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.
XVI
BUT 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,
“Now what shall we do? I see that Third Brother of mine coming near.”
“Does he come?” Mayli exclaimed. “Then I will dress myself quickly.”
So she did and in a moment she was ready for she had only to put on her wet uniform and bind her wet hair and there she was.
So she came out from behind the matting and there was Sheng. The first thing she saw was that he looked ill and then she saw that his arm was tied into a rough sling with a short length of hempen rope.
“Oh, you are wounded!” she cried.
“I don’t say it is enough to call a wound,” he replied. “It is a nail hole that I had six days ago and I thought the wound clean, but now I think there was poison on the nail.” And he told her how he had felt a sting and had found a nail buried in him to the head.
“Let me see it,” she cried, and she drew him aside into the little tent, and made him unwrap the cloth he had torn from the tail of his shirt. There was indeed before her eyes a very ugly angry wound, for his arm had swelled and pus was coming out of the hole and small red veins ran up and down his arm and shoulder.
“Oh you stupid!” she cried, her fright making her angry, “how could you not tell me about this before now?”
“Who has had time to think of himself?” he said.
And what had she to reply to this? She turned to Pansiao who was looking at them with anxious eyes.
“Go and call the doctor,” she said. “Tell him this time it is your brother.” And away Pansiao went running to find Chung, and while
she was gone Mayli washed the wound with medicines from her own kit.
Now shyness fell upon them, and yet it seemed good to them to be alone in spite of all their evil circumstances. It could be only a few minutes, they both knew, and each quickly set about to think what to say in those few minutes, and for some words that would last until they were alone again. And Sheng who was always outright spoke first and he said, “If ever we come out of this trap in which we are I will not wait one day longer to know your true mind about me.”
She had been making herself very busy at his wound, and now she looked up to smile but the smile stopped on her face for she saw that even the soft touch she put upon that arm had made him sick with pain.
“Oh,” she cried, “this is very bad—you should have told me how bad. Sit down, Sheng—”
And she made him sit down on a box there which had once held bullets and which she had brought in for a seat. She went on washing his wound and she comforted him with humming. “Now, I must hurt you, poor fellow—I cannot help it. It makes my own flesh ache to hurt you like this, but the filth must be washed out and the poison. Then when Chung comes he can see it clean and he will know what next to do—”
And he sat still, not speaking because her words were sweet to him and the tone of her voice warm. How close—how close they were, and could anything part them, even death?
But that moment was only a moment long and it was gone before they could grasp it, and there was Chung at the flap of the tent.
“Now what?” he asked.
“This fellow,” Mayli said. “A nail has poisoned him.”
Chung’s square face was like a death’s head these days it was so thin, and the cords of his neck were like strings that moved his head, and the little belly he used to have in good times was gone now and in its place was a cavern around which he knotted his girdle twice. But he was not ill and he never spoke of weariness. He stared into the hole now cleaned and smelled its taint, and shook his head.
“This man should have the sulfa,” he said, “but I have none. I used the last days ago.”
“Would they have some—the English?” Mayli asked.
“How do I know?” Chung answered. “I have not seen an English doctor these ten days.”
“We can’t keep up with them,” Sheng said wryly. “They are always ahead of us in retreat.”
And now this was the first time that Mayli knew why they had gone back each day. “Is this why each midday we hasten so?” she asked.
“We get our orders each morning to hold,” Sheng said hastily. “We hold at any cost. Then by midday the order comes to straighten out the lines. Then we spend the afternoon retreating to where the line is.”
They looked at each other in deepest gloom.
“But where is the end of this?” Mayli asked.
“Who knows?” Sheng said. “Be sure the General is like a man gone mad. He who has never retreated in his life of war is now pulled back and pulled back, leaving his men dead. We who command under him—what can we do?”
“But the American?” Mayli breathed.
“What can the American do?” Sheng said shortly. “He is no god—he is like us—a foreigner, fighting on foreign soil. No, the battle is lost. We know it. The men smell defeat even in the rear and soldiers are deserting.”
“Our men?” Mayli asked faintly.
“All men—” Sheng said. “Those who have the will to desert are deserting—white, yellow, black—”
All this while he had sat holding his arm stiff, and now the doctor recalled himself, and sighed.
“What to do with you I cannot tell,” he said.
Then Pansiao spoke. She had stood silent while they talked of the war and she had paid no heed to their talk but only to her brother’s arm.
“Do you remember, Third Brother,” she now said, “that our mother used to make a poultice of baked yeast-bread wet and she put it on us when we had boils in the summer and it drew the boils and then they broke and went away? Sometimes she put in yellow rape seed too, but we have no such seed here. But I have a piece of bread in my pack that I have kept a long time against when I might be hungry and every day I have wiped the mold off and while a little is eaten I have saved the rest fearing there would always come another day when I would be more hungry than this one.”
