The Bitter Tea of General Yen (22 page)

As she stood there she heard from the direction of the city a distant but distinct sound like the drawing of a stick along a picket fence. It stopped, broke out again as if coming from several directions at once.

“What’s that?” Megan exclaimed.

She turned. Each man held an attitude of suspended action and listened. No one answered her.

“Firing?” she asked.

The General nodded. The noise continued.

“Or is it fireworks?”

“No, not fireworks,” said the General.

Megan leaned out and found that she could see the lighted square of window across the court and the officers sitting at the mah jong table. They sat like figures of wood, motionless. Megan looked from them to the group in the room behind her. Their attitudes were almost identical; the same suspense held them.

The firing stopped.

Almost immediately the telephone rang, and Megan saw one of the wooden figures start toward it with the jerk of something inanimate drawn by a string. His replies were so low spoken she could not even hear his voice. Presently he hung up the receiver and turned. Megan saw that he looked at the seated men in silence and they looked back at him. She thought he was smiling. She had the impression, even from those whose faces were turned from her, that they were all smiling. The one who had answered the telephone left the room and came across the court. He knocked on the door. The orderly opened it and he came in. Megan turned from the window to watch him. He stood by the door; if he had been smiling he was stolid enough now. The General spoke and he answered in short phrases. Mr. Shultz listened intently, his eyes turning from the face of the officer to Captain Li. As he listened he looked down at Captain Li with a smile of contempt, hardy and open.

“Well, that’s that,” he said crushingly.

Captain Li did not look up.

The General dismissed the officer, and Megan watched for him to cross the court but he did not appear for a moment and when he did the General’s orderly followed him. He went back to the lighted room, and at the table where the three others waited for him, he leaned forward to speak to them, resting his hands on
the table. They got up and, leaving the tiles in disorder as they lay, one of them suddenly turned off the light.

With the blotting out of the lighted room and its figures of men, with the cessation of small sounds of chairs scraping the floor, of telephone calls, a barrier seemed to have suddenly broken down and night poured unrestrictedly around the yamen, flooding the courtyard with darkness and loosing a wind that rustled along the eaves and brushed the branches of the willow trees restlessly against the wall.

Megan went back to the table and sat down. A change had occurred inside the room. The three men sat back in their chairs. The pressure that had held them for a time against their wills, molding them into a group, had relaxed and each was once more an individual. Each only waited now, in order to prove it to the others, some opportunity strongly to assert himself. As Megan had partaken slightly in their fear she now experienced some of their relief and an acute interest. “Well,” said Mr. Shultz, “so that is over.”

The General said, “It seems to be. I have just been thinking how fortunate it is that men are divided so unevenly into the simple and the astute. One astute say to a hundred thousand simple.

“Yes,” said Mr. Shultz, “like the Belgian’s patty,—one hare, one horse.”

“There is no other real division among them,” continued the General, “and no other is necessary.”

“Don’t be too sure of being astute,” said Mr. Shultz, and in spite of his evident satisfaction over the turn of affairs in the city, his words were clipped and irritable. He slammed his hand down. “Let’s cut this out. Three-handed poker is a waste of time. Yes, I know how smart you feel just now. It is a grand feeling to get in first, but don’t forget who it was put you wise.”

The General also laid down his cards, and Captain Li, perceiving the game to be over, put his hand down regretfully—it
contained a full house—and folding his arms sat gazing at the light. Mr. Shultz turned in his chair and leaned his elbow on the table. He took a cigar from his pocket and examined it, together with his highly manicured nails, smelled it, then twisted it about in his mouth, wetting it with his tongue, and catching it finally with a vicious snap in his fine teeth.

“Yes, don’t forget,” he continued, “don’t forget that you’d have been cold meat by now if it wasn’t for me.”

The General looked at him with an expression of tolerance.

