The Promise: A Novel of China and Burma (Oriental Novels of Pearl S. Buck) (30 page)

Sheng lifted his eyes upon the Englishman and let them move up and down that tall thin young man, who had not understood one word of what was being said. Now he stood there grinning like a boy, full of good nature.

“Who is this long white radish?” Sheng asked Charlie.

“I stumbled upon him in the forest, and he nearly choked me, mistaking me for a devil, and then he came with me when I persuaded him otherwise,” Charlie said.

The two Chinese and the Indian stared at Dougall and he stood patiently, still good-natured, under their stares.

“Does he say why they left us without a way of escape after we had rescued them?” Sheng asked.

“I have not asked him,” Charlie replied.

“Ask him now,” Sheng commanded.

So without ado Charlie changed his tongue and he asked the Englishman, “Why did you fellows destroy the bridge after you had gone over and so left us with no retreat, when we came to save you?”

Dougall opened his blue eyes wide. “I’m sure we couldn’t have done that,” he said.

This Charlie told to Sheng, changing his tongue again.

“Does he not know what happened?” Sheng asked.

“He knows nothing,” Charlie replied.

“This fellow,” Sheng declared after a moment, “is a deserter. Ask him why.”

“Why have you left your army?” Charlie asked Dougall.

The young face of this Englishman burned red again under the thin white skin. “I was fed up,” he said. “Any one could tell we were licked,” he said again after a moment. He examined his long pale hand. It was covered with red scratches and the nails were broken and black. “It was simply too silly,” he said at last. “The commanders themselves didn’t know what they were doing they were retreating so fast. It was every man for himself.” He smiled, shamefaced. “After all,” he said in his bright confident way. “What’s the use, you know? If we win the war, this’ll all come back to us. If we lose—well—” he shrugged: “Then what would be the use of fighting for this bloody bit of heathen ground?”

This Charlie translated to Sheng and Sheng groaned in his weakness. “Ask him what he will do now,” he commanded again.

“What will you do now?” Charlie asked.

“I?” Dougall lifted his head and looked at one face and another. “Why, I’ll simply come along with you, if you fellows don’t mind. It was most awfully lucky my finding you—I mean, because you can speak English, you know.”

“He says he will come with us,” Charlie told Sheng.

Sheng closed his eyes.

“He did give you some white pills he had,” Charlie said, “and it is also true that he has made your bed of those ferns and he has held your arm in the sunshine to heal it. Can a man help it that his mother gave birth to a fool?”

Sheng smiled bitterly without opening his eyes. “Since he is our ally,” he said, “let him come.”

Two days later they set out for the west again. Sheng was on his feet, weak but ready to live.

T
HE GENERAL LOOKED AT
the American. He made his face blank to hide the repulsion and the refusal which tingled inside him to his very fingertips. He wanted to say what he felt, that nothing this American could do would save any of them. He wanted to say what they all knew, that the battle here had been lost before any of them ever trod upon the soil.

“I have sacrificed one division,” he said. “Not one of the Fifty-Fifth has returned. Where are they?”

“Heaven knows,” the American replied. “I have never heard of such a thing as a division disappearing, but so it is.”

The General determined to be patient. “It is impossible for one army alone to fight, you understand,” he said. He made his language simple and plain for this foreigner. The foreigner was proud of his Chinese but he did not know that he spoke as a foreigner does, having learned from simple men. “You understand? I am given orders to hold a sector of the line. I hold. My men fight without regard to life. Then we are given the order to retreat so that the line can be straightened. What do we find? While we have been fighting our allies have been retreating without notice to us. We have to give up what we have been holding at the cost of our lives. Is this the way to fight a winning war?” The American’s thin cheeks flushed. He did not answer.

“You white men,” the General said distinctly. “You are determined to save each other’s faces.”

