The Bitter Tea of General Yen Read online

  Megan lay looking idly at the frontispiece which gradually caught her attention. It was an old steel engraving of a Jesuit church in a Chinese city the name of which was unfamiliar to her. All round the church were curving Chinese roofs, laden with preposterous porcelain figures, over garden walls sprouted fantasies of unknown trees and before it were set small swarming figures of coolies bearing yokes, beggars with their bowls, ladies with parasols, and the sedan-chairs of the rich. In the midst of all this, the Jesuit church lifted its flat façade, broken half-way by two orderly volutes, with half-dimensional, twisted pillars on either side of its doors. The suggestion of the grandiose and the gigantic was discreetly tempered by reflections of logic, of Aristotle and the sciences, and the inappropriateness of the whole to its surroundings lent it a delicious perversity and charm. A Jesuit façade in China. The first small wedge in the breach which was to grow wider and wider till all Europe poured in, no longer, alas, the Europe of amiable sophistries and the art of making clocks, but a vast and terrible lava flow of artillery, transportation, oil, steel-girded buildings, sanitation, jazz, democracy, equality of the sexes, business efficiency and the true word of God.

  V

  On one of those blue and white days that sometimes come as a voluptuous relief in the midst of rain, and at about noon, the city was taken. Mrs. Jackson and Megan spent the morning in small shops along the Rue du Consulat looking for jade to send to Megan’s mother. The small streets running between the Rue du Consulat and the Rue des Deux Republiques, which is Chinese territory, ended in grilles, and they were further guarded by barbed-wire entanglements and chevaux-de-frise. At intervals along the Rue du Consulat were redoubts of sand-bags guarded by French marines, and as Megan and Mrs. Jackson walked along the sidewalks crowded with Chinese, they passed, every hundred yards or so, groups of Annamites under French officers slowly patrolling. Among the usual flutter of banners, red, white and yellow outside the shops, were a great number of Nationalist flags, red with a white sun on a blue field.

  “See,” said Mrs. Jackson, pointing to them, “they know the city is going to fall and they have turned already.”

  But they themselves did not know it had fallen until they reached home about noon to find the telephone ringing. Mr. Jackson was calling.

  “The Cantonese have taken over the Native City and the railroad station,” he said. “I think you had better stay indoors until we see if anything further is going to happen.”

  Megan thought there must be some mistake. “But do cities fall like this?” she asked. “I have not even heard a shot.”

  Mrs. Jackson said: “Now I guess Miss Reed will be sorry she did not move out of Chapei.”

  “Maybe she was right after all and there is no danger.”

  “We’ll see,” said Mrs. Jackson.

  When Mr. Jackson came in a half-hour later he brought Doctor Strike, whom he had met in the city. They all had a late tiffin together. The windows were open and sunlight poured in with a spring odor of flowering bulbs in the garden. They could hear the rumble of heavy trucks passing and once firing a long way off. Doctor Strike said:

  “When I was on the Bund they were firing on the Pootung side, but you couldn’t hear it here.”

  He was a tall gaunt man almost entirely bald, with a salient jaw and fine large mouth; his pale eyes under bushy brows burned with such intensity that he himself seemed to realize their gaze would be difficult to bear and let them only flicker over those he looked at. As soon as he came into the room Megan felt that here was a man of a totally different caliber from the Jacksons. There was something restless, fluid and molten about him, that one felt even under his quiet voice and rather laboring speech. Megan wondered if it was because he was a great Chinese scholar that he spoke English laboriously, used it as if it were a not too familiar vehicle, hesitating over some words and then bringing them out with a sudden impatience.

  After they had talked for a while Megan asked him about his work at the Christian College in the capital of the province of which General Yen Tso-Chong was military governor.

