The Promise: A Novel of China and Burma (Oriental Novels of Pearl S. Buck) (11 page)

“You like radishes better than I do, then,” she said, still laughing.

But Mayli would not acknowledge even to herself that she, too, wondered why Sheng did not come.

From that day, Mayli spoke no more of Sheng. There was no time indeed, for early the next morning Mayli was summoned by messenger to come to her superior, Pao Chen, to receive her orders.

When that message came she deemed it time to tell Liu Ma what lay ahead, and so when she had eaten and when the old woman came in to fetch away the bowls to wash, she lit a cigarette and said,

“Liu Ma, I have something to tell you.”

“Tell on, then,” the old woman replied. She stood waiting with her hands folded under her apron upon her middle.

“I am going away,” Mayli said abruptly. “I have received a command from the Ones Above to do a certain work I cannot tell of, but I must do it.”

Liu Ma did not speak, but her jaw dropped and she stared at Mayli.

“What day I go is not yet known,” Mayli said, “but that messenger who came this morning brought me the order from my superior and there I must go and see what is wanted of me. As for you, you will stay here until I return and keep the dog and this house. If you are lonely you may find another woman to stay with you.”

Now Liu Ma was used enough to change in her long life and, hearing whence the commands came, she did not dream of crying out against that, but still she did not like what she heard and because she could not protest the larger she protested the smaller.

“Why should I want another woman here to be fed and spoken to and noticed all the time? I had rather stay alone with the dog whom I know.”

“You shall do as you like,” Mayli said with good humor. “All that I ask is that you keep the house for a home for me.”

“I do not know whether it is well even for me to do that,” the old woman said, wanting to feel peevish. “This is not my native earth and water and how shall I know whether you will come back or not? You may change your wish and here I shall be waiting for you until I die and die, perhaps, with nothing but a dog beside my bed.”

“Now you are being troublesome,” Mayli said laughing. “I say then that you are only to stay if you wish to stay and, when you go, lock the gates and take the dog or leave it, and in all things do only as you wish, good soul.”

Thus she took away all cause for discontent, and this made the old woman more peevish still. She clattered the bowls as she picked them up and she said, “Why is it you are being sent for a work? Even in a dream I could not guess.”

“You must ask the lady that,” Mayli said. “I too wonder why I am sent, but I am sent and so I must go.”

“She does not know you,” Liu Ma exclaimed. “A willful rootless man-woman sort of thing you are,” Liu Ma went on, “and what will you do—hold a gun and march beside that big soldier?”

Now this pricked Mayli very deep and so she grew angry and leaning over she slapped Liu Ma’s cheek. “Hold your jaws together,” she cried. “I do not even know whether I am being sent where he goes or not. How evil an old mind that always runs upon lust and lechery!”

Liu Ma drew herself still at this. “I am a decent woman,” she bawled, “and what my mind runs on is getting you wed and made decent, too, instead of running everywhere loose. The only decent woman is one wed to a man and behind walls and made the mother of his children.”

“You dream, old woman,” Mayli retorted. “Is this a time for marriage and having children and being locked behind walls?”

Now that she spoke so sternly Liu Ma was frightened and so she held her peace and went on about her work though she thrust out her lip in a most sulky fashion. And Mayli made ready to obey the summons she had been given, and her anger made her silent, too, and she felt righteously that she was not going westward because of Sheng but truly enough because she wanted to go for what use she could be.

So she went on foot to the place where she had been told to go, and when she reached the gate she saw other women going in, too, all young and strong and grave-faced. She joined them and went in with them to a large room where two men sat behind desks and took their names and sent them to the right and left to wait.

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.

T
HEN 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.