The Bitter Tea of General Yen by Grace Zaring Stone Page A

he had selected for president was a fine fellow, I knew him well, I hoped to work through him, or at least to save our property and all our gear for better days. But the General had no intention of my remaining. He had just sold out to the Nationalists, not from conviction but from pure political expediency. He saw they would win anyway. He felt himself particularly strong, particularly successful. He ordered me to leave. There was no getting around him this time; I had to go. An armed guard escorted me to the train and we parted,” the Doctor smiled bitterly, “with all the flowery speeches you could think of. And since then I have been waiting here to see what happens.”
    “Well, I’m surprised,” said Mrs. Jackson. “I thought the General was always a great admirer of yours.” It seemed that Mrs. Jackson was gratified by the General’s defection, whether because of a natural satisfaction in some one else’s disappointment or because it illustrated some conviction of her own that the Chinese could not be depended upon.
    “I don’t know,” replied Strike. “Certainly I was once an admirer of his.”
    “Well, what do you suppose caused him to turn on you?”
    “Oh, I don’t know,” Doctor Strike spoke in a low voice, and there was something painful to Megan about the puzzled, stilledlook on his face. The General’s defection from such a man seemed to her horrible. She wished Mrs. Jackson would leave Doctor Strike alone. But suddenly he lifted his head and flashed a look around at all of them. “It doesn’t matter what he thinks about me,” he said, “it doesn’t matter. I shall never give up hope of him. It is hard to make clear to others on just what we rest some of our convictions. They seem to rest on nothing tangible. Perhaps on instinct. Perhaps they are a truth which we remember, though it was spoken to us when we were unaware. I only know this, I shall never give up hope of the General. I know that there is something fine in him, yes, and even something superfine. It is as though under all the load of falseness his spirit continually cried out to me, ‘I’m here, I’m here, come and find me.’ ” The Doctor stopped abruptly and looked down, both hands clenched beside his plate. As Megan watched him he looked up again, not seeing her, and suddenly his face was touched by a fluttering, strange smile, as if before some more vivid memory of the General he found himself once again charmed and dismayed and hopeful.
    “Where is General Yen now?” asked Mr. Jackson. “Mrs. Jackson was reading in the paper that he had come to Shanghai.”
    Doctor Strike spoke with an effort at casualness:
    “Has he? I don’t know. He is probably with friends in the Chinese city.”
    Megan was annoyed with the Jacksons for continuing to talk about what was obviously so poignant a thing to Doctor Strike, but Mr. Jackson insisted:
    “He wouldn’t have been safe in the Chinese city until today. If he came while the Northerners had it he must have come incognito and gone into the Settlement, or into the French Concession. You probably know, Miss Davis, that the French have always kept their Concession separate from the International Settlement here in Shanghai. The paper said he had gone to aChinese hotel in the French Concession. Maybe he came to try to buy them out here.”
    “Perhaps,” said the Doctor shortly.
    They left the table and went back to the front room, where they could see the road outside and the refugees who flowed past now as inevitably as water down-hill. Against their steady stream the big armored trucks loaded with Annamites in mushroom hats lunged their way toward Siccawei. Doctor Strike watched them pass, never taking his eyes from them, as he smoked his pipe by the window. And Megan watched him, wondering how old he was, what his life had been, what his thoughts now could be, and filled at the same time by a complete satisfaction as though she had found something which she had felt all