The Promise: A Novel of China and Burma (Oriental Novels of Pearl S. Buck) (21 page)

“I will tell a story,” Chi-ling said.

And so, one by one, some twenty came forward, each with a thing she could do, and these followed Mayli toward the ranks of the men and there they found a hollow center ready for them. Pao Chen had waited for them and when he saw them coming he began to clap his hands and all the men clapped their hands, but softly and only for a moment.

There in the brilliant light of the moon Pao Chen spoke and spoke very well, as though he read writing aloud.

“Brothers,” he said, “tonight we are far from home and the earth we call our own. It is true that no ancestor of ours has ever done what today we do. We carry the battle into the land of other peoples. This is foreign to us and because it is foreign we feel restless and not sure that what we do is right. Therefore let us reassure ourselves. We go at the command of the One Above and him we must obey. And the enemy is the same enemy, the one who even today let loose his bombs upon our own homes, who killed today his hundreds and his thousands. Though we are on foreign earth, it is not this earth we want. When the enemy is vanquished, we will go home again, taking nothing that we did not bring with us. Therefore we can be confident, knowing that what we do is right.

“Now, so that our hearts can be free and so that we can sleep our sisters will sing to us, play before us and speak to us for an hour or two. What their names are does not matter. They are our sisters, and it is enough.”

So saying, he bowed, and stood aside, and Mayli came forward and in simple short words, she told what they would do. She, too, spoke no name, not even her own, for what indeed did their names matter? Before her in that bright moonlight she saw the faces of many men, and they had no names either.

“One of us will sing to you,” she said, “and some of us will speak. And six of us will make a little play for you that these six played often in the villages of home, when they traveled from place to place to tell the people what this war is and how it must be fought by us all, here and at home.”

Now, when she began to speak, Sheng was sitting far toward the back. He gave a great start and stood up on his feet. Could two voices be so same as this girl’s and Mayli’s, he asked himself? He stood listening, catching not every word she said because he was too far away, and because the mosquitoes whined so loudly about his ears. But how could he see her face in the moonlight? She wore the uniform they all did, and looked, from where he stared at her, like a boy. The breeze lifted her short hair and blew it back from her face, and he could see no feature clear.

He sat down again. Of course it was not she. How could it be she when he had left her many hundred miles away in a little house at Kunming?

Then he remembered when he had last seen her. He had not seen her face, but only her hand wearing the jade ring. She had been leaving the General’s room, and he and the other young commanders had been waiting while the guard flung them his ribald words.

“It will be a long time yet, elder brothers,” he had told them, snickering. “The General has a beauty in there.”

And when at last she came out it had been Mayli! He had led his men out at dawn the next day, and he would not go near her to ask her anything. A man about to go to battle must not ask a woman anything.

Now the girl stopped speaking and instead he heard her begin to sing a foreign song, her voice high and sweet. He had never heard foreign music in his life except sometimes out of the wireless machines in cities. But Charlie sat near him, and he knew Charlie understood all foreign things and he leaned toward him.

“What is she singing?” he asked.

“Some song she learned in school,” Charlie said. He translated it after a moment. “Drink to me only with thine eyes,” he said.

“Drink to me only with thine eyes,” Sheng repeated astonished. “What does that mean?”

“It means,” Charlie said, “that when a woman’s eyes look into yours you need no wine.”

Sheng did not speak again. He listened to the strange words and the clear high voice. The tune was painful to him. It twisted itself into him and made him tremble. “It is true,” he thought, remembering Mayli, “when I looked into her eyes it was as though I drank wine. I felt my veins grow hot.”

He rose when the girl stopped singing.

“Where are you going?” Charlie asked him.

“Upon my own business,” Sheng said shortly, and he wound his way among the men, sitting and lying upon the ground as they listened. He went beyond the outermost edge of them. Then under a little tree he took the blanket he had with him and rolled himself up in it, head and all, and lay stolidly enduring his inner loneliness.

