The Promise: A Novel of China and Burma (Oriental Novels of Pearl S. Buck) (26 page)

Pansiao put out her hand and Sheng took it and held it.

“Ai, my little sister,” he said sadly, “why are you here? It is worse for you than for me. What can be your end?”

“But it is very lucky for me to have found Mayli and now you,” Pansiao said cheerfully. “It might have been that I was here all alone,” and so she told him how it happened that she had come here by one chance and then another.

“You have been like a leaf on a river,” he said, “borne along without knowing how or why.”

“But now I am quite safe,” she said cosily, “now I am with both of you.”

Over her head those two, Sheng and Mayli, looked at each other, and well they knew what each was thinking. Though they longed to be alone, how could they tell this young and trusting creature to leave them even for a little while? They had not the heart to be so cruel, and so they sat listening while she prattled, and looking at each other over her head.

And what she prattled of was always home and again home. “Do you remember how Jade used to try to teach me to read, Third Brother?” she asked. “I wish I could show her now how many letters I know and read to her out of my little book. I have the book still in my pack.”

“Yes, she does,” Mayli said. “I have seen her reading it sometimes.”

“I learned to read it in the white woman’s school,” Pansiao said, “where I first saw you, Elder Sister,” she said to Mayli. “And the moment I saw you I knew that you—”

She turned to look at her brother with sudden thoughtfulness. “The moment I saw this elder sister I said she would be a good wife for you,” she said.

Sheng laughed aloud. “So have I always said the same thing,” he told Pansiao, “and so I still do say. But can you get her to agree with us?”

Now Pansiao was all eagerness. She took Mayli’s hand and brought it to Sheng’s upon her knees and she put them together under her two little rough hands and held them there.

“Now you t-two,” she said, stammering, “you two—ought you not to agree?”

And as though to humor her Mayli let her hand lie under Sheng’s, and Sheng closed his right hand strongly over her narrow one and held it and above these two clasped hands Pansiao’s hands pressed down, quivering and hot. “Will you not agree with us?” she said pleadingly to Mayli.

“Child,” Mayli said, “is this the time or the hour for such talk? Who can tell what tomorrow will bring to any of us?”

“But that is why we should agree together,” Pansiao said anxiously. “If we were sure of tomorrow—there would be no haste. But when there may be no tomorrow, should we not agree tonight?”

“She is right,” Sheng said in his deep voice.

Then Mayli felt her heart drawn out of her body. Would it not be strength to make her promise to Sheng and so be secure at least in that?

Then as though Heaven would not give her even so much, before she could speak they heard the sound of running footsteps and there was An-lan, pale in the moonlight, gasping with running, and her eyes were staring black in her pale face. She ran to Mayli as though the other two were not there and she shouted as she ran,

“Oh, you are here—Oh, I have searched for you everywhere! Chi-ling—Chi-ling has hung herself upon a tree! She—she is there!” And An-lan pointed to the further side of the encampment.

Mayli leaped to her feet and ran toward the place she pointed and Sheng came behind her. Behind him Pansiao stood still but none thought now of her. They ran to the further edge of the jungle, beyond where the men lay behind the barricade of their vehicles, and there upon a gnarled low tree whose small fan-shaped leaves quivered even in the silent air, they saw Chi-ling, a slender shape hanging loosely from a branch.

Sheng took out his knife and cut the cloth that held her and caught her as she fell and laid her on the ground. It was Chi-ling indeed, and she had torn her girdle in half and made a noose and by it had taken her own life.

But was her life quite gone? Mayli stooped and felt the flesh still warm. “Run,” she bade An-lan. “Run—find Chung!” And she began to chafe Chi-ling’s limp hands and to move her thin arms. In very little time Chung was there, girding himself as he came, for in the heat he had been sleeping nearly naked, and he stooped and felt Chi-ling’s heart. He shook his head—the heart was still and she was dead. They rose and An-lan stood gazing down at her with no tears in her staring eyes, and only grimness on her mouth.

“Did she say nothing to you, An-lan?” Mayli asked gently. “You two were such friends.”

