Captain Li on her other side and Mr. Shultz across from her. The poker game with its monotonous phrases continued.

  “Sweeten up here. How about a few royalties?”

  But there was a difference. Mah-li was not here. Although she had scarcely spoken all that other evening, she had been all along the disturbing element, not, Megan felt, through any fault of her own. To her Mah-li was helpless in the midst of circumstance, and no matter what she had actually done, Megan continued to count the final humiliation to her suave and provocative person as a cruelty. But now Mah-li was gone and the disturbing factor to-night was something from without. The pressure of it was felt by all three of them and seemed to push them closer against one another. Megan even felt herself brought closer to them by the common danger, vague as it was.

  But she was still sleepy. She yawned once or twice and in spite of polite efforts to swallow it the General noticed.

  “You are tired,” he exclaimed. “My note must have wakened you. How stupid of me!”

  “No, no,” said Megan, “I’m entirely rested. Don’t pay any attention to me.”

  The game continued, but like the officers at the mah jong game they were all three preoccupied by something else. When the boy came in with the tray of drinks they deliberately put down their cards to fill their glasses. Mr. Shultz, instead of his whisky and soda, drank in little determined gulps a small glass of brandy. The betting was so listless that Megan, who by now understood a little of the game, was bored by it. She was looking at the General’s hand.

  “Why did you lay that down?” she asked once.

  “Really I don’t know,” he answered.

  He looked at her as though he were listening for something. After his first flurry of welcome he seemed to have forgotten her presence. For the moment, and until whatever threatened them passed, they counted only as a group, they were being bundled roughly together and their importance as individuals was in abeyance. Megan realized this herself, feeling no longer keen interest nor antagonism toward any one of them. This bored her too. She watched them play for half an hour, till the smoke began to give her a headache. Then she wondered if it would not be better to go back to bed. She yawned once or twice again, partly from ennui, partly from nervousness.

  “I don’t believe anything will happen to-night,” she said to herself. “At any rate I can’t sit here waiting for it.”

  She got up, but instead of leaving them she went over to the window opening on the court. It had become chilly and clear. Little sudden gusts of wind blew along the eaves, and the stars trembled as they do on cool windy nights.

  As she stood there she heard from the direction of the city a distant but distinct sound like the drawing of a stick along a picket fence. It stopped, broke out again as if coming from several directions at once.

  “What’s that?” Megan exclaimed.

  She turned. Each man held an attitude of suspended action and listened. No one answered her.

  “Firing?” she asked.

  The General nodded. The noise continued.

  “Or is it fireworks?”

  “No, not fireworks,” said the General.

  Megan leaned out and found that she could see the lighted square of window across the court and the officers sitting at the mah jong table. They sat like figures of wood, motionless. Megan looked from them to the group in the room behind her. Their attitudes were almost identical; the same suspense held them.

  The firing stopped.

  Almost immediately the telephone rang, and Megan saw one of the wooden figures start toward it with the jerk of something inanimate drawn by a string. His replies were so low spoken she could not even hear his voice. Presently he hung up the receiver and turned. Megan saw that he looked at the seated men in silence and they looked back at him. She thought he was smiling. She had the impression, even from those whose faces were turned from her, that they were all smiling. The one who had answered the telephone left the room and came across the court. He knocked on the door. The orderly opened it and he came in. Megan turned from the window to watch him. He stood by the door; if he
had been smiling he was stolid enough now. The General spoke and he answered in short phrases. Mr. Shultz listened intently, his eyes turning from the face of the officer to Captain Li. As he listened he looked down at Captain Li with a smile of contempt, hardy and open.

  “Well, that’s that,” he said crushingly.

  Captain Li did not look up.

  The General dismissed the officer, and Megan watched for him to cross the court but he did not appear for a moment and when he did the General’s orderly followed him. He went back to the lighted room, and at the table where the three others waited for him, he leaned forward to speak to them, resting his hands on the table. They got up and, leaving the tiles in disorder as they lay, one of them suddenly turned off the light.

  With the blotting out of the lighted room and its figures of men, with the cessation of small sounds of chairs scraping the floor, of telephone calls, a barrier seemed to have suddenly broken down and night poured unrestrictedly around the yamen, flooding the courtyard with darkness and loosing a wind that rustled along the eaves and brushed the branches of the willow trees restlessly against the wall.

