Inside the house Megan sat down by the fireplace, in which a fire was
being built and lighted by the coolie. In leaving the street she had
turned her back on China; the house she was in was on the wrong side
of the barbed-wire barricade and in Chinese territory, but it might
have been a house in Brighton, as English as it was possible to make
it. There was a cottage piano in one corner, loaded with photographs
in standing frames; a plum-colored carpet covered the floor and on
the walls hung pictures, evidently belonging to a series and
representing dogs of different breeds sitting on cushions, taking
tea, and wearing lace caps and top-hats. The tea table was being set
near the fire by the number one boy for the Jacksons, who had said
they would be back about five o'clock.
It was the Jacksons who met Megan on her arrival at Shanghai that
morning. The ship anchored down the Whangpoo, and before she could
step aboard the launch that was to take the passengers up to the
jetty she was accosted on deck by a small, shabby man with a soft
apologetic voice and a very drooping mustache who told her he was Mr.
Jackson, of the China Inland Mission, sent to meet her. Megan turned
so pale that the little man caught at her arm to steady her.
"But Bob," she stammered, "has anything happened to him?"
"No, no," cried Mr. Jackson hastily, "he is well, he is quite well."
And all the time the launch was chugging up the river he continued to
reassure her as to Bob's safety, for he was terribly afraid of
emotional women, that is, when they were of European race; the
outcries of a recently widowed Chinese he was capable of taking with
calm. He explained to her that Bob had been unable to leave
Changsha, and that while he was not exactly in actual danger, still
there was a great deal of fighting around Changsha and at various
points along the river, so that he might even be delayed for weeks.
"But can't I get up to him?" asked Megan. "After all, I've come all
this way to marry him."
"Well," said Mr. Jackson soothingly, "well, as a matter of actual
fact you cannot. I've tried to get a permit for your passage from
the authorities, but they aren't permitting any women and children to
travel on the river now. We want you to stay here with us, and when
Bob does come we'll have the wedding in Shanghai. Mrs. Jackson and I
were forced to leave our station a month ago, and we've taken the
house of some friends who are in England on leave. You'll be quite
comfortable with us, and it will give you a little time to adjust
yourself to the conditions here. I see Mrs. Jackson now, standing on
the jetty. See, the one with the green umbrella. She will be mighty
glad to have you with us. She has lived for so long where there are
very few white ladies."
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 usual 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.
[Illustration: Chapter III headpiece]