Free The Bitter Tea of General Yen by Grace Zaring Stone Page B

in the Route Ghisi but a very insolent boy coming to the door told me he wasn’t in. ‘When will he be in?’ I asked. He said he didn’t know, so I pushed in past him and said I’d wait. I sat in a dark hall. The house seemed truly deserted by its masters; no one came in or out and I could hear behind a heavy door at the end of the hall the muffled voices and laughter of the servants. Every now and then I’d call the number one and question him as to the whereabouts of General Yen, but he would not tell me anything. I waited there from nine to eleven. Finally the number one came and asked me for five dollars. I gave it to him and he said General Yen was attending a banquet being given for him by friends at the Great Eastern Hotel.
    “I went there but when I spoke to the clerk he told me the General was not in the hotel. So I went over the hotel myself from floor to floor, till I heard sounds from a room that made me feel a party was going on inside. I pushed open the door in spite of all the room boys on that floor who had gathered to protest against it. Well, he was there. It was already late and the party had been going on a long time. The General was quite drunk, drunker than I have ever seen him. But he knew me at once. He insisted I sit down beside him and join in the festivities, he offered me food and champagne,—yes, he prefers champagne to samshu,—and he presented me to all and sundry as his old and honored friend. Of course I took nothing, and every time I tried to speak to him about the safe-conduct pass I wanted from him he would only answer by offering me champagne, or he would recite amorous verses, some of which he said he had written himself, and his friends would all laugh and the singsong girls would set up a din. It was very difficult. I began, I am afraid, to get angry. At one moment I had an impulse to pull everything off the table and throw chairs at each member of the party. I sat there sufficiently silent and stiff one would imagine to cast a damper on them. And perhaps I did, for suddenly the General grew silent too. He satand looked at the ceiling, a way he has when he is thinking, and I began to pray that I might be given the power to touch the good that is in him, that I know is in him. My prayer must have been answered. After a little time he reached over for a sort of menu card that lay by his place and called for some one to bring him a brush and ink. ‘What is this you are asking me for?’ he said.”
    Doctor Strike took a soiled piece of stiff paper out of his pocket and handed it around for them to see. He smiled at Megan, the smile she found so charming, for it was always a little tremulous and uncertain in the midst of his firm, lined face. He put the paper back again.
    “What time is it now?” he said.
    Megan looked at her wrist-watch.
    “Quarter to four.”
    “I don’t want to cut too close on time. If I can have that coffee I’ll get right along.”
    “You aren’t going there now, are you?” asked Mrs. Jackson, and without waiting to hear his answer she went out to hurry the preparations.
    “I must leave as soon as I can,” said Doctor Strike. “You see, it is like this. I did not feel myself that a safe-conduct pass alone in times like this would be much of a help. I spoke of this to the General, asking him if he couldn’t let me have one or two of his men as a body-guard. He hesitated about this, said he was leaving himself on a special train at six o’clock from the North Station and would have to take all his guard with him. I told him the orphanage was so near the station I could get my friends out and have his guard back by six o’clock. He said his guard were already at the station and unless I could get that far there was no way he knew of to communicate with them. ‘Then give me an order to them,’ I said, ‘I’ll pick them up there.’ He still hesitated, and then a peculiar thing happened. There was a young woman with him, one of his concubines, I