The Bitter Tea of General Yen

by Grace Zaring Stone

  “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.”

  “You accuse me of all excesses, even the grossest,” exclaimed the General. “Are all excesses alike to you? Because I drink often until I am overcome, because I admire women easily, because I love painting and fireworks, do you think I am capable of jealousy, of anger, of revenge? Miss Davis, the things you speak of, the excesses which make a man disgusting and ridiculous, were all overcome for me by the patience and wisdom of my remotest ancestors. Those which they have permitted me to keep may seem equally repellent to you, but they do not seem so to me. No,” he cried emphatically, “I am incapable of these things you speak of. You will never make me over in that way, Miss Davis. You will never turn me into a creature of emotion and impulse and blind energy. No matter how much you urge me to overcome qualities I don’t possess.”

  Megan hesitated over her answer, she really had not been listening carefully to what he said, because she was more occupied in the change which had come over him. His voice, his expression, had changed. He did not seem as before to be amused, charmed, irritated, as though he played with an unruly child, who in the excitement of the game might even be expected to hurl a brick at his head. He was suddenly neither amused nor charmed, he was not even irritated. She did not know if he was angry but she felt that he must be more deeply disturbed than she had ever seen him. She could not understand why.

  “But what is it?” she exclaimed. “If I misjudge you I am sorry.”

  “Sorry!” exclaimed the General. “What could make you regret anything! Your energy would merely carry you on to something else.”

  “But what are we talking about? I don’t want to hurt you.”

  “Don’t you?” cried the General.

  He made a move, as though he would get out of his chair, but suddenly he sat down again and with a gesture swift but light he put his hand over hers. Their eyes meeting were as startled as though they had run into each other in an unexpected place. She could not doubt, seeing his eyes, that he was as unprepared as she for the impulse that he unthinkingly followed. But he did not move his hand away, and Megan looked down at it. The pressure was so slight she scarcely felt it, but as she looked at it a tingle of repulsion ran from his fingers up her arm, a repulsion definite enough to be an actual shudder of pain. It ebbed gradually, drained off, and a counter-current of magnetism took its place. This flowed more deliberately, expanding into slow heat, setting in motion a vibration of the blood which hummed in her ears like a shell held against them. A delicate, dim anæsthesia settled over her like a cloud, her pupils dilated a little, her muscles relaxed. She felt herself slipping loosely toward something that awaited her. The weakness that drew her toward it made her feel it must be evil, yet it could not be so simple as that. It was at once familiar and strange, compelling and repellent, eternal and yet it passed from her like a breath. Megan jerked her hand away and held it tightly with her other hand as though it had been touched by fire. She breathed in astonished little gasps, startled as much by the rescue as by the danger. Her salvation seemed to have come from without and to be miraculous. She faced the General coldly and said as though some one else had prompted her:

  “What did you finally do about Mah-li?”

  She caught only a last glow on the General’s face before it darkened into obstinacy. He did not answer. He leaned back in his chair and tapped on the table with his fingers.

  “What a pity,” he said so slow she could scarcely catch the words. “For a moment then you were as lovely as you were meant to be.”

  But Megan insisted. “Where is Mah-li now?”

  After a moment’s silence, the General looked at her as coldly as she at him.

  “She is probably dead,” he said in his harsh official voice.

  “Probably dead! You don’t mean you———?”

  “She allied herself with Communists. I allowed her to share their punishment.”

  “You did that! But you couldn’t have done that when you knew how I felt! I can’t believe it of you, you couldn’t have done that!”

  Megan was suddenly thrown again into a state of inner disorder. It was quite true that she could not believe it of him. He had always seemed to her so deeply vulnerable. Even in moments like those just past, when his influence over her had been most powerful, there had always seemed to be in him the germ of defeat. And now he had proved himself impervious, adamant.

  “Yes, I did just that,” he said.

  She could not find words to answer him. She sat looking at him in a silence of anger, consciously giving way to its onrush because it seemed to carry her further from that moment of weakness. Then words broke from her in a hot torrent.

  “Then all you said just now was a lie!” she cried. “You are capable of jealousy and of revenge. You were angry because she tried to harm you, so you decided you would harm her more than she could possibly harm you. And you were jealous, because she was young and lovely, and she didn’t love you. That was really her unforgivable sin, wasn’t it, that she didn’t love you, so you revenged yourself for that most of all!”

