The Bitter Tea of General Yen (20 page)

Megan, raised to a higher point of sensitivity, felt that the General, looking at her, was aware to some extent of what she was thinking and that he was smiling a little ironically, saying to her in his mind, “See what we are capable of living through untouched. And how can you ever hope to change us?” She heard his inner laughter and with it the laughter of hundreds of small voices, shrill, thin, as notes of cicadas, rising all about her from tree, water, earth, hearth flame, the voices of the small gods, the ancient gods of China never abandoned, forever satisfying a people whose contemplations are all bounded by the earth and the sky, whose kitchens, markets, fields, temples and gardens, they fill with their aroma of homely poetry, their ceremony, their magic. The General laughed with them, and they, a little senile in triumph, laughed with the General.

“You make me think such strange things,” said Megan aloud.

“I know,” he replied. “You were thinking that you do not represent the first religious invasion we have lived through. And perhaps you are even wondering if you will be able to do more for us than the others did, yes, even with all that you are willing to give
away with it in the way of kerosene and munitions and a thousand like commodities, tucked in like a coupon in a package of cigarettes, entitling one after so many to six plated silver spoons.”

But Megan did not feel that he spoke bitterly. He looked at her with a smile of pure banter.

“You do like to make fun of us, don’t you?” she said. “But after you have made fun of us, admit that what we strive for is worth more than a life of agreeable social relations. For that is your ideal, isn’t it?”

“But, Miss Davis, the most important thing in a man’s life is his social relations! It is true that in China everything is built on that. We have a sense of harmony and just proportion that you can never understand. In a man’s duty to his gods we leave him considerable choice. It concerns him alone. In letters and the arts he is allowed less choice: an error of taste or judgment would have more effect on others. But in his duties to those dependent on him and on whom he is dependent, it was long ago decided what they were to be and since then no choice has ever been allowed. Our fault is that we are what one might call myopic. We cannot see clearly beyond a certain radius. Few of our works of art, for instance, are meant to be seen from a distance. And so the immediate relations are apt to seem more important to us, the more distant ones less so. It seems to work out with us that a man’s relations to his father are very nearly perfect, to his state as good as he can conveniently make them.”

The General picked up a few pebbles and threw them one by one into the stream, then he threw them a little farther, until one struck the knee of a seated figure. It was the first gesture Megan had seen him make that did not seem the expression of some secret strain, in spite of the fact that all his gestures were gracious.

“Now I’ve told you what our goal is, tell me what you understand to be yours. I’ll see if I think it is so much finer than a life of agreeable social relations.”

“You explain things so much better than I do, I don’t know whether I can tell you.”

She thought a moment.

“I suppose,” she said, “our ideal is all contained in the words of Christ. ‘Thou shalt love the Lord, thy God, with thy whole mind, thy whole soul, and thy whole strength.’ And following that, ‘Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.’ He himself says that is all the law.”

“To love my neighbor as myself has always seemed to me a very disgusting injunction. I can only say that you don’t usually carry it out. You personally perhaps, but then you are strangely sincere. To you the important thing seems to be a certain generosity. You are willing (you must forgive me this, Miss Davis) to be generous at nearly any one’s expense. Most people are not. Your tenet, if carried out, would lead to an inconceivable state of disorder. It is possibly the theory most dangerous to humanity at large that has ever come into the world. It is fortunate, perhaps it was inevitable, that it should have been accepted by races gifted with an ability to think one way and live another. The Ideal. Yes. To them that remains sufficient in itself. They hold it up in one hand, as if it were a great crystal ball, and they say to others, ‘See, this is what I aspire to. Isn’t it beautiful of me!’ And with the other hand they quietly pick the purse of an admiring listener.”

Megan burst out laughing, partly at the droll twist of his eyebrows as he said this, and the sly gesture of the hand delicately picking an invisible pocket.

“It isn’t fair to judge a man by what he succeeds in accomplishing,” she said. “Your theory of social relations, you admit, doesn’t work out perfectly.”