  Megan went back to the table and sat down. A change had occurred inside the room. The three men sat back in their chairs. The pressure that had held them for a time against their wills, molding them into a group, had relaxed and each was once more an individual. Each only waited now, in order to prove it to the others, some opportunity strongly to assert himself. As Megan had partaken slightly in their fear she now experienced some of their relief and an acute interest. “Well,” said Mr. Shultz, “so that is over.”

  The General said, “It seems to be. I have just been thinking how fortunate it is that men are divided so unevenly into the simple and the astute. One astute say to a hundred thousand simple.

  “Yes,” said Mr. Shultz, “like the Belgian’s patty,—one hare, one horse.”

  “There is no other real division among them,” continued the General, “and no other is necessary.”

  “Don’t be too sure of being astute,” said Mr. Shultz, and in spite of his evident satisfaction over the turn of affairs in the city, his words were clipped and irritable. He slammed his hand down. “Let’s cut this out. Three-handed poker is a waste of time. Yes, I know how smart you feel just now. It is a grand feeling to get in first, but don’t forget who it was put you wise.”

  The General also laid down his cards, and Captain Li, perceiving the game to be over, put his hand down regretfully—it contained a full house—and folding his arms sat gazing at the light. Mr. Shultz turned in his chair and leaned his elbow on the table. He took a cigar from his pocket and examined it, together with his highly manicured nails, smelled it, then twisted it about in his mouth, wetting it with his tongue, and catching it finally with a vicious snap in his fine teeth.

  “Yes, don’t forget,” he continued, “don’t forget that you’d have been cold meat by now if it wasn’t for me.”

  The General looked at him with an expression of tolerance.

  “What is the matter with you, Shultz? It doesn’t annoy me that you helped me out in this matter. Why should it annoy you that you are obliged to consider my safety as your own? To a certain extent we are each dependent on the other.” His eyes on Mr. Shultz beamed with benevolence. It was evident that he had leaned heavily on him in the last crisis, perhaps draining confidence and courage out of his mere presence. “I’m surprised at you, Shultz, I really am. You don’t seem to love mankind as you should, all of them, the astute and the simple”—he turned to Megan and his eyes were full of released good humor—“as Miss Davis does,” he added.

  “Hm,” Mr. Shultz grunted, “I don’t know what you are talking about.”

  Facing Megan, the General poured himself a whisky soda.

  “I am talking about Miss Davis so I don’t blame you for not understanding. Miss Davis is much more complicated than you are, Shultz. Although you are compatriots I should not wonder if you found each other quite strangers most of the time. Isn’t that so?”

  Mr. Shultz did not condescend to answer. He smoked on as though he had not heard.

  “Miss Davis!” the General exclaimed, holding up his glass; Megan measured his former disquietude by this too exuberant gesture and excused it on that ground. “Miss Davis, it is a mistake, an esthetic mistake, to try to understand you, because the whole produced is probably better than any of the component parts. To analyze you would be to reduce the phœnix to mere bones, skin and feathers.”

  Megan looked at him astonished, and from him to Mr. Shultz, who had turned and whose scrutiny held surprise and faint contempt.

  “Of course you are being absurd,” said Megan. “There is no reason at all why you and I should not understand each other. You yourself once said men of the same race don’t necessarily resemble each other as tigers do tigers. You just wondered if Mr. Shultz and I might not find each other strange. You see, it is up to the individual in each case. All of us, with some effort and sympathy, can be reduced to certain elements and consequently understood.”

  Mr. Schultz got up and walked over to the phonograph. He began to turn over the records. The General leaned toward Megan, and his voice became less declamatory, more confidential.

  “But is it really understanding you want? I have an idea that understanding doesn’t enter very largely into your program. I have an idea that what you really want, certainly where I am concerned, is to change me, to make me over into some new image; the image of God, but also, slightly, the image of Miss Davis, His creation and at the same time hers. Isn’t that so?”

  This statement brought a chill to Megan. It was not his manner of making it, which she had already excused, but that stated from this angle her intention did not appear as crystalline as she felt it to be.