“What is the matter with you, Shultz? It doesn’t annoy me that you helped me out in this matter. Why should it annoy you that you are obliged to consider my safety as your own? To a certain extent we are each dependent on the other.” His eyes on Mr. Shultz beamed with benevolence. It was evident that he had leaned heavily on him in the last crisis, perhaps draining confidence and courage out of his mere presence. “I’m surprised at you, Shultz, I really am. You don’t seem to love mankind as you should, all of them, the astute and the simple”—he turned to Megan and his eyes were full of released good humor—“as Miss Davis does,” he added.

“Hm,” Mr. Shultz grunted, “I don’t know what you are talking about.”

Facing Megan, the General poured himself a whisky soda.

“I am talking about Miss Davis so I don’t blame you for not understanding. Miss Davis is much more complicated than you are, Shultz. Although you are compatriots I should not wonder if you found each other quite strangers most of the time. Isn’t that so?”

Mr. Shultz did not condescend to answer. He smoked on as though he had not heard.

“Miss Davis!” the General exclaimed, holding up his glass; Megan measured his former disquietude by this too exuberant
gesture and excused it on that ground. “Miss Davis, it is a mistake, an esthetic mistake, to try to understand you, because the whole produced is probably better than any of the component parts. To analyze you would be to reduce the phœnix to mere bones, skin and feathers.”

Megan looked at him astonished, and from him to Mr. Shultz, who had turned and whose scrutiny held surprise and faint contempt.

“Of course you are being absurd,” said Megan. “There is no reason at all why you and I should not understand each other. You yourself once said men of the same race don’t necessarily resemble each other as tigers do tigers. You just wondered if Mr. Shultz and I might not find each other strange. You see, it is up to the individual in each case. All of us, with some effort and sympathy, can be reduced to certain elements and consequently understood.”

Mr. Schultz got up and walked over to the phonograph. He began to turn over the records. The General leaned toward Megan, and his voice became less declamatory, more confidential.

“But is it really understanding you want? I have an idea that understanding doesn’t enter very largely into your program. I have an idea that what you really want, certainly where I am concerned, is to change me, to make me over into some new image; the image of God, but also, slightly, the image of Miss Davis, His creation and at the same time hers. Isn’t that so?”

This statement brought a chill to Megan. It was not his manner of making it, which she had already excused, but that stated from this angle her intention did not appear as crystalline as she felt it to be.

“But of course I want to help you,” she said. “The motives of those who try to help are always suspect. But I don’t see why you said just that.”

And as she thought about it she became even resentful that
he had been able so deftly to uncover an aspect of her desire to convert him, which she herself had been dimly aware of for some time, but until now unwilling to admit.

The General, watching her closely, now assumed his buffoon’s expression of mock alarm.

“You are angry with me,” he exclaimed, “because I have said what is true. And it is you who tempted me to be truthful in the first place by your own directness. But of course I was foolish to suppose you meant me to follow you in that.”

Megan glanced at Mr. Shultz, who was turning over records, and at Captain Li, who was apparently about to go to sleep. Captain Li did not count, but she did not want to be spoken to like this before Mr. Shultz. She lowered her voice a little.

“Yes, I have been very frank with you and you have a right to be frank with me in return. That is quite all right, I don’t mind that. I don’t want you to think however—that is, I don’t want you to feel—that I am trying to force you to any change just to gratify myself.”

The General was about to answer but changed his mind. He slowly took a cigarette from his gold case and lighted it.

“Miss Davis,” he said finally after several puffs, “I want you to believe that I consider it a privilege to be included in your regard, even along with several hundred million other human beings.”

Megan did not answer. She looked down at her clasped hands and saw with annoyance that she still wore the jade rings. After Mah-li had left them with her there had seemed no other place to put them. She tried covering one hand carelessly with the other but, ashamed of this, she boldly laid her hand on the table so that the General could see that she still wore them if he liked. He looked at them a moment with a slight smile, then resting an elbow on the table he waved one hand before her like a magician about to begin an incantation. A tiny banner of smoke from his cigarette blinded her for a moment.

