The Bitter Tea of General Yen Page 6

  And she continued to look around her with a politely furtive greediness at this delightful world which she knew only too well she would shortly have to leave.

  “Isn’t that Mr. Jackson?” asked Megan.

  Mrs. Jackson turned. “Why, so it is.”

  He was talking to a man who, Mrs. Jackson said, was one of the American consuls. Presently he saw them, nodded absently, and in a moment came over and joined them. His face was very flushed, his eyes looked heavy.

  “Doctor Strike is still trying to get his pass,” he told them. “He has been trying all afternoon to reach General Hsu at the Nantao Yamen. I don’t know with what success. I advised him if that failed to try to get hold of General Yen. You know, the paper said he was somewhere in the French Concession. I have just been trying to get the Orphanage by telephone but can’t get it. The whole district is a blaze of fire, it seems.”

  “Well, you’ve done all you can. Sit down and have some tea.”

  “Yes, do have some tea,” said Megan.

  Mr. Jackson sat down heavily with a sigh. Megan poured him a strong cup and he drank it without saying a word. Then he made an effort to recover his cheerfulness.

  “Well, I’ve always been a little afraid of Miss Reed,” he said; “maybe the Cantonese will feel the same way.”

  “It seems to me I smell smoke,” said Megan.

  “You probably do. Chapei is not far.”

  Megan looked out of the window. She could see the patrols on the Garden Bridge, Spanish marines from the Blas de Lezo. In the ballroom of the hotel the orchestra was tuning up for the tea dance which began at five.

  “Do let us go and walk a little,” she said. “If you are not too tired, let us walk toward Chapei.”

  Mr. Jackson thought they would not get very far, but he got up and Mrs. Jackson reluctantly followed.

  They walked along North Szechuen Road. There were so many Chinese on the sidewalks, they had to elbow their way through. The Chinese stood about not moving, not even talking much. There was none of the nervous activity of Nanking Road. They stood looking dully at the passing motorcars, wheelbarrows, rickshaws, loaded with the refugees pouring in from Chapei. Several stretchers passed, carried by coolies. On one a Japanese child in a gaudy kimono lay face downward, joggling helplessly.

  “Most of the Japanese live this way,” Mr. Jackson called over his shoulder. He walked ahead of them, elbowing his way along. “There must be sniping going on.”

  A Sikh stopped them and told them by signs that they could go no farther. He held out his arms and made a pantomime of shooting. “Click, click,” he said, “plenty shoot.” His face crinkled into smiles, his eyes nearly shut, his teeth and tongue showed in the midst of his handsome black beard; his smile was so infectious they could not help smiling with him and liking him. They stood for a moment, feeling friendly but not knowing what to do.

  Then the Sikh moved off and they turned up Range Road, a street of red brick houses with small garden plots in front behind brick walls, like a street in an English Midland town or in a London suburb. The street was nearly empty and instead of sky a great cloud of smoke rolled up from behind the roofs. There was an all-pervading acrid smell of charred wood and burning paints and varnish. At the far end was some sort of barricade with a few people standing before it. They walked down toward it, wondering why the street was so empty and hearing every now and then a soft spat on the walls of the opposite side.

  Suddenly Megan almost tripped over a bundle that looked as if it might have been dropped from a passing truck, and saw other bundles lying about, gray, the color of the road itself. They were Northern soldiers in gray woolen uniforms. One lay with his head hidden on his arm as if asleep; another, his face turned toward the sky, was as livid as though a green light had been turned on him, and still another had his arms stretched out in an arrested, a histrionic gesture of abandon. Megan noticed his hands, which were very plump and delicate; they reminded her of the hands of the man in the wrecked car.

  Mr. Jackson shook his head over them.

  “Poor fellows,” he said, “they were trying to get in here to save their skins.”

  At the barricade a few British soldiers, Durhams, stood by a machine-gun, and just outside, about fifty yards farther on, a hundred or more Northern soldiers sat about on the ground, their arms in a pile in front of them. Like school children they were waiting to be told what to do next. But there was no one to tell them. A few civilians, Japanese and European, had gathered around the barricade, and a good-looking young Jew in riding clothes came up to Mr. Jackson and began to tell him what had happened.

