The Bitter Tea of General Yen (14 page)

“My friends,” he said, “knew I was leaving the city at a certain hour; so, because of the extreme merriment of the party, they themselves accompanied me to the station. When I got there I found you being handled very roughly by the crowd around the gate. A coolie was hitting you on the head with a carrying-pole. It must have been the coolie you said struck Doctor Strike a moment before. He was probably emboldened by his success in felling the Doctor. I had my guard extricate you. And then I really had no idea what to do with you. I have explained to you that for various reasons I had to leave without involving myself in explanations with the foreign authorities. I was already in Chinese territory, my train was waiting, so I brought you along. As soon as I can make suitable arrangements you shall return. In the meantime you must consider yourself my guest.”

Megan thought for a moment before answering him. He had not said a single unreasonable word. Except for the anxiety for her parents for which he was hardly responsible, she was glad to be here. She had no thought that she was in any personal danger; on the contrary it was she herself who was the disruptive element in the midst of a long-established plan. The prospect of troubling all this false security filled her with excitement and genuine pleasure, yet she was at the same time on the verge of anger. Surely
she was not really disturbed by so trivial a thing as the nearness of a stridently alien flesh; perhaps it was the pressure and the will to dominate of an alien mind.

The General in his turn, she could feel it, was taking advantage of her abstraction to scrutinize her more closely. She threw her cigarette out the window and turned to him.

“I see I owe you a great deal,” she said; “please forgive me for not being more gracious about it. The truth is I am still a bit bewildered.”

“That is quite natural. It must be bewildering to you to wake up unexpectedly in China.”

“By the way, there is something I would like to ask you to do for me that will put my mind very much at rest.”

The General nodded.

“It is to send a telegram to Shanghai to my friends there so that they can let my parents and the man I came here to marry know I am safe.”

“The parents and the bridegroom! But certainly I will send one at once. In all probability they believe you dead. Now there will be rejoicing, even though they will not be able to think so ill of us as they might have liked.”

“I feel sure,” said Megan stiffly, “that in this case they will be glad to be mistaken.”

“No doubt at all. And I shall see about reassuring them at once.” He leaned toward her, his cigarette case held open, but Megan shook her head.

“No more, thanks.”

“As it turns out,” said the General, tapping a cigarette on his thumb-nail and slowly lighting it, “as it turns out I shall not be able to arrange for your return immediately. An incident occurred at Nanking, at the same time I brought you here, which has aroused so much feeling, both among my people and among yours, that I do not yet know what will come of it.”

“What sort of incident?”

“In capturing the city of Nanking the troops of General Chen Chien got a little out of hand. War, you know, does not bring out the best qualities of tolerance and self-control; that is one reason why we Chinese are so unfitted for it.”

“But what was the incident?”

“A number of people were shot and some were killed, missionaries largely, Doctor Williams of the Nanking College, some ladies, the British Consul too, I believe.”

“Shot by Chinese?”

“By troops, yes.”

“But that is an outrage!” cried Megan, overwhelmed with anger. “We are not at war with you!”

“No? Well, at any rate your gunboats, in retaliation, fired on the unarmed, civilian population of Nanking, killing hundreds. But after all, why should you and I talk about it?”

“I don’t believe they fired on the civilian population, or if they did, they must have been forced into it.”

The General shrugged his shoulders.

“We will get nowhere by discussing this. It would only drag us both into the vulgarity of open anger. I will send you some Shanghai papers which have just come to me. You can read there all your own point of view.”

But if the General was not already angry, he was agitated. His hand holding the cigarette shook nervously. This shaking hand made Megan realize how near she herself had come to losing control, perhaps irreparably. What about all the vast misery of China which had in no wit changed? What about the word of God that was to illumine the drowsy twilight of its spirit? Christianity had always spread to an inevitable accompaniment of bloodshed, its own and, it must be admitted, that of others. But the loss of life was not to be considered in the saving of a soul. Life, blood, flesh, were nothing; the spirit everything. Megan sat with clinched
hands, and while for several moments neither she nor the General had said a word, she was as exhausted as though they had been engaged in a mortal struggle.

“Yes, you are right,” she said. “We won’t talk about that. I want as a matter of fact to see your point of view as far as I can. I believe I can do it better when you don’t argue with me.”

The General smiled suddenly and taking out his handkerchief wiped his forehead.

“Delightful,” he murmured. “Do you know,” he said, “for a moment you quite terrified me. There is something about the European eye, I can’t explain the effect it has on me. It gets so—large.” He returned his handkerchief carefully to its pocket. “But I am glad you are trying not to think too ill of us.”

Megan’s cheeks still burned and her voice was still a little husky.

“Oh, we don’t really think ill of you. Certainly not in America. On the contrary we like to sentimentalize over your superiority to ourselves. Haven’t you noticed that attitude in England too? Peace-loving exquisites, passionate over tea, philosophy and calligraphy, that is how we like to think of you.”

The General seized with relief this diversion into a wider field.

“And aren’t we that?”

“I know nothing about your actual tastes. But as to peace, the country never seems to have known it. And any one can see that your philosophy has never brought you good government, justice, or an equal distribution of happiness.”

