The Promise: A Novel of China and Burma (Oriental Novels of Pearl S. Buck) (7 page)

“I went outside for a moment to see which way the enemy came, and they were there over my head,” the man cried. At this moment he came upon a small piece of red flowered cloth. “It is my little son’s jacket!” he screamed.

By now Sheng had seen a carrying pole lying beside a dead farmer. This man’s baskets of rice on either end of the pole were as smooth and whole as when his hands had made them so, but a piece of metal flying through the air had caught him between the eyes, and had shaved off half his head as cleanly as a knife parts a melon. So Sheng took the pole and began to dig and Mayli when she saw the flowered cloth fell to her knees on the rubble stones and dug with her hands, too.

Soon the child was uncovered, and the young father lifted him up in his arms. But the child was dead. Not one of them spoke, and the young man lifted the child up and sobbed to the heavens over them, until none of them could keep back tears from his own eyes. Mayli wiped her eyes with her kerchief, and Liu Ma picked up her apron. But Sheng put down the pole.

“If this child is dead, be sure all the others of your house are dead,” he said, “and you alone have been saved for some will of Heaven. Come with me. I will give you a gun for revenge.”

Now the man could see easily that Sheng was a soldier and a leader of soldiers, and so he turned blindly, the tears still running down his face, and made as if to follow Sheng with the dead child lying in his two arms as though on a bed.

“Leave the child,” Sheng ordered him.

But the young man looked piteously from one face to the other. “I can leave the ones that are buried under the house,” he said, “but how can I put down my little son? The dogs will eat him.”

“Give him to me,” Mayli said. “I will buy him a coffin and see that he is buried for you.”

“Good,” Sheng said, and his eyes fell warmly upon her when she said this.

So the young man gave her his dead boy, and Mayli took the child in her arms. In all her life it was the first time she had ever held a child so close. By some strange chance this girl had been near no child. Alone she had grown up in her father’s house and in a foreign land where she had no cousins and cousins’ cousins. She took this little creature and he crumpled in her arms and lay against her so helplessly that her heart swelled in her breast and she could not speak. She could only look at Sheng.

Over the dead child they looked at each other and though neither of them had ever seen him in life, this death of a child made them suddenly tender toward each other again.

“I will come to you as quickly as I can,” Sheng said.

“I shall wait your coming,” Mayli said. It was only a courteous sentence, such as any one uses for an expected guest, but she made her eyes speak it, too.

So he understood, and he went his way, the man following, and she went hers.

“Let me carry the burden,” Liu Ma said.

But Mayli shook her head. “I am younger than you,” she said, “and I am stronger.”

And so she carried the child home, and there the house was as they had left it, though on the south side ten houses had fallen in a row, and a cloud of dust was everywhere. Inside the court her little dog stood trembling and waiting, and when she came in it smelled the dead child and lifted its head and whimpered. But she went on without speaking and laid the child on her own bed.

He was a fair little boy, about three years old, and his face was round and smooth. So far as eye could see there was nothing injured in him, and she took the little fat hand, wondering if by some chance there was still life in it. But no, she could feel the stiffening of death begun already in the delicate fingers, dimpled at the knuckles. So she laid it down again and sat there a while, not able to take her eyes from this child whom she had never seen alive. And for the first time it came to her what this war was and what it meant in the world when a child could be murdered and none could stay the murderer. Anger grew in her like a weed.

“I wish I could put out my hands and feel an enemy’s throat,” she muttered.

At this moment Liu Ma put aside the red satin door curtain and peered in because she heard nothing so long but silence. There she saw her young mistress sitting on the bed, gazing at the child.

“Shall I go and buy the coffin?” she asked.

“Yes,” Mayli said.

“But where shall we put the grave?” Liu Ma asked.

“We will find a little land outside the city,” Mayli said. “A farmer will sell me a few feet somewhere for the body of a child.”

“To rent it will be enough,” Liu Ma said. “A child’s body does not last long, and this child is not even your own blood.”