  “I came along just here like this and I say to myself, these boys are going to make a rush for it. There were some on the roofs firing into the street,—they are still there, better keep close to the wall. They came in a rush, and they scared the daylights out of me, I’ll tell the world.” But he moved on, leaving unexplained what a young Jew in riding clothes, without a horse, was doing in that galley.

  Mr. Jackson spoke to one of the young Durhams. The cornered Northern troops had tried to break into the Settlement for safety, so they had had to kill about sixteen of them. The rest had thrown down their arms. He himself was nineteen years old and had never been under fire before. His eyes were shining, his voice cracked a little, and when a Japanese wishing to hear pushed too near him, he kicked him violently away, not because he was brutal,—his face was that of a good-tempered child,—but because he was excited into a state bordering on exaltation.

  A car came along Range Road and with a sharp scream of brakes stopped at the barricade. It carried a Japanese flag and Japanese Marines on the running-board. A British car followed it. Three British officers, among them General Duncan’s Chief-of-Staff, got out and walked through to where the Northern prisoners sat about waiting for something to happen. Fifteen or twenty Sikhs on horseback trotted along the road, at the end a magnificent one who rode thoughtfully, stroking his gray beard, deep in contemplation of some private matter, neither hurried nor indifferent but as obviously made for war as the Chinese are for peace. An ambulance came with great honking, for the road was becoming crowded. An army doctor and several hospital corpsmen got out and bent over the bodies. Over one who was alive they held a consultation. The Chief-of-Staff came back and gave orders for the road to be cleared. The Durhams began to push people along.

  As Megan turned, she saw one of the doctors light a cigarette and put it in the mouth of the Chinese soldier. She held back long enough to be sure that a faint breath of smoke drifted between his colorless lips. She walked along content that at least one of these hunted creatures had escaped, that in the midst of all this defeat she might identify herself with one tangible victory.

  VII

  When they reached the house it was seven o’clock. The house was cold, for the coolies had let the fires die down, and when Mrs. Jackson fussed about, spurring the boys to activity, she saw that dinner had not even been started.

  “What is the matter with these boys!” Mrs. Jackson complained, but she knew what was the matter.

  There was no word from Doctor Strike.

  Megan went to her room and sat down with a book. She was quite aware that she was becoming overcharged; her hands trembled noticeably as she turned the leaves, and with an instinct for preserving her balance she tried to take her mind as far as possible from China by reading a book that had nothing to do with it. But she could not. She remained abnormally alert to all she had just seen. Finally she left the book open on her lap and deliberately abandoned herself to the barbaric images that filled her mind, letting them riot through as they must, hoping when they had had their will for the power to discipline them into some permanent understanding of them. What she most clearly saw were the young Chinese soldiers tossed like discarded bundles on the road, yet lying in dignity for all that. Only man among animals, she thought, even among those most noble, has any dignity in death; the rest become at once carrion. But Megan had never in her hospi
tal, nor again here, looked at a man just dead without feeling that that which had just left him had been in its essence truly august. The young Chinese soldiers were past help from her, but there remained all of China and it could not be possible that having reached China she should find herself thwarted as at home. That almost desperate irritation which she felt before obstacles began to take hold of her. She dropped her book and walked over to her window, open now on darkness and rain and a few casual lights. She thought of Miss Reed at the beleaguered orphanage in the midst of Chapei. Miss Reed’s ultimate desire, she was convinced, was for martyrdom, and apparently she was about to attain it. A desire so capable of definite realization was, she felt sure, rare. Miss Reed was fortunate. And it came to her with a further irritation how much her own desires still floated unharnessed and goalless, waiting amid a confusion as of voices, beating of wings, sharp flashes, for something they could take hold of and make their own.