H
E WAS AWAKENED BY
some one stumbling over his body. Before he could rise another fell over him and another. He sat up with a roar.

“You big turnip!” he bellowed and flung his arms out and grasped a leg. The man fell on him and they fought for an instant and then together staggered to their feet.

“Your mother!” the man cursed. They glared at each other. “You an officer!” the man shouted when he saw Sheng’s shoulder signs. “Asleep, when the command has come down to march instantly! Our allies are in a trap, you sleeper! Where are your men?”

Sheng’s jaw went slack and he rubbed his face with both hands. Then without a further word he put out his two elbows and made a battering ram for himself and so he charged his way through the running crowd of men.

How long had he slept? Not surely for more than an hour. The sky was glittering with stars, and the silence of night was deep over the valley. He seemed still to hear the echoes of music in his ears.

“I am an ox,” he thought, in shame. “How was it I fell asleep?”

He caught sight of one of his own men and pushed his way to him.

“You, Little Crab!” he shouted. This man was called Little Crab because he was one of two brothers and because he had once received a wound in battle which had shortened his left leg so that he walked as though he were going sidewise.

“What is all this noise?” Sheng went on. He pulled Little Crab aside and they left the others and went a rounder way to their tent which was still shorter because it was out of the crowd.

“How do I know?” Little Crab retorted. “I am only a small soldier and nobody tells me anything. But when the women were making a play about how a girl student was captured—how she killed six of the enemy by poison upon her lips before it was discovered—in the midst of this a messenger came running from the General to say that we were marching within the hour, for the white men are trapped southward beyond the river, and there they are, all mixed together, advance and rear and troops, and the dwarf-devils are attacking on all sides. The white men have no food and no water, and unless we can reach them in time they will die like beasts.”

Sheng’s answer to this was to push ahead and leave Little Crab to limp on. In a few minutes he had reached the General’s own headquarters and there he found the other commanders gathered already and waiting. If there was any doubt in the General’s mind now he showed no shadow of it on his face. He stood behind his desk, in his hands papers which he read as he gave his commands in a low sharp voice.

“You, Pao Chen,” he said, “are to form your men into the middle ranks. Yao Yung and Chan Yu, your men are to be the two wings.”

He looked up and his darting eyes caught sight of Sheng, and a flicker of laughter shone in them for a moment.

“You, Sheng, look as thought you had been asleep in a briary bush,” he said, in exactly the same voice.

Sheng put his hands to his head. In his haste he had left his officer’s cap on the ground where he had fallen asleep, and he felt dried bamboo leaves in his hair. He combed them out hastily with his fingers, and his face was scarlet.

“I am a water-buffalo,” he muttered. “Let there be quiet around me and I fall asleep like a beast.”

“There will be no quiet for the next days,” the General said grimly. “You are to be the vanguard. Your men must leave within this hour. You are to lead south and then bear west. You will cross the next river at the first ford, and that must be as soon as you can, for it is not trustworthy that the bridges further down still hold. The enemy is in a circle, or so it is said, around the white men.”

“I am willing enough to obey you,” Sheng replied and saluting, his hair still on end, he turned and walked quickly from the room. When he had reached the door he broke into a run, and nearly overturned the doctor who was hurrying toward the General. Chung’s face was as pale as the handful of papers that fluttered in his hands.

“Is the General there?” he shouted as Sheng ran past him.

“Where else?” Sheng bellowed back over his shoulder. In the darkness a woman stepped quickly and lightly along behind the doctor, but Sheng did not turn to look at her.

As for the woman, it was Mayli, and at the sound of that voice she stopped and stared after the young man’s hurrying figure. A flickering lamp swung over the doorway of the General’s door, but its light was lost here. Upon the threshold Chung turned and called back to her, “Don’t delay—there’s no time! We cannot start until we have our orders clear.”

She pulled back her wondering mind. There was no time indeed, and indeed why should she wonder? There were thousands of young men with loud voices in the army, and why should she think of Sheng?

