The next morning she felt very much better, and after her European
breakfast she decided to go out into the garden. No one had told her
to keep to her room. As she opened her door she saw Mah-li, in a
little furred cape, crossing the outside room. Mah-li stopped.
"Good morning."
"Good morning, Mah-li."
"You are going out?"
"Yes, to the garden," said Megan. "I feel I would like a breath of
air."
"Do you want to come with me then? I am going into the city to buy
some things."
"I would love to."
Mah-li hesitated.
"Only I am not going to drive in the automobile, I am going in a
chair, because the streets where I am going are so narrow. Perhaps
you wouldn't like that."
"I would like it all the better."
"Come along then and I will order another chair."
Megan went with Mah-li across the flagged court she had seen from her
window and through a room furnished with heavy American metal office
furniture, with calendars, Chinese and English, large wall-maps, and
on one table a dark blue, glazed bowl with a twisted skein of yellow
plum. A few officers sat about, and Megan saw the telephone she had
heard ringing all during the day. A soldier sat before it with a pad
on the table beside him, and when he was not engaged in telephoning,
he drew pictures on the pad. They went on to an open space of bare
dirt and a few trees, where platoons of soldiers were being drilled
by a smart young gray-clad officer. They were of all ages, some,
Megan was sure, no more than twelve or thirteen years old. She
recognized the gate in the red stucco wall through which she had
come. They passed around the spirit screen, through the gate, and
stood in the roadway that followed the shore of the lake. Mah-li's
chair was waiting, and while the coolies in dark blue livery went off
to get a second chair Megan looked about her.
The lake was so near that just across the road stone steps led down
into it, under a great stone pailou with four columns. The sky was
cloudy, the water of the lake milky white, darkened by fleets of
little islands connected by shapely half-moons of bridges, or
causeways, planted in trees; low mountains hemmed it in with delicate
but firm corves of blue and fainter, smokier gray. At its far end
Megan could see the town, and all around the shores a succession of
gardens and groves from which rose low, tiled roofs of pleasure
houses. Before the yamen a backwater formed by a bend of the shore
was filled with drifts of lotus plants. She turned to look behind
the yamen where the hills were very close. On one of them stood the
trunk of a pagoda, shorn of all its roofs and bells, out of the top
of which sprouted a ferny growth. Megan was overcome by beauty, for
which nothing that Doctor Strike or the General had said had
adequately prepared her, but she thought she recognized in it
nevertheless a quality similar to that of the landscape seen from the
train. The one line that drew the eye upward was that of the pagoda
trunk, which even without its upturned eaves struck a note of
intended levity amid the great, flowing, earth-bound curves which
circled and so completely enclosed the horizon.
When the chair came Megan climbed in and Mah-li recommended that she
let down the small blinds before the windows on either side so that
her appearance would create no comment in the streets. The coolies
picked up the poles and started off with a peculiar jouncing motion
that gave Megan a headache. Every now and then at a cry they stopped
and shifted the poles to the other shoulder. She drew her blind back
a little so as to look at the lake. As they crossed one of the
causeways, planted in trees, they passed through more platoons of
soldiers marching in goose step, absurdly unmilitary creatures, with
ingenuous smiling faces. On the left side of the road were garden
walls enclosing summer-houses and gardens, most of them of ox-blood
red, with undulating dragon tops and odd-shaped windows elaborately
latticed. They came to the outskirts of the town, to narrow lanes
between small shops and whitewashed blank walls, sometimes with great
black characters painted on them, lanes so narrow they jostled
against the coolies with their carrying-poles. The streets grew more
crowded and noisy. Megan held open only a crack of space between the
blind and the window so that she saw in too quickly passing glimpses.
The sun came out and the chair began to get uncomfortably warm.
In a street in the heart of the town they stopped and got out. Megan
followed Mah-li into a shop through a wide portal of profusely carved
and gilded wood. In the gloom hundreds of jars on shelves around the
wall looked down at them like great glaucous eyes.
"This is a medicine shop," Mah-li told her. "One of the famous
medicine shops of China. I take Chinese medicines always. I am
afraid of foreign doctors."
"I hope you are not ill."
"I have a pain here that comes and goes, especially after I have
eaten a big meal." And Mah-li, opening her cape, laid her hand
wistfully over a section of her green satin coat.
"Dear me, I hope it is not serious."
The place was full of a pungent but stale medicinal odor as
unfamiliar as the flavor of Chinese dishes; it suggested roots and
herbs brewed a long time in ancient pots. In the close air of the
place it was overpowering. They crossed an open court where Megan
stopped to admire the intricate carving of the woodwork, angles of
temples and pavilions, all smothered in dense foliage, from which
peered tiny faces of men and animals, smiling from a serene secret
world. Inside the next building a clerk brought her a high blackwood
stool, where she sat while Mah-li made her purchases. For the pain
that came after a large dinner she was apparently buying all the
drugs in China. A clerk figured up her account on an abacus.
"Would you like to see more of the shop?" asked Mah-li.
Megan said yes, though she was giddy and tired. She followed Mah-li
into more rooms and across more courts, where unexpected sunlight cut
through the gloom in blue smoky shafts. At the end of a tunnel-like
passage Megan sniffed amid all the dead odors a sudden drift of musk,
savage and alive. In the court beyond were wooden barred cages along
the walls, in which large deer stood amid heaps of dirty straw,
looking out with beautiful eyes full of fear and a certain disdain.
"Oh, I love them!" She leaned against the bars, but they were quite
wild, they would not come to her hand stretched confidingly toward
them.
