Chapter XVII

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!"