When her turn came she was not sent with the others but straight ahead through an open door and there she found the same man who had been the only other passenger in the plane with her a few days past. She wondered when she saw him that he had not spoken to her that day beyond the commonest greeting. But still it was so that he had not chosen to speak, and now she did not recall herself to him. She stood before him until he bade her sit down, and then she sat and waited while he looked at a paper before him. Then he put it down.
“You have been told your duties,” he said.
“I have been told only part of them,” she replied.
“Here is all your other responsibility written down,” he said, and he took the sheet of paper and handed it to her. “Read it,” he commanded, “and tell me what you do not understand.”
She read it carefully, and there was nothing she could not understand. Indeed all was written down and numbered. He waited motionless while she read.
“Is all clear?” he asked.
“It is clear,” she replied.
“It is your duty to see to each of these things,” he said, “and if any fails to be done I shall look to you. Your co-worker will be the head doctor, Chung Liang-mo. Together you two will be responsible for all that concerns the sick and the wounded and the nurses will work under both of you. In this he will be responsible for the medical and surgical matters, but you will be responsible for all that concerns the nurses, the food, the quarters, the supplies. Where you disagree, you will come to me and I will decide between you. I do not expect disagreement.”
She bowed her head in assent. He struck a bell on the table and a soldier came in.
“Invite Dr. Chung to come here,” he said.
He sat silent and without moving until in a few minutes another man entered the room. Now Mayli waited with some impatience for this man, for this was the one with whom she must work side by side, and if she disliked him from the beginning the work would be the more difficult. But the moment he came in she liked him. Chung Liang-mo was a man short and strong in the body, and his head was round and his face round and he had a patient mouth and patient good eyes, and yet intelligence was the light behind the eyes. He was neither shy nor bold. He greeted Pao Chen as though they were friends and sat down, and Pao Chen seemed to wake into new interest and he said,
“This is your co-worker, Wei Mayli, of whom you have been told. She has received her orders and you have received yours, and it would be well for you to draw apart and talk together awhile. Go into this next room while I proceed with what I have to do.”
Dr. Chung rose and smiled his easy smile and he said to Mayli,
“Shall we go apart?”
She rose, too, and followed him into the other room, and there he sat down and she also. Then he took out of his pocket a sheet like hers and gave it to her. “I will read yours and you mine,” he said, “so that we may know all our work.”
“Here is mine,” she said, and so they studied the sheets for a moment.
“This Pao Chen,” the doctor then said, “is a strange man. He will always write a thing down rather than speak it, but he has a head so clear and hard that his mistakes are very few. He is a man who had rather act than talk, and yet I do not know another better for his part of this campaign.” He looked at Mayli kindly, examining her face. “You are very young, I think,” he said. “Have you ever endured any hardships?”
“I have not,” she confessed, “but I am ready to endure them.”
“We shall have great hardships,” he said gently. “This campaign must be a difficult one. The Chairman has laid down a very stern duty for the soldiers. We are not to yield. That is the only order. We may die, but we may not surrender.”
“It would be the Chairman’s order,” Mayli said, remembering that soldier’s face with the eyes of the saint burning in it.
“Many will be wounded,” the doctor went on, “and we must be ready for day and night without sleep or rest, once the battle begins.”
She bowed her head, “I can eat and sleep or I can go without,” she said simply. “I have only one question—when do we go?”
“That one question no one can answer,” he replied. “It is locked in the mind of the One Above. When he gives the sign we go. But all is ready. One division indeed is already gone. Two more go within the next few days. Then we will go, or perhaps we go with them.”
She heard this and her heart immediately put another question of its own—was this Sheng’s division which had gone and was that why he had not come near her? But who could answer a question her heart asked? She sat silent, her eyes upon the doctor’s round patient face.
“We are not even sure where we are sent,” the doctor said. “There are those who say we go to Indo-China. There are those who say we go to join the white men in Burma. Others say we go both ways. We shall not know until our feet begin the path.”
Her heart cried out another question—“What if I go one way and Sheng another?”
But who could answer any question of the heart? She could not speak it aloud, and after a moment she rose.
“You will therefore be ready to leave at any moment,” he said.
“I shall be ready,” she said.
VII
THEN SHE CHID HERSELF. In such times as these, when the enemy threatened the life of the nation, when the artery of the Big Road into Burma was about to be cut, what right had she to think of herself or what her heart cried? These were not the times for love. She had said it often to Sheng without believing it for herself. Now in the presence of these grave men who were planning for the lives of many others, she did believe. For one moment she was afraid of herself. Had she the strength and the courage indeed to see wounded and dead, to travel by foot and by cart and by any way she could over hundreds of miles of rough road and roadless country and jungle? But it was too late to draw back now. And if she drew back could she endure the waiting and idleness? It seemed to her that the whole city would be empty if Sheng went on and she were left behind. Whether she met him or not, it would be something to know that she went westward when he did and that they were employed in the same great thrust against the enemy.
“What are your orders?” she asked Dr. Chung.
