The Bitter Tea of General Yen

by Grace Zaring Stone

  “The road is over there,” he said. “The car, if it is still waiting, is along this stretch.”

  They crossed a field. Ahead of them, sprinkled at an indefinite distance in the dark, were a few trembling lights. The field was full of mounds, some topped with what seemed replicas of houses. Graves. Once a fetid odor drifted across their path like a warm current in the cold air. Then their feet touched the smoother surface of the road, and they almost collided with a car that, without lights, waited there.

  “Well, this is luck,” exclaimed Mr. Shultz. “Think of the old bus being here!”

  The General’s driver sat at the wheel. He had been waiting stolidly and he showed no surprise at seeing them. Perhaps he was expecting them. He climbed down without a word and opened the door. The General and Mr. Shultz explained to him the route he was to follow. The General and Megan got in and Mr. Shultz sat between them, Captain Li took one of the folding seats. Against the faintly luminous square of the windows the chenille fringes made fanciful patterns. The car started.

  “Looks as though we’re going to get a good break all around,” said Mr. Shultz with satisfaction.

  The sound of the motor was comforting and enveloped them in security. That the car should have been there, that it should function so perfectly, seemed to mean they were intended to get away unharmed. Mr. Shultz’s hunch evidently told him so, and Megan was inclined to believe he was right. Mr. Shultz talked in a low, agreeable voice, like a host who feels the responsibility for his guests. He talked to Megan more directly.

  “Well, this will make something for you to write home about, Miss Davis; your friends will enjoy all your Chinese adventures.”

  “Yes,” she answered absently.

  From time to time he leaned across to peer through the window.

  “Nice clear night,” he said, “good wind. We’ll be down the bay in no time. If my launch isn’t where it ought to be, we’ll take a junk. There is bound to be at least one there, probably more. How much money have you got with you, General?”

  “Oh, five or six hundred dollars.”

  “Well, I always carry some. I wish, though, I had more on me to-night, though sometimes that’s the worst place for your money.”

  He kept up a continuous comment to divert them, because he was doubtful in some degree of all of them. He himself needed no distraction; he had the peculiar resolution of a man who goes into danger continually in order to make money, the resolution, more dogged than courage, more suave than courtesy, of a good salesman. Every thing of the chancey, the romantic, was so far removed from him, he seemed to operate so definitely by rules that could not go wrong for him, that he gave an illusion of safety. Megan accepted safety and was conscious of the General.

  She thought nothing coherent about him. His refusal to accept the conversation she had tried to reveal to him had been followed so rapidly by his own failure and downfall that she was not able to strike a balance of feeling. Bitterness, satisfaction and even pity contended with one another.

  The road grew rougher, and they were jolted mercilessly. Megan took advantage of the movement to turn her head so that beyond the bulk of Mr. Shultz she saw the General’s profile against the window. Seen only as a dark outline, the humorous lines, the effeminate softness, the occasional arrogance, all she disliked in him, were not visible; only the profile detached itself, holding as in carven rock its look of race, its sureness and purity of line. Listening to Mr. Shultz’s voice, Megan stared at the General with a growing sense of dull and helpless regret as though she saw before her the now useless charm of the dead.

  The car stopped suddenly. Mr. Shultz let down a window and leaned out.

  “Well, here’s the bay anyhow.”

  The General said nothing. Megan saw an embankment sloping away from them and at its foot a small landing stretching into an indeterminate expanse of water. On the shore by the landing a lantern hung on a bamboo pole. Mr. Shultz peered intently into the darkness.

  “Do you see your launch?” asked the General.

  “Not a sign. But I see a sampan alongside the landing. It may be mine.”

  “Are you sure this is where you ordered it to be?”

  “Sure.”

  The driver stopped his engine and turned their lights off. Their eyes accustomed themselves to the dark, and they heard the quick, angry lap of water on the shore and the blowing of the wind. The General pointed up the shore.

  “I see people there and a junk. Perhaps they are loading.”