  Even as she spoke it struck Megan that anger was a strange thing for her to be feeling so overwhelmingly at this moment. The pathos of Mah-li’s death had not yet touched her, the enigma of that purposeless little life. And more in compunction for her own blind violence she exclaimed:

  “Poor little Mah-li! Oh, I should have kept her with me. I shouldn’t have trusted her with you at all. But how could I know what you were? A brute, yes, just a bully and a brute!”

  The General’s voice broke in harshly.

  “Not at all.” His calm was imposed now only by a mighty effort. The nerve over his eyelid throbbed visibly. “Of course you would want to see Mah-li’s punishment in some such light. I knew that by the reasons you advanced against it, by your hysterical manner when you urged them. You were so carried beyond yourself that if it had been of no particular importance I would have been glad to do what you asked. But it was important, and not at all because of my individual feeling. Mah-li behaved in a way which, for reasons I’m not able to understand, you find admirable. Why, one would imagine that you found rebellion admirable of itself! Well, fortunately society does not. Mah-li had a definite place in society, just as a bowl is meant to be shapely
and to hold wine, tea or water. If the bowl were no longer shapely and wouldn’t hold anything I would throw it out. Mah-li had made of herself an ugly, useless, an incongruous object. I threw her out. Not from revenge or jealousy, which are as bad as rebellion. No. But as a man who wants his house and his world full of peace and propriety and harmony.”

  Megan was silent.

  “Am I quite clear?” he insisted.

  “Oh, quite clear!” Megan suddenly began to laugh, and her laughter, though low and suppressed, forced tears from her eyes. “But how conventional you are! Yes, you are even willing, as you once said of my generosity, to be conventional at any one’s expense.” Megan’s laughter was ready to burst into tears. “Oh, oh, I am so disappointed in you!” she cried. “If you had done away with her for any other reason. But to have done it through cowardice, yes, cowardice, and such a paltry cowardice at that. Because you weren’t even really afraid. You just couldn’t stand to see Mah-li forget her place in the world. How horrible! Nothing could be more horrible! I am ashamed for you!”

  A sudden knock on the door silenced her.

  XXIII

  Mr. Shultz called from the window, “What’s that?”

  The door opened and a gray-clad officer stepped in. He held on to the door-knob and, swaying a little, looked wildly from face to face. Then his eyes fixed themselves on the General. He began to talk in a high-pitched steady stream of Chinese. Mr. Shultz came over to the table and stood behind the General’s chair. The General asked a few questions. The officer answered. Mr. Shultz, in an effort to understand, puckered his mouth and knitted his forehead. One statement struck him like a blow.

  “Hell,” he exclaimed and his face grew dark red.

  The officer stopped on a high note like a wail and stood breathing heavily with his mouth open. The General nodded to him. He went out.

  Megan looked from one to the other, aware that something had gone wrong, but aware also that it did not matter much now what it was. The General, sitting back in his chair, looked up at the ceiling. Mr. Shultz stood beside him, alert.

  “I had a hunch,” he said, “that something like this would happen. That first boy that came to bring us the news was all wrong. I saw it in his eye. I never disregard a hunch but I don’t regret it.”

  “What is wrong?” said Megan. But no one answered her.

  “We’ll have to do a lot of high-speed thinking now,” said Mr. Shultz. “You’ve got the brains, General, I leave it to you.”

  Mr. Shultz went over to the window and leaned out into the dark court listening to the stillness of the yamen. He came back.

  “The place is deserted,” he said. “They’re all gone. I can feel it.”

  “Then it is useless for you to stay,” said the General. “The sooner you leave, I should say, the better.”

  “What is the matter?” Megan repeated more insistently.

  Mr. Shultz looked at her as though he had forgotten her, but answered pleasantly.

  “The Communists have taken over the city, Miss Davis. That was the firing we heard. The troops went over to them. Even the General’s body-guard has deserted. The boys at the telephone got word what had happened, came and gave us a false report and cleared out. This last officer who just came was on guard at the arsenal. They have taken that over. I’ll bet,” he added, turning to look down at Captain Li, “our little friend here could tell us something about this.”

  “As you leave,” said the General, “you had better take Li with you and shoot him somewhere outside. See if he is armed, will you, Shultz?”

  Mr. Shultz leaned over the back of Captain Li’s chair, jerked him to his feet and felt his body expertly.

  “Nope,” he answered, finding nothing.

  Captain Li, who had taken his mauling with the absent expression of a child being undressed for bed, on being released as absently sat down again.

  The room was extraordinarily still. For a moment they all sat listening to the stillness which pressed in upon them the completeness of their desertion.