“Nothing,” An-lan said. “We ate our meal together tonight as we always do, she and I, a little apart from the others for the sake of quiet. Then afterwards she did what you told us was to be done for the wounded. She did for hers, and I for mine.”

“I saw her,” Chung said slowly, “not above an hour ago. She came in to tell me that one of the Australians had died. But I had feared he would. There was gangrene in his wound and my sulfa drugs are gone. But she knew that he might not live—besides, he was a stranger to her.”

“She always took every death too hard,” An-lan muttered. “I told her—I said, we shall see many die, and what are we to do if you behave so each time?”

“What did she say?” Mayli asked.

“You know how she never answered anyone,” An-lan said. “She did not answer me. But I was speaking thus even as she went to the young dying man and it must be that when she saw him die, she came here to the jungle and died, too.”

“Let us go and look at that dead man,” Chung said. “It may be she left some sign on him.”

“But we cannot leave her here,” Mayli said quickly. “The jungle beasts would have her—the ants, the wild cats—they say there are tigers here, too.”

Sheng stooped. “I will carry her,” he said, and he lifted Chi-ling’s dead body over his shoulder, and so they went into the encampment. An English guard peered at them.

“Who goes there?” he asked.

“A nurse has killed herself,” Chung said shortly.

“Oh, I say!” the guard murmured. He lowered his gun and put up the mosquito netting that hung from the brim of his hat and stared at Chi-ling. “Why, that girl,” he said aghast, “she passed me not half an hour ago, and I said she had better not go out alone, but she pushed by me, and I let her go—it’s hard to argue with them when they don’t speak English.”

“Put her down,” Chung said to Sheng. “The guard will watch her until we come back.”

So Sheng put Chi-ling down and Mayli stooped and straightened her body on the ground and there she lay peacefully, the white moonlight on her face.

“I’ll watch,” the guard murmured.

They went on silently then to the place where the young man had lain upon a pallet on the ground and there he still was, dead. But there was neither sign nor message there from Chi-ling. Only when they looked closely did they see how ordered was the young man’s body, his hair smoothed, and over the foulness of the gangrene wound in his lower belly there lay a handful of fragrant leaves of some sort.

“She put those leaves there,” An-lan said.

So they stood a moment and then Chung said, “Let us go back and bury her. In this heat it will not do to let her lie. The young man others will bury, but let us bury her for she is ours.”

So they went back, and there beside the road in the edge of the jungle they dug a hole with sticks and a shovel that Sheng found and An-lan and Mayli put green leaves into the hole and they laid Chi-ling among them and then when the earth was covered over her Sheng and Chung together lifted the log of a fallen tree and laid it across the grave to keep the beasts away.

When all was done, Sheng and Mayli looked at each other and Sheng said in his old rough way, “Now I must get back to my men and you back to where your duty is.”

They looked and Pansiao had come up and she was watching them, but silently, her eyes strange and startled. They did not heed her, nor did they heed An-lan who sat on the end of the log, her head in her hands. Chung had gone already.

“Let us meet as often as we can at night,” Sheng said. “Keep watch for me, and I will find you when I am free.”

She nodded, and he went away and when she saw him gone, she went over to An-lan and put her hand on the girl’s shoulder. “Come,” she said.

And An-lan rose and now Pansiao came near and she was silent and afraid, and Mayli put out her hand and took Pansiao’s, and so in silence the three went into the encampment to sleep, if sleep they could in the few hours until dawn would come again.

B
UT NOT THE NEXT
night nor the next nor for six nights after that did Sheng and Mayli meet. For at dawn the next day those whom the mosquitoes and the leeches had not waked, or the sandflies and all those many teasing insects and small creatures which dwell in wild lands, now were awakened by low-flying enemy planes which strewed fire even on the rear where Mayli and her women were. She had lain down for an hour or two and Pansiao beside her, after Sheng left, and she had commanded An-lan to stay within her sight, on the pretense that she might need her, but truly to watch the girl whose silence she did not trust.