  “But of course I want to help you,” she said. “The motives of those who try to help are always suspect. But I don’t see why you said just that.”

  And as she thought about it she became even resentful that he had been able so deftly to uncover an aspect of her desire to convert him, which she herself had been dimly aware of for some time, but until now unwilling to admit.

  The General, watching her closely, now assumed his buffoon’s expression of mock alarm.

  “You are angry with me,” he exclaimed, “because I have said what is true. And it is you who tempted me to be truthful in the first place by your own directness. But of course I was foolish to suppose you meant me to follow you in that.”

  Megan glanced at Mr. Shultz, who was turning over records, and at Captain Li, who was apparently about to go to sleep. Captain Li did not count, but she did not want to be spoken to like this before Mr. Shultz. She lowered her voice a little.

  “Yes, I have been very frank with you and you have a right to be frank with me in return. That is quite all right, I don’t mind that. I don’t want you to think however—that is, I don’t want you to feel—that I am trying to force you to any change just to gratify myself.”

  The General was about to answer but changed his mind. He slowly took a cigarette from his gold case and lighted it.

  “Miss Davis,” he said finally after several puffs, “I want you to believe that I consider it a privilege to be included in your regard, even along with several hundred million other human beings.”

  Megan did not answer. She looked down at her clasped hands and saw with annoyance that she still wore the jade rings. After Mah-li had left them with her there had seemed no other place to put them. She tried covering one hand carelessly with the other but, ashamed of this, she boldly laid her hand on the table so that the General could see that she still wore them if he liked. He looked at them a moment with a slight smile, then resting an elbow on the table he waved one hand before her like a magician about to begin an incantation. A tiny banner of smoke from his cigarette blinded her for a moment.

  “Yes, I find you truly remarkable,” he murmured. “Tell me, please, what gives you this confidence with which you go about the w
orld? You pass through dangers that are not dangers to you, through temptations that are not temptations. You feel you are armed with a glorious medicine that is a sure cure for all disorder, and you don’t see that your medicine (which so far as I am able to make out consists of an indiscriminating universal love) would, if taken, produce a ten times greater disorder. And as to this love you talk about, I believe you are even mistaken in its true character. It seems to me only an outlet for your irresistible energy. It is energy. I have not seen in you any real concern over living harmoniously with your fellow men.”

  Megan twisted one of the jade rings on her finger and did not answer. She looked even sullen.

  The General continued: “Truly there have been many moments when I have wanted to laugh at you, and other moments when I have found you admirable.” He paused and his voice sank almost to a whisper. “And even other moments—but perhaps you don’t want me to speak of them. I might astonish you beyond endurance.”

  Megan looked quickly and instinctively toward the corner of the room where Mr. Shultz stood turning over the phonograph records and humming softly to himself. For the first time his solidity was comforting to her. She looked down again reassured. The General talked on in a low murmurous voice, like a bee drumming from flower to flower.

  “Perhaps you believe us incapable of such moments. I am quite sure you do. You have never seen our young men poring over stories whose sentiments would seem very startling to you. I don’t know why I say our young men; our old men also. I could tell you of an officer of mine who spends all his pay buying costly medicines from Szechuen, so that his father, who is a very old man, may enjoy the society of a young wife. Have you read any of our poetry, Miss Davis? Do you understand our music? Have you seen paintings of women walking among fruit trees, in which the fruit trees seem like women and the women like fruit trees? Do you know that there has never existed a people more purely artist and therefore more purely lover than the Chinese? The fact is that it was to protect themselves from the excesses of their own temperaments that our earliest ancestors patiently and laboriously fortified themselves by a submission to ritual and authority. Of course we still retain excesses, being civilized, but our excesses are even now those they long ago decided to allow us. Yes, we are completely enmeshed, Miss Davis, like caterpillars in cocoons. I know that we seem very dull to you, because we no longer depend on a personal inspiration. But you must remember that the personal inspiration is apt to be dull to every one but to him who feels it. He, of course, is carried away by the intoxication of supposing he has created something. But because we refuse to be carried away by it or to depend on it, you must not imagine that we do not think with any profundity—nor feel with any passion.”