The Bitter Tea of General Yen (6 page)

Bates said: “We’ll see nothing like this up-river, better enjoy ourselves while we can.” For Bates considered them fellow victims.
“What do you suppose your missionary crowd would think of this place?”

“I suppose they’d be shocked. They are not out here for this, you know.”

“I’m willing to believe that. I’m very broadminded myself, but I don’t see where their jobs would be if there weren’t things to shock them going on. You really have to look at that side of it, don’t you?”

“Yes, I suppose so.”

“You do now. Then there is this side of it: why don’t they turn to on some of the white population, do a bit for the Russkys, say? There are thousands and thousands of them here, all out of work and selling themselves and whatnot. Look at that one over there for instance, rather easy to look at and undoubtedly on the road to Gehenna.”

There were plenty of Russian faces, but the girl Bates meant sat by herself at a table near them, getting up every now and then to dance with whoever asked her. The men who came over to her from other tables were in general as self-conscious as though they had been asked to go up on the stage and help a conjurer, but the girl was somber and half asleep with exhaustion. She was overly buxom, dressed in a too thin, soiled, flowered chiffon dress. Her hands were dirty, but her eyebrows met in an exquisite scimitar arch over black eyes like those in Persian miniatures. Her head was beautiful in a way that was almost an affront. Bates did not really admire her, he was accustomed to prettiness groomed and moderated; she was beauty in the raw. Still she disturbed him and he went on looking at her. Megan’s mind flashed back momentarily to the Chinese woman she had seen in the car with the chenille fringes, the car that had stopped at the scene of the motor wreck. She remembered against the Russian woman’s look of submerged revolt the Chinese woman’s air of modesty and complete acceptance of living.

“That girl is too fat but she has got a good nose,” Bates continued. “That is what is the matter with these Chinese women. No noses.”

“They have rather Egyptian noses, haven’t they? And they are rather alike, come to think of it, both agriculturalists for thousands of years and peace-loving. I suppose it is natural for an agriculturalist to be peace-loving. But can there be any connection, do you suppose, between agriculture and noses?”

“Well, I’m not prepared to say. Let’s dance. You wouldn’t think,” he said as they worked through the crush, “that this city is going to be captured in a few days, would you?”

“But is it? And will it make a great difference?”

“Bound to be. And it will make plenty of difference to the Chinks. Don’t you worry though. We’re looking after the Concessions. You can give us credit for that, noses or no noses.”

The evening stretched in front of her like a tunnel. The continuous blare of sound, the smoke, and across from her the fatigue and scorn of the Russian woman, who never ceased to dance with whoever asked her and to say at intervals, “One small bottle wine, please,”—these things became insupportable. Feeling that it must be nearly morning she stole a glance at her wrist-watch and found it was only quarter past twelve.

“I must go now. The Jacksons will worry if I am out late.”

“Good girl. Must get good girls home early. Boy, bring chit.”

But he had time to consume another whisky soda. He was becoming agreeably boisterous, he laughed at everything she said.

“Perhaps after all I’ll have a chance to sack a city. Can you see me doing it? Can you see me tearing jade earrings off the shrieking women? Can you?”

“No, I can only imagine you rescuing them in the orthodox manner.” But the truth was she did not want to imagine Bates in China at all, and it was a matter of complete indifference to her what he did or did not do.

In the lobby he tried to persuade her to go on to some other place with him. There was a Russian club just outside the Settlement where they had real vodka and served the meat on a bayonet, and another place where they had a roulette wheel.

He was like a child in his desire for entertainment and in his dependence on some one else for it. He was even dependent on Megan now that they had had dinner and a few drinks together. But she would not stay.

When he deposited her at the house she found Mrs. Jackson sitting up for her.

“Did you have a nice time?” she asked.

Megan admitted that she wished she had not gone.

In her own room she decided to have a bath and turned on the water so that the little bathroom was a cage of steam. She had an idea of washing away the unpleasant impression the evening had left with her, but in the tub she felt more depressed than ever. Clothes are more of a protection to us than we realize until we take them off. When we take off our clothes we take away at the same time all the evidences of the rôle we have chosen; we are very apt to lose our dignity and even our purpose, and for the moment to sink back into an indistinguishable humanity. Megan lay in the warm water feeling that this poor stripped creature that was herself was not worthy of her vocation.

