The Bitter Tea of General Yen

by Grace Zaring Stone

  They reached the end of the street, turned to the right and walked slowly, the limping Miss Minton in their midst, past the smoldering, smoking ruins of the godowns to the North Station.

  The station enclosure was crowded and steam from an engine gushed up from behind the roof of a platform. They kept on the far side of the street. Miss Minton was groaning and sobbing. She fell against Doctor Strike’s shoulder.

  “I can’t do it,” she cried, “I just can’t do it.”

  The Doctor looked over and saw inside the iron fence of the enclosure five or six rickshaws waiting, the coolies squatting between the shafts. There was a crowd around the entrance, which was a side one leading directly to the train platforms. They had not yet come to the main gate. They could see that the crowd was mostly soldiers but there were coolies among them. The Doctor seized Miss Minton more firmly about the waist and half carried her across the street to the side gate. Megan, Miss Reed and the children followed close behind. At the gate the Doctor called stridently:

  “Wambotso!”

  The rickshaws swooped down on them like pigeons to scattered grain. There were six of them jostling and tugging for place. The crowd in their curiosity pressed them against the iron fence. Megan’s shoulder was pressed against the iron. She pushed and kept as well as she could a clear space in front of her for the huddling children. A very tall coolie with a bronze aquiline face and a cue wound around his battered felt hat was looking at her across several heads and shoulders. He held a long bamboo carrying-pole. He said something in a loud voice and some of the others laughed. Megan looked away from him. Doctor Strike had reached one of the rickshaws with Miss Minton and lifted her in. The rickshaw started. He put four children into the next and sent it following, Miss Reed he lifted by force into the next. Megan saw her protest, heard her say wildly, “Not till you come, Doctor!” but he set the youngest Russian on her lap and himself shoved the rickshaw forward.

  The rickshaws swerved aside to make room for a big closed car which had come up to the side gate. The soldiers began shoving the crowd to make way and Megan was nearly pushed off her feet. She had a momentary glimpse of Doctor Strike’s face, rigid and white, and the blaze of his quicksilver eyes, as he turned to put her in the next rickshaw. Then the tall coolie with the carrying-pole struck him over the head. He staggered backward from her, crashing into the rickshaw he had intended for her. Megan caught him under the arms and, with an effort that seemed to tear her strength out by the roots, lifted him into it. The rickshaw lurched forward and she had time to see them all four wabbling drunkenly in their flight away from her down the street. Suddenly frantic, almost beyond consciousness, she clutched at the remaining one. But she felt herself torn from it, heard shouts, indistinguishable clamor, and through it, like a thin ray of light, like a small sudden pain, one scream that was her own.

  XI

  The circles that whirled around Megan’s head came dangerously close, but there seemed to be no way to stop them because she floated on darkness unsupported. Then something else touched her, harsh and ugly even in darkness, and on consideration she found it was within her and it hurt. But that was exactly it, it was pain. And pain made her aware of a body that seemed to form sluggishly about her once more, out of uncertain elements.

  The circles swung past, widening, they slewed off, whirled more remotely. But the pain became something that had to be handled. It was punctuated by a joggling movement, irritating, persistent. It was like tiny jets of flickering light.

  The last of the circles throbbed dimly a long way off, vanished, and the joggling went on. Something must be done. An effort of some sort must be made. But where was the spring of action? In the arms, in the legs, in the eyelids? Push somehow. And it was easy after all. It was done.

  Megan saw that it was raining again. Another rainy day. She seemed to be caught in one great, gray, endless spiderweb of a rainy day.

  But the pain was only a pain in the head, over the eyes, making it difficult to keep them open.

  The joggling went on, modified now and unimportant.

  Directly ahead was a little half-moon shining agreeably in the grayness, a little half-moon of lime-green satin supporting another moon, full, round, traced with benevolent, surprised eyebrows.

  “Do you feel better?”

  Some one had said that.