“I will ask you to come each day to my office,” he said, “and help me prepare the boxes of goods which must accompany us. There will be nothing except what we can take with us.”
“I will come tomorrow morning,” she said.
And so she went each morning thereafter for eleven mornings and came home late for eleven nights. She did not mention Sheng to Liu Ma except one day when the old woman wondered again where he was.
“That big soldier—where can he be?” Liu Ma asked.
“Doubtless he has been sent to Indo-China,” Mayli replied calmly. “Many have been sent.”
She felt Liu Ma’s eyes upon her sharp and curious for a moment, as the old woman busied herself with her dusting, but she remained calm. Something about that calm held back Liu Ma’s tongue and from that time on she, too, spoke no more of Sheng.
… All her life now began to fall into the pattern which was to govern it for many months ahead. She rose early in the morning, ready for the day’s work. Never before had she had work to do every day, but these hours were filled from early until late. When she had eaten her breakfast she put on a dark robe, padded with silk, and she walked a mile or more to the house where the hospital supplies were gathered together. However early she went, the doctor was there before her, his stiff hair brushed up from his plain good face, and his hands, red with cold, piling goods into bundles and tying them himself if no one else came as early as he. But soon the long room made of boards and paper was full of men and women, nurses and soldiers and clerks, checking lists and putting aside drugs, wrapping them into oil cloth and oiled paper and nailing up boxes. At one end of the room these boxes began to grow into a great heap. Each must be weighed for none could be heavier than the back of a man could carry.
> On the very first day Chung had assigned to Mayli the task of overseeing the goods which the nurses must use and he had thrust into her hands a sheaf of lists.
“Check them yourself, please,” he said in English, “if there is anything missing, supply it.”
He always spoke to her in English, for his own language was a dialect of a remote region far in the depths of the province of Fukien, and English came to his tongue quickly, for he had spent more years abroad than he had in his own home, and French and German were as quick on his tongue as English. Yet his short squat figure was common looking enough. Only his hands were the fine hands of a surgeon. She did not know enough in those early days to protect his hands. But the time was to come when she had seen them explore the tendrils of a man’s life so often that she ran to save them when he touched a coarse or heavy thing, lest their life-saving delicacy be harmed.
He spared himself nothing, this doctor. She saw him stoop and heave up a box as though he were a coolie, and test it on his back to see if its shape were hard to balance upon his shoulder. He pounded nails and he picked up the glass of broken bottles and cut himself often. In her own corner of the long room day after day as she checked off her lists and saw to the goods, he was everywhere, kind, silent, busy.
Slowly the mass of goods, the crowd of men and women grew into order and readiness. She came to know her nurses one by one. There were several score of them; some were dull and slow. But all went because they were glad to go, and all felt that what they did was a worthy necessary thing. Four she soon knew because they were always near, ready to take her commands. One of these was Han Siu-chen, a student whose family had been killed in a sack of Nanking, and she had escaped by being in an inland school. She was a round-faced girl, merry in spite of her sorrows, but she had plenty of hearty hate for the enemy, and she was eager to do her work for revenge. Her plump hands with their pointed fingers were always raw with chilblains, for she had a fine rosy skin, the blood very near the surface so that her lips were red and her cheeks scarlet and ready to burst with blood. These hands were what made Mayli notice her first, for she had called to the girl to fold some bandages that had come out of their wrapping, and she saw blood on the white cloth.
“Whose blood is this?” she asked.
Then the girl, shame-faced, held out her pretty hands, and they were cracked and bleeding.
“Come here and let me oil them and bind them,” Mayli said. “What can you do with hands like that?”
Every day thereafter in the morning Mayli oiled and tied them with bandages, and so she came to know the girl, who was always blushing and laughing and crying out that it did not matter about her hands.
The second girl was a thin, pale, small one from Tientsin, a city girl accustomed to wealth, whose parents had escaped before the enemy, and her mother had died from hardship, and her two brothers had been killed in battle and she and her old father were left alone. He, having nothing else to give, and being old and feeble, besought her to go and in some way avenge herself for her brothers. When he found that she was unwilling because when she went he would have no one to care for him, he took a peaceful poison, and she found him dead one morning, and knew that now his command upon her could not be denied. This girl’s name was Tao An-lan.
The third girl was a very pretty one and her name was Sung Hsieh-ying, and she had suffered no hardships of any kind, except when the city was bombed, for she belonged to this city and had grown up here, and her whole zeal was love of her country, unless perhaps she longed for change and travel, but she thought it was love of country.
The last girl was no girl at all but a young widow who had suffered from the enemy in ways she would not tell. But she had been a soldier in the army in the northwest, and had been captured and had escaped, and passing through many ways, she had come at last to this place and hearing that armies were being sent westward, she offered herself. Her name was Mao Chi-ling.
Each of these women had been taught, as all had, the care of wounded and sick men, and some knew more than others, but all knew something.
