The Promise: A Novel of China and Burma (Oriental Novels of Pearl S. Buck) (5 page)

“Of what use are you?” Sheng now inquired of the small dog. Its large brown eyes hung out of its small face like dark glass balls, and its body quivered. When it heard Sheng’s voice, it put out a paw and touched his foot delicately, then wrinkling its black nose, smelled him and shrank back. Sheng burst into loud laughter, and at that moment Mayli opened the door. She had put on an apple green robe and her hair was bound in its coil on her neck. On her finger was a ring of green jade.

“Why are you laughing at the little dog?” she asked.

“I am too strong for him,” Sheng said. “He smelled me and drew back afraid.”

“He is a wise little dog,” Mayli said.

She came in and picked up the tiny creature and sat down with him on her knees and Sheng watched her.

“Why do you hold a dog as though it were a child?” he asked. “It is not fitting.”

“Why not?” she asked. “He is clean—I washed him only yesterday.”

“That also,” Sheng replied. “To wash a dog as though it were a child! It makes the hair on me rise to think of it. To treat a beast as though it were human—is this decent?”

“It is a nice little dog,” Mayli said fondling it. “At night it sleeps on my bed.”

“Now that is the worst of all,” Sheng said impatiently.

Mayli did not cease to smooth the silk smooth hair of the little dog which lay curled tightly on her knees. “You should see the foreign ladies,” she said smiling, “how they love their dogs! They lead them on chains, and they put little coats on them when it’s cold—”

Sheng gave a loud snort. “I know that you learned all the ways of the foreigners,” he said. “But of them all this love of a dog is the one that sickens me most.”

Suddenly as he spoke he leaped up from his chair and in one instant before she had time to see what he did he seized the dog from her lap and flung it across the room and out of the door into the little pool in the middle of the court.

“Oh you—you beast, yourself!” Mayli cried and she ran into the court and took the dripping, crying creature out of the water. But now she could not hold it against her silk gown, and so she cried out again for Liu Ma, and Liu Ma came running.

“Fetch a towel!” she commanded the old woman. “Look what Sheng has done—he threw my little dog into the cold water.”

But for once the old woman did not take her mistress’s part. “Let him be dried in the sun,” she said coldly. “I am busy and I cannot take my time to dry a dog.”

“The old woman is wise,” Sheng said.

But Mayli herself ran for a towel, while the dog shivered and looked sadly at Sheng as he stood there, and then Mayli rubbed the dog dry and laid it down on the towel she first folded upon a stone which the sun had warmed.

And all through this Sheng stood watching her as she moved so swiftly and willfully and full of grace. She was as foreign, he thought, as though she had no blood of her people in her body. For the first time it seemed to him that perhaps he was not wise to love her and that if he married her his life would be war at home as well as on the battlefield.

“I came to tell you, before all this foolish noise, that I am to be sent with the armies to Burma,” he said.

She forgot the beast at the sound of these words, and she stopped where she was in the court, and the sunlight fell on her green robe and on her hair. He stood in the doorway, watching her.

“When do you go?” she asked.

“In a few days,” he said, “two or three—perhaps at most four.”

She sat down on a porcelain garden seat and looked up at him. The sun shone down on her fine smooth skin, and he saw each hair of her long straight eyelashes, black against her pale skin, and he saw each hair of the narrow long brows above the eyes. Into her eyes he looked, and the white was white and the black divided from it clearly. But now that he looked into the blackness of her eyes, he saw that there were flecks in them, like light.

“You have gold in your eyes,” he said. “Where did it come from?”

“Do not talk about my eyes,” she said. “Tell me why it has been decided that you go so quickly?”

“It only seems quick to us,” he said. He came out and drew up the stool upon which Liu Ma had been sitting asleep and he sat down, too. The little dog crawled, still shivering, nearer its mistress and away from him, but neither of them thought of the dog now.

“It has been talked of for weeks,” he said. “My own General is against it. But the One Above is for it. And when that one says ‘yes,’ what ‘no’ is strong enough to balance it? We go.”