"I hope they are not going to kill them."
But no one answered her and turning she saw Mah-li had left. She
looked across the open court where coolies, naked to the waist,
pounded something in a mortar, and saw in the dusk behind them the
satin gleam of Mah-li's collar. Megan did not know whether to join
her or not. She made several further attempts to attract the deer
and turning was about to follow Mah-li when she saw that a man was
with her. They were so absorbed in what they said to each other that
distance condensed heavily between her and them and they seemed to
stand unattainably far. She stopped abruptly, and waiting, listened
to the low murmur of their unknown words. Presently they separated
and their heads, bowed in the repeated noddings of a ceremonious
farewell, were caught for a moment and illumined by a common shaft of
sunlight. Their delicate faces, their narrow eyes fixed on each
other in a locked and grave attention, glowed like those of
marionette lovers in a fairy play. Mah-li's companion was the
exquisite apparition who had brought Megan the cigarettes and
Shanghai papers.
Mah-li returned to her slowly, her eyes fixed on the ground. She
lifted her head and her look collided sharply with Megan's curious
gaze. "That was Captain Li," she said, "the General's aide."
Her eyes reminded Megan of the deer's eyes, holding a little of fear
and a great deal of scorn, the scorn of a simple organism for a more
complicated one. Megan felt a slight uneasiness.
"Oh, yes," she replied vaguely. "Tell me, do they kill these deer?"
"No," said Mah-li, after a slight pause in which she turned to look
negligently at the deer, "they use the horns only."
They left the medicine shop and once more got into their chairs.
Megan wondered if the shopping tour had been entirely for the sake of
that meeting. Having seen them together she could not doubt that
Mah-li and Captain Li were lovers, and yet she was not entirely
shocked. The relation of the General and Mah-li seemed to her quite
as irregular. She knew that this relation was only the outgrowth of
a patriarchal state of society, but she was inclined to look on the
man's side of it as tyrannical and an abuse of privilege. As to its
romantic importance she felt that it could not measure up in any way
to what she had read in the attentive faces of Mah-li and Captain Li.
But she realized her inability to weigh values with any such scales,
she knew that from a lack of experience she looked on all such
relations in a literary, a decorative, an unbrutal sense.
Mah-li stopped at one other shop where they sold fans. She bought a
black one with a multitude of tiny brilliant figures on one side and
gold characters on the other. In selecting it she had them bring out
quantities of fans while Megan sat beside her looking on. Mah-li did
not speak to her, she was very much occupied with the fans. She
carried an elaborate French purse, from one of the Russian shops of
Shanghai, one of green spangles with a marcasite clasp. She was very
proud of this and left it lying under piles of fans, so that she lost
sight of it and then had it searched for and finally recovered after
some confusion.
When the fan had been wrapped in cottony paper she stood looking at
it, then suddenly handed it to Megan. "I would like to give this to
you," she said. "Will you please accept it?"
Megan was not expecting this and said rather briefly: "Thank you."
When she got into her chair she looked at the fan thoughtfully.
Megan grew tired and very giddy as they made their way along in the
enclosed chairs, and an emanation a little sickening began to steam
up from the close-packed crowd about her. It struck her immediately
and instinctively as a certain cruelty, though she could not place it
very definitely unless it was in the overcrowding of any confined
city, where the relentless fecundity of the population continues to
turn out more human beings than there is need for. She felt it
strongly however in the straining back muscles of her bearers, in the
heads of the little scrambling children dusted with powder and
plastered with paper seals over deep ulcers, and finally she heard it
in the music of a wedding procession, in the midst of which rode the
bride in her sealed, red satin chair, music that was acrid,
irritating, aphrodisian. It was a great relief when they left the
city and came out on the open shore of the lake. The sun was
streaming through openings in the clouds and breaking into light and
shadow the sustained lines of the mountains and the curving shore.
Megan drew up the blind so that the cooler, cleaner air bathed her
head.
At the yamen Mah-li took her into one of the gardens a little way up
the hillside, where in a stone pavilion were benches and a center
table.
"I know you would like tea," she said. "They will bring it here to
us."
Megan leaned her head against a pillar and closed her eyes. The air
was full of the watery smell of the lake, and fatigue that was almost
an appeasement flowed over her. She heard the General's voice and
opened her eyes. He stood just outside the pavilion as if he had
stopped on his way through the garden.
"Have you been to the city?" he asked.
"Yes."
"You must not tire yourself. Remember, you are very important to me,
I cannot return you in anything but good condition."
"I suppose you mean I am now a sort of demonstration of your good
behavior."
"Just about that. By the way, you got the Shanghai papers?"
"Yes. Thanks very much."
"I suppose you enjoyed the experience of reading about yourself all
those extravagant things that are only said when one is dead?"
"I don't believe I enjoyed it. I kept thinking how dreadful it must
be for my family to have to read these things. And then, it wasn't
right somehow."
"When I was a child," said Mah-li, "I was very sick once and every
one thought I would die. So every one at the Mission was very kind
to me, especially people that had never been kind to me before. Even
the very cruel embroidery mistress brought me a large peony and laid
it on my pillow. But when I got better they were all just as they
had always been and the embroidery mistress made me work harder than
ever."
Megan watched Mah-li with a smile, as we watch children whose
gestures are so pretty, whose motives are so helplessly transparent,
that even their vanity, greed and deceit have the charm of being
reduced in scale and harmless. It seemed to her that her smile was
shared by the General.
[Illustration: Chapter XVI headpiece]