  “I believe I do,” said Megan and saw a train moving, rain streaming down a pane, a Chinese face over a collar of lime-green satin.

  “Then I want you to drink some tea.”

  A hand like a curled shell held a glass over which hung steam in a small fog, with an odor of aromatic flowers.

  “I don’t think I can drink it.”

  “Please try.”

  “I think it will make me sick.”

  The eyebrows lifted now with such a delicate insistence, not really eyebrows, only painted lines done with one stroke on a powdered forehead.

  Some one came up from behind and held a hot, wet towel on her forehead. Surprisingly, it felt well, seemed to dissolve most of the pain and made her conscious of other lesser pains in the back, shoulders and arms. But the head was the real pain in spite of towels.

  “You must not be frightened,” said the lady, “no one will hurt you.”

  Suddenly a vista clicked open. She saw the face of the coolie with the cue wound round his hat, four rickshaws fleeing from her down a dark street, and she felt again the last draining of strength as she lifted Doctor Strike into the rickshaw, felt also the humiliation of her terror which had permitted her to shriek for help in the midst of a crowd. This last became physical.

  “I’m afraid I’m going to be sick,” she said.

  “Try to drink some tea.”

  A cool hand slipped under her head. Megan looked into a glass and saw little tea flowers swimming in it upright like weeds on a river bottom. They moved up to her and a heat that was pungent flowed down her throat direct to some center of weakness which was instantly fortified. She was not sick.

  “The General thinks it will do you good.”

  “The General!”

  In the corner of the carriage nearest the window sat a man in a gray uniform. His prominent eyes held the reflection of some incomprehensible amusement. As he saw her looking at him he rose out of his seat and bowed.

  “I am so sorry for you,” he said. “I am not responsible for what has happened. But I am charging myself to take care of you and you will not be harmed.” He made a slight gesture with one hand, expressing an apology more delicate than his words. Megan stared at his hand. The beauty of it was strangely familiar.

  The amah put another towel on her head, and the lady in the green satin coat at intervals held the tea to her lips. Megan sipped it slowly. There was a significance to all this which escaped her.

  “Haven’t I seen you somewhere before, or am I imagining——”

  “No,” said the General, and he smiled outright, “you do not imagine. You were kind enough to offer me a handkerchief.”

  “But of course. You were going into the Concession. The wrecked car.”

  He and the lady nodded.

  To decide what she was doing in a train with the man of the wrecked car, with the lady of the green hat, was too much for her. To ask them did not occur to her. But she had seen them before. That made the situation reasonable enough that she was able to accept it for the time being.

  “Oh, I guess it is all right,” she said vaguely.

  They nodded again, both smiling to reassure her. Megan closed her eyes. She heard them murmur to each other in Chinese. When she opened her eyes the lady was sitting across from her, over her knees the amah had spread an embroidered towel and she was feeding herself with chopsticks out of little bowls, held close to her mouth, which the amah handed her in turn. The General was not eating. He smoked a cigarette and, his head leaning back against the cushions, blew smoke rings toward the ceiling. Megan studied the amazing, wasteful beauty of the hand with the cigarette. She remembered it
s inefficiency when touching a bleeding forehead, when holding open a car door, yet it remained an exquisite instrument.

  She turned her head a little. The corridor behind the glass-topped door was crowded with soldiers in gray. One leaned with an air of privilege against the glass. Around his neck he wore a salmon-pink silk cord attached to a Mauser from which hung a salmon-pink silk tassel. The other soldiers carried small bath towels and tin cups. This grander one no doubt was the General’s orderly. Megan turned to the window, trying to raise her head a little, and the amah at once lifted her, supporting her against a cool linen shoulder.

