The next morning early Megan went to her window. The rain had
momentarily stopped, but the sky was gray and low and it would surely
rain again. Along the muddy road passed the Chinese, pushing heavily
laden wheelbarrows or sitting in rickshaws holding bundles bigger
than themselves on their laps. Even motor-cars were bulging with
mattresses, sewing-machines, stoves, all those possessions which are
accepted without thought but which when dragged out of the houses
where they belong give such a pitiful exposure of the actual
simplicity of our needs. Mr. Jackson was right; the rush for the
Settlement had begun.
It was Sunday. After breakfast they rode to church in rickshaws,
with the hoods up and leather aprons fastened across them by
patched-up loops of string. It was raining a little. Megan had
never been in a rickshaw before and she did not feel the horror she
had anticipated at being pulled along by a human being. The coolie
had muscled bare legs and he swayed from side to side with a faint
trace of swagger; the odor of garlic he had been eating came cheerily
back to her. There was something about the equipage, disreputable as
it was, that gave her a feeling of pomp and circumstance not entirely
unpleasant.
They passed the entrance to the Avenue Joffre, going along the road
edging the Settlement, to the Avenue Haig. On their left heavy coils
of barbed wire shut out a few mean Chinese houses, a large Chinese
building behind a brick wall, with an institutional look about it,
farther on making a barrier to dreamlike vistas of water-soaked
fields, canals, and low Chinese farmhouses with roofs horned like the
new moon. They turned to the right at the side of a large
riding-school with paddocks and an enclosed ring. A huge tow-haired
Russian groom was leading a horse from the ring.
The church was bare. Only Europeans were there, and they got up, sat
down, made the responses with what seemed a determination wearier but
more dogged than it would have been at home.
"'Let me never be confounded," sang the choirboys in their white,
reedy voices.
In the afternoon Mr. Jackson went off to try to persuade Miss Reed
for the last time to evacuate the orphanage. Mrs. Jackson expressed
the belief that he would not succeed.
"I wish Doctor Strike were here," she said to Megan. "He could make
her do it. But Will never can; he is afraid of her."
She added that Doctor Strike might be expected at any moment now, and
every time the telephone or the door-bell rang she said, "That is
probably the Doctor now." But he did not come.
The afternoon passed interminably to Megan. She longed to be out
helping Mr. Jackson evacuate the orphanage. She envied Miss Reed,
who at least was in the midst of the storm. It was so hard sitting
still and watching Mrs. Jackson knit, trying to talk to her. After
she had shown Mrs. Jackson her trousseau, which Mrs. Jackson
evidently found much too plain, and had answered a few questions of
"what they wore" at home, they really had nothing to say to each
other. Toward the one subject on which Megan tried to draw her out
Mrs. Jackson maintained an evasiveness that had a flavor of positive
resistance. In her rambling sentences she would sometimes mention
casually and without explanation, as if every one must have heard of
them, such persons as Doctor Strike, Mrs. Walsh at the Socony
Installation, Miss Reed, her amah who was devoted to her, but she
could not be induced to talk about China. She had not a trace of
intellectual curiosity. If there were things in the world mysterious
and a little terrifying, she would refuse to be either mystified or
terrified, she would blank them off. And China she ignored as if it
had been an obscene fact of life, like sex. Megan tried to imagine
her sitting for the last twenty years in a Chinese house, eating
Chinese food, speaking Chinese and ignoring China.
Seeing Megan was restless, Mrs. Jackson asked her if she cared about
reading, and when Megan answered that she did, Mrs. Jackson went
up-stairs and returned with a book.
"I find this very helpful," she said, handing it to Megan.
It was a small, thin volume printed in 1884 by some mission press in
Calcutta and it was called _A Noble Life_. Megan looked through its
yellow pages and saw it was an account of the life of Archibald
Alexander McPherson, who left the British army to engage in mission
work in India. As Megan read here and there to see if she might
discover what had been the force that had driven him to do this, she
came on sentences like these:
"He became more and more sensitive to sin. On one occasion he
corrected his native boy for some fault with more sharpness than
he afterwards deemed necessary and when he became convinced that
he had given away, even in a slight degree, to anger, he called
his servant and falling on his knees begged his forgiveness with
tears of contrition."
