The Promise: A Novel of China and Burma (Oriental Novels of Pearl S. Buck) (13 page)

So when they had eaten of what had been prepared for them, great bowls of rice and meat, and cabbage, nothing could prevent Hsieh-ying from climbing in beside the big-faced fellow and Mayli found herself beside a pale thin young man who nodded to her without smiling when she took her seat.

It was true that this was a very different fellow. He knew his vehicle like a brother, and he handled it with care and the vehicle moved along as smoothly as a cat. It was the same road and no better than it had been, but how different it was! Mayli said, “You drive this, car as though you knew it.”

“I do know,” the young man said. “I am an engineer. I have a degree from an American college.”

“Then why are you doing this?” she asked.

Without knowing it she spoke in English and in English he answered her. “I was studying in America—my last year—and then I couldn’t go on. I had to come home and get into it. Well, I went to Chungking and waited and waited. Months. Nothing happened. This chance came and I took it.”

“Nothing happened?” she repeated.

His lip curled. “I hadn’t what it takes to get through to the big fellow,” he said.

“What it takes?” she repeated.

“Pull—money to open the gates—politics—something.”

“But it takes nothing,” she said. “I have nothing and I went in and saw them both.”

He shrugged his shoulders and kept his eyes on the road and was silent for a long time. Then, without moving his eyes from the road, he began suddenly to talk to her.

“Ours is the most beautiful country in the world. Look at those mountains! They are the most beautiful in the world. I was sick to get back home.”

Indeed all around them was very beautiful. The hills, bare of trees but covered with ruddy winter grass, were purple in the evening, a rich purple against a gilded sky. In the valleys the farmhouses clustered in villages, which lay before the mountains, and the hills were terraced into fields. Blue-clad farming folk stood at their doors to watch the trucks go by, and little children ran to the roadsides to shout to them and wave their arms. Bamboos were still green in the hollows of the hills, and now and then a temple roof lifted its high pure curve.

“This is what I came back for,” he told her, still in English. “I came back for this land and these people—not for any big men at the top.”

“Are you a communist?” she asked out of a second’s instinct.

“I don’t know what you mean when you say communist,” he retorted. “I’m a man of the people.” He was silent again for a long time and then he said, “Of the people—by the people—for the people.”

She recognized the familiar foreign words without knowing why he used them now. Nor did he explain them. They rode another half hour in silence, and he drew up smoothly outside the gates of a small town. “Here is where we camp tonight,” he said and leaped out.

She climbed down then and saw him, before she turned away, examining the vehicle as tenderly as though it were a living creature that belonged to him.

“Tomorrow I must ask him his name,” she thought, and she wondered that she had not asked it today. But she had not. Names seemed meaningless. They were all moving forward together and the name of any one was nothing.

S
HE SAID TO HERSELF
that certainly she could not sleep. Never in her life had she lain upon the ground to sleep. The four girls had piled some straw under her and when she had seen that all were in their places for the night, fed and cared for, she had lain herself down with her blankets wrapped about her. They slept in the back courtyard of a temple. The men were in the front, and this back room was very small so that half of the women slept outside, and she had chosen to be among these. The night was not cold and its silence was broken by the small waterfall of a brook which had been led through the court from the hillside above the temple. The tinkle of the water teased her ears for a while as she thought of the day.

“Certainly I cannot sleep,” she thought, but it did not seem to matter whether she slept or not. What did anything matter that might happen to one person? She lay thinking that for the first time in her life it seemed of no meaning what happened to her, no, nor even what happened to Sheng, wherever he was. They were being swept along in the same great wave westward. They might meet and they might never meet, and this, too, was without meaning. To go on, to find the enemy, to defeat that enemy, for them all this had become the whole of life.