  Megan, following the direction he pointed, made out a dark cluster that might be men and, dimly on the water, the outline of a junk with three masts, the foremost slanting sharply forward and faintly illumined from below by a light in the bow.

  “Loading rice,” said Mr. Shultz. “Some of your internal revenue, General.”

  He leaned further out and peered around, then drew his head in again.

  “Now let’s figure this out,” he said. “If the launch is not here, they have either taken it, or some accident or carelessness is responsible. But we can’t wait around here and I think the junk is our best chance. The sails are hoisted. In five minutes we can be aboard. What do you say?”

  “We must get aboard,” said the General, but when Mr. Shultz opened the door none of them moved, as though each was reluctant actually to precipitate any action. Finally Mr. Shultz climbed heavily out, and the rest followed him. They stood outside the car, exposed once more to the vast insecurity of the night. Then they started down wide steps cut in the bank. Megan could see the loom of the junk below them and a great white eye staring from the bow. It was farther out from shore than she had at first realized. The General’s steps lagged. Half-way down he stopped and said:

  “They are not loading. No one has moved. There hasn’t been a sound. They are soldiers put here to guard the landing. It is no use, Shultz.”

  Megan tried to see his face; there was not enough light to make out his expression, but his voice had been flat, a little breathless. It showed no excitement, even no fear, because he knew suddenly that there was no hope for him. From the moment when firing broke out in the distant city he had been lost. He knew it now.

  Megan stepped close to him and whispered, “Don’t give up like this. Don’t.”

  “Oh, it’s not so good,” said Mr. Shultz. Megan saw him feel his hip pocket. “But we can’t turn back now. They are coming to meet us.” And he leaned toward Megan. “If they start firing before we get down, you run back and get in the car.”

  Megan watched the dark group moving along the shore toward the foot of the steps. In a moment, if they went on down, they would be in their midst. If they turned and went back they would, she supposed, be fired on. And where would they go? The group of soldiers stopped and stood apparently looking up at them.

  “Oh, come on,” said Mr. Shultz. “They are only Chinese soldiers. I can wangle this.”

  They started down once more. At the base of the steps was a narrow strip of beach. They stood in the light from the lantern, which made a circle around them like the halo around a dim moon. On its edge the fifteen or twenty soldiers hesitated, huddled against one another. One was elbowed by a companion into the circle of light and Megan saw his bare feet and the shine of his cheek-bones, but having been forced forward, he only smiled foolishly and tried to step back. But more were coming, pushing in from the dark and their shifting, uneasy movements were forming a semicircle on the steps, cutting them off from all but the landing. Mr. Shultz looked them over.

  “Don’t let them hear your voice,” he said to the General. “Maybe they won’t know you under your cap. Keep an eye on Li.”

  He took out a cigar and with an ostentatious lack of hurry or concern lighted it in his cupped hands. He threw the match aside with a sweep of his arm. Then he stood quite still, puffing smoke from between his teeth, still holding the cigar. He looked at the soldiers, taking stock of the barrier they made, stupid, even timid, but dismaying by mere numbers.

 
; The wind blowing off the water caught loose hairs and whipped them across Megan’s eyes; it made a small but disturbing whistling in her ears, and filled her with a penetrating chill. Her jaw began to tremble with cold. Why didn’t Mr. Shultz do something?

  Mr. Shultz stepped abruptly out on to the landing and leaning over the side called in a low voice, “Wake up, you louse.”

  A small boy’s head, with startled goggle eyes, rose from the sampan into the light.

  “Well, it isn’t my sampan after all,” said Mr. Shultz casually surprised. “But it will have to do. Come on.” He leaned down to cast off the mooring.

  The General took Megan’s arm and made a step forward, but at the same moment Captain Li caught her other arm and jerked her away. The unexpectedness of his movement gave it strength. She stumbled, and he gave her a push that sent her out on the landing. Then he began to shout, to wave his hands. Unable to move, she stood watching the hideous activity of his puppet-like figure. Suddenly he snatched the General’s cap off and his gesture revealed a violence of purpose of which his feeble body was incapable. His falsetto voice, as though aware of its impotence, broke into sobs.