  “I was president of the college a great many years,” he said, “and certainly they were the best years of my life. It is a lovely city, Miss Davis, a capital of old China, classical China. I wish you might see it. But it is impossible now, every one has cleared out; I don’t believe there is a white man there. In my time there were a hundred or so, not counting those of us out at the college. Yes, it was a wonderful time. I had fine young men to work with, the best type of Chinese. Among them was General Yen, not a general then of course, but a brilliant youngster, already a Chinese scholar, and coming from one of the old Mandarin families of the province. I was very attached to him. When he left me he went to Europe for a few years and when he came back I still saw him, but of course not so much. He was interested in politics then and very occupied. He went to Wampoa for some military training. We rather drifted apart, but I always admired him and when he made himself tupan of the province I believed it was the best thing that could have happened. I had confidence in him. I knew there would be certain traditional things he would do that would be wrong, but I hoped for others, for an increasing number of others, that would be right.” Doctor Strike flashed his eyes absently over them all for a moment, then looked down at his plate.

  “It is hard to tell when things first began to go wrong,” he said, “but it came about slowly and surely. All this political unrest to begin with. Then the General, once the power was in his hands, began to abuse it. He took over all the revenues of the province and gave no accounting for them; he began to train large bodies of troops, troops he conscripted and paid off by loans from the local chambers of commerce. I say ‘loans’ but of course they were actually levies never meant to be paid. Then he stopped all the exportation of rice (rice, you know, is one of the chief products of the province), and made large sums out of kumshaw from the smugglers. Why, when I left he had actually collected all of the taxes of the province up to 1930! Of course he did a few admirable things too. He kept strict order; he made expenditures on public works. Certainly the roads were never in better condition (he was fond of motoring), and unexpectedly he even endowed a few charities here and there. Well, as I said, all this happened gradually and in the meantime the political situation grew more and more acute. The Cantonese, or Nationalists, as they like to call themselves, were practically at his doors. It was about then he told me he was obliged to put in a Chinese as president of the college. He did not say who obliged him, but I got nothing out of argument except that I might remain, because of his friendliness to me, as adviser to the Board. Then he said the whole foreign staff would have to leave to make way for Chinese instructors, the instructors all men we had educated of course. So they left, but I hung on. The man he had selected for president was a fine fellow, I knew him well, I hoped to work through him, or at least to save our property and all our gear for better days. But the General had no intention of my remaining. He had just sold out to the Nationalists, not from conviction but from pure political expediency. He saw they would win anyway. He felt himself particularly strong, particularly successful. He ordered me to leave. There was no getting around him this time; I had to go. An armed guard escorted me to the train and we parted,” the Doctor smiled bitterly, “with all the flowery speeches you could think of. And since then I have been waiting here to see what happens.”

  “Well, I’m surprised,” said Mrs. Jackson. “I thought the General was always a great admirer of yours.” It seemed that Mrs. Jackson was gratified by the General’s defection, whether because of a natural satisfaction in some one else’s disappointment or because it illustrated some conviction of her own that the Chinese could not be depended upon.

  “I don’t know,” replied Strike. “Certainly I was once an admirer of his.”

  “Well, what do you suppose caused him to turn on you?”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Doctor Strike spoke in a low voice, and there was something painful to Megan about th
e puzzled, stilled look on his face. The General’s defection from such a man seemed to her horrible. She wished Mrs. Jackson would leave Doctor Strike alone. But suddenly he lifted his head and flashed a look around at all of them. “It doesn’t matter what he thinks about me,” he said, “it doesn’t matter. I shall never give up hope of him. It is hard to make clear to others on just what we rest some of our convictions. They seem to rest on nothing tangible. Perhaps on instinct. Perhaps they are a truth which we remember, though it was spoken to us when we were unaware. I only know this, I shall never give up hope of the General. I know that there is something fine in him, yes, and even something superfine. It is as though under all the load of falseness his spirit continually cried out to me, ‘I’m here, I’m here, come and find me.’ ” The Doctor stopped abruptly and looked down, both hands clenched beside his plate. As Megan watched him he looked up again, not seeing her, and suddenly his face was touched by a fluttering, strange smile, as if before some more vivid memory of the General he found himself once again charmed and dismayed and hopeful.