  Mrs. Jackson called her from below and she ran downstairs in great haste because haste gave an illusion of direction. But she found it difficult to eat, and Mr. Jackson also sat making scraping sounds with his fork, eating nothing. His face was flushed and his eyes were heavy. Mrs. Jackson, after watching him anxiously during the meal leaned over and felt his forehead.

  “Will,” she exclaimed, “You have a fever!” She jumped up and ran to the foot of the stairs, calling her amah to bring down the thermometer.

  Mr. Jackson looked apologetically at Megan.

  “I got soaked to the skin yesterday and today, but I don’t feel as if I had a cold at all.” But sitting foolishly with the thermometer in his mouth, he admitted to pains in his head and back.

  “Does your chest hurt you?” demanded Mrs. Jackson.

  He said it did not.

  “Well, into bed you go. I am going to rub you with Vick’s Salve and give you a hot lemonade and some aspirin. And don’t you stir till they burn the roof over our heads. Mr. Jackson had pneumonia two years ago at Shasi,” she explained, “and it all came from not doing as I said.”

  “But, dear, I must stay up till Doctor Strike comes, or at any rate till I have some word from him. He may need me.”

  “When he comes I’ll send him right up to you. But there won’t be a thing you can do, Will. The Doctor is never going to get a permit from that man.”

  “No, I’m afraid not,” Mr. Jackson admitted sadly, and he suffered himself to be led up to bed.

  Megan and Mrs. Jackson sat up a while. Several times the telephone rang and Megan always ran to answer it herself. But it always proved to be a Chinese who had got the wrong number. Even the exchange was worse than usual that night. Doctor Strike did not come. Finally they went to bed.

  Megan lay in bed knowing she would never be able to sleep. The rain had stopped but moisture dripped off the eaves of the house and it grew gradually colder so that she pulled a blanket over her. Suddenly she heard what she knew to be firing. It came from somewhere the other side of the International Settlement and it sounded like a stick drawn rapidly along a picket fence. Megan got up and ran to the window, but aside from the red glow in the direction of Chapei there was nothing to be seen. The firing went on but came no nearer. Then it stopped. Megan went back to bed. She began to count sheep as her father had made her do as a child. Sometimes when she had been sick or frightened he would sit by her bed and count them for her. She made herself think of her father. Then of Bob. Bob was as near to China as she would let herself think. It was easier to picture Bob’s fulfillment than her own. She saw Bob’s life as one long integrity in the midst of grossly multiplied odds. She saw too, with some confusion of feeling, his blue eyes. Dear Bob. And she did not know she had gone to sleep until a bell jangled immoderately somewhere in the midst of her unconsciousness. Before she knew what she was doing she had jumped up and turned on the light. Her traveling clock said three-thirty. The bell rang again and she heard one of the boys scuffling to the door. As she dressed she heard the door open and Doctor Strike’s voice in the hall. Then she heard the voices of the Jacksons. But while she listened there were no sounds that might be Miss Reed and her orphans.

  When she got down-stairs she found Doctor Strike and the Jacksons in the living-room before the fireplace, where the sleepy coolie was laying a fresh fire. Mrs. Jackson wore one of Mr. Jackson’s overcoats, Mr. Jackson was wrapped in a blanket, Doctor Strike was hanging his wet overcoat on a chair. His face was hollower under the eyes and quite white, but he did not suggest fatigue; on the contrary he seemed to restrain, as ever, a restless, burning vitality.

  “Good evening, Miss Davis,” he said as she came in. “Or probably it is good morning.”

  “Yes, it is three-thirty. No Miss Reed?”

  “Not yet,” he answered. He sat down with them and began to rub his strong bony hands together. “Pretty cold,” he said briskly. “I wonder if I could have some coffee. I have not eaten anything since noon.”

  “I’ll get you some,” said Mrs. Jackson, “and you’d better have some sandwiches too.”

  She went out and Megan sat waiting for Doctor Strike to tell them what had happened. The room had a strange look, seen in a startled awakening from sleep, as though what was most familiar in it was only a replica in a changed substance. She let her eyes linger on the plush carpet, the pictures of dogs in lace caps and toppers, the flannel collar sticking up from Mr. Jackson’s blanket, the coolie making the fire, whose bristling head some disease had turned bald in patches, all of which assured her that she was awake in a world of things that remain permanent.

