The Bitter Tea of General Yen (4 page)

After all there was nothing to do but go with the Jacksons, but Megan was not so deeply disappointed as her first fright had led Mr. Jackson to suppose. She could not explain to him what she had never fully admitted to herself, that she had come as much for China as for Bob.

Megan had not looked to Mr. Jackson, and she would scarcely have looked to any one, the sort of girl who would become the wife of a medical missionary in China. She had been born and brought up in a small New England college town, but she had had
winters in Boston and several trips to Europe, and because her father was for many years the president of the college she was used to a society of comfortable means and a most determined intellectuality. Bob lived in the same town, the son of an Episcopal rector with a large family. They had known each other always, gone to dancing class, picnics together, been completely indifferent companions, until quite suddenly, when she was seventeen, Megan fell in love with Bob, that is to say, she decided to focus on him all the ardors and enthusiasms, all the capacity for dreaming and questioning, of which she was capable. It was a secret passion of course and not a little desperate, because she knew with that part of her which in every sane person, and even in the young, remains the onlooker, that no one would take her seriously, least of all Bob, who was a good-looking young man, an excellent athlete, but full of common sense. And Megan did not really want Bob to be conscious of what she felt for him. She never wanted to realize him in an actual world in any rôle that he would be likely to play; it was enough for her to dance with him sometimes in a tense and beatific silence and to write a great many poems which she kept locked in a drawer in an envelope marked “in case of my death, please destroy.”

Megan had been one of those dazzlingly beautiful children whom people exclaim over as if they were deaf or insensible, so that even very young she had been aware, as children of royal blood or great wealth are aware, that she enjoyed some special privilege. And not alone from the exclamations of the careless but from the attitude of her parents did she divine this privilege. Her father would tear his eyes from the pages of a book to look at her; he treated her with an aloofness that had a touch of awe. Her mother’s attempts to be severe, to discipline, broke down always into endearments, so that Megan lived with her in an excited atmosphere of fancied slights, sulks, tears, kisses and passionate admiration. Megan was privately considered by some older persons
as a thoroughly detestable child whose parents, and indeed most of the world, spoiled beyond reason, and to these persons her screaming tantrums enjoyed an equal fame with her beauty, but to most people this beauty had its usually happy effect of minimizing her faults and enhancing her virtues. Scarcely any one could fail to be touched when so brightly lovely a child was willing to share her cake with another or tell the truth under stress.

But as Megan grew older she began, by degrees but surely, to be a little less beautiful, until by the time she was well in her teens her beauty had left her entirely. This did not happen suddenly, and she herself was slow to realize it because the attitude of people toward her was so well established that it was slow to change. But it did change. And once she overheard some one say:

“Yes, that is Davis’ daughter now; you would never think she was such a ravishing child, would you?”

Megan went home and saw in the glass the thin well-shaped body, the rather hollow-cheeked face of a handsome girl, a girl with some of that haggard Celtic look, together with the long upper lip, the rather blunted Celtic nose, the eyes greenish gray, brilliant and black-lashed, but she saw that of the intangible and extraordinary Celtic bloom nothing remained. She saw also that she had lost her kingdom.

Of course this loss, as in her love for Bob, would mean practically nothing to any one else, not even to her parents, and the realization only added to her bitterness and resentment. The callousness of the world to the greater part of human suffering struck her for the first time. But there was nothing to be done about that and she herself remained profoundly indifferent to all the hidden sources of grief that people around her concealed daily. She cultivated the belief that the beauty of the world is always in some sense marred, that we must all expect to lose what we most cling to, and therefore that it is our own fault if we let ourselves in for disappointment. For a year or so Megan constrained herself
into the pattern of the cynic, astounding when she could by bitter speeches and pleased only when she created a flutter of alarm. Then at the moment when she felt she had established the fact that she had nothing to live for, Bob, who had come back from two years as interne in a Boston hospital, made two astonishing statements: one that he was going out to China as a medical missionary and the other that he loved her and wanted to marry her.