These words, “We go,” he said so firmly and his face was so stern as he did so, that Mayli said not one word. She looked at him, seeing in a moment what her life would be without this man with whom she quarreled every time he came. But when did she ever wish a quiet life?

“So now we go to ally ourselves with white men,” Sheng said.

“Why is your General against this?” she asked.

Sheng reached to the branch of bamboo above his head and plucked a leaf which he tore to shreds as he spoke, and she sat watching not his face but his hands as they moved, with strong slow strength. The thing they tore was slight and fragile, but he tore it to pieces with precision. His hands were delicately shaped, as the hands of all were in her country, even the hands of the sons of farmers.

He did not look at her. Instead he too watched the bits of green that fell away from his hands. “My General says that already it is written that the white men will fail,” he said.

“Oh, why?” she asked. Her mind flew across the sea to the land where she had spent most of her life. When she was born her mother had died, and before she was a year old her father had taken her to America. The first words she had spoken were in the language of that land, and they were taught her by a dark-faced woman who was her nurse. The Chinese nurse whom her father had brought with him to care for her had grown sick for home by the time the ocean was crossed, and he had sent her back from the coast. And now Mayli thought of those great cities and the factories and the rich busy peoples, and all the wealth and the pride everywhere.

“How can the white man fail?” she asked.

“It is so written,” Sheng replied.

She curled her red lip at one corner of her mouth. “I am not superstitious,” she said. “There must be a better reason for me than the prophecy of some old geomancer who sits on a street corner and wears a dirty robe. Has your General ever spoken to a white man—has he ever been in those countries?”

“I do not know,” Sheng said. “I do not ask him anything.”

“Then how does he know?” she asked.

“He has seen them here on our own earth,” Sheng told her. He blew the bits of green from his hands and then he sat, his fingers folded together, and now as he spoke he looked at her, but she knew he was not thinking of her. He was thinking of his own words and their meaning.

“My General has seen the pride of the white men in Shanghai and in Hongkong and he has seen them on the pieces of land they took from our ancestors and made into their own cities. He says they have always considered us as dogs at their gates, and he says that wherever they have lived among the peoples near us, whom they have ruled, they have so held them as dogs, and that now those people will join even with the enemy they hate, because more than they hate the enemy they hate the pride of the white man who has despised them and their ancestors.”

This Mayli heard without understanding it. How could she understand it when all her life until now she had lived in a country where all had been kind to her? Her father had held an honored place in the capital city and she was his daughter, and if the citizens of the city despised the dark ones who were their servants, was that to say they despised her?

“The people of Mei do not despise us,” she said. “They despise only the black-skinned people.”

“Well, we are not going to Burma to fight beside the people of Mei,” Sheng replied. “It is the people of Ying who rule there and it is the people of Ying whom those people hate.”

“There is no great difference between these two peoples of Mei and Ying,” she said.

“If that is true,” Sheng said, “then it is the worst news you could have told me.”

She fell silent, biting her red lip and thinking what to say next. “Perhaps it does not matter whether we are liked or not,” she said. “Perhaps the only thing we need to know is the strength of the peoples against our enemy. If the people of Ying are against the Japanese, then we must be with them.”

“If we can win with them,” he said gravely.

“Who can conquer the peoples of Ying and Mei together?” she cried. She remembered again the great factories, the iron wheels of factories, the terrible precision of the wheels, shaping out iron and steel as though they were wood and paper.

“The dwarfs have conquered thus far,” Sheng said in a low voice. “Do not forget—the dwarfs took them by surprise. Well, you say, any man may be taken by surprise once. But on the same day and hours later, they were taken by surprise again in the islands to the south. Wing to wing, their flying ships sat on the ground again and once more the dwarfs destroyed them. It is not enough to be strong only! One must also be wise.”

He rose in sudden impatience and stretched out his great arms. “Look at me!” he commanded her. “Look at this great piece of meat and bone that I am! Is it enough that I am so huge? Is it enough that I can bend a piece of iron in my two hands? If I am a fool, is all this size and strength of any use to me? No, I must have wisdom here!” He tapped the side of his great skull as he spoke.