“Every child whom the enemy kills is my own blood!” Mayli cried with such passion that the old woman hid herself quickly behind the curtain.

So Liu Ma went away and after a while Mayli rose and drew the curtains about the bed and she went out into the court and lay down in a long rattan chair that she had bought and kept under the eaves of the house. She lay with her hands over her eyes and the dog came and curled beside her. The little dog was alive and the child was dead. There was no meaning to this. For the first time she understood something of Sheng’s anger that she had valued a dog so much. If she had come back and found the dog dead she would have mourned for a pretty thing but she would not have wept. But the child was a life and now she, too, almost hated the dog.

She did not weep again, for she was not given to weeping, and when Liu Ma came back with the coffin in a riksha, she helped her to carry it in, and together they laid the child in it. The riksha man waited for his fee, and he found another man, and then they all went outside the city wall, Liu Ma and the coffin in one riksha and Mayli in the other.

A mile or two beyond the city they found a farmer, an old man whose sons had gone to war, and for some silver put in the palm of his hand first he dug a hole at the far end of a field and they laid the coffin into the earth.

“You are to guard it that the wild dogs do not dig it up,” Liu Ma told him, but he chuckled at her.

“Do you think the dogs need to dig up graves nowadays? No, they are better fed than any of us!” He sighed and spat on his hands and lifted up his hoe and went back to his work.

And Mayli and Liu Ma stepped into their rikshas again and went back to the city.

I
N THE NIGHT SHE
woke. For a moment she listened to hear what had wakened her. But there was only silence over the weary sleeping city. Nothing had waked her—nothing, that is, from without. She lay, listening and aware suddenly of everything, of her body and her breath, of the room and the bed she lay upon, where today she had laid the dead child. All was real and yet nothing was real. She had waked to the blackest melancholy she had ever known, a sadness so heavy that it stifled her.

“Did I dream an evil dream?” she asked herself. But no, her mind was empty of everything except this desperate sense of loss. Yet what had she lost? The child was not hers. Could his death alone have made this melancholy? She sat up in fear. Was there some one in the room and had she waked because she felt an evil presence near her? She leaped from her bed and lit the candle that stood on the table and she held it high and threw its light toward the door. But there was no one. She went to the door and opened it. There Liu Ma slept on a couch, and she was not awake. She lay sleeping with her mouth open, her old face the picture of peace. And yet everywhere in the house was this deep emptiness.

“What does this mean?” she asked herself. She went back to her room and closed the door and stood there, the candle in her hand. Everything about her seemed suddenly foreign and she longed for some home she did not have, that she might escape the disaster that was everywhere around her. But what home? She had no one except her father far away.

At the thought of her father all her longing welled up. She thought with sudden sickness of longing of the cheerful room in the American city, where he lived. She thought of the clean bright curtains, the blue carpets on the floor. Why had she left him? Why had she left that good place?

She had left it because she wanted to share in the war in her own country.

“You will be sorry,” her father had warned her. “You will wish you had not gone. You are not used to troubles.”

“I cannot go back,” she thought. The red line of her full lips grew straight. “I will not go back,” she thought.

She blew out the candle and crept back into her bed and pulled the red flowered silk quilt over her head and cowered under it for shelter. But what shelter was it? Liu Ma had bought it made at a shop and it was cut for the usual small woman and not for a tall woman, and so when Mayli pulled it over her head it left her feet bare, and when she pulled it down over her feet, her head was out, and she could not curl herself small enough.

She grew impatient at last and got out of bed again. And all the time the knowledge of desolation did not leave her. She sat on the side of her bed with the quilt over her shoulders and gave herself up to the misery she did not understand. And now she thought that there was no place for her in her own country. There was no place here for such women as she was. Peasant women tilled the soil as the young men did, or if they had been to school they made themselves into nurses and caretakers of the wounded. But what could she do who had never done work of any kind? She had left her father to come back to her own country and he did not even know now where she was.