“Our poor philosophy! So you demand it give us good government, justice, and an equal distribution of happiness? But you seem to think it is a safe-conduct pass! Haven’t you people rather a mania for drastic remedies? I have observed that you are very prone to attach yourself to one thing like religion, or democracy, or even proper sanitation, and believe that it will cure all. Our philosophy enables us to support life in the only way it can be supported, by
an endless series of compromises; successful compromises, perfectly adjusted to our temperament. That is surely a great deal for a philosophy, don’t you think so? It is even a great deal for a religion. But,” he added, “you are right in supposing we are peace-loving. In the real China we have always been predominantly agriculturists. A farmer’s life is bound down to his plot of earth. He doesn’t need to fight like the herder for new pasture grounds, or the trader for new markets. So war is not the result of our deeper necessities and certainly not of our inclinations. We fight because the corruption of our officials forces us to. But even then we run as often as we fight, which proves, as Bertrand Russell says, that we are rational men, because what we fight for is not worth our death.”

“It is arguable whether there are not some things worth dying for, even if you have failed to discover them.” Megan tried also to speak lightly. “So I am right as to your being peace-loving. And as to tea, is it true you drink only that?”

She remembered then that Doctor Strike had said he had found the General very drunk, even the General had admitted his weakness, and was sorry she had spoken, but the General said pleasantly:

“In our period of greatest civilization we drank wine, and those who could afford it drank it to excess. Only savages and animals practise sobriety, continence and moderation. Yes, our greatest poet was drowned in an attempt to catch the moon in the river. I saw once in a private collection in England—so much of our art has gone abroad—a very charming painting of Yang Kwei Fei, who was a great beauty of the Tang dynasty. She is holding a wine-cup and the legend says, ‘Yang Kwei Fei, drunk but still drinking.’ ”

“I wonder if you can be typical,” said Megan. “What you say is very confusing.”

“I don’t want to tire you with discussions, when you are just up.” The General got up and threw his cigarette out of the
window. “But I do not see why I should be typical. Fortunately for our entertainment, men of the same race don’t resemble each other, as ants resemble ants, or tigers tigers. Though it might prove more convenient in the matter of international relations if we did. Then we could all behave toward each other without compunction, in the simple brutality of the animal world.”

He held out his hand to her and Megan shook it carefully as though she were handling porcelain.

“I will send word to Shanghai at once,” he said. “And by the way, I don’t yet know your name.”

“My name is Megan Davis, Miss Davis. If you will send word to Mr. Jackson, of the China Inland Mission, and ask him to notify my family and friends I shall be very grateful.”

“Will you please spell all that?” said the General, and he wrote it down in a little note-book he carried in one pocket. When he had closed it again he said very formally, in a high strange voice, as if he were making an official proclamation:

“There is at present only one female in my household. If you have no repugnance for her society she will be glad to visit you from time to time. I myself am very busy with the political situation in my province.”

“Of course I have no repugnance,” Megan exclaimed. “She has been very kind and I think she is charming.”

“Then she will come again whenever you wish. She speaks English well.”

He took out his handkerchief, wiped his forehead and smoothed his hair before putting on his cap. His gesture was eloquent of relief from a considerable strain. He gave her a slight salute and walked over to the door.

“Good morning,” he said, clicking his heels together.

“Good morning,” said Megan.

The orderly with the salmon-pink cord, who had been waiting just outside, opened the door for him and he went out.

Megan spent the rest of the day on the bed or sitting by the window. She felt no desire to leave her room to see what was beyond the tiled roofs, to meet half-way any new experience. The peace of the General’s yamen began to act as a soporific on her nerves. The one sound that persisted, the distant ringing of the telephone and the Chinese voice, became part of the silence. Only once she heard violent voices outside, which proved to be the amah hysterically haranguing one of the servants, but seeing Megan looking at her from the window the amah smiled as if to reassure her that it was nothing serious, and the quiet became even deeper than before.

Late in the day they brought her some Chinese food, rice and concoctions of meat and fish, bamboo shoots, cabbage, bean sprouts and soy sauce, served in delicate bowls veined like thin flesh. Megan ate adventurously and found it represented a whole new scale of flavors, as outside her experience as the tones of a Chinese musical scale, so that her hunger remained mysteriously unsatisfied.

She was lying on the bed when a knock at the door made her sit up. The orderly with the Mauser on the salmon-pink cord opened the door but instead of the General a much younger and smaller man in the uniform of an officer came into the room.

As without a word he walked over to the table, Megan looked at him with astonishment. She saw that his body and hands appeared to belong to a very young girl, his face suggested the texture of
pâte tendre
and his black eyes and eyebrows were outlined with exaggerated precision above cheeks that surely had a trace of rouge. If he had been an actor, he would have excelled as an impersonator in female rôles. Evidently he spoke no English for as he put down on the table a roll of papers, a carton of cigarettes, a box of matches and an ash-tray, he said something in Chinese, then bowed and with a smile of thin sweetness turned and went out. If the papers and cigarettes had not been there to prove his reality, Megan would almost have believed him to be an apparition.

They were the Shanghai papers promised by the General. She lay back on the bed to read them. There were pages about the Nanking incident, but for fear she might become angered again, Megan looked only at the head-lines. It was when she saw her name at the head of a column that she felt a sudden sharp excitement.

TRAGIC INCIDENT IN RESCUE OF ST. ANDREW
’
S ORPHANAGE. YOUNG FIANCÉE OF DOCTOR LOSES LIFE NEAR NORTH STATION
.

She read an account of what had happened, or what had so nearly happened.

Megan put down the paper, feeling that she had perpetrated a fraud on the world. Still, death had come very close to her, and if she were not actually dead and no longer in danger, she was at least alone as she had never been. Unlike the bewildering loneliness one feels in the midst of crowds, or the terrible loneliness one feels at times with those one loves, this loneliness was profoundly exhilarating. It meant that she had been, for the time, stripped of her tradition and her place in the world, cut off from the physical support of her parents’ love and of Bob’s. It is not the eerie loneliness of the spirit. It was a challenge.