She did not answer. Instead she sat looking up at him as he stood against the sky above her, and she was filled with the sense of his power. How many times she had asked herself if this man had power in him! Had he not? She trembled and she felt the blood run up her body to her face. He dropped his arms and stood there, looking down on her, and she rose quickly and slipped sidewise as though to escape him. For not once did she dare risk his power over her. He must not touch her.

She walked back and forth in the little court once and twice and the small dog dragged itself to its feet and walked after her, still shivering. Then she stopped and sat down on the edge of the pool and she put her arms about her knees. She did not look up at him but he could see the reflection of her face in the still water of the pool. He sat watching this clear reflection. Since it was winter there were no lotus leaves, and the pool was a clear mirror under the sky.

Liu Ma came out, her under lip thrust far beyond her upper one, and she set down the tray she carried on the garden table near the porcelain seat. She poured the tea from a blue and white teapot into the bowls and then to show that she did not approve of these two sitting together in talk, she did not hand them their bowls, but went away again into the kitchen. In a moment the quick smoke of grass-fed fire poured out of the low chimney and hung above the court like a cloud. Mayli laughed.

“Liu Ma hopes that the smoke will choke you,” she said to Sheng.

“I am too good to that old crone,” Sheng said with heat. “I give her very often a silver coin to make my way here easy.”

“She is old,” Mayli said, “and she loved my mother, and she does not think I am good enough to be my mother’s daughter. She thinks I am too foreign.”

“And it may be that you are,” Sheng retorted.

He saw the painted reflection of her pretty head shake itself in the water, and then he saw her reflected face grow grave.

“Whether one is foreign or not,” she said, “today what does it matter? It is not sensible any more to hate something—or some one—because he is foreign. It is better to ask ourselves whether we should not ally ourselves with the strongest people in the world, and these are still the peoples of Ying and Mei.”

“Are they so strong?” he asked. “Then why have the dwarfs beaten them so easily, and us they have not beaten although we have fought all these years?”

“Do not take a trick for a victory,” she said. “I know so well those people of Mei! It is quite easy to believe that the enemy tricked them. They are so rich, so used to their own skills and power, that they would not believe they could be tricked. But now in their fury they will be twice as fierce and ten times as wary. In one day they learned what it might have taken them a year of usual war to learn.”

“It is a pity for us that it had to be learned at such cost to us also,” Sheng said grimly. “With a few of those airships that were destroyed in an hour or two, we could have driven the enemy out of our land. It is not only they who were the losers.”

Mayli dipped her hand into the pool and stirred the water gently in small circles. “All that you say is true,” she said, “and yet when I remember them—I know they cannot lose—no, whatever has happened, and whatever will happen, they will be the victors in the end and for this we must stay with them.”

“What do you remember?” he asked. The tea grew cold in the bowls but neither of them thought of it. The small dog had lain down on the folded towel and now it rose again and whimpered beside its mistress but she did not hear it. She let her hand lie in the water, as she remembered, and she sat gazing across the court, seeing only what she remembered.

“It is the most beautiful country,” she said. “I do not love it as my own, and yet I can say that. The great roads go winding over the hills and the mountains and the deserts and the plains. The villages are so clean, and the people are so clean and fed well. Upon the land the farmhouses are clean, too, and there are no beggars with sores and no hungry wolves of dogs. The forests are deep and the streams are clear—”

“These will not win a war,” he said sternly.

“No, but there are the factories,” she said quickly, “the factories make ships and automobiles—everybody has automobiles, and they know all the strength and the secrets of machines. Why, they can make enough airplanes to cover the earth!”

“It is strange they have not been able to send us a few,” he said bitterly.

“No, but they have not begun yet,” she cried. “You do not understand—” she cried. “A people who are so happy and so well fed—they cannot wake up in a moment. They must suffer and feel the war on their own bodies first—”