  Megan thought how absurd this all was. She had expected a night of alarms and bloodshed and yet it had all come about in a way peculiar, apparently, to China. The General had simply been sold out. Nothing more would happen unless he insisted on remembering that Captain Li also had forgotten his place in society.

  Mah-li of course was safe. If she was to share the fate of the Communists it was certain that she was now sharing their triumph. The General had failed there at any rate. She repeated this to herself with an exultant satisfaction. He had tried to preserve a decorum that was already a corpse. And perhaps since he had failed, since he had been forced to do as she asked, it might be possible to forgive him. Even now, though she was still ready to heap every reproach on him, she felt an obscure, imperative necessity to reinstate him.

  “I think we’d better take Li with us,” said Mr. Shultz, breaking the silence. “But I don’t like to shoot him unless I have to. Come along, General, let’s get going.”

  The General did not answer, and made no movement of getting up. He stared at Mr. Shultz, and Megan saw on his face the same expression of doubt she had seen before, when he had spoken of Doctor Strike and the safe-conduct pass. It was a doubt that struck at the deepest roots of his beliefs.

  “What’s the matter?” demanded Mr. Shultz.

  “Do you mean,” said the General, “you want me to come with you?”

  Mr. Shultz looked at him in astonishment, and as the General’s meaning dawned on him he was even embarrassed. He said nothing.

  The General spoke haltingly and in a low apologetic voice. “But I am the one they are after. If I come with you your chances of getting away are practically nothing.”

  Mr. Shultz suddenly regained his assurance.

  “Oh, go to hell,” he said jovially. “What do you think I am!”

  The General dropped his eyes and bent his head. Megan saw he was undergoing a deep humiliation; that this generosity, because he had been unable to admit its existence, was cutting him to the quick. She wanted him to be so humiliated and so wounded. She wanted him to be smitten, as by a scorching bolt, with this unlooked-for example of a generosity that not all her words or those of Doctor Strike had been able to convince him of. Not their words, not even the obvious trend of their lives, had touched him. Now, strangely, Mr. Shultz had been made the instrument. Mr. Shultz was not the man she would have chosen. This particular quality was perhaps the only estimable one he possessed, but he had presented it nevertheless, flawless, intact, indisputable as a diamond.

  “We’d better make straight for the bay,” he said. “The railroad won’t be possible. Where’s your car, General?”

  “About a quarter of a mile up the road. The officer who just came drove from the arsenal in it. He left it there in case the yamen was already in their hands.”

  “Will he take it away?”

  “No, he won’t want to be caught in it.”

  “Then if we get going, it may still be there. It is our only chance I’d say.”

  “And at the bay, what then?”

  “There is my launch. I leave it in a different place every few days. They’re not apt to know where and only the sampan will be at the landing, a sampan like any other. Tonight it should be at the landing where they load the junks of contraband rice.”

  “Can the launch get us down the bay?”

  “I think so. Anyway, it can get us away from here.”

  “Well, let us go then.”

  Mr. Shultz went over to the door of a small closet used as a pantry. He opened it and disclosed the boy who served their drinks, asleep under shelves laden with bottles. Mr. Shultz shook him until he woke, then taking him by the shoulder propelled him across the room to the phonograph. He took the first record he came to and put it on the machine, turned the crank and adjusted the needle. The bright and alien Italian magic vibrated once more through the Chinese room.

  “You keep this going. Must wantche walkee, savvy?”
r />   The boy nodded and leaned anxiously over the instrument.

  “Another round before we go?” asked Mr. Shultz, coming back to the table. “Have a little Dutch courage, General? Miss Davis?” He looked over the litter of glasses, cards, and trays full of cigarettes and ashes. Then he poured himself a swallow of brandy and gulped it down. His eyes fell on Captain Li again. “Come on, big boy, and just remember, whatever happens to us now happens to you too.”

  He jerked Captain Li out of his chair. The General said a few words in Chinese to him and Mr. Shultz pushed him forward. The General caught his arm.

  “If you follow me,” he said to Mr. Shultz and Megan, “I think it would be better to go out this way.”

  They passed into another room, unlighted except for the light coming from the door left open behind them. They crossed two rooms and an empty dark court, turning down a narrow runway between houses from which they came out on an open space. Megan supposed it to be a garden because the gravel of ordered walks crunched under their feet and in the gusty wind the dark trees about them made sudden abrupt gestures against the pallor of starry sky. After the smoky room they had left the air seemed fresh and even sharp, full of the agitation of hidden rustling leaves and grass. They came to a gate which the General opened himself.