The Bitter Tea of General Yen

Megan, drawing her chair over to the window, saw that the rain had given an air of transcience to the solid Chinese earth. For the moment it had stopped raining and all the pools reflected cloudy sky, making the roadway an unsubstantial track over emptiness; willow trees hanging over a wall at the far side of the road were silvered and delicate with moisture, and even the brutal fact of barbed-wire entanglements stretching along the foot of the wall was tempered by the fragility of tremulous drops. She had been told that the barbed-wire entanglements bounded the French Concession and that farther to the left the opening in the barricade marked the entrance to the Avenue Joffre, one of the chief thoroughfares of the Concession.

A French non-commissioned officer and several Senegalese soldiers stood at the entrance and examined, bored but relentless, all the traffic going in and out. All afternoon, in spite of bad weather, there had been a straggling passage of motors, rickshaws, wheelbarrows, and Chinese men in long black skirts, holding large umbrellas, fastidiously picking their way among the puddles. Megan since her arrival in the house, while talking to the Jacksons and when they had gone, unpacking, directing the amah’s pressing, was always conscious of the windows. In the dimness of the European house those gray windows opened strangely on to the Chinese road. She was more and more conscious of them as she did various small things that had to be done, longing to possess them undisturbed, and when finally she drew up a chair in the little drawing-room and rested her elbows on the sill, she looked out at that moment when China, washed in a luminous impermanency, presented itself to her not with the dull impact of a solid fact but with the peculiar intensity of a vision seen partly from within.