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 its 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.
"Miss Davis!" he cried.
Megan went to him and took both his outstretched hands.
"Don't get up, you are still ill. Were you badly hurt?"
"Yes, hurt," he repeated.
A little red plush stool, with a book on it, stood by his feet.
Megan pushed the book off and sat down. He still held her hand,
gripping it with nervous bony force, not taking his eyes from hers.
"I've prayed for you, my child," he said, "every hour since. I thank
God."
"It's all right," said Megan, "I'm quite safe."
"And you saved me!" he cried. "Yes, I know that. I can't forget it
ever. You saved me."
"Don't," said Megan, pained by his intensity, "Don't. What does that
kind of saving mean?"
"It means life," said Doctor Strike roughly.
His eyes searched her up and down, seeing her Chinese dress, even the
jade rings on her fingers.
"Did you get the General's telegram?" she asked.
"Three days ago."
"He picked me up at the station and took me on a train down to his
capital. I was very kindly treated."
"Good, good." The Doctor's eyes softened. "You were well treated.
That's good."
"Yes, very. He meant to return me. But trouble broke out there. An
uprising. We were trying to get away and just at the last moment he
was killed. An American who was with him, a Mr. Shultz, brought me
back."
But Megan saw that at the word of General Yen's death Doctor Strike
had ceased to listen to her. His eyes looked beyond her to take in a
greater perspective. She stopped and waited for him to speak.
"It is hard to believe," he said at last, "hard to believe. I've
known him to be in danger so often. But he has always got through.
Now he is actually dead. Well, then it is all over. It is finished.
That is what your gift of life means, my dear, it means we can still
go on, that the final reckoning, when our successes and our failures
are summed up, is not yet upon us.
"But he is dead and we can't do anything more for him, we can't help
him, we can't save him. It looks as though we had failed." The
Doctor stopped and his mouth of an old man trembled. "Perhaps we
can't be sure," he said in a lower voice. "Perhaps we can't be sure.
He said, 'I am the Way.' The way may stretch farther than we think.
It may not end here with the end of life. The General too believed
in a Way, another Way. Perhaps they meet." Doctor Strike dropped
his head in his hands. He had forgotten Megan. "We must trust to
the mercy of God," he said.
They sat in silence, both thinking of the General and of that mercy
to which they at last so unwillingly relinquished him, both only
fearful that since it must recognize justice, it might be less
perfect than their own.
THE END