  The train was cutting across a land spread out in the greenness of young rice and mulberries beginning to leaf, a land webbed with canals bringing water to the endless fields, on whose muddy shallows fringed with water hyacinths the laden, unhurried processions of sampans wove great slow patterns of movement about the arrow-like flight of the train. The train passed relentlessly the small half-naked men carrying loads swung from their shoulders, who stepped with the jogging trot of the heavily burdened along stone trails already pressed deep into the sod by the weight and weariness of endless feet. A hill rose and disappeared, carrying on its crest a pagoda, an unstable shape of inverted bell-flowers stacked one on top of another, surely a deliberate note of the purest frivolity against the fatigue, the solemn fertility of the land.

  Megan closed her eyes and the amah gently let her slip back on the seat. She opened her eyes to be sure that nothing had changed, for already the train, the General, the lady, the door against which leaned the orderly with the pink-silk cord, the window opening into China, had become the accepted reality to which she clung. She tried to stay awake.

  The General leaned back, blowing smoke rings, looking up meditatively at the ceiling; the lady sat beside him, silent because he did not wish to talk, but with an air of readiness as though her own possible meditations were held only at his pleasure, never quite losing, even when he was not looking at her, the slightly seductive smile with which she turned to him when he spoke or even made a movement.

  Megan closed her eyes, opening them suddenly again. The General was handing his cigarette to the lady to extinguish for him. He leaned his head more firmly on the seat-back and closed his eyes. The lady watched him and, seeing he did not appear comfortable, slipped an embroidered satin pillow back of his head. He did not thank her, his eyes remained closed and his head slipped forward slightly. Apparently he was asleep. Megan watched him without restraint. His hair, growing in a peak from the well-modeled forehead, was smooth and black as a Spaniard’s; with his eyes closed, their prominence, the effect of the Mongolian slant, were exaggerated and some of the masculinity of the face was lost, so that he looked like one of those sculptured heads of androgynous Eastern deities. The lady also watched him for a time to be quite sure he slept. Then she put a smaller pillow behind her own head and closed her eyes.

  Megan slept and awoke with the certainty that she had slept long.

  “Oh, yes, that Chinese train.” She was for a moment even frightened. Some quality of the light had changed, it must be afternoon. Very close to the window and throwing its shadow into the compartment passed a great crenelated wall hung with tattered vines. A towered water-gate made a fantastic opening in it. The lady had covered her satin coat with a darker one trimmed with fur. The General with her help was putting on a military overcoat. Then he bent down to look out the window, yawned copiously and smoothed back his hair before putting on his cap. The orderly came in to assemble the luggage. In the corridor the soldiers were standing at attention, flattened against the wall to make a passage. Seeing Megan was awake the lady leaned over her.

  “We are here now,” she said. “Your tiresome trip is over. Do you feel well?”

  “Not too well.”

  The General spoke to her in Chinese and after a few words she turned again to Megan.

  “The General thinks it will be better for you not to walk through the station. He will arrange to have you carried out in a chair. You must be very quiet.”

  “Where are we going? What general?” Megan was suddenly angry. “Who is this general?”

  The lady’s reply meant nothing until she had repeated it several times over. Finally she penetrated the unfamiliar pronunciation, “General Yen Tso-Chong.”

  Doctor Strike’s General.

  And the concubine.

  XII

  It was an elaborate, brass bed enclosed on three sides and heaped with bright satin quilts. Megan had been in it all the afternoon of her arrival and all the next day. Now it was morning again. She had wakened to a tumult of birds but they had quieted now and in spite of certain small noises about the house the underlying stillness struck her as remarkable. She moved her arms and legs tentatively and as she held up one arm the white-silk sleeve of a Chinese coat fell back from it, showing an ugly green bruise reaching almost from shoulder to elbow. She examined her hands. They looked veined and tired.

  She could not distinctly remember how she had got here. Only a vague impression of a station in which throngs of clamoring Chinese were pushed aside to make way for her chair, a closed car with the curtains down where she leaned her head on the shoulder of the lady with the green coat. And they had driven perhaps half an hour, perhaps less. Then she had stepped out before a gate in a red stucco wall, had insisted she could walk and fainted. Since then she had dozed or slept, waking to sip tea brought her by the amah and sometimes by the lady. Now for the first time her head felt clear and the pain in it was almost gone.

