The Bitter Tea of General Yen (19 page)

The inadequacy of words became almost terrifying to Megan. With all the affection and help she wished to pour out on Mah-li she could only flounder about in phrases that seemed to bend under her. But she felt Mah-li must be aware of the warmth of her intention.

“You are very kind,” said Mah-li.

“I suppose,” said Megan, “that you are an expert with your needle and can make all those fascinating embroideries such as I saw in Shanghai. And then you type, you tell me. That might be something you would like to follow up. And speaking English so well, I have an idea we could find you some very interesting secretarial work.”

Mah-li looked into the corner again and a smile curled her lips, a timid smile, but one holding the ghost of mockery. Megan stopped, for she could not continue to ignore the fact that Mah-li, as she stood, was a piece of pure decoration, made only to give pleasure. It was with relief that she thought again of Captain Li.

“Is Captain Li a Christian?” she asked, not that it seemed likely but as a means of introducing him into the field.

“Oh, no,” said Mah-li, and she added, “He is a scholar.”

Megan ignored this jibe, if it really was meant as such, and thought for a moment of just how she had better present Captain Li as a solution of Mah-li’s future. She found, as she considered him, that he was a more delicate problem than she had first believed.

“I suppose you will expect to see Captain Li again,” she said hesitatingly. “You will expect to—that is, you will—well, will you see him again?”

Having on Mah-li’s behalf abolished the fantastic custom of concubinage with one wave of the hand, she now was not sure where to place her. Marriage with the young captain did not seem to offer the inevitable solution. She found him increasingly difficult to talk about.

“I don’t know,” said Mah-li.

“But he knows you are being sent away, does he not?”

“He will see that I am not here,” said Mah-li sensibly.

“Then surely he will realize that you are in trouble and that his actions have put you in the way of being misunderstood by the General. I believe the General even thinks that you gave
information about him to Captain Li. I am sure he believes it. Mr. Shultz practically told him so before us all.”

Mah-li’s eyebrows contracted sharply.

“But as I said before, don’t let that upset you too much,” said Megan hastily. “It will all come out all right when we can only think of what is best to do for you. We don’t want to act hastily. Captain Li, you say, is a scholar. He comes of a powerful family, and I hope he is a young man of principle and good character. Is he?”

Mah-li did not answer, and Megan realized that in her desire to help and in her confusion she had stepped far over the line that Mah-li appeared to believe should exist between them. She stopped, looking anxiously at Mah-li’s face. It was quite blank. She sat with her hands clasped on the little blue embroidered bag which she pressed against her stomach. She leaned against it as if for support. Megan saw that the bag contained a hot-water bottle, the little red rubber collar and nickel stopper of which protruded over the top. She smiled suddenly at the combination. What a child Mah-li was! It seemed once more clear to her that while she must treat her as a child, with patience, with indulgence even, she must also handle her with firmness.

“Mah-li,” she said directly, “why is the General sending you away?”

Mah-li looked suddenly sick. She drew her shoulders together, huddling forward over her hot-water bottle. She looked like a small costly bird transported to an unfavorable climate.

“The General is sending me away,” she said, “because Mr. Shultz told him I got money from Captain Li for giving him information about the General.”

And looking up at Megan she smiled again her constrained formal smile which Megan knew was meant to recall her to reticence. But she disregarded it.

“Why does the General believe Mr. Shultz?”

Mah-li answered in a barely audible voice.

“The General believes him because he himself has not been generous to me. He supposes I want the money. My mother and my grandparents live in Soochow.” She added, and Megan could scarcely catch the words, “They are very poor.”

For a moment Megan was tempted to transfer some of the responsibility for Mah-li’s conduct to filial devotion. It would be more Chinese. But Mah-li’s motives were not really important to her now; they seemed only an indistinguishable part of the general romantic error of her life. What was important now was that Mah-li should put herself in her hands, confide herself and all her little complexities to her, so that she might save her.

“Is it true, Mah-li,” she demanded, “that you did sell information about the General?”

Mah-li’s eyes had such a look of withdrawal that it was as though her face sank down through water, then she bent her head, looking into her lap, but Megan pressed forward relentlessly.