… In the morning she woke first. For an instant she could not find herself. Upon the gray morning air, now very chill and damp, she heard the thin struggling crow of a young cockerel. Then she saw lights already lit in the temple and, lying a moment longer, she heard the deep droning chant of the priests at morning prayer. This was a Buddhist temple and the music, though so old that its source was far beyond the memory of any man now alive, still had foreignness in its cadence. It had come from India and India was in its sound. She had never seen India, nor ever thought of it except as a color upon the map at school. In this gray dawn, listening to the chant, she thought of India as the land toward which their faces were now turned. In ancient days men had gone from China to India to find a new and better god. An emperor had told his messengers, “I hear there is a god in India whom we do not have. Go and find him and bring him here to live with us.” So they had gone and found Buddha.

Now they went toward India, soldiers and not priests. Thousands of soldiers went even on foot, dragging artillery behind them by ropes and straps across their shoulders. They were camping somewhere now on the road. Thirty miles was their day’s march and they had set off two days earlier than the trucks, and the trucks had not caught up to them yesterday.

At her side Chi-ling lifted her head.

“Are you awake, captain?” she asked. For captain was the title that Pao Chen had given to Mayli.

“I am awake,” Mayli replied.

She put back her blanket and sat up. All about her heads lifted. They had not been sleeping either, but waiting, and when they saw her awake one by one the young women rose and folded their blankets and packed their knapsacks and bundles, and almost in silence they all did this.

And Mayli was among the first and she went to the temple kitchen. There she found two old priests already behind the great earthen stoves feeding in grass, and there was a cauldron of water very hot.

“Dip in, lady,” the old priest said, not looking at her because she was a woman. “That is water for washing.”

She saw a tin basin there and she dipped a gourd dipper into the hot water and she took the full basin and in a corner behind some bamboos, she washed herself and combed her hair. She had kept her hair long as it was, but at this moment combing it over her shoulders, she thought:

“What will I do with this hair? What can it be but a care to me?” For one moment she thought of Sheng and how he had liked her hair long.

“I like to know that a woman is a woman when I look at her,” he had said once when she had teased him by saying she would cut off her hair as many women now did.

But she thought of him for only a moment. Then she seized the long twist in her hand and went to where she had slept and opened her pack and took out the little scissors that Liu Ma had put in her sewing bag. Holding her hair in her left hand she cut it off at her neck with the scissors. The women watched her, but no one said a word. She went with the long hair in her hand into the kitchen and she went behind the stove where the little old priest was crouched, and before his astonished eyes she thrust her hair into the fire like grass.

He chuckled and she saw his toothless gums. “I swear it is the first time priest’s breakfast has been cooked by woman’s hair,” he said in the little high squeaking voice of a eunuch.

She smiled and went away again, and out in the court she shook her head, and the wind was cool in her short hair. She felt light and free, and from that day she held her head higher than before.

… On this day the Big Road, which had risen beneath them as they traveled it the day before rose still higher upon the mountains. They had come by small roads until a day ago, to escape the enemy’s bombing. But as they had come near to the border, the order came down to move south on the Big Road. Who had not heard of this Road? They all knew how it had been made by men and women whose tools were the spades and hoes with which until now they had tilled only the fields. Those who had no tools had used their hands.

Mayli rode in the second truck in which she had been the day before, and she was glad of that, for now the young engineer made her see that which without him she might not have seen with understanding. He was in the truck when she came out, after she had been busy with all she was responsible for. It was her pride that not one moment’s delay should be caused by her women, and so she stood waiting at their head outside the temple when Chung came out. He smiled ruefully when he saw her there, for his own garments were hastily put on and his hair stood up unbrushed.

“To get up early,” he groaned in pretended agony, “it is the curse put upon man.”

“I thought you were always earlier than I am,” she said.

He yawned loudly for answer and shook himself like a dog and took a piece of brown sesame bread out of his pocket and gnawed it while he found his place on the top of bales of goods. She took her own place when all her women were in their vehicles, and the young engineer sat waiting, his motor hot, and he very neat and clean and his hair smooth.

He looked at her with the smallest of smiles on his lips. “My name is Li Kuo-fan,” he said. “Called Charlie by the Americans.”

