The Promise: A Novel of China and Burma (Oriental Novels of Pearl S. Buck) (33 page)

But Chung as he worked to heal them was uneasy, for he heard rumors among the men more quickly than the women did. One evening he went to Mayli as she sat sewing a ragged coat of her own, and she still had by her the small sewing bag that Liu Ma had made for her. He sat down near her on the ground and he said in a low voice,

“Should we be attacked, should we be defeated, what plan have you to save yourself and your women?”

Now Mayli had often thought what she would do in such a case for she knew that her women would look to her, and she now said, “We will stay by the armies if we can, but if we cannot we will strike out into the jungle and hide—what else can we do?”

“I want to give you a small gift,” Chung said, and he put his hand into his pocket and took out a little compass. “Take this, so that you will know how to walk west away from the enemy.”

She put out her hand and took it and put it in her pocket. “I thank you for it,” she said, and went on sewing. And he looking at her face thought to himself how changed she was from the beautiful careless impetuous girl she had been when he first saw her. She was lean and hard now as a peasant and her black hair was burned in brown streaks, and her face and arms were brown and her lips were less full and very set and firm and her brows were thoughtful. Her hands were gnarled and the nails broken, for there was nothing she did not do of the hardest sort of labor. Her ways had changed, too. There was no time in these days for coquetry and smiles, and indeed she seldom smiled.

She felt his gaze and looked up, and he caught that straight gaze. But she did not speak nor did he, for what was there to say about today or tomorrow which it would be well to say? He rose and nodded and went away, not knowing that never again would he see this woman whom he had learned to lean upon as he might upon a comrade and a man.

… At dawn the next day, out of the seemingly peaceful countryside, the enemy came down upon them. The first men to rise saw a cloud on the horizon toward the south, but what is a cloud? Here the mornings were often cloudy until the sun rose full, and if a cloud was more yellow than others, in this foreign country nothing was strange.

But that cloud came from the dust of trucks and vehicles which carried the enemy army, and above them and beyond them were airplanes, and these airplanes suddenly roared down out of the sky.

“Evil—evil!” they cried, and they hurried hither and there and everywhere to get themselves ready for escape.

The General had not slept, and when he heard the commotion he leaped from his pallet and ran out of his tent. And at that moment a small enemy plane swept downward and let fire out of its little twin guns and this fire caught the General in the shoulders and he fell. He had no time to think of fear for in that one second his life was over.

Few saw him fall, for now the enemy was everywhere on sky and earth, pushing and attacking and scattering and felling all as they ran. Under such fire who could think of another? Chung flung up his arms and stood still. “I am caught,” he muttered, and he turned his face to the sky, and the enemy dropped down on him and he fell.

The enemy pushed between the General’s men, between regiments and battalions, and they circled the men who were in the rear, and separated and honeycombed them, and then they fell upon them in these small pieces and destroyed them, and this division disappeared as though it never was.

Wounded men and whole, all were alike, and what the enemy in the sky did not do, the enemy pressing furiously from the earth finished. In so little time that the sun had scarcely crept above the clouds, the battle was over, and the enemy vehicles and the marching men and the airplanes were sweeping furiously northward, a typhoon of men and metal. And what lay behind lay unburied by the road that ran through the jungle.

… Now some escaped by the jungle, and of these were Mayli and Pansiao and the three women, Siu-chen, An-lan and Hsieh-ying. For after the doctor Chung had left Mayli last night, she grew very troubled and she did not sleep. “He would not have come to me unless he had been fearful,” she told herself, and the more she thought of the enemy and of their evil ways with women the more uneasy she grew. At last she gave up sleep and she got out of her bed and she went to Pansiao and to the other three and she woke them and whispered,

“I feel uneasy somehow. Get up, all of you, and listen to me.”

She stood hesitating, under the small hand light which she let fall upon them, looking at the other sleeping women. They slept huddled together, weary and muddy as they were and her heart pitied them. “Shall I wake them all or not?” she asked herself. She gazed into the blackness of the sky and then passed the cone of her light over them again. None stirred. The night was so still that she began to be sorry that she had yielded to her fear and she did not wake the others, and she went back to the few she had waked, and she bade them sleep again. “I ought not to have waked you because of my own fears,” she told them, “what have I to judge by except this uneasiness inside myself?”

So they lay down again, and she downed her fears except enough to say, “Still, should my fears have a reason, then you are all to go straight west into the jungle. Choose a spot a mile or so inside, and wait for me.”

They heard this, awestruck, and Pansiao cried out softy, “You do make me afraid, Elder Sister.”

“You need not fear,” Mayli answered quickly. “Go back to sleep,” and she went away then to her own bed.