In her bed she propped up the pillows and picking up the account of the early Jesuit Missions ruffled the pages back and forth, thinking of the view she had just had of the European excrescence on China. It was obvious that white Shanghai must be chiefly composed of homes full of honest citizens like any other city, like Indianapolis, like Dijon, like Brighton, probably as nearly like them as it could possibly be made. But the dulness of the entertainment she had taken part in was doubly dull, seen as a transplanted thing, just as the stoves and sewing-machines
of the refugees had seemed particularly pitiful as things one felt compelled to drag with one from place to place.

Megan lay looking idly at the frontispiece which gradually caught her attention. It was an old steel engraving of a Jesuit church in a Chinese city the name of which was unfamiliar to her. All round the church were curving Chinese roofs, laden with preposterous porcelain figures, over garden walls sprouted fantasies of unknown trees and before it were set small swarming figures of coolies bearing yokes, beggars with their bowls, ladies with parasols, and the sedan-chairs of the rich. In the midst of all this, the Jesuit church lifted its flat façade, broken half-way by two orderly volutes, with half-dimensional, twisted pillars on either side of its doors. The suggestion of the grandiose and the gigantic was discreetly tempered by reflections of logic, of Aristotle and the sciences, and the inappropriateness of the whole to its surroundings lent it a delicious perversity and charm. A Jesuit façade in China. The first small wedge in the breach which was to grow wider and wider till all Europe poured in, no longer, alas, the Europe of amiable sophistries and the art of making clocks, but a vast and terrible lava flow of artillery, transportation, oil, steel-girded buildings, sanitation, jazz, democracy, equality of the sexes, business efficiency and the true word of God.

On one of those blue and white days that sometimes come as a voluptuous relief in the midst of rain, and at about noon, the city was taken. Mrs. Jackson and Megan spent the morning in small shops along the Rue du Consulat looking for jade to send to Megan’s mother. The small streets running between the Rue du Consulat and the Rue des Deux Republiques, which is Chinese territory, ended in grilles, and they were further guarded by barbed-wire entanglements and chevaux-de-frise. At intervals along the Rue du Consulat were redoubts of sand-bags guarded by French marines, and as Megan and Mrs. Jackson walked along the sidewalks crowded with Chinese, they passed, every hundred yards or so, groups of Annamites under French officers slowly patrolling. Among the usual flutter of banners, red, white and yellow outside the shops, were a great number of Nationalist flags, red with a white sun on a blue field.

“See,” said Mrs. Jackson, pointing to them, “they know the city is going to fall and they have turned already.”

But they themselves did not know it had fallen until they reached home about noon to find the telephone ringing. Mr. Jackson was calling.

“The Cantonese have taken over the Native City and the
railroad station,” he said. “I think you had better stay indoors until we see if anything further is going to happen.”

Megan thought there must be some mistake. “But do cities fall like this?” she asked. “I have not even heard a shot.”

Mrs. Jackson said: “Now I guess Miss Reed will be sorry she did not move out of Chapei.”

“Maybe she was right after all and there is no danger.”

“We’ll see,” said Mrs. Jackson.

When Mr. Jackson came in a half-hour later he brought Doctor Strike, whom he had met in the city. They all had a late tiffin together. The windows were open and sunlight poured in with a spring odor of flowering bulbs in the garden. They could hear the rumble of heavy trucks passing and once firing a long way off. Doctor Strike said:

“When I was on the Bund they were firing on the Pootung side, but you couldn’t hear it here.”

He was a tall gaunt man almost entirely bald, with a salient jaw and fine large mouth; his pale eyes under bushy brows burned with such intensity that he himself seemed to realize their gaze would be difficult to bear and let them only flicker over those he looked at. As soon as he came into the room Megan felt that here was a man of a totally different caliber from the Jacksons. There was something restless, fluid and molten about him, that one felt even under his quiet voice and rather laboring speech. Megan wondered if it was because he was a great Chinese scholar that he spoke English laboriously, used it as if it were a not too familiar vehicle, hesitating over some words and then bringing them out with a sudden impatience.

After they had talked for a while Megan asked him about his work at the Christian College in the capital of the province of which General Yen Tso-Chong was military governor.