“It can do no harm,” the doctor said, “though perhaps no good. Fetch the bread, child.”
So Pansiao opened her little pack and took out a bundle wrapped in thin brown oiled paper, and this she unwrapped and another paper, and inside was the bread dried and molded in its pores, and she gave it to Chung and then he took the bread and made it into a poultice and wrapped it about Sheng’s arm.
“Do not use your arm at all,” he said.
“Luckily it is not my gun arm,” Sheng said, “and so I can obey you.”
Then he stood up. “I must not stay longer,” he said. “The General has called us to him this midnight.”
He did not put out his hand to touch Mayli, but he gave her a long deep look.
“Better for you if you come back tomorrow and let me look at your arm again,” Chung said.
“If I can, I will,” Sheng said, looking at Mayli still. “But if I do not come for some days, I cannot tell how many, do not think it is because I am ill of the wound. It will be because the General has put a command upon me. When I can come I will.”
This he said to Mayli and she smiled and said with courage, “Be sure I shall not let myself fear anything for you.”
And so they parted yet again.
… Now Sheng when he had left Mayli went his way among the disarray of the retreating army and then he turned to the left and toward a small tent which was the General’s. He coughed at the door to signify his presence and he heard the General’s voice calling him to come in and so he went in.
The others were already there, Yao Yung, his long face sad, sitting on a folding stool, and Pao Chen squatted on his heels. There too was Charlie Li, a ragged pair of trousers held about his waist and torn off at the knees.
“Sit where you can,” the General said shortly. “This is no time to think who is what. I have called you here because Li brings evil news. The rear is already lost. That is, the men know the battle is lost. Supplies are stopped. Where there should be order there is none. If the rear is lost can the front be held? And yet in spite of this tonight I have orders from the American that we are to move quickly to relieve the white men who are in yet another trap. The enemy have beset them once again from the rear. Their armies have crept through the people, disguised and with the help of these people, until they hold the river where the white men must cross it. We are commanded to fight our way through and open up a space on the river enough for these white men to escape. There is a bridge which the enemy hold. We must force the enemy from the banks and hold them to the east of the bridge while the white men cross, then cross ourselves and destroy the bridge before the enemy can follow. It is a piece of work as delicate as an ivory maker’s.”
He said all this in a level cold voice, and when he had finished none spoke for a while, then Sheng asked,
“If it is true that the rear is lost, as Li Kuofan says it is, then what will become of these white men when they have crossed the river?”
“They will continue the retreat,” the General said.
He lifted his haggard face and looked at their faces one by one.
“Let us not deceive ourselves by hope,” he said. “The air support which we thought the white men would send, they cannot send. There will be no help of any kind.”
“Do they leave their own men to die here?” Yao Yung cried out in horror. He was too tender for his task, indeed.
“Those above them count it less waste to let them fight their way out than to send more in to be lost, too,” the General said.
“Then what do we fight for?” Sheng inquired.
“Let each man ask himself,” the General said with gloom. “Meanwhile—here are the orders. W
ho volunteers?” Now the General remembered that the Chairman had said if there were a task too difficult for any other he should call upon Sheng, and he remembered that Sheng had said, “I will do it,” but he was not willing to command any man to die, and so he waited.
Still there was the silence.
“Will one say he goes, or shall I choose which one must go?” the General asked when at last he saw that none would speak first.
Pao Chen spat into the dust and did not speak. Yao Yung thought of his young wife and little sons and did not speak. Chan Yu did not speak for he knew beforehand that the General would not let him go, for it was his duty to support the General and be always near at hand.
Then Sheng looked around upon them all and he remembered his promise too. So he flung back his head. “Why, since all of you cannot speak,” he cried, “and only I have my voice left, I will speak! I will go, sir, and I and my men will open the path for the white men. But let me know first why they are trapped so that I may feel the task a duty.”
“I know nothing,” the General said. “Nothing is told me. The orders are sent down. My choice is only whether or not I will obey. So far I have obeyed. If you go, I still obey. If you do not go—”
Then was Sheng secretly very torn indeed. It was true that nothing was told to them. What the white men did, or why, none knew. They fought to hold a line decided on by the white men, and without telling them the white men went back perhaps a day’s march of thirty miles, or more or less. Now they were again entrapped and how it came about, who knew? His arm ached and pain shot into his shoulder and down his back as he stood and pondered all this.
“If it were not for the Chairman and his pride in us,” the General said slowly, “then would I give the command for us all to turn our backs upon this lost battle—lost before we ever set foot upon the soil of this country. But how can I face the Chairman unless I have spent all he bade me spend?”
The Promise: A Novel of China and Burma (Oriental Novels of Pearl S. Buck) Page 21