“No, it does not. But taken purely as an ideal of conduct, tell me why I should be expected to love an aged beggar, who sits outside my gate, who is a congenital scoundrel, and who is loathsomely afflicted with elephantiasis?”

Megan, at the risk of being inept, decided to answer him seriously. But it was something of a strain to do so and she spoke with none of the heat that had formed her words to Mah-li.

“Why, to help him, of course. I believe that only through love can people be saved. And your beggar must be saved, must become conscious that he too is a creature of God.”

“But he knows already that he is a creature of God. And I cannot save him. Elephantiasis is incurable, so is old age, so, I believe, is even rascality.”

“Really!” Megan laughed, abandoning seriousness, “you almost make me despair of you. Do you consider then that between you and that beggar there exists no relationship whatsoever?”

“Certainly. But it is a very simple one. Mine to him is to toss him the coins on which he sustains his life. His to me is a lively gratitude for my bounty. In this way each of us is satisfied. But it would be as horrible for him as for me should I undertake to love him. Indeed, when you insist on that you can really put no limit to what I must love. You will end up by insisting I love things of which I can’t even speak.”

“You are reducing it to the absurd and that isn’t fair. Just tell me one thing. You call yourself a Communist, don’t you?”

“No, no,” protested the General.

“Well, a Republican then. Does a beggar at your gate fit into that picture?”

“Oh, politics!” The General shrugged and made a little half-turn with his fingers, dismissing politics like so much dust. “Every one must have a label. Almost any label will do.”

Megan felt too languid to continue. Beauty rising from the grove and from the figures carved in the rock seemed to coil like delicate smoke through her brain. They sat without speaking for several moments and then by unspoken agreement got up and walked farther along till they came to the temple, containing a vast wooden Buddha whose head touched the ceiling. Priests were
chanting in voices pitched on a low note which mounted and descended as in a Catholic vespers. One sounded, at intervals, a little muffled drum. A young acolyte brought them tea, which they drank on a wooden bench against the temple wall. They wandered afterward into a dusty hall full of gilded lohan standing in rows in the gloom. But there was little beauty in the temple, the great Buddha or the lohan, and Megan’s eyes returned to the hill outside, feathery with bamboos and mounded with graves. Soft white clouds rested on it. The temple lacked utterly what she had already found in the grove, a sense of mystery.

They walked slowly back to their waiting car, and as they drove along the General pointed to an island in the lake.

“To-morrow if I am free we must visit that island. There are pools and pools of lotus there, crossed by red causeways. I will have them forbid the landing of any visitors for the whole day and we will take tea undisturbed in one of the pavilions. You will imagine that you are in old China, not the China of temples but the China of gardens.”

“What a delicious phrase!” and she repeated it in a whisper. “ ‘The China of gardens!’ You must not think,” she said dreamily, “that I don’t realize what charm your life had at its best. The truth is I scarcely dare to think of it. The faintest fragrance of it would seduce any imagination.”

Megan looked toward the island the General had indicated and thought of a red pavilion over pools of still lotus, and she suddenly thought of the tea the General would pour for her as having the power to steal away the soul. A slight shock as if something had fallen seemed to vibrate warningly through her nerves. She turned to look curiously at the General. He returned her look blandly, a little absently. Perhaps he also was thinking of the pavilion. Megan’s eyebrows gathered in a frown.

“But the trouble with that life was,” she said severely, “it was
enjoyed by far too few. Such a tiny per cent of your countless millions ever knew it.”

“And what difference does that make? Undoubtedly the quality of it was such that only a rare few could appreciate it. Who wants a civilization that would seem satisfying to your beggar with elephantiasis? But how you struggle, Miss Davis, against the idea of your own pleasure! Your plan is to diffuse it over the whole world, share it with the whole race. I am surprised at this in one of your incomparable distinction. Don’t you know that the more concentrated pleasure becomes the keener it is? I sometimes feel it is at its best when tasted by oneself alone.”

“You are a poor Republican. You don’t dare admit your ideas to many people, do you?”

