Then he considered quickly. It was perhaps a mile to the south gate. If the gates were not closed, it might be they could gain the countryside before the enemy came. Outside the gate they could take refuge in the bamboo groves. At least the beams of the roofs and the masonry of thick walls could not fall upon them and crush them. They would have only the danger of the chance of a bomb falling upon them.
“Come!” he shouted. The two women ran to follow him. But Mayli remembered the little dog and she ran back to pick him up, and now even at this moment the two must quarrel. For when Sheng saw she had the dog in her arms, he cried out at her a name for her folly, and he wrenched the dog out of her arms and threw it on the ground. Then he pushed her out of the gate and held her to his side so fast that all her struggles could not free her.
“Oh, you daughter of an accursed mother!” he shouted. “When your two feet must run faster than a deer’s four feet, you stop for a dog—a worthless dog that does not earn its food—”
But she was wrenching and twisting to be free of him, and the more she wrenched and twisted the more he held her and all the time he was hurrying her down the streets to the south gate, and a few people even in their haste wondered at this tall man who forced the struggling girl. Behind them Liu Ma called and panted, but Sheng would not stay to hear her.
“Her feet are not bound,” he muttered, “and let her use them.”
Once an old man shouted after him, “Do you force a woman at such a time as this, you soldier? Give over—give over—lest you be killed and enter hell—”
For he thought that Sheng had seized a young woman against her will as soldiers sometimes did, and that Liu Ma was the girl’s mother, screaming and calling behind. But Sheng only shouted at the old man, “You turtle!” and hastened on. And at last Mayli gave up her struggling and went with him in silence, and only then did he let her go, except that still he held her hand in a great grasp and he did not let that go.
By now they could hear the drone of planes coming nearer and still they were only in sight of the city gate. But they could run freely enough for the streets were empty. The people had hidden themselves in their houses to wait for whatever came down out of heaven. But the great gate was ahead, and in a moment they had entered the cold shadows of the city wall thirty feet thick which arched over the road, and at the end of this long arch was the gate.
In that moment when he entered the shadows Sheng saw that the city gate was closed. Many a time he had passed through under this city wall to go out into the country, for he was one who had not lived for many days inside encircling walls. It had always been a pleasure to him, when he entered these shadows where the cobbled road was wet from year’s end to year’s end because the sun never shone here, to see the shining countryside through the open gate beyond. Now there was only darkness, and into this darkness they entered. It was full of other people who had come here for shelter, people who had no homes, travelers caught in the city and beggars.
In the chill dimness under the wall Sheng and Mayli now saw these people, crowded together, the ragged beggars pressed against the others. At such a time none drew away from any other except that one beggar, who had his cheeks rotted away with leprosy, of his own accord drew as far away as he could. But still this was not very far, and it happened that he had been the last to come in, and so he was nearest to the entrance when Sheng and Mayli came in. And Mayli before she took thought cried out at the sight of this wretched man.
“Oh Sheng, look at the man—he has leprosy!” And she turned to run out again.
But by now the airships were over the northwest corner of the city and already the heavy thunder of the bombs had begun. Sheng put out his arms and held Mayli, and yet he, too, was torn between his horror at the leper and his fear of the bombs.
“Wait,” he cried, and he put himself at least between her and the man, though himself careful not to touch him.
Now there were voices that cried out against the leper that he ought not to come in where other people were, and one voice after another complained at him.
“Is your life worth saving, you rotted bone?”
“Are we all to escape from the devils outside only to come upon another here?”
Such things were called out and especially the mothers of children were harsh in their anger against the leper, and Liu Ma’s voice was loudest of all.
“Stay far from us, turtle’s egg!” she cried to the leper. “Fair flesh sickens as well as foul!” And she cursed the leper and his mother, and his ancestors.
Through all this the leper said not one word. His lashless eyes blinked now at this one and now at that one. In the midst of the unrest in the gateway, and some were for going out because of the leper and yet the bombs were now thundering down all around them, there came out from the far end of the tunnel a Buddhist priest. He wore his gray priest’s robe, and in his hand he held his begging bowl and he was a young man, and only a new priest, for the nine sacred scars on his head were still red and fresh.
As for the leper, though indeed he felt himself vile and unclean, yet he clung to his life, for it was all he had, and he made no move to go outside where the bombs were. By now the noise was so loud that none could hear a voice, and so without speech the priest put the leper against the wall and himself stood between him and the others, and so all stood, their heads bent, while the fearful rain from heaven came down.