He slapped his knee and rose, saluted with sharpness, wheeled and went away. He nodded at a guard curtly, his own guard waiting at the door fell in behind him and he marched to his own quarters, holding his slight body very straight. He had now made up his mind that he would never see his wife or his sons again. The conviction made him cold inside as he had once felt when he had eaten a foreign frozen dish—ice cream, they called it. The pit of his stomach felt like that now. He suddenly wished that he had a woman to talk to as he might talk to his wife. His wife, though younger than he by six or seven years, was sensible and quick to think of a way out of trouble. But she was thousands of miles away. He entered his own gate and passed the guards without seeing them. In his tent he sat down and closed his eyes and rubbed both hands slowly around and around his head. He was really desperate. Sheng had never returned. Meantime the rate of advance of the enemy was tripling itself. At first the advance had been at not more than ten miles a day. Then it was twenty and now it was thirty and forty miles a day.

He sat still, thinking, his hands outspread on his knees. He would echelon his men along the line of the Lashio road. At least he would protect that road, “since they never think of us,” he muttered, “let us think of ourselves.”

He suddenly felt the impulse to weep and was surprised at himself. “It is this eternal retreat,” he told himself. “I must get into action. Well, I will act for myself.”

He unbuttoned the collar of his uniform. It was very hot, day and night hot, and while he did not mind heat, for his own town at home was at the bottom of a valley between two mountain ranges, still it was not like this. The snakes alone were an enemy and the mosquitoes another. Two nights ago he had been bitten by a scorpion on his ankle and it was still swollen. Only the quickness of one of his men who had pulled out the sting with his thumb nails had kept it from being dangerous. He sighed and thought of his lost men. Sheng was lost, that great brave fellow from the Nanking hills! He thought of Sheng and then it occurred to him that he should tell that pretty girl about him—warn her, at least. If he was never to see his wife again, she need not be jealous. He shouted and an aide ran in.

“Send Wei Mayli to me,” he said shortly. And then for an excuse he said, “Tell her I wish her to go as a messenger for me to the American. Her English is good enough—I cannot understand his Chinese.”

He thought with a sparkle of pleasure that he would send Mayli and shame the American by saying that he could not understand his Chinese of which he was so proud. He smiled, and a little of his old quiet arrogance came back to him.

… “Yes, of course I will come,” Mayli said. She wiped her hands on her apron as she spoke. “I will only change my coat—it is blood-spattered.”

The messenger nodded, and she hastened toward the operating room where a moment before she had been helping Chung deliver a Burmese woman of a large fat boy. The woman’s husband was a Chinese merchant. He was waiting now at the door and stopped her as she passed.

“Tell me,” he urged, “has the child a mole on his left ear lobe?”

“Now have I time to look for that?” she said and laughed.

But the man was grave. “You do not know these Burmese women,” he said solemnly in his old-fashioned Chinese. He had not been home for many years and he still spoke as he had when he was a boy before he set out to find his fortune. “How shall I know this is my son if there is not my mark on him?” he asked.

He turned his head and there on his left ear lobe was a round black mole with hair growing out of it.

“But not every child you have will bear your mark,” she cried. “What—will you test your wife’s virtue by a mole?”

She laughed again but still the man would not laugh. “Look for it, for I do not want to waste any red eggs on another man’s son. She is pretty and young and I cannot always be at home.”

She pulled away from him, promising, and in the room she found Chung carefully washing and polishing his instruments before he put them in the closed can which was his sterilizer.

“Chung, the General has sent for me,” she said. She began to scrub her hands in the bucket of hot water which stood on a bench. “Oh, Chung, is it Sheng, do you think? Why else should the General send for me? I have not seen him for weeks.”

“Sheng should be back by now, certainly,” Chung said. It had been strange to see so many men march away and not one return, no wounded, none living. This had been a strange pause, indeed—no orders to move, only waiting here now for nearly eight days.

The women came in and lifted the stretcher on which his patient lay and took her away. He had been undecided whether or not to waste anaesthetic on her. Then he had done so. After all, it was a boy.

Mayli reached for a clean uniform and he turned his back modestly. He was never sure whether or not she was immodest or only unthinking, but there was no need for him to find out. In a moment she was clean and at the door again, when suddenly the child wailed. He had been forgotten and was lying wrapped in a towel on some straw in a corner.