“I was president of the college a great many years,” he said, “and certainly they were the best years of my life. It is a lovely
city, Miss Davis, a capital of old China, classical China. I wish you might see it. But it is impossible now, every one has cleared out; I don’t believe there is a white man there. In my time there were a hundred or so, not counting those of us out at the college. Yes, it was a wonderful time. I had fine young men to work with, the best type of Chinese. Among them was General Yen, not a general then of course, but a brilliant youngster, already a Chinese scholar, and coming from one of the old Mandarin families of the province. I was very attached to him. When he left me he went to Europe for a few years and when he came back I still saw him, but of course not so much. He was interested in politics then and very occupied. He went to Wampoa for some military training. We rather drifted apart, but I always admired him and when he made himself tupan of the province I believed it was the best thing that could have happened. I had confidence in him. I knew there would be certain traditional things he would do that would be wrong, but I hoped for others, for an increasing number of others, that would be right.” Doctor Strike flashed his eyes absently over them all for a moment, then looked down at his plate.

“It is hard to tell when things first began to go wrong,” he said, “but it came about slowly and surely. All this political unrest to begin with. Then the General, once the power was in his hands, began to abuse it. He took over all the revenues of the province and gave no accounting for them; he began to train large bodies of troops, troops he conscripted and paid off by loans from the local chambers of commerce. I say ‘loans’ but of course they were actually levies never meant to be paid. Then he stopped all the exportation of rice (rice, you know, is one of the chief products of the province), and made large sums out of kumshaw from the smugglers. Why, when I left he had actually collected all of the taxes of the province up to 1930! Of course he did a few admirable things too. He kept strict order; he made expenditures on public works. Certainly the roads were never in better condition (he was fond
of motoring), and unexpectedly he even endowed a few charities here and there. Well, as I said, all this happened gradually and in the meantime the political situation grew more and more acute. The Cantonese, or Nationalists, as they like to call themselves, were practically at his doors. It was about then he told me he was obliged to put in a Chinese as president of the college. He did not say who obliged him, but I got nothing out of argument except that I might remain, because of his friendliness to me, as adviser to the Board. Then he said the whole foreign staff would have to leave to make way for Chinese instructors, the instructors all men we had educated of course. So they left, but I hung on. The man he had selected for president was a fine fellow, I knew him well, I hoped to work through him, or at least to save our property and all our gear for better days. But the General had no intention of my remaining. He had just sold out to the Nationalists, not from conviction but from pure political expediency. He saw they would win anyway. He felt himself particularly strong, particularly successful. He ordered me to leave. There was no getting around him this time; I had to go. An armed guard escorted me to the train and we parted,” the Doctor smiled bitterly, “with all the flowery speeches you could think of. And since then I have been waiting here to see what happens.”

“Well, I’m surprised,” said Mrs. Jackson. “I thought the General was always a great admirer of yours.” It seemed that Mrs. Jackson was gratified by the General’s defection, whether because of a natural satisfaction in some one else’s disappointment or because it illustrated some conviction of her own that the Chinese could not be depended upon.

“I don’t know,” replied Strike. “Certainly I was once an admirer of his.”

“Well, what do you suppose caused him to turn on you?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Doctor Strike spoke in a low voice, and there was something painful to Megan about the puzzled, stilled
look on his face. The General’s defection from such a man seemed to her horrible. She wished Mrs. Jackson would leave Doctor Strike alone. But suddenly he lifted his head and flashed a look around at all of them. “It doesn’t matter what he thinks about me,” he said, “it doesn’t matter. I shall never give up hope of him. It is hard to make clear to others on just what we rest some of our convictions. They seem to rest on nothing tangible. Perhaps on instinct. Perhaps they are a truth which we remember, though it was spoken to us when we were unaware. I only know this, I shall never give up hope of the General. I know that there is something fine in him, yes, and even something superfine. It is as though under all the load of falseness his spirit continually cried out to me, ‘I’m here, I’m here, come and find me.’ ” The Doctor stopped abruptly and looked down, both hands clenched beside his plate. As Megan watched him he looked up again, not seeing her, and suddenly his face was touched by a fluttering, strange smile, as if before some more vivid memory of the General he found himself once again charmed and dismayed and hopeful.