Megan looked up at Mrs. Jackson with astonishment. She now pictured
her on her knees before the number one boy, begging his forgiveness
with tears of contrition. And even Megan smiled. Mrs. Jackson and
Archibald Alexander McPherson both had a knowledge, perhaps equally
unerring, of their own needs, and Mrs. Jackson was not to be diverted
by any pleasing fantasies she might profess; she remained untroubled
by such mystic pressures as tormented Archibald Alexander McPherson.
As Megan sat pretending to read, the telephone rang again. It turned
out to be a young naval officer she had met on the boat whose name
was Bates. He wished to take her to dinner. She had not
particularly liked him but after a slight hesitation said yes. She
explained him to Mrs. Jackson as a pleasant sort of fellow who had
come out to command a gunboat and would leave the next day for
up-river. Mrs. Jackson did not understand why an engaged girl wanted
to dine with another man, especially on Sunday.
"I'm really not endangering my future happiness. And certainly I
ought to begin to know something of China."
"I don't think the wife of a mission worker needs to know the China
that a gunboat commander is going to show her."
"Are they so dreadful?" asked Megan, smiling.
"I think they're pretty loose in their morals, though there was a
nice one evacuated us out of Shasi."
Lieutenant-Commander Bates took her first to the Palace, where they
could sit and watch the lights of the war-ships anchored along the
Bund,--English, French, Dutch, Italian, Japanese and American. Megan
looked at the American cruiser with pride. More than any of the
others, of course, it contained steel, discipline, honor, handsome
men and sudden death.
"Have a cocktail," said Bates.
"Thanks, I believe I'll have a glass of sherry."
"Better have a cocktail. I knew by your voice over the telephone
that you thought you should not come. I see by your face you wish
now you hadn't. Suppose you be as reckless as you can and I'll be as
careful as I can and perhaps we'll strike a mean."
Megan was regretting she had come; in saying yes she had been
headlong, thinking only of a momentary escape from the dear Jacksons,
forgetting that she might find Bates' society infinitely more trying.
She was so stiff and formal that Bates himself began to have regrets.
He said to himself that she would be completely wet, and to brighten
up the prospect a bit he drank three Martinis.
They started for a place some one had assured him was amusing. Megan
wanted to ride in a rickshaw so they ambled up Nanking Road in the
rain, a European street of European shops, harshly lighted, with
glimpses down narrow side-streets of more diffused lights and
fluttering banners. Farther along the shops became all Chinese and
suddenly the street was a blaze of lighted turrets and towers. On
Bubbling Well Road opposite the dark emptiness of the Race Course
they found the place they were looking for.
In the cloak-room a flock of Chinese women fluttered about her. They
wore evening coats with great ruches about the necks and underneath a
hybrid garment, half of Europe, half of Asia, the costume of the
treaty port, a long coat dress with a stiff high collar. They were
thin, fleshless, with the bones of birds, their lacquered hair cut
short like men's, their skins seeming without pores, _mat_,
delicately yellow. Some had brought small children, dressed and
painted as miniatures of themselves. In the café they sat about in
chattering groups, and when the music began they fox-trotted and
Charlestoned with Chinese men in evening clothes or long skirts.
There were an equal number of Europeans about and the place was full
of smoke and jazz tunes. Down a long stairway at one end some
Russian Jewish strong men, coated with liquid powder and draped in
leopard skins, postured under a white spot-light. Bates found a
table, and Megan resigned herself to enduring Bates and the jazz and
the Jewish strong men. It was the things which made it like a dinner
at home she found hard to endure. But there was so much noise they
did not have to talk much, and a certain amount of time was passed in
dancing.
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 what-not. 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, cruel and Semitic. 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 tack 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.
[Illustration: Chapter V headpiece]