  “He has gone mad!” cried Megan. She turned to Mr. Shultz and saw him straighten up, the mooring rope slack in his hand. She was horrified to see that he looked undecided, puzzled. She had been so confident he would be able to do something.

  A crashing report made her wheel around. The General’s arm was still raised, still holding a revolver, and Captain Li beside him stood swaying on his feet, poised in the attitude of a man about to catch a ball, his mouth open, but suddenly and astonishingly silent. As she watched he crumpled to the ground.

  The General stood alone in the ring of soldiers.

  Megan for the last time turned to Mr. Shultz. The indecision in his eyes was terrible. He looked at her almost pleadingly. Then she saw resolution take form in them. He picked her up under the arms and dropped her into the sampan. Megan scrambled to her knees and caught hold of the gunwale, but Mr. Shultz jumped heavily down beside her and shoved clear of the dock. Megan caught his arm, trying to hold him back. She clutched at the dock.

  “Don’t leave him!” she cried.

  “No use,” said Mr. Shultz. “I’ve got to get you out of here.”

  Megan repeated stupidly, “Don’t leave him!”

  She saw the General standing on the shore in the midst of the soldiers who had hesitatingly, even apparently good-humoredly, closed around him, leaving only an opening on the side of the water, where he could not now escape. No one had touched him. He stood still, head bent a little forward, searching the darkness for Mr. Shultz, for Megan, who were abandoning him. The light of the solitary lantern shone on his hair ruffled into an unaccustomed disorder. He looked younger, fugitive, afraid. She could not see his eyes but she felt sure they were fixed now on her, she felt they were asking her for something, for what she had always promised him, her medicine, her courage, her salvation. Now was her last chance. One word would give it all to him. One word would save him. But what word? Only a low cry escaped from her lips, an inarticulate dim signal of one human creature to another.

  But the General must have heard. He lifted his head, suddenly erect, and Megan saw that with one hand he nervously, but with dignity, with a final necessity for decorum, smoothed back his ruffled hair.

  The small boy poled, the current caught the sampan and drew it from the shore. There was only a tangle of struggling figures now on the bank. Some one knocked the lantern into the water and night swirled over Megan.

  The General was gone.

  XXIV

  The little coast steamer rolled laboriously up to Shanghai. Mr. Shultz got a deck chair and dragged it forward so that Megan, who was very seasick, could get the breeze. She lay back with her eyes closed, trying by will power to hold off nausea. Mr. Shultz sat beside her. He told her about a scheme he had to get up radio programs in Shanghai, for broadcasting to the Chinese, make the Chinese firms do it as advertising. When it got cold he put his coat over her, and once he gave her a swallow of brandy with disastrous results. Gradually he stopped talking and finally sat looking at her with clouded eyes. He could not entirely forgive her for having been there. It was her presence that had prevented his taking a chance on getting the General off. Of course, he had to save a white lady but he had wanted to save the General too. When he thought of how he had been obliged to watch the General’s end he was filled with an enormous despondency and helplessness.

  “Well, they got him,” he would repeat to himself, “they got him, the sons of bitches.” Then he would call the Chinese steward again.

  “Boy, you catch whisky soda, chop chop.”

  Megan, turning in her chair, saw his head nodding forward.

  There had been little sleep for either of them on the junk. When they climbed aboard the crew had stared at them stupid and insolent, paying no attention to Mr. Shultz’s demands to see the laodah. But Mr. Shultz had gone boldly aft, followed by Megan, and for long moments she had listened to his voice, now creamy with persuasion, now breaking into sharp spattering threats. Finally, under pressure of a roll of bills and a Mauser nestling against his ribs, the old Chinaman by the tiller had given in. Three or four of his crew manned the capstan to weigh anchor, singing a strange broken song, others sheeted home the sail that had been idly slatting in the wind. Presently Megan heard the slap of water against the blunt bow. When they were well under way, Mr. Shultz led Megan into the cabin so that she might stretch out on one of the bunks, but she only stood a moment inside the door, looking hopelessly through the thick air at the hostile eyes of the Chinese women, at the babies on the floor, the ducks and fish hung against the bulkhead, the shrine at one end, smelled the mixed odor of hot rancid grease, opium and incense, and staggered out again. Mr. Shultz rolled his coat up for her, and she lay cold and desperately seasick, flat on the deck near the tiller.