Chung hurried toward the child and picked him up. “After all this trouble you are forgotten,” he remarked. Mayli paused, and ran back again. “Give him to me,” she said. “I will tell Pansiao to look after him until I come back.” She seized the plump little bundle and hurried toward the door once more. There outside was the patient father and seeing him she remembered what he had wanted. “Here,” she said, “see for yourself.”

What small chance there was that the child had inherited a birthmark she knew, but she moved the end of the towel from the black head and there was the little left ear, perfect except for a tiny dot of black.

“It is here,” Mayli cried with joy, “so small that it can hardly be seen, but then he is so small.”

The Chinese merchant rose, felt in his bosom for his spectacles which he put on and then he examined the tiny lobe.

“He is my son,” he said, solemnly. A smile came over his face. “My first,” he said. He put out his arms. “I will take him.”

“But I was about to wash him and put on his clothes,” Mayli protested.

“I will take him,” he repeated firmly. “I can wash him and put on his clothes.”

She gave him the child and watched for a moment while he strode away, his robes swinging, the child laid across his two arms like tribute being borne to an emperor. He disappeared down the street and she came to herself. How foolish was life, she thought, that in the midst of war and death and evil news of every kind, one could forget for a moment all except that a son had been born to a man again!

She hastened on, smiling and sad.

… “Of Sheng I have heard not one word,” the General said. Mayli clasped her hands a little more tightly on her lap. He was not looking at her. “What there is between you two I do not know,” he went on, “but I ought to tell you that not one man of his command has come back. They went across the river of course with the allies, but by now I ought to have had Charlie Li here at least to tell me that they were rejoining us. It is in my mind to put my armies along the Lashio road, but how can I do this unless they return? The line will be too thin. Nevertheless I will do it.”

“Does that mean we move?” she asked.

“It means we move at once,” he replied. “And I want you to go for me, as my private messenger, you understand, and speak to the American in his own language so that I can be sure he understands and tell him that I move, regardless of all others. I am wearied of this constant retreat. I will retreat no more. I will take my own stand and guard the borders to our own country and let the white men do what they like.”

He was very tired, she could see that. His bony face, always thin, was now a series of hollows and cups, the temples hollow, the cheeks hollow, hollows under the jawbones and under the ears. But the retreat had been swift. She had been troubled enough at it herself, moving every few hours as the orders came down. How could Sheng find her? She was a hundred miles from where he had left her.

“Shall I go to the American now?” she asked.

“Now,” he answered, “for tomorrow we march.”

She rose, and he lifted his haggard eyes to regard her. “I think I shall never see my wife and children again,” he said abruptly.

“Do not give up hope,” she said quickly.

“I have not given up hope,” he replied, “but hope has been torn away from me.” He hesitated and then went on. “And I am afraid,” he said, “that this young man—this Sheng—whom you—”

“Oh no,” she said. “Don’t speak of him—I do not give up hope. You have no idea how strong he is—he cannot be killed.”

“Yes,” he said. “He is strong. But then—so am I.”

“Shall I go?” she urged. She was uncomfortable. This man was deeply moved and desperate. She was not afraid of him, but he was clutching at anything, at anybody. “I will go and come back quickly,” she said, and went away.

She knew of course where the American was. They all knew that he lived in a little tent like any common soldier’s tent. It was under a banyan tree for coolness, and through the arches of this great tree with its hundred trunks she now walked. She was not afraid of the American, although she had never spoken to him. Gossip had made him known, the talk of men and the talk of women. She knew that he made friends easily with the common soldiers and not so well with the officers. “The old dislike of equality,” she thought with scorn. “The white men want us all to be common folk so that they can continue to be our lords.”

When she came to the white guard at the entrance of the tent she said curtly in English, “I come as a messenger from the Chinese General.”

“Righto,” the guard replied, without saluting, and went inside. In a moment he came back. “The boss says to come in,” he said. She went in and there she found the American sitting on a folding stool, eating a green-skinned melon. Inside the melon the meat was a clear golden yellow. He looked up, smiled and rose, the half-melon in his hands.