  “Where is General Yen now?” asked Mr. Jackson. “Mrs. Jackson was reading in the paper that he had come to Shanghai.”

  Doctor Strike spoke with an effort at casualness:

  “Has he? I don’t know. He is probably with friends in the Chinese city.”

  Megan was annoyed with the Jacksons for continuing to talk about what was obviously so poignant a thing to Doctor Strike, but Mr. Jackson insisted:

  “He wouldn’t have been safe in the Chinese city until today. If he came while the Northerners had it he must have come incognito and gone into the Settlement, or into the French Concession. You probably know, Miss Davis, that the French have always kept their Concession separate from the International Settlement here in Shanghai. The paper said he had gone to a Chinese hotel in the French Concession. Maybe he came to try to buy them out here.”

  “Perhaps,” said the Doctor shortly.

  They left the table and went back to the front room, where they could see the road outside and the refugees who flowed past now as inevitably as water down-hill. Against their steady stream the big armored trucks loaded with Annamites in mushroom hats lunged their way toward Siccawei. Doctor Strike watched them pass, never taking his eyes from them, as he smoked his pipe by the window. And Megan watched him, wondering how old he was, what his life had been, what his thoughts now could be, and filled at the same time by a complete satisfaction as though she had found something which she had felt all along must exist.

  “Do you like the Chinese people, Doctor Strike?” she asked.

  He turned quickly and leveled his colorless brilliant eyes on her.

  “But I love them!” he exclaimed. “Who would not? They are perhaps the most tragic people that has ever lived. For hundreds of centuries they have enjoyed the highest plane of living and thinking. I doubt if even the Greeks ever perfected a more entirely civilized being than a Chinese gentleman of the Tangs or of the Sungs, and yet they have so far been permitted to be the victims of what seems the most colossal irony. Like the Greeks they have been permitted to miss persistently the one essential truth.”

  “You mean the existence of God?”

  “Not the existence of God,” cried the Doctor violently, “of any god, a god of truth, of justice, of power, of wisdom. No, what would all that mean, but the existence of a God of love?”

  His words had such a naked ring that Megan was momentarily abashed, even while she more than ever admired him.

  Mrs. Jackson got up with some suggestion of hauteur to go up-stairs. She was offended by an enthusiasm which she felt obscurely was a reflection on her own value.

  “Well, I don’t like them,” she said coldly, pausing at the door, “and I’ve lived among them for years too. But I’ve done what I could for them, and I guess I’ve given the best of my life. Mr. Jackson and I did a good work in Shasi.”

  And she went out.

  Mr. Jackson spoke hastily and rather at random but with his habitually good-humored intent.

  “I wish we had had a strong central authority in Hupeh like your General Yen. Any strong hand is better than none. We were overrun with bandits and deserters from both armies, and the lawlessness has been such for years that there was practically nothing we could accomplish. And I sometimes think,” he added sadly, “that God’s work is accomplished better by a celibate, like yourself and, well, like that French priest in Shasi, Father Roget, a great friend of ours. He had a very humorous way about him, big and fat he was, with beard and glasses. The Chinese like that. When we left we tried to get him to come too, but he wouldn’t. He was killed finally. Some roughnecks tried to break into his church and when he tried to stop them they killed him. But he was beloved for all that. I would have liked to stay too, but of course I had Mrs. Jackson to think of. You know, we thought for a time we weren’t going to be able to make it. We missed the gunboat that was to take all refugees away. We were inland when it came, so when we reached Shasi we had to hide forty-eight hours in a sampan in a crowd of other sampans till luckily the gunboat came back for us.” And Mr. Jackson looked affectionately at the spot where his wife had vanished, “Brave little woman,” he said very low to himself. Then he pulled out his watch. “Well, about time to go for Miss Reed now,” he said briskly. There seemed to be no doubt now Doctor Strike was here that they would get Miss Reed. “We can put them in the two north rooms,” he said.

