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

by Pearl S. Buck

  “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.

  “It is very quiet with her gone,” she said. “I fall asleep without knowing it.”

  But he did not answer. He stared about the empty court and then thrust his hands into his girdle and turned away. But at the gate he paused to shout at Liu Ma.

  “If she comes back, tell her I have gone away to war.”

  She had sat down and already her eyes were closed, and she opened them a little at this.

  “Eh!” she murmured, and she folded her hands over her belly and closed her eyes contentedly as a cat does.

  … At that moment Mayli was swinging high above the mountains in the Genera
l’s own airplane, and the General was beside her.

  She had gone straight to his headquarters, and because the guards knew her they had let her pass them. The General was at his breakfast when she came in, and she laughed when she saw his wry face. For what he ate was not the rice and dried fish, the sweetmeats and the dainty salted vegetables he liked. He ate a foreign gruel made of oats because he had heard it gave strength to men’s bodies.

  He rose when she came, being a courteous man with some knowledge of the new manners toward women, and then he said:

  “I would ask you to eat some of this food, but I swear it would be no kindness in me. Now I know why the white men look so grim until noon, if this is what they eat when they get up.”

  She laughed and took a spoon and dipped it in the main bowl that stood in the middle of the table. Then she too made a wry face. “But it is burned bitter,” she said, “and it has no salt, and it is meant to eat with sugar and with cream.”

  “What cream?” he asked.

  “The cream of cows’ milk,” she said.

  But he looked at her aghast. “Am I a calf, to eat milk from a cow?” he cried.

  She laughed so much at this that her cheeks grew red and he was pleased with himself, for he was still a young man.

  Then he grew solemn and he clapped his hands and a soldier came in and he shouted to him, “Bring in the cook!” and so the cook came in and he roared at him, “You have burned this foreign gruel and put no salt in it and no sugar and why did you not tell me it must be eaten with a cream made from cows? You told me you understood everything about it!”

  The man turned pale under his skin, and he faltered. “But I knew you did not like the smell of milk, because you always say the white men stink.”

  “Is that what they smell of?” the General cried. “Well, I say that it is a good thing they smell so. I shall know my allies by their smell.”

  He laughed at his own talk, and then waved his hand at the dish. “Take it out,” he said to the cook, “and throw the stuff away and bring me rice. And do not even give this to the dogs. Throw it in the ordure jar where it belongs.”

  So the cook took away the dish of oats and soon he brought back the rice the common soldiers ate, and the General took up his bowl and chopsticks and held his bowl to his mouth and ate down the good food with sighs of pleasure.

  Now all this was quickly done, and yet it had seemed long to Mayli, but still she had let the time pass until the man was pleased again. Then she said, “I daresay you will be going back once more to see the One Above before you go west?”

  He looked up from his bowl. “Who told you we go west?” he asked.

  “I know,” she said, smiling the least smile she could. “And I want to go, too.”

  He put down his bowl. “You!” he cried. “But what would you do?”

  “You are taking women with you,” she said, and she leaned her two arms on the table and would not let his eyes escape her.

  “Well, only those to care for the wounded,” he said. “We take some doctors and with the doctors are the nurses. It is not we who take them but the doctors.”

  “I can care for the wounded,” she said.

  But he shook his head. “It is not my affair,” he said. “I will give no such permission. Why, if my men knew, do you think that they would believe why I took you? Would they not see how young you are, and how beautiful? And my wife—do you think she would not scratch out my eyes and pull out my hair? No, we go to win a war.”

  She seemed to yield to this, and at least she said nothing. But she sighed and then she said gently: “Perhaps you are right. Well, I will ask another kindness of you. Take me with you to the capital when you go to see the One Above.”

  “Whom have you there?” he asked sharply.

  “I must do something,” she said humbly. “I came here thinking I would join an army or be of use, but I am no use. If I go to the capital perhaps I can help the Ones Above. I can work in their orphanages, or use my foreign language for them. I know my father would be willing for that.”

  Now it happened that this General knew her father very well and the more he thought of what she said, the better it seemed to get this handsome, bold woman near to the Ones Above so that they could guard her. It would be a favor to her father, he told himself.

  “That I will do,” he said.

  And this was how it came about that she went with him in his own plane. He had planned not to go before the next day at dawn, but when he found she would not go to her home again, he could not think what to do with her, especially now that the young captains made excuses to come in while he ate and tell him one thing and another and always to look at Mayli until his skin burned hot under his collar. What if one of them should tell another and he another, until mouth to ear his decent wife should know of it? And would she believe him when he said the girl was the daughter of a friend and as much forbidden to him as his own daughter? His wife was so jealous by nature that she always believed what she thought instead of what he told her.