  At last day broke underneath the world and light began slowly to flood the sky with ripples of light from below, crossed by flying wedges of birds. The sun came and tormented her all day, its direct fire searching under her eyelids. By mid-afternoon they reached the mouth of the shallow river, too late, Mr. Shultz told her, for the flood tide, so they hung for hours, swaying giddily between the two blazing mirrors of sea and sky. The women did their cooking, smoke curled from the vent hole in the cabin, and the laodah had a game of mah jong with two of the more decorative of them. Fish were caught. A baby wailed. The delay was of no importance. Gradually the two mirrors dimmed and burnished again into crimson. Night came. The world for Megan became the cycle of day and night. Endless.

  Then out of emptiness she heard water under the bow again. It was very early in the morning, still dark, when they came to the junk anchorage off the low-built city. Mr. Shultz called a sampan, that like an unsubstantial water insect carried them under the shadowy hulls of the junks to the Bund, where a small coast steamer lay waiting as squat and respectable as a boarding house.

  In the basin-stand of the cabin was a cake of fresh pink soap. Megan, holding it to her nose, smelled Europe once more and fell over on the transom for a few hours of troubled sleep.

  The jetty at Shanghai was crowded with passengers just off a tender from one of the big liners, such a crowd as Megan herself had landed with so short a time before. Now in her soiled Chinese robe she sat huddled on a bench while Mr. Shultz went to a near-by alley off Nanking Road, across from the Palace Hotel, to get a taxi. Megan could not endure to wait in the Palace while he got one, but here on the jetty no one particularly noticed her.

  In the taxi they sat in silence, driven recklessly along the winding Avenue Foch between lines of tangled barbed wire. It seemed strange to see the barricades again, strange to them just risen out of China like drowned men from deep water. As they neared the Jacksons’ house, Megan said:

  “Forgive my saying this, but I’ve been so dependent on you, you won’t mind. You must promise me that if you need any money now or any
help, you’ll let me know.”

  “Well, that is very kind of you, I am sure,” said Mr. Shultz. “But I sent some money to Shanghai a few days ago for safe-keeping. I sent it in my name. If it is safe I’m fixed. If it isn’t, I’ve got other lines out. You forget, Miss Davis, I’m a financial adviser!”

  When they reached the house she said, “You will come in with me?”

  “Not now. I’ll be around some time later.”

  They shook hands lingeringly.

  “You’ve been splendid,” said Megan.

  “Thanks. You have too.”

  “No, no, you were the one. You were splendid.”

  Mr. Shultz repeated, “Well, thanks.”

  They were friends now, not so much because they had shared danger, as because each had found something in the other to forgive and had forgiven it. He watched her up the steps and saw the door opened before he drove off.

  The number one boy stood at the door glassy-eyed with amazement at the sight of Megan in her Chinese dress.

  “Missie no have got,” he stammered. “Master no have got. Other master have got.”

  “It must be Bob,” thought Megan, and at the door of the little drawing-room she paused, trying to control the sudden pounding of her heart.

  But it was not Bob. Doctor Strike, his head wrapped in bandages, sat in a chair by the window. His eyes were closed, his mouth, relaxed from austere tightness, was slack, a little open. He was asleep, and his sleep exposed him to her; he was sick and old, and he had, to all appearances, failed. Megan now knew how much. She had herself measured the very depth of his failure. As she looked at him, his eyes opened. Dazed with sleep he looked at her unknowingly, and suddenly they lighted from within.