  Megan did not listen to their plans for Miss Reed. She was thinking of Mrs. Jackson waiting in the sampan for the gunboat they did not know was coming back. No matter how vividly she could imagine what Mrs. Jackson ought to have been thinking of in the sampan she felt sure that in reality Mrs. Jackson’s thoughts would always be to her incalculable, and, it must be admitted, unimportant.

  VI

  But when Doctor Strike and Mr. Jackson returned about six o’clock they brought the disquieting news that they had been unable to get into Chapei and to do so it would be necessary to get permits from so many authorities, English, French and Chinese, that they would be obliged to wait till the next morning. All evening they talked about it off and on, and Megan saw it was greatly on their minds, though no one seemed to think the orphanage was in any immediate danger.

  The next day was a typical one of the lower Yangtze Valley, an enclosed day of gray, low-hung sky, rather warm. Doctor Strike and Mr. Jackson left the house early. As they did not return or even telephone at noon, Megan after tiffin persuaded Mrs. Jackson to go into town with her. They walked down Nanking Road through dense crowds. It was easy to see that something was hanging over the city; the streets were thronged but the shops were empty, even the drums beating and the screech of mechanical pianos in the cheaper shops could not draw any one from the streets. Rickshaws passed, their air of gliding swiftness an illusion created by the angle of the coolies’ bodies and more coolies carried a heavy piano by on bamboo poles. “He, ho, he, ho,” they sang as sweat streamed into their eyes. Megan stopped to watch the skirted Chinese dart through the crowds between crossings. She saw that they never looked at what was coming toward them but only at what had already passed. They were saved by auto horns and shouts of coolies. At one crossing came an old man with a venerable thin beard and a big blue smocked apron swinging from his hips. As the Sikh policeman gave the signal for traffic to swoop down once more upon him he stopped, held up one hand admonishingly and looked about with an air of pained surprise. Then he sneezed twice, and having done so, with dignity moved on. It became difficult to move among so many people.

  “Let us go to the Astor for a cup of tea,” suggested Megan. She was touched to see by Mrs. Jackson’s expression that she considered this casual invitation an occasion of social importance and that in the crowded lobby she lost her air of assurance and became suddenly a timid, badly dressed woman, but one who is nevertheless enjoying herself.

  They found a table wedged close to others where they could see through a window the Soviet Consulate across the wa
y and a corner of the Garden Bridge.

  It was not five o’clock, yet because of the grayness the lights were on. Three men and a woman sat at the table closest to them. They were leaning forward and talking confidentially, but they had to raise their voices. Their words came over the hum of the tea-drinkers and the clink of crockery, and Megan, hearing them, became gradually aware of their stinging, their fantastic incredibility.

  “—spent bullet came into her room, right here. The clerk at the desk just told me.”

  “Who is she, do I know her?”

  “—they say the whole of Chapei is on fire now. You know what those Chinese houses are. It is one fiery furnace.”

  Mrs. Jackson and Megan looked quickly at each other.

  “—Yes, a shambles too. Full of cornered Northern troops, fighting from house to house. They are so desperate they’ll probably try to break into the Settlement for safety.”

  “—But the worst is those Russians. You know, White Russians in Northern pay. They are in an armored car on a siding over by the North Station, they are shelling everything around till their ammunition gives out. They’re doomed and they know it. What will happen to them?”

  “I hate to think.”

  Megan leaned toward Mrs. Jackson.

  “Do you hear what they say?”

  Mrs. Jackson nodded absently.

  Megan felt her heart beating faster. She could not drink her tea and wondered how Mrs. Jackson could go on eating large cream cakes and toast with jam. But war was a commonplace to Mrs. Jackson, while tea in a hotel lobby was not.

  “Can’t they do something about it?” Megan asked.

  “Oh, no, that is all Chinese territory.”

  Megan took out her leather cigarette case and put it back again.

  “I see,” said Mrs. Jackson, “they are wearing lots of red fox. And it used to be so out of date. Isn’t it funny how things always come back?”