“Charlie?” she repeated. “It suits you better than Li Kuo-fan. Let it be Charlie. And I am Mayli, surnamed Wei.”

He nodded without repeating her name and the truck started.

She could see excitement in his long narrow eyes. “I’ve looked for this day,” he said. “I have wanted to travel the Big Road since it was made. This is my first chance. Maybe this is why I came along.”

The road rose ahead very rapidly, and yet its slope was clever and even. It clung to the sides of the steepening hills like a trail.

“See how it follows the footholds on the hills,” he said. “It was made by men who had walked these hills so long that they knew where foot could cling.”

So it had been. Generations of grass cutters had found the most hidden easy path for the feet, and generations of traders, following their pack mules on their way to the West, where they could sell their goods and find new goods to bring back, had searched out the possible ways, as they climbed the mountain ranges of the western wall.

“They asked foreign engineers how long it would take to make this Big Road,” Charlie said. “They considered their tools and said ‘Years.’ But the Chairman said, ‘It must be months. We will use our own tools.’ So it was months.” His eyes swept up the climbing agile road. “I’m proud of it,” he said, and she, looking at him, saw his eyes fill with tears and she was silent.

They passed in the middle of the morning a great hole in the road where yesterday the enemy had bombed it, and there they saw such men and women as had built the road. They were now mending the hole, and it was nearly ready for their vehicles. Who were these people? When the vehicle stopped she came down to rest herself and to tell her women that they too could come down since it would be awhile before they could go on. She saw the rugged blue-clad crowd busy at their task, and she went over to a woman who sat flat on the earth, pounding rock to pieces with a harder, larger rock. The woman was young, but the rock dust had made her face and hair gray, and it clung to her eyebrows, and it was thick on her shoulders. Near her in an old basket a little child slept, under a torn quilt. When Mayli came the woman looked up shyly not sure whether this was a foreigner or what. But Mayli spoke to her politely. “Have you eaten?” she asked. Now this was the salutation of the north, and the woman answered it as a question.

“I have worked all night,” she said. “And I eat while I work.”

Now that she perceived that Mayli spoke her own language a wide bright smile came over her dusty face and her teeth were very white and even.

“And the child?” Mayli asked, astonished.

“He sleeps here well enough,” the woman said laughing.

“But your family?” Mayli asked.

“There is my man and me and the older two, and we all work here on the Big Road,” the woman said with pride. “We helped to make it.”

“Like this?” Mayli asked.

“I pound rock and my man carries earth,” the woman answered. “The girl pounds rock over there, and the boy carries what we pound.” She nodded to a girl child a few yards away, who had stopped to stare at Mayli.

“Which is your man?” Mayli asked.

The woman pointed with her chin at a man digging with his hoe in another place. He filled his bamboo baskets and lifted the pole on his shoulder and carried them and emptied them where the earth had been blown away.

“We live not far from here,” she said, pointing again with her chin, “and when they call for the road to be mended, we lock the door and all come together. Let the enemy blow their holes—we can mend them.” She laughed and again her white teeth shone out of her gray and dusty face, and she began pounding. Men and women, they worked with the unhasting speed to which they were used and in less than an hour more there was a bridge of earth and rock, narrow but firm.

“These are the people to whom I belong,” Charlie said when they went on again.

“Were your parents really like these?” she asked.

His thin lips grew more thin. “The people are my father and mother,” he said shortly. It was all she was ever to know of his forebears.

This day was one like the many that came after it. If she had been timid or afraid, she would have been often afraid, for that road now soared so high that to travel upon it was more like flying than riding upon rock and earth. More than a few of her women were sick and they leaned over the side of the vehicles where they rode and vomited heartily. But they did not complain and they would allow no delay. Once when the road marched along the top of a high ridge between higher mountains, Mayli chanced to look back, and she saw An-lan, her pale face set in terror. Indeed it was a cause for fear to see how the ridge dropped down on both sides of the narrow rough road. She called back, “An-lan, An-lan, can you go on?”