  “It is cold driving,” said the Doctor, still rubbing his hands together.

  “Have you an open car?” asked Mr. Jackson.

  “Yes, all I could get. It was the only kind they would send with a Chinese license, and they were reluctant enough to give me that.”

  “Then you got your permit, did you?”

  “Yes, finally.” And though he did not yet say so, Megan felt sure by the sudden flare in his eyes that he had got it from General Yen. “I spent some time at the Consulate, as you know, and a great deal more time trying to get in touch with the Nantao Yamen. I tried through every Chinese of influence I know in Shanghai. Our authorities were trying to arrange an armistice between the Cantonese and the Northern troops cornered in various sections around the North Station, and General Duncan sent one of his officers who went with a Commissioner and some Chinese to the Nantao Yamen to see what could be done about it. I asked them to speak at the same time about the orphanage. But all the negotiations fell through and on their way back from the Yamen they were nearly killed by a mob. They only escaped because General Hsu, questioning the guard he had sent with them, found they had not been escorted all the way to the Settlement. So he sent after them, and they were barely reached in time to save them from the mob. Not too reassuring, is it? Remember, these were some of our highest officials under a flag of truce. Well, well,—at any rate this got me nowhere and it was already late. Earlier in the day a Chinese I knew had mentioned that General Yen was staying in a house on the Route Ghisi, and I determined as my last resort to try to reach him. After all,” he said, “we had been friends.”

  Mrs. Jackson came back and sat down.

  “The sandwiches and coffee are coming,” she said. “So you saw General Yen again? What did he do?”

  “I went to the house in the Route Ghisi but a very insolent boy coming to the door told me he wasn’t in. ‘When will he be in?’ I asked. He said he didn’t know, so I pushed in past him and said I’d wait. I sat in a dark hall. The house seemed truly deserted by its masters; no one came in or out and I could hear behind a heavy door at the end of the hall the muffled voices and laughter of the servants. Every now and then I’d call the number one and question him as to the whereabouts of General Yen, but he would not tell me anything. I waited there from nine to eleven. Finally the number one came and asked me for five dollars. I gave it to him and he said General Yen was attending a banquet being given for him by fri
ends at the Great Eastern Hotel.

  “I went there but when I spoke to the clerk he told me the General was not in the hotel. So I went over the hotel myself from floor to floor, till I heard sounds from a room that made me feel a party was going on inside. I pushed open the door in spite of all the room boys on that floor who had gathered to protest against it. Well, he was there. It was already late and the party had been going on a long time. The General was quite drunk, drunker than I have ever seen him. But he knew me at once. He insisted I sit down beside him and join in the festivities, he offered me food and champagne,—yes, he prefers champagne to samshu,—and he presented me to all and sundry as his old and honored friend. Of course I took nothing, and every time I tried to speak to him about the safe-conduct pass I wanted from him he would only answer by offering me champagne, or he would recite amorous verses, some of which he said he had written himself, and his friends would all laugh and the singsong girls would set up a din. It was very difficult. I began, I am afraid, to get angry. At one moment I had an impulse to pull everything off the table and throw chairs at each member of the party. I sat there sufficiently silent and stiff one would imagine to cast a damper on them. And perhaps I did, for suddenly the General grew silent too. He sat and looked at the ceiling, a way he has when he is thinking, and I began to pray that I might be given the power to touch the good that is in him, that I know is in him. My prayer must have been answered. After a little time he reached over for a sort of menu card that lay by his place and called for some one to bring him a brush and ink. ‘What is this you are asking me for?’ he said.”

  Doctor Strike took a soiled piece of stiff paper out of his pocket and handed it around for them to see. He smiled at Megan, the smile she found so charming, for it was always a little tremulous and uncertain in the midst of his firm, lined face. He put the paper back again.

  “What time is it now?” he said.