Megan slept heavily and as she came slowly out of unconsciousness she
checked off one by one the familiar sounds of the yamen, the farmyard
crow of the roosters, the soft thud of barefooted soldiers drilling
in the outer court, the ringing of the telephone and the voice of the
young orderly. Already these sounds meant a routine of life. She
lay in bed all morning and toward noon asked her amah for a hot bath.
Presently she heard the coolie carrying pails of water and emptying
them in a robin's-egg blue Soochow tub that stood in a little bath
closet off her room. She listened, thinking how much labor each
intervaled splash had cost and wondering at the simplicity of Eastern
life.
In this yamen of the General she had seen no sign of luxury or
magnificence. It was a house obviously made for a life which began
and ended with the rising and the setting of the sun. Early in the
evening she had heard a click of tiles from the kitchen court in the
rear, where some of the servants played mah jong, but that had soon
stopped and by ten o'clock the yamen became a collection of dimly
lighted rooms where people slept. Even the group at the poker game
had an air of enforced wakefulness, like children kept up at a
railroad station.
After her bath Megan sat down before Mah-li's little dressing-case
and brushed her hair into lacquered smoothness. Then she examined
the case and the lipsticks and eye-pencils it contained. She gave a
slow experimental stroke to her lips and, daring further, touched her
face with some of the pallid almond powder, put a faint touch of blue
on her lids. Her eyes stood out startlingly in a face of luminous
skin, of subtle transparent shadow; she saw that whatever the cause
she was changed, something had heightened, intensified, she was once
more beautiful.
Her eyes caught Mah-li's rings lying where she had left them. She
picked them up to examine the jade more closely. For all their high
polish they gave back very little light, rather light sank in them
and was lost; they retained obstinately their perfection of green.
Megan put them on her thin fingers so that when she saw Mah-li she
would have them ready to slip into her hand. While she waited for
more food, for something, it did not matter much what, to happen, she
stroked her lips fastidiously with the lipstick, looking at herself,
gratified by her appearance and by her gesture, which was like a
movement in a steady pantomime.
A tiffin came and was eaten, cleared away. She smoked five
cigarettes, watching the jade on her fingers as she smoked. Then
there was nothing to do. She lay down again, her hands behind her
head. How bewilderingly full a Western day is, how many things to do
and what little time to do them in! What does a Chinese lady's day
consist of? Small duties no doubt, little rituals, talk about
sewing, gardens, children, the everlasting preoccupations of women.
Mah-li's day,--what did she do, what did she think about? How could
she ever understand what Mah-li would think about! Yet it must be
simple too, if one only had the key. If there were only some way to
grasp what it meant, this life murmuring around her, a monotonous
melody, so widely spaced that years grew between the notes.
And there seemed to be three notes dominating: simplicity, sameness,
security. How long ago did they irrevocably decide, these people,
just what and how much to extract from the world about them, from the
jewels of the earth and growing things, from rivers, the seasons, men
and women? How long ago did they gather together ceremonials and
establish the relations of a man among men into a stylized routine,
in which the dignity of each is preserved intact like a fly in amber?
How did they unerringly know what fragile crystallizations of verse,
what massive undulations of form and color, would satisfy their
palates? How did they render their palates once and for all
incapable of satiety? Perhaps by turning every effort toward the
establishment of peace, peace in the land and in the heart, by
refusing action for the sake of decorum, by placing propriety above
love, by ignoring equality and freedom that the best may be
cultivated, and by refusing to be lured from their submissive
contemplation of life to the perils of ecstasy and aspiration.
"I wonder if I am right about them," thought Megan, "and should one
consider any group so enormous as a homogeneous unit. There is
surely room among them for greater variety than this. And so many of
them have already been assailed by contacts from another world, the
circle has already been broken in places. The General has spent
years in Europe. He speaks English perfectly, and it should be
impossible for him to speak a language so different in all its forms
from his own without experiencing certain modifications of thought.
One would imagine the language, even taken by itself, to be as active
as a cake of yeast. And he is troubled. That is just what is the
matter with him, he is disturbed as I could never even conceive of
being disturbed. No wonder he instinctively resists as best he can,
striking blindly, making foolish gestures, taking refuge in any
formula that presents itself. Poor General!
"And how very charming he is!"
[Illustration: Chapter XVIII headpiece]