“To practically no one. I know I am a poor Republican. Whenever a good Republican becomes really necessary in China, I will go under.”

“You hate all this change then?”

“Not entirely.” He smiled at her. “Certain new combinations seem to rise out of it occasionally that make it worth what is lost.”

Megan exclaimed, “It is not possible that you are being gallant, is it?”

“Why not? How very unflattering you are! Do you think we have never been gallant to women?”

“Well,” Megan laughed with a touch of constraint, “I somehow never pictured a Chinese gentleman as being anything but subdued by his mother and tyrannical to his wife. But I suppose that is an absurd injustice. You must have had generations of women with beauty and wit and of course goodness. And then in modern China,—I should think you would enjoy these astonishing changes that must have come about in educated women.”

Megan realized that the comradeship they had managed to arrive at so suddenly and without effort had vanished at the first
mention of women. They were once more on their first uneasy footing. Why? Because such a comradeship was fundamentally unnatural to him, or because she was thinking again of Mah-li? With a sudden compunction she forced Mah-li to the foremost position in her mind. Until his responsibility to Mah-li was settled, she told herself, there could never be real friendliness between them. She said decidedly:

“And even among those not educated in the modern way, one has only to look at their faces to see how many of them have good temper and a keen sense of humor.”

He bowed his head toward her.

“I thank you on their behalf.”

“For instance, Mah-li,” she insisted, “I find her full of all sorts of possibilities.”

The General did not answer. He turned half-way toward the window.

“I have grown very fond of her. She struck me as a child who has for the time more or less lost her way. She is only a child, you know.”

But the General evidently meant to discourage her. He did not answer, and Megan felt alternately hot and cold with the desire to urge him to some declaration of his intentions and the fear that he would only continue to be baffling. She turned from him and saw on the hill, outlined against a white cloud, the pagoda with tufts of foliage sprouting from its top. It recalled the General’s phrase about the China of gardens and she regretted that the illusion of their sympathy had to be lost so soon. In helping people, she thought, one foregoes such a great deal of their charm, one even at times voluntarily destroys it. She permitted herself one final pang that this must be so, and because of this weakness returned with even greater insistence and fervor to her determination that the General should face the issue on Mah-li. But before she could speak again the General said to her:

“Please let us never talk any more of Mah-li. I respect your feeling toward her, but she is worthy of none of it. You do not understand.”

He spoke in his rather curious high voice, what she thought of as his official voice, and his rebuke gave the final spur to her ardor. She saw that the car had reached the gate of the yamen and it was slowing down to stop.

“But I do understand,” she cried, “I do. Don’t stop here, please, drive on a little. I have to talk to you.”

The General looked at her blankly; astonishment seemed always momentarily to paralyze his initiative. Then he leaned forward and spoke to the driver. The car moved slowly along the road. For a moment Megan tried to think clearly what to say to him, but could not and decided to trust to an onrush of emotion.

“You and I will never be friends,” she said, “till we settle this about Mah-li. It is just like a wall between us. I must make you see it as I do. I must make you feel your responsibility to Mah-li. She is a creature dependent on you, so much less intelligent than you, so simple, so uncomplicated, that she is like a child beside you. You can do anything you want to her, make nearly anything you want of her. Your responsibility is simply limitless. You feel she has deceived you, sold information about you to your enemies, perhaps even been unfaithful to you. All that is dreadful, and if it is true you have a certain justification in crushing her. She is probably helpless to prevent you. I want you to think of all these things and then forgive her. I don’t know exactly how you feel about her. I mean whether you love her—as—well, as a lover. But that is of no importance.”

Though Megan said this she saw on the contrary that it was of tremendous importance, that perhaps it was the key to everything, and her attack took a slightly different direction. “I want you to see the beauty of giving love where it isn’t returned or merited, isn’t even understood. Any man can give love where he is
sure it is returned. That perhaps isn’t love at all. But to give it with no thought of return, of merit, of gratitude even, that is ordinarily the privilege of God. Now it is your privilege.”