The young cynic vanished as quickly as she had come. The sterility of that attitude had always repelled her, even while she had taken a perverse enjoyment in its repellent effect on others. She now unconditionally renounced it. Bob was in love with her. They would be married as soon as he was settled in China and was able to send for her. Megan underwent one of those irrational and complete changes that happiness will produce in nearly any one. She was herself astonished at the change. She not only loved Bob, but some emotion had been released in her which welled up irresistibly and for which Bob alone was not enough. Up to now she had treated her religious beliefs with some indifference, sometimes with scorn, but Bob’s orthodoxy, his desire to serve, seemed to her now to have the only beauty and dignity. She was going to be a part of his life, which was a life for the relief of suffering. Her part would be to bring happiness. All the misery of humanity, by which she had been only vaguely irritated when she felt herself to be a part of it, she now looked on with the sensations of a man cured of a disease who is impelled to testify to the remedy before others. She knew that no one should be unhappy, that evil, sickness, poverty, injustice, all demanded one treatment. No man would be unhappy if love for his fellow man filled his heart. During the time before Bob left for China Megan lived in a period of exultant joyousness. There were no problems, there was nothing that was not fundamentally right. She even looked at herself in the glass. She was no longer beautiful. Good. She instantly accepted humility, and she discovered that even humility may
always be accepted by the proud when it is acknowledged to be a grace and ornament of the spirit.

Bob went to China and was not able to send for her as soon as they had both expected. A long summer dragged past and autumn came. Megan, still happy but a little less exultant, tried to do settlement work in the small city where she lived, a city where the prosperity of the inhabitants made such work among them so difficult, so desultory, that she gave it up. In the early winter she went to a hospital in Boston as a probationer. But she was not a success. The external ugliness of the life depressed her, and her imaginative pity for the worst cases, added to an irresistible physical disgust, was such that she became fumbling and even absent as to detail. The patients themselves did not like to have her about. This discouraged her, and when her mother on a visit found her more than ordinarily hollow-cheeked, with eyes over-brilliant from strain, she promptly took her home. So a gradual depression began to settle over her. Her impulses did not change but there was no outlet for them. She thought a great deal of China. She read Bob’s letters over and over and out of their bare words extracted gradually a vision of China’s wretchedness and beauty. China and Bob both needed her, but Bob was now an accepted fact, dear, a part almost of herself, while China was unknown; it put no limits on her imagination. And China held the greater magic.

Then in January came a letter saying that conditions in China had grown suddenly worse; Bob gave them details that at this distance lost their significance. The British at Hankow, the Nationalists, Russian influence, all this meant nothing. Still, Megan’s parents were worried. It did mean another delay. As they sat about together, Megan reading parts of the letter aloud, she suddenly felt that another crisis had come to her, like that one when she looked in the mirror and for the first time saw there a long pale face that was her own. If she could not get to China now, and to Bob, it
seemed that something terrible and definite would happen to her. She did not define it, but it seemed vaguely to take the character of a loss of faith. It cast her into a panic. Looking up she saw her father and mother watching her with a common expression of anxiety on their faces. She knew by instinct that some peculiar quality of their love for her made them vulnerable, in a way that she was not, and abruptly, without reasoning, she stormed over their weakness. She burst into tears.

“But I’ve got to go,” she cried. “I can’t stand these disappointments any longer, I’ve got to go.”

And as she knew at once, even without looking at them, that she had won, a feeling of release streamed over her.

When the Jacksons returned for tea she told them all about the wrecked car, which they said they had seen as they came in, and particularly about the extreme callousness of the owner of the car. Mr. Jackson did not seem to think that was anything out of the ordinary.

“It was probably some rich man taking refuge in the Concession,” he said. “They tell me the Cantonese are at Sunkiang, only about thirty miles away. Lots of Chinese are making for the Settlement.”

Mrs. Jackson held her cup in one hand and the
North China Daily News
in the other. She read:

“ ‘Over a hundred executions of Communist sympathizers took place yesterday and the heads of some of the more prominent agitators were put in cages over the gates of the native city.’ That ought to be a lesson to them. Will, why don’t you go and take snap-shots of them to send home?”