The air in the gateway under the wall grew thick with dust and once or twice the old wall shook around them. A thousand years before this day the wall had been built, and who of those whose hands had built it could have dreamed of such an enemy? Yet because they had laid the foundations so deeply and so well, the old wall stood, and by heaven’s kindness, no bomb fell directly upon it as it went curving in and out between the hills about the city. So now it did not fall upon the heads of those who took shelter under it, and they stood speechless and gasping under this rain.
Then it was over. The enemy flew away, and Sheng stepped out of the shelter to see them go. He had seen them come in a line drawn against the sky as clearly as though a painter’s brush had drawn wild geese flying. And that he might see them go he climbed quickly up on the wall. They flew home again as evenly as they had come and as full of grace. And Sheng felt such bitterness in his heart that he could not swallow it down. There had been nothing that any could do that could so much as break the perfect line of those ships in the sky. They had come and done their evil work and gone away, maintaining even their shape.
And as he watched he remembered what Mayli had told him, how the machines and the factories in the land of Mei could grind out such ships by the score every day, and yet they would not send a few hundred across the sea to beat off the new enemy. A day’s harvest of airships would have been enough! And as Sheng stood watching from the city wall he thought to himself how earthbound he was and all his men were, and he longed to be able to fly too, so that he could follow after that enemy. But no, he was earthbound. Upon his feet, plodding ahead of his men, he would have to march a thousand miles to do his share of the battle, while here, where she whom he loved must live, the enemy came on wings and did what it willed.
He leaned over the edge of the grassy inner side of the wall and shouted to Mayli that she was to come up. Now all the people were going back into the city whose homes were there, and those who were travelers went on their way, for the gate was opened. Only the leper sat down beside the gate, for he had no home. As for the priest, he went outside the gate toward his temple in the hills, for he had only come into the city that day to beg. But before he went he took out some coins from the bosom of his gray robe and dropped them into the palm of the leper. When they fell there they made a sound as though that palm were of metal, so hard and dry and white it was with leprosy.
But now Mayli was climbing up the wall and soon she was beside Sheng and he saw distress in her eyes.
“I must go home and wash myself,” she said. “I shall not feel clean until I am washed.
”
He was astonished that she made such ado about this leper and told her so. “You did not touch the man, and he cannot hurt you if he is not touched,” he said. “I took care, too, that my body did not touch his, and it is only that priest who touched him, and he is holy and no hurt will come to him.”
“But a leper ought not to be allowed to come out,” she cried. “If it were in the Mei country, or the Ying, do you think a leper would be allowed to wander among the people?”
“Why, what would they do with him?” Sheng asked amazed. “Surely they would not put to death a man who cannot help what he is?”
“No, of course they would not,” she said. “But they would put him into a place where there were others like him and where none would touch those who are not lepers.”
“Yet that is unjust, too,” Sheng said gravely. “Is a man to be kept in a prison because he has an illness he cannot help?”
“Oh, you who understand nothing!” she cried impatiently. “It is for the sake of the ones who are not lepers!”
He looked at her and saw her dusty face and hair and her cheeks, which were always rosy red, now pale.
“Let us not quarrel when we have only escaped death together,” he said. “You and I, we quarrel whatever comes to us. It will be better perhaps that I go away and leave you. For I begin to see that you will always quarrel with me because I am not what you want.”
He saw her red underlip begin to tremble and she turned her head away, and then she saw the city. They had forgotten the city for a moment, but there it lay, smitten under the enemy. Four great fires blazed, and the coils of smoke rose against the fair evening sky. Suddenly she began to sob.
“What now?” he cried, frightened, for he had never seen her weep before.
“I am so angry!” she cried. “I am so angry that we are helpless. What can we do? We wait for them to come and kill us and we can do nothing but hide ourselves!”
He reached for her hand and they stood watching the fires. A roar of far-off voices rose as the gathering crowds began to throw water on the fires, but they did not move to go to help. There were people enough—all that the city had was people!
Liu Ma’s voice came scolding up to them from the street. “Are you staying there in the cold? It will soon be night. I go home to cook the rice.”
They came down at the call, and followed her, and they felt themselves tired and their hearts were cold with what they had seen and each was weary.
“I must go back to my men,” Sheng said.
“Will you come to me again before you go to Burma?” she asked.
He did not answer. For they were stopped in their way. Here where the street forked to the north a house had fallen under a bomb, and a young man, weeping aloud, was digging at the ruins with his hands.
“Was it your house?” Liu Ma bawled at him, and her old face wrinkled up with pity.
“My house, my silk shop, and all I had are buried underneath it,” the man sobbed, “my wife and my old father and my little son!”
“How are you escaped?” she asked, and now she began to dig too, and Sheng looked about him for something to dig with.
“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.
IV
IN 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.
The Promise: A Novel of China and Burma (Oriental Novels of Pearl S. Buck) Page 5