“Tell me. It makes no difference to me what you did. It won’t change my feelings toward you if you sold him ten times over. I can understand that you may have been driven to it. I only want to help you. I want to do everything I can for you. I must make the General see as I do, that you have never had a fair chance, and that you are a child and haven’t understood right and wrong any more than a child, that he must forgive you and do what he can to help you. He also has been to blame in his relations to you, so he ought to be all the more willing to forgive. But you see, I can’t talk to him, Mah-li, until you tell me the truth. Try to tell me. I’ve told you it doesn’t matter, but just tell me. Why, Mah-li, you don’t realize to what extent I want to be your friend.”

Mah-li did not raise her head. Megan saw her face foreshortened, and her forehead was a dome of obstinacy. Her eyebrows raised slightly but she made no answer, and Megan was unable to continue with any assurance of being understood. She had no
idea what to say now and a definite irritation with Mah-li for not accepting her generosity stole over her. Mah-li’s every effort was to maintain, even with desperation, the obscure balance necessary to her self-respect, or perhaps only her vanity.

They sat in silence; Mah-li, reassured, raised her head and looked now with polite inquiry toward Megan, waiting for her to continue. Megan wished that she were actually a child and could be given one efficacious slap. She thought of the rings.

“I have your jade,” she said. “I would have sent them to you but I thought it safer to wait until I saw you myself. I put them on so I would be sure to have them ready.”

She slipped off the rings and handed them to Mah-li. Mah-li took them without hesitation but she did not put them on. She looked at them lying on her palm and Megan felt she was trying to make up her mind to say something about them.

“You have told me,” she said finally, “that you would be glad to do me a favor. Did you really mean that?”

“Why, of course I did. I have just told you I would do anything for you.”

“Then I want you please to send these rings to my father and mother for me. They are old people and poor. They live in Soochow. I have written it down for you.” She reached inside her coat and drew out a slip of paper with a few Chinese characters on it. “Your friends in Shanghai, who have lived in China for so long, will know how to send a package there. Or that Doctor Strike who came that night to the General. He is a very superior man,” she added, obviously anxious to please Megan by praising him. “I knew him when I was a little girl in Soochow. He would tell you just what to do with them.” She handed the rings back and for a moment her fingers rested on Megan’s warm palm like cold little shells.

“You have a chill,” Megan exclaimed, “you mustn’t go out like that. Let me order some hot tea for you.”

“No, no, don’t order anything. I ought to have gone earlier, and I really am not cold. These spring days are sometimes a little chilly. You see, I brought my hot-water bottle.”

She touched the embroidered blue bag, and Megan once more smiled at the combination of ornament and utility. But as she looked up she surprised in Mah-li’s eyes a wild uncovered gleam of fright. For a whole moment it fluttered before her uncontrolled and Megan stared back in dismay.

“My dear child,” she cried, “you are ill, you mustn’t go away at all. Stay here with me. I’ll arrange it somehow.”

“No, no,” said Mah-li, “that is impossible.”

She ran one finger across her eyebrows to restore serenity to her face. Megan could scarcely believe she had seen that look.

“I am not ill. I am tired; that is all.”

She got up and drew her coat together. Megan got up too and impulsively taking her hands drew her slightly resisting figure to the window.

“Don’t forget that I meant what I told you. I am your friend and am here to help you.”

Mah-li let her hands lie irresponsively in Megan’s, but she turned her face toward her with what seemed for the time a vague expectancy.

“And don’t forget either,” said Megan, emotion making her voice a little husky, “that you have another Friend who is always with you. Didn’t they ever tell you these words of His at the Mission schools?—‘Come unto me all ye who are weary and heavy laden and I will give you rest.’ ”

“Yes, I remember that,” said Mah-li. “I embroidered it on a scroll once and they framed it and hung it on the wall. But it never seemed to me to be true. It was two thousand years ago He promised that and the happiness and unhappiness of the world have not changed since. No, the unhappiness is still poverty, sickness, dying and separation, the happiness is still the friends around the
rice bowl, the acquiring of riches and honor, the son that is born. These things are the same. He has not really changed the world. I think He only used words of courtesy like any other man.”

“But He was not man, Mah-li, He was God. And you are wrong; millions have listened to Him and His love has transfigured the lives of half the human race.”