When she lay down she would have said she could not sleep, for her thoughts were torn and troubled indeed, but she did sleep, being still so young and now very weary. From this sleep she too was awakened by the thundering of bombs very near and she leaped out of her sleep, dragging Pansiao with her, and they fled into the edge of the jungle. There in the half darkness they clung together. A flying rain had fallen a little while before, a rain which had not waked them in their shallow tent, but which had wet every leaf and bush, and now in spite of the heat and the stillness of the morning this rain made them feel chill. Nor was it safe even here, for all knew that the enemy crawled through the trees like monkeys, disguised in green, and so Mayli looked fearfully about her. But instead of that enemy, at this moment she saw near her a short thick serpent rearing its head from behind a rotting log.

“Do not move,” she whispered to Pansiao. “There is an evil-faced snake watching us.”

So, not daring to move, they clung together staring in horror at that snake, while above them the planes soared and dipped and soared again with loud whines of sound, and each time they dipped the thunder fell. The snake grew angry as it listened and now it began to weave itself back and forth lifting its squat head out of the nest of its own body and darting out a thin, split thread of scarlet tongue.

Pansiao watched it and her face grew pale. “I think that is no snake,” she whispered. “I think it is a demon.”

In this close wet heat, in the dripping wet, the two girls stood motionless, watching the creature. It dipped its head and then moved it slowly from right to left and back and forth, its two round black eyes fixed upon them, and though it was twenty feet and more away from them yet Mayli too began to be sure it had an evil intent toward them.

“We must not stay here,” she whispered to Pansiao. “Let us move away so slowly that it does not know we move.”

So they began to move slowly backward to the edge of the jungle again, forgetting in this terror the enemy above. But the instant they began to move thus in retreat, terror took them entirely and without thought and with nothing indeed except mad fear they ran into the middle of the road and not once did they look back at that serpent.

“Do you think perhaps it blames us for all this noise?” Pansiao asked anxiously, when they had stopped.

“Perhaps indeed it does,” Mayli said. “That I had not imagined,” she added, and in the midst of the danger and the explosions to the right and to the left of them she gave a second’s wondering thought to the creatures in this jungle, used to silence since the world began and now crazed doubtless with what they could not understand.

She was to remember often in the next days the terror which had seized her and Pansiao together when they fled from the snake. For something of the same terror seemed to possess the armies in retreat in these days. The enemy made sorties over them five and six times a day as they moved toward the rear, and each time the dead were more than could be buried and the wounded more than could be cared for, and there was no sleep and little time for food and no appetite for the poor stuff that was given them to eat, for they had lost communication with the rest and must eat what could be found. In those few days Pansiao grew thin and white and Siu-chen’s ruddiness was streaked with paleness. There was not strength now for tempers or quarreling. Those who lived did what had to be done for the dying.

And over them and under them and about them like blankets of wet wool was the eternal heat, which did not abate night or day. By day the sun was not to be borne, and they longed for the night. Then in the night the hotness of the dark was so hateful that they longed for the day again. This was the season of the mango showers, those light and fleeting rains which fall suddenly and soft out of seemingly sunny skies, the rains to which in better years than this the people had looked forward with thankfulness for the ripening of the fruit. Now while the showers gave a moment’s respite from heat they sent a lasting chill through bodies weakened by battle. Indeed there was no good thing to be said of these days. They were an endless struggle and striving to retreat more quickly, until at last this retreat grew to terror in them all, a panic that spread from body to body, for it was flesh that feared and mind was dead.

Thus did six days pass and Mayli saw Sheng not once. She had not looked for him, it is true, for there had been no time in this retreat. But on the evening of the sixth day retreat was held because a heavy rain that afternoon had mired them and had clouded the skies too so that for a while the enemy did not come out. For the first time in all these days and nights Mayli took time to wash herself. The rain came down, steady and soft, and she took out from her pack the last piece of soap she had saved jealously since she left home. She called Pansiao a little apart and told her to hold up a piece of matting between her and the road, and behind that matting she washed herself clean in the rain.

It was while she did this that she saw Pansiao’s face peeping over the matting, the rain streaming down her cheeks, and she said,