“I do not delay,” she said firmly, and entered the General’s room.

… Before midnight the march was begun. Whether or not the white men could be succored before it was too late was now the question, but every small old enmity was put aside and each man and woman thought only of the honor of his own people, that now it was they who went to rescue those who had always behaved as lords and masters to them.

“They look to us for once,” the General had said brusquely to them all. A scornful pride had glittered out of his eyes and made his voice harsh. “We have never been fit for anything before, but now that they are trapped on all sides by the East Ocean dwarfs, they need us. Well, let us show them what we are!”

In this spirit every man did his duty and so the march began. It was not to be made in one day or even two or three. The terrain was their enemy, and the roads were few, for the white men had built few great roads through this land in the days of their rule. Small old country roads had now to be followed, roads rough with dried mud and broken ancient cobbles and rutted with the wheels of rude farm carts. Sometimes there were only paths, so that they had to walk singly, and twice they struck through the jungles with no paths, but this at least was in full daylight because of the snakes and the leeches and such hateful creatures. And it was not enough to watch what crawled under their feet. The skies must be watched for the enemy planes that went to and fro among the clouds, trying to discover just such aid as this to the beleaguered white men.

“We are safer in the jungle with the snakes,” Sheng told those men who followed him.

Now all put on their green coats and wound branches of trees about their heads so that from above they would be the color of the earth and so less easily seen. And Mayli, walking with her women, bade them, too, wind branches about their hair. They were very pretty, she thought, watching them, and so young that they made a game even of this trick against death, laughing at each other, and one bending to twist another’s crown of green more gracefully, and some were careful what leaves they chose, and Pansiao found scarlet jungle flowers on a vine and twisted them into her crown, and her round merry face under the flowers made them all look at her and smile.

And Sheng was in the vanguard, pushing on ahead of all the others, and Mayli and her women were in the rear, and still those two did not meet or know that they were part of the same battle. Across the grave business of the day and the night, even through the weariness of the march, each thought for seconds, for a moment, of the voice and the look that had been like, and yet how could they be one another’s? And still the war carried them on, a part of itself, and separating them with the heavy duties each had to do, so that there was no time for thought or dreaming.

Each night when the company halted, Mayli must make sure that her women were fed and that they were safe for the night, and Sheng, when his men had eaten their rice cakes and dried beancurd and dipped up whatever water could be found to drink, must pore over his maps and send out his spies to see what could be learned about the enemy and about the trapped white men.

By now the whole countryside knew that the white men were encircled and a sort of glee was upon every face. It was an evil merriment, and Sheng took it as an enemy thing, for it was against them, too, because they went to the aid of the white man. Especially it was against every hapless man of India, who lived in these parts, for the people of Burma hated the people of India heartily, for they thought those Indians had come into Burma and had taken work and rice that belonged not to them but to the people of the land. Everywhere Sheng found this hatred as he pushed the spearhead westward and southward, and Sheng three or four times saved an Indian or even a family of them from the hatred of the people of Burma. One of these left his comrades out of gratitude and followed Sheng for a whole day. But at the end of the day Sheng felt his devotion a burden and he called Little Crab to take the dark fellow away and let him live among the men.

“I am not easy with his eyes always on me and his leaping forward to help me wherever I move,” Sheng said.

For so the Indian did, Sheng having saved him when some Burmese had drenched him with oil and set him on fire. So from that day on Little Crab took care of the man and somehow told him what to do, and the man obeyed him like a dog.

Now the General had appointed Charlie Li to come with Sheng, for Sheng was still a man of the hills to some degree and not used to being far from home. But Charlie was a man of any country where he set his foot, and he read people as farmers read the clouds and winds and he caught the thoughts of people like the breath from their mouths. So in the nights that they were upon this march he came back each night to Sheng and told him what he had found, for by day, in his beggar’s garb, he wound in and out of the people on both sides of the march and ahead of it, and now he had enough of their language to know half what they said and to guess the rest.