  So he had put off what he planned to do that day and in less than two hours after he had filled himself with rice, they were in the sky.

  Mayli sat behind him, and the little plane dipped and soared and fell into a pocket and came out again, and under them the clouds swelling upward. She felt the sweetest pleasure now in thinking that Sheng did not know where she was, nor would he dream of this. When would she see him, where would they meet and when she saw him what would be their first words again?

  She smiled into the heavens, and the General turning at that moment caught the smile. “I feel I am a dragon,” he shouted at her, “a dragon riding on the clouds!”

  She laughed and the wind rushing through a hole where the cover was broken, tore the laughter from her lips.

  V

  NOW THESE ONES ABOVE were no strangers to Mayli. She had heard her father talk much of them. The lady was once her mother’s friend, and the One Above was himself her father’s friend, and the one, moreover, to whom her father looked for direction and command.

  Therefore Mayli prepared herself for the meeting, not only in her looks and garments but in what she would say. The meeting was granted easily enough. Mayli sent a message and a message was returned. It was written in English by the lady herself, and it said, “Come and breakfast with us tomorrow.”

  So the next morning Mayli, having slept heartily in her hotel after the day’s ride through the sky, put on her favorite gown of apple green and bound back her long black hair in its smooth knot and she added scarlet to her lips and a touch of black to the ends of her eyebrows and she hung plain gold rings in her ears. Then, going out of the hotel, she sat herself in a riksha which was waiting at the door.

  “I go to the Chairman’s house,” she said, for the One Above was commonly called the Chairman, and all knew him by that name.

  Without any astonishment, the riksha puller said, “The price is half a silver dollar to the ferry,” and when Mayli nodded, he tightened the girdle of cloth about his middle and set off at the smooth running pace to which his brown legs were used.

  The streets leading to the river were lines of ruin, and there was scarcely a whole house to be seen anywhere, so heavy had the summer’s bombing been in this city of Chungking, but nobody seemed to see it. Indeed the war had gone on so long that there were now children able to talk and to run about and even to work at small matters to help their parents who had never seen a roof whole over their heads, and who looked on bombings as on thunderstorms and hurricanes, and no more unnatural. On these streets the people went about their business of buying and selling, and in some places houses were even being mended while business went on inside them, and children ran and played and fell under the feet of carriers and riksha runners, so that pleasant curses and laughter and the shouts of people at their everyday life filled the air, even so early. There was liveliness everywhere and no sign of fear or sadness, and Mayli found herself smiling out of simple satisfaction that s
he was alive too and here and on her way to have breakfast with the Ones Above. And as she liked to do, being so full of life herself, she fell into talk with the person nearest, who was the riksha puller.

  “Are you one of those who have come up from under the feet?” the riksha puller asked in politeness.

  Now Mayli knew that that this was the manner in which the people of this city asked whether one were a citizen here or not, and so she said, “I come from far away indeed.” He was willing to talk as all his kind are and willingly told her that the times were good for men like him.

  “I had rather pull a riksha than be a scholar in these days,” he said laughing. “The truth is that so would scholars. Why, I know a learned man who has papers even from foreign schools, and yet he is pulling a riksha because he earns more so than he did being an official. Yes, in times like this a pair of good legs are worth more than a headful of brains and a bellyful of learning.”

  And he went on and told her that his family had escaped without death through two summers of bombings, and that even the smallest child learned last summer to toddle toward the cave in the rocks when the signal went up for the enemy in the skies, and so that his wife would not have to walk so far with the children when he was busy with his trade he had built his hut near the mouth of the cave, and they were very comfortable there.

  “Still, it is not a good life,” Mayli said, “and there must come an end to it.”

  “There comes an end to all things,” the man said cheerfully, “and our care should be only to be alive when it comes.”

  So saying, he drew up before the river, and Mayli paid him his fare, and something more, and then she stepped upon the ferry boat that was waiting for last passengers.

  The boat left the shore as soon as she came, for the ferry man was awed by her looks and good garments, and as he rowed across the river, she stood and looked at the scarred city on the shore. It was like a battered brave creature, a dragon who has fought and been wounded and still holds up his head. The light on the muddy river made the water look pearly clear and the city still more dark and scarred.