“Yes, I find you truly remarkable,” he murmured. “Tell me, please, what gives you this confidence with which you go about the world? You pass through dangers that are not dangers to you, through temptations that are not temptations. You feel you are armed with a glorious medicine that is a sure cure for all disorder, and you don’t see that your medicine (which so far as I am able to make out consists of an indiscriminating universal love) would, if taken, produce a ten times greater disorder. And as to this love you talk about, I believe you are even mistaken in its true character. It seems to me only an outlet for your irresistible energy. It is energy. I have not seen in you any real concern over living harmoniously with your fellow men.”

Megan twisted one of the jade rings on her finger and did not answer. She looked even sullen.

The General continued: “Truly there have been many moments when I have wanted to laugh at you, and other moments when I have found you admirable.” He paused and his voice sank almost to a whisper. “And even other moments—but perhaps you don’t want me to speak of them. I might astonish you beyond endurance.”

Megan looked quickly and instinctively toward the corner of the room where Mr. Shultz stood turning over the phonograph records and humming softly to himself. For the first time his solidity was comforting to her. She looked down again reassured. The General talked on in a low murmurous voice, like a bee drumming from flower to flower.

“Perhaps you believe us incapable of such moments. I am quite sure you do. You have never seen our young men poring over stories whose sentiments would seem very startling to you. I don’t know why I say our young men; our old men also. I could tell you of an officer of mine who spends all his pay buying costly medicines from Szechuen, so that his father, who is a very old man, may enjoy the society of a young wife. Have you read any of our
poetry, Miss Davis? Do you understand our music? Have you seen paintings of women walking among fruit trees, in which the fruit trees seem like women and the women like fruit trees? Do you know that there has never existed a people more purely artist and therefore more purely lover than the Chinese? The fact is that it was to protect themselves from the excesses of their own temperaments that our earliest ancestors patiently and laboriously fortified themselves by a submission to ritual and authority. Of course we still retain excesses, being civilized, but our excesses are even now those they long ago decided to allow us. Yes, we are completely enmeshed, Miss Davis, like caterpillars in cocoons. I know that we seem very dull to you, because we no longer depend on a personal inspiration. But you must remember that the personal inspiration is apt to be dull to every one but to him who feels it. He, of course, is carried away by the intoxication of supposing he has created something. But because we refuse to be carried away by it or to depend on it, you must not imagine that we do not think with any profundity—nor feel with any passion.”

“Why do you tell me this? Is it really necessary that you explain everything to me, even your occasional moments?”

Megan spoke sharply and she hoped indifferently, but her face was flushed.

“Simply to show you how unaware you are of so many of the fundamental impulses of people around you. Those,” he added gently, “whom you wish to help, to change. But don’t be offended with me, Miss Davis. It is true that my admiration for you is enormous, and it is true also that I detest a lapse from suitability, a vulgar action. I would never do anything unworthy of either of us.”

“No,” said Megan, “I feel sure you wouldn’t. Now don’t let us talk any more about it.”

“Certainly not if you find it so objectionable. But I wish you didn’t. It is very trying never to be able to approach you as one human being to another. Because I see clearly I am not really a
human being to you, simply a problem, an object of attack, and impersonal attack at that. Perhaps no one about you is entirely real to you yet. You are too young, you have lived too little. And because I am an alien I am even more remote than the others.”

“I’m not too young,” said Megan indignantly. “I have lived much more than you think, and I have had disillusionments and disappointments.”

The General smiled. “Not really? Why even your voice is unbruised.”

“And you are wrong too about my not looking on you as a human being. I realize how human you are, and it is because I do that I wanted to save you from what you just called the excesses of your temperament. I was afraid in that instance we spoke of this afternoon (I won’t speak of it again because I know you did as I asked) that you might be carried away by jealousy and revenge. I wanted you to put them out of your heart and do a very beautiful act of mercy instead.”