  She turned on one side and looked curiously at the room she was in. It was rather bare. There were a few pieces of blackwood furniture, differing at once from the blackwood pieces of the missionaries by an air of unmistakable sophistication. By the octagon-shaped window, in a dark blue bowl, bloomed a twisted miniature tree bearing translucent yellow Chinese plum flowers. On the wall across from her bed was a hanging painting on brownish silk of two dark, furry monkeys eating orange-red persimmons. Megan looked at this a long time. It was impossible not to feel in sympathy with these monkeys; they pecked at the fruit so absently, they were so distrait, unable to concentrate on anything, forever vaguely and obstinately pursued by some great, mysterious sadness in all things, a sadness that not caperings, malice, nor a full stomach could quite take away. It was a true portrait, delicately executed, precise but summary; it gave character to the whole room, making unimportant the offense of the brass bed, the phonograph and records piled on a table, a gilt clock and candlesticks empty of candles, such as one sees on the mantels of cheaper French hotels. Yes, in spite of these things the room had an appearance of style in the sense that a defective work of art may still have style because whoever created it has been able to set on it the seal of a superior personality.

  Megan liked the room, her father she thought would like it. And suddenly she realized that her father at this very moment must be believing her dead. Her parents’ grief, Bob’s grief, struck her too vividly, with too strong an implication of reproach, to be endured. Her headlong rush into this disaster blazed itself like a trail from the moment when she had sat with Bob’s letter on her knee and told her parents that she had to go to China come what might, down to the moment when she had demanded a miracle from God. The miracle had come but already it had lost its sheen, as though it had been tossed to her carelessly by One who knew that miracles are not always of very great account. A depression began to settle over her because she felt that she had been humiliated by something more profound even than fear. Then she thought, “Well, perhaps it is all of no importance, I am not dead. I will let them know it in the quickest way possible. As soon as I can get a paper and pencil, write a note, have a telegram sent. And after all, I am in China, where I felt I had to be, and maybe I was even right.”

  She thought of the General and his concubine, of all Doctor Strike had told her about the General. Apparently for all the Doctor’s ardor, his knowledge, he had never been able really to touch the Genera
l. And how much he had wanted to! All the time he had been talking of him Megan felt she must have been half aware that she herself had already touched the General’s life by the mere brushing of a wing and that she would inevitably touch it again more deeply. Perhaps this was to be the miracle.

  She was too recently humbled to be willing to dwell much on this, but in spite of herself vague and glorious pictures began slowly to flood her mind. A Chinese man. A Chinese woman. Truly that was all of China. Her pictures merged into sleep and she awoke again, determined at once to get up. She sat on the edge of the bed and waited until the dizziness and slight pain in her head passed. She sat there wondering if the house she was in could possibly be in the midst of a city. It was so quiet. In the early morning there had been so many birds and even now the air coming in the open octagon-shaped window was fresh and there was about it some indefinite coolness, an aroma, as of water near by. Occasionally she heard soft slippered feet cross a tiled or brick pavement outside her window, and there was a telephone somewhere in the house that rang at intervals, answered by a Chinese voice, monotonous and persistent. But the telephone was not ringing just now. From a greater distance she heard on a soft road the march of feet, then a staccato command. The footsteps halted and at another command she heard the muffled clatter of rifles as the company came to rest. Bugles sounded and the notes dissolved instantly like bubbles in the tranquillity of the air. And from somewhere a cock crowed.

  Certainly she was not in a city.

  Beside her bed on a small table was a wicker basket. She opened it and found silver tea things kept warm by the wadded lining. She poured herself a cup and drank it. When she put her feet to the floor she had another moment of dizziness, but she was stronger than she expected. She had to wait a moment until her head grew steadier. Then she moved slowly and with shaking knees but she managed to reach the window.