Besides these four, who attached themselves of their own will to Mayli as their head, there were all the others who from day to day began to look toward her as their head and the one between them and the others above, and this made a change in Mayli. She who all her life had thought of no one except herself now found these young women for whom she must think and plan. She worked all day and in the night she woke to dark fear lest she had forgotten something, which when they were in the middle of the march in the jungle, would be needed perhaps to prevent death. There were no books to tell her anything of the march, and now she began to search out those who had traveled westward and she asked a truck driver or a bearer coolie, a soldier, or a traveling merchant, any and all who had been to the west.
“What is the climate there?” she asked.
“So hot that hot tea is cool,” one said.
“So rainy that the clothes mildew and fall from your back,” one said.
“The insects consider you a gift from heaven,” one said.
“The snakes rise up in the middle of the path before you and greet you as their daily rice bowl,” one said.
“The poisonous vines reach out their arms,” one said.
“The sun peels off your scalp, hair and all,” one said.
“Fever crawls into all your seven apertures and shakes your bones like dice in a cup,” one said.
“The rivers lie smooth and small until you come and then they rise into seas and swallow you. The river gods there are very strong and evil, and they have all been bribed by the enemy,” one old man said. He had fallen into a river somewhere and his leg had been bitten to a stump by a crocodile.
She listened to all they said, finding the truth in their several ways of telling her that the country through which they would march was dangerous difficult country, full of sickness and ill fortune. It would be her duty to guard as she could against these evils. Medicines Chung would take, but she bought extra leather shoes for her women, to each a pair more than they wore, and she rolled wide strips of the heavy cloth woven in the farmhouses of that region, and these were to wrap around the legs to prevent the insects, and she found yards of coarse linen and she tore them into veils, to keep away the poisonous flies and mosquitoes, and she devised and packed boxes of compressed extra foods, each woman to have such a small box of dried bean-curd and salted meat and rock sugar. Everything must be light and small, for if the carriers failed, all must carry their burdens and none must be heavy laden at any time, since to breathe the very air in the jungles was a burden. There were tales enough everywhere of the foreign soldiers who had so much to carry to provide comfort for themselves that they could not march quickly enough to catch the enemy.
An old soldier who had come back from a battle in the south cursed and spat and laughed as he said one day, complaining against carrying a change of garments, “Shall I be like those foreign turtles who carry summer clothes and winter clothes and rain shoes and a rain cloak and bedding and food and a sun hat and a rain hat and everything but a house? A gun, all the bullets I can steal, a second pair of straw sandals, and it is enough. I can feed myself as I go, and why should I be afraid of rain?”
This indeed was the temper of all the soldiers. They were willing to carry only what would help them in the battle. Each man held his gun dearer than himself, and guarded his ammunition even from his comrades, for there were those who would steal bullets who would have considered it sinful to steal anything else.
The day came for which all waited. The General, who had waited with great anger and impatience for the command to come down from above, had declared himself ready for the past eleven days, and everywhere he was cursing and swearing that there must be some trick to delay their going, for why did they not go, seeing that the enemy was everyday growing more strong? In the islands to the south the white men had been defeated again and again, and now they were clinging to the sides of mountains in dens l
ike beasts. Then suddenly one day the order came down, and within an hour he had sent it out, and all knew that the next morning at dawn the great march would begin.
That night in her little house Mayli could not sleep. Twice and three times she got out of bed and examined her garments. Everything lay upon the chair ready for her, the heavy shoes, the uniform that was like a soldier’s, a pistol, her pack. Once she opened the pack, counting everything that was in it. She had a belt made with pockets for her money, to wear under her coat.
In the middle of the night the door opened and Liu Ma came stealing in. She had a small bag in her hand, not much bigger than her own palm, and she gave it to Mayli.
“What if a button tears off?” she whispered solemnly. “A small thing may cause great trouble.”
Mayli took the bag and inside she found short Chinese needles, and yards of fine strong silk thread wound small about paper spools, a pair of small steel scissors very sharp, and there were two brass thimbles, some foreign bone buttons, six foreign closing pins, though where Liu Ma had found these luxuries who could tell?
“I had not thought of this,” Mayli said. “But indeed it is what I might need very much.”
“Why should you think of a small thing when I do all your sewing?” the old woman said. “But now who knows whether you will ever need me again?”
Saying this she burst into loud tears, and sobbed. “You are a troublesome child to me, but it will be more trouble to live without you!”
“I shall be back,” Mayli promised her. “You must wait here for me and see—I will come back, I promise you.”
“Only Heaven can fulfill promises,” the old woman said and went away wiping her eyes on the corner of her jacket.
In the darkness Mayli lay down again upon her bed. Now that she was about to leave, and indeed perhaps forever, her mind seemed to be one vast confusion. Why was she going? The will to go had begun half idly as a wish partly made of loneliness, partly made of her reluctant love for Sheng, partly out of a true longing to be useful to her country. Now all of these parts had become a whole. She was going. She knew that Burma had become the single gate for China to the rest of the world. The gate must be kept open, for only through that gate could help come against the enemy.
The Promise: A Novel of China and Burma (Oriental Novels of Pearl S. Buck) Page 9