Megan involuntarily raised her eyebrows and Mrs. Jackson saw her.

“But it does them good to see what goes on out here! They ought to see it with their own eyes. Why, I’ve seen plenty of executions at Shasi, and sometimes they hung them alive in chains
on the city wall. And I’ll never forget seeing heads there one rainy evening with birds pecking at them. Yes, it would do them good to realize some of this at home. No one knows what we go through out here. It is the fashion nowadays to accept everything, but it is a whole lot easier to accept things at a distance than close by. And the only way to accept calmly what happens in China is to stay at home and believe nothing any one tells you.”

“It is the only way, my dear, to maintain any pleasant international relations.”

Mr. Jackson smiled under his long mustache at Megan as he spoke. Megan did not have a very keen sense of humor, and unlike most people who lack it she knew that she lacked it. She considered it the refuge of those who dare not look facts in the face, but she saw that Mr. Jackson possessed a sense of fun arising from fundamental good temper, which he took to be humor, and it was a great comfort to him. As a boy she was sure he had put wet newspapers in the beds of his school fellows, and still remembered it with a wistful smile.

“Besides,” he said, “you mustn’t try to frighten Miss Davis.”

“I’m not being frightened. I want to know what is actually happening. Whatever it is I want to know.”

Mrs. Jackson returned to the
North China Daily News
, which she laid on the arm of a chair while she buttered a scone.

“ ‘It is rumored,’ ” she read, “ ‘that General Yen Tso-Chong is in Shanghai in one of the Chinese hotels of the French Concession. Not long ago the General successfully completed negotiations with the Nationalists which resulted in the turning over of his province with practically no shedding of blood. The General has a well-organized army and maintains an arsenal under the management of a European, which turns out among other things a trench mortar said to be the equal of any. His province is one of the most prosperous in China. He is particularly able and astute, and despite his unfriendliness to the Hankow faction (his own
capital has lately been the scene of numerous Communist executions) he is regarded by many as one of the coming leaders of the Nationalists, among whom he represents the more sane and anti-Bolshevist element. The purpose of his alleged presence in Shanghai, at a time when it is held by the troops of the Northern party, is unknown.’ Will, isn’t that Doctor Strike’s General? But of course it is. Yen Tso-Chong, that is the name. He is the one who turned the Doctor out of his college.”

“Doctor Strike,” explained Mr. Jackson, “is a very good friend of ours. He is a very learned man, belongs to all sorts of scientific societies and is a great Chinese scholar. He has written a textbook on the Chinese language and translated the Odes. Besides that he is a man of amazing power, spiritual and physical as well, though he is not as strong as he used to be. His life of labor is beginning to tell on him.”

“Is the Doctor in town?” asked Mr. Jackson.

“I don’t believe he is in town. He was to get in touch with me as soon as he got back. Yes, General Yen must be the Doctor’s erstwhile friend. I believe he did use to think very highly of the General, who they say is a well-educated, intelligent man. He didn’t seem to change his mind about the General even when he turned him out of his college. But the Doctor isn’t one to give up hope of a man easily, not when he has set himself to save him.”

“They say the General is very dissolute in his private life,” said Mrs. Jackson. “I am surprised the Doctor would overlook that. They say he never travels without special trains for his concubines, and when you read in the French papers (they publish such things) that his concubines are sent away from a city, it means that city is about to fall.”

“Is a Chinese dissolute because he has concubines?” asked Megan.

“He isn’t considered so by the Chinese. But then that really
isn’t the point, is it? We have to apply our standard to them, don’t we, and make them accept it?”

Megan sipped her tea and considered this last remark, coming so flatly from the apologetic little Mr. Jackson. It is always so easy to mock at intolerance because quite naturally each one of us would prefer to be treated with tolerance. In fact, we much prefer tolerance to mercy. Mercy is forced to recognize that justice exists; tolerance is indifferent to it. As to Mr. Jackson’s statement, obviously they were here to enlighten China. To assume the apologetic attitude, the humorous, the tolerant attitude, would in his case be merely a flabby cowardice.