“Has it?” Mah-li turned away. A shadow of disappointment crossed her face. Whatever she expected she had evidently not received. She walked slowly to the door and when she reached it, Megan took her by the shoulders and suddenly kissed her in an awkward school-girl fashion on both cheeks. She felt the blunt little cheek-bones and sniffed the perfume of Mah-li’s young skin, that was strangely like the aroma of fine old parchment, but when she looked at her she saw that this intimacy brought them no closer together.

After Mah-li had left she stood wondering what she could have said or done that would have proved more effective. The remembrance of Mah-li’s fingers clutched about the neck of the hot-water bottle struck her to the heart. She could not rid herself of the idea that Mah-li had come to her in the hope of something quite definite that she had not received. But what more did Mah-li want? Had she looked for a confirmation, or for a new formula, or only for some comforting observance? Or had she too hoped for the miracle, and this time the miracle had not been forthcoming?

She was still standing in a rather cold and discouraged preoccupation when the orderly came with a note from the General asking her to drive with him. She decided at once that she would go, seize a favorable opening in their conversation and speak to him about Mah-li. That would obviate at least any imminent physical danger. She did not know just how far a Chinese general might be expected to go in punishing an unfaithful concubine but it did not seem unlikely to anticipate even sudden death. However, death for Mah-li did not greatly worry her. Her coldness and her discouragement had vanished at the prospect of an encounter with the General.

She was elated to discover that she had now a definite issue on which to base an attack on him, an issue entirely satisfying in its human implications, the very ache and anguish of mind he would feel over Mah-li’s defection making more valuable his forgiveness of her. An issue also on the grand scale, since it demanded of him an unqualified renunciation of his sterile ethic. In a word, if she could force him to accept it she would at the same time force him to accept irrevocably the very essence of the Word of God.

She joined him before the yamen and once more got into the car of which she had a faint remembrance of having driven in
from the station. It was very elaborately fitted with green enamel vanity case and smoking set, the windows garlanded with chenille fringes. Two gray-clad soldiers armed with Mausers rode standing on the running-board. They drove in silence and Megan watched the lake with its fleets of islands strung together darkly. There was a light mist, the young leaves of some of the trees had a reddish flush, almost like the first bronzing of autumn, and the low key of all the colors, the milky air, would have given a late autumnal melancholy to the landscape if it had not been for a few fruit trees that bloomed with poignant freshness. They turned into the hills and stopped before a great gate.

“Would you like to get out?” asked the General. “This temple is very interesting. I want to show it to you.”

They walked up an avenue of huge camphor trees and turned off at the left before a curious mound of rock, fretted and hollowed out by water. In the depressions were carved half-relief figures of Buddhas and Bodhisattvas. The General led her into narrow caves and passages in the rock, where water dripped and dim Indian faces sculptured in low relief looked down from the walls.

“But this can’t be Chinese!” she exclaimed.

There was a closeness, a secrecy about the place and the faces had a quality of emotional life that did not seem to her Chinese.

“The monk who founded this temple came from India. This hill reminded him of India, so he called it ‘the hill that flew over.’ ”

They walked farther into the grove across little streams of clear water, paved with polished pebbles, over which hung an occasional graceful pavilion. Among the rocks were more sculptured figures. On a ledge across the stream, behind a pattern of branches, was a figure that particularly attracted her. Megan stopped to look at it, and the General suggested they rest for a moment. To have an uninterrupted view of the Buddha Megan sat down on a smooth low boulder and the General sat beside her. He offered her a cigarette and Megan took one, sitting with her
elbows on her knees, her chin on her knuckles, entirely at ease now. The General watched her between soft puffs at his cigarette. Megan, smoking, was absorbed in the figure carved in the rock. The sun came out and a few leaf shadows wavered over it, breaking up the lines and surfaces. What was there about it, as in the faces carved in the caves, that had seemed not quite Chinese? It was a face serene and with the lowered eyelids of a man asleep, but one felt that this man dreamed and that in his dream he knew all the lost paradises, where love is the law, the beginning and the end. The Chinese do not dream such dreams. Even during the brief Buddhist domination they remained secretly and profoundly indifferent, insensible, to these intoxications of the spirit, and Buddhism passed, leaving them untroubled as though its shadow only had passed over them.