Of all the world she really knew only Sheng and in a few days he would be gone. Then what had she left except old Liu Ma and her dog? Her lips curled at the thinness of such a life. In these times, with all her wit and skill and cleverness, was this enough? She threw off the quilt and lit the candle again and began to walk about the room to warm herself. And whether it was the blood beginning to warm her body and to flow hot into her brain or what it was, suddenly it came to her with clearness what she would do. She would go into the west, too. When Sheng went to fight, she would go to do—anything.

When this thought came it came as hard and true as though a voice decreed it. Her loneliness went away and with it the stupid sadness she could not understand. Yes, there it was, she would go with the armies. Well, but how?

There were no women in the soldiers’ ranks of the armies that were being sent. They were the armies only of the best trained men. Often she had heard Sheng boast that the men with whom he marched were the picked and chosen, and he boasted what was true, that the One Above had himself examined every man to see that all were young and whole. It was the only time that Sheng had seen the One Above and he had talked for days of that grave thin face and those dark and piercing eyes.

“I went into his presence,” he had told her, “and when I saw his eyes, my body prickled as though a thousand needles touched me.” And then he had told her what the One Above had said, “Of all my men, you are the tallest and the best in body. Therefore be a better soldier than the others.”

“And so I will,” he told her.

Now she wished she had learned something of the care of wounded, but she had not. She knew nothing even of the sick. Well, then she must have another influence to let her go.

So as her brain went flaming on its thoughts, and as her will grew firm and stubborn, she was her old bold self. “Why should I not go to the One Above?” she asked herself. “I could go to him, and if he will not let me go, then his lady will. I daresay she is like me. We both grew up in the same foreign country. She will know what I want and how I feel. She is an impatient woman, too.”

So she planned, and knowing that she would not tell Sheng, for she knew he would forbid her. He always said that men about to go into battle must not think of women or have women near them or remember there were women on the earth.

“And what of the girl soldiers?” she had asked him once when he said this.

“They are not girls when they become soldiers,” he had told her gravely. “A soldier is not male nor female, he is all soldier—that is, will and steel and power and fight and fire.”

If she told him what she planned he would shout at her, “And what can you do with your feet in satin shoes?”

“I will tell him nothing,” she thought. “I will go and get my way. Whether he likes me to be there or not I shall not care.”

When she had made up her mind thus she lay down on her bed again and fell asleep as sweetly as a child does.

… “Where has she gone?” Sheng asked Liu Ma two days later.

“How can I tell you when she did not tell me?” Liu Ma said. “When I asked her where she was going she laughed and said that she would not tell me because you would ask me and if it were in me you would pull it out. So I know nothing and there is nothing in me. All I know is what I saw, that she had her little box and she went with it in a riksha.”

Sheng pawed the earth with his foot like an angry beast. “But what direction did she take?” he bellowed.

“Since our street is at an end three houses away,” she said calmly, and with secret pleasure to see this big soldier teased, “she could only go one way and you know the street turns there and so beyond it I did not see.”

“But she told you when she was coming back,” he said.

“She put some money in my hand and told me to feed myself from it and that before I had eaten it all up she would be back.” Liu Ma said.

“Let me see how much money she gave you.” Sheng commanded her.

So the old woman put her hand in her bosom and brought out ten silver dollars wrapped up in brown paper.

“How many days will you eat from that?” he demanded of her.

“I can eat it up quickly if I eat well,” she said. “Or I can eat poorly and make it feed me for a month.”

He would like to have pushed her old face against the wall, it was so calm, but if he did she would tell him nothing. So he only kicked the small dog that came smelling at him timidly, and the beast howled and fled.

“Kick the dog if you will,” Liu Ma said. “I do not love that dog.”

She pulled the silver ear-pick from her coil of hair and began slowly to pick her right ear. A look of dreamy pleasure came over her face and after a moment she yawned and put the ear-pick back into her hair.