Mrs. Pollifax on the China Station

Li, Mr. Kan ,
and the tour group— she said with feeling, ”Pure bliss! It’s safe to speak
English now?”
    He gestured around them at the empty pale countryside. ”Who’s to hear?”
    And so they began to talk. Of families. Of what they had left behind to
come to China. Of the desert. ”The Taklamakan desert,” Peter told her, ”has
been called a hungry and ravenous monster. It’s considered far more treacherous
than the Gobi , it eats people and cities,
swallowing them whole.”
    ” Cities?” she said incredulously.
    He nodded. ”Entire cities that flourished in the days of the Silk Road.
They find them now and then, the archaeologists, and there are probably more
treasures buried there still than you or I could ever imagine, as well as the
bones of men and animals caught in its violent dust and earth storms.”
    She shivered. ”We’re not on the desert yet, are we?”
    ”No, and won’t be. Only its rim.”
    ”And you and X—you won’t cross it, will you?”
    ”No—skirt it.”
    As they talked, their voices low in keeping with the rhythm of the
plodding donkey and the clouded moon binding them in its spell, she thought and
spoke of Cyrus.
    ”Why don’t you marry him?” asked Peter bluntly.
    ”If we get out of—if I get out of this in one piece, I intend to,” she
announced with a firmness that startled her. ”It seems to me now that I
hesitated—oh, for all the wrong reasons. Foolish ones.”
    ”Someone said that if the heart is engaged—”
    ”Yes,” she said, nodding. ”And mine is. I hesitated, wanting to be sure,
feeling—oh feeling that life would be different, changed, if I married, and
that I might have to give up—all this.”
    ”All this,” murmured Peter, and suddenly smiled. ”So you’re an
adventurer, too!”
    ”Yes—no—yes, of course I am,” she admitted, laughing. ”But what I
overlooked—”
    ”Yes?” he asked curiously.
    ”What I overlooked,” she said simply, ”is change . . Meeting
Carstairs and becoming useful to him changed me so that nothing was or ever
could be the same again.” Like a kaleidoscope, she thought, remembering
that simile following her first adventure. ”But meeting Cyrus also changed me
so that nothing will or can be the same ever again. Nothing. Not even
this,” she added ruefully. ”Which is what I didn’t see clearly until now.”
    ”You’re not sorry you came?” he asked.
    She shook her head. ”Oh no! There were things I had to learn, as you can
see. Important things. Even at my age!”
    He said with a sigh, ”I think my parents stopped learning a long time
ago, which made me a misfit, a changeling, and restless. A very conventional middle-class
family, except they did send me to Harvard where I didn’t belong either but—”
    ”But where you learned to speak Chinese.”
    ”Yes. Funny, isn’t it? It came so easily to me, without any classes or
lessons at all, as if I’d spoken and read it before and it was already etched
in my subconscious waiting to be rediscovered. You must know the very Eastern
theory that we’ve lived many lives; can you believe in that at all?”
    ”Easily,” she said, nodding. ”For a long time I’ve found it a very
supportive, meaningful explanation for the curious things that happen to
people: the tragedies, the uncanny rescues, and coincidences in life.” She
laughed suddenly. ”And Cyrus has a rather mandarin look about him,- he’s a
large man and very American, but there’s an oriental cast to his eyes that drew
me from the beginning. Just as I’ve been drawn to the country of China itself,”
she added meditatively.
    ”Think we’ve known each other before?” asked Peter, with a chuckle.
    She thought without saying it aloud: yes it’s possible, why else do I
feel so connected with you—suddenly and inexplicably—and so alarmed about what
lies ahead for you ? There’s an understanding between us, unspoken but
familiar, that I’ve experienced only with Tsanko and with Cyrus. Aloud she
said quietly, ”It’s quite possible, yes. A sense of fatefulness— of stars
crossing—happens rather frequently to me these days. I lived a very prosaic
life, you see, and then suddenly I too met Carstairs, and I’ve often wondered
if this strange new life was waiting for me all the time during those years I
lived so quietly. I’ve wondered,” she added softly, ”how much choice we really
do have about some of the large events in our lives. Is Peter Fox your real
name?”