Privately she blamed herself because she knew much of her sleeplessness and restlessness now was because of Sheng and because she did not know whether he were living or dead, or if he were alive whether she would ever see him again, for he might be a prisoner. Nothing was good to her in this uncertainty. She had not slept and her food was dust in her mouth.

So she was still sleepless and when the first distant roar began in the sky she heard it and she leaped up and searched the skies. Be sure she saw that yellow cloud, and she saw it was no common cloud, and she screamed to her women to wake, and she ran to where the sick and wounded were. “Run—run for yourselves, those who can!” she screamed, “and those who cannot—lie upon your faces!”

Even as she spoke the enemy came down from the sky and she threw herself on the ground, but seeing before she did that Chung had fallen.

Who can tell why one is spared and another killed? She lay motionless, her face upon her arms and nothing between her and the enemy and she felt the heat of fire upon her and around her and she heard the roar and whine and throb of guns and nothing touched her. She did not lift her head as she lay there.

“I am dead,” she thought. “This is death. I shall never stand upon my feet again, never speak a word. This thinking I now do is my last.”

She felt her brain alive and masterful, ready to live forever at this instant of its death. “A good brain,” she thought, “it’s been a good brain.”

Her body, too, was quivering and alive and she felt her blood running smoothly in her veins and her supple muscles and her strong bones. She had never been so living as she lay waiting for the quick death which would end her and forever. “I wish I had married Sheng,” she thought passionately. “I wish I had even once slept with him—what waste to have lived lonely all these months!”

These were her thoughts, and she thought of nothing else, for she was sure she was about to die. “Sheng, Sheng!” she thought. “This body of mine dies without having lived.” And this was what she sorrowed for most, awaiting death.

But death did not come. The enemy went on and she lay there still alive in a field of dead. The noise grew less and the planes went echoing over the sky and she heard them no more. The battle here was over and the sun rose as it ever did. She lifted her head and saw that the dead were all about her, but she—she was alive. She rose and stood, lost and small, because she was alive and all these others dead. She stood one moment staring about her at the twisted shapes, the torn, the bleeding, the wounded and the dying. These were her other women, killed while they slept. “I ought to have waked them, too!” she cried. Then she turned blind and sick and ran, stumbling and moaning, toward the jungle.

… Try as they could, Sheng and his companions could not circle the enemy, for the enemy went in vehicles faster than human feet could walk.

When at last they did come up to where the enemy had been, there were only heaped dead, rotting in the sunlight and in the sudden hot rains that fell every hour or two. Eye would have taken it that not one escaped. The General they found dead. He lay before his tent, on his face, as he had fallen. The enemy had stayed to seize his weapons and his insignia. Sheng lifted him and turned him over and there he was.

Yet how could he mourn even for this one? “Where are the women?” he muttered to Charlie. “There was one among them whom I knew—”

“Was there?” Charlie asked. “There was one among them whom I knew, too.”

The two men stared at each other in this field of death. The enemy was gone, sweeping northward toward Lashio to cut off the Big Road into China. They were safe from the enemy, but who could save them now from sorrow? It seemed to Sheng that he must speak Mayli’s name only to ease himself of fear, and he said to Charlie, “I mean that tall one—surnamed Wei and named Mayli.”

“That one?” Charlie exclaimed and for one evil instant Sheng feared that he and Charlie loved the same woman. But Charlie went on quickly, “And the one I know is a little thing, like a child, who follows Mayli all the time as though she were a small dog.”

“Why, that is my sister!” Sheng cried. “That is Pansiao.”

“Is Pansiao your sister?” Charlie shouted.

And these two young men in the midst of the death around them seized each other’s hands, and they let the tears come into their eyes. Each would have spoken to the other but the Englishman spoke first.

“What do you chaps plan to do? I say, what next? I hope you know now I was right—we should have gone straight to India.”

… What was there for Sheng and his companions to do indeed but to move toward the jungle where they would be out of the stench of the dead, so that they might plan what step lay ahead? Yet neither Sheng nor Charlie could leave the dead until they had walked everywhere among them to see whether or not Mayli and Pansiao were there. There were many others whom they knew, but what hope had so few of burying all these? They moved those whom they knew best so that they lay decently and they found a torn piece of tent cloth and covered the dead General against the flies. They searched everywhere for the two women, and when at last they could not find them, the heat being now very intense and the flies fearful in number, they went into the jungle for shade and to find water and to eat the little food they had in their pockets, which they had bought with the money the merchant had given Sheng.

Now the jungle was as all are, and it was difficult to find a path into it, and now it was the Indian who led them. He searched out the only slight path he saw and thus they went by the very way where Mayli and the women had gone that morning, some four hours or five before this. By this same path Mayli had found the women easily when she went stumbling into the jungle, and she found them there clinging together in fearful silence. A rain had begun to fall, as rains did fall out of these low skies and all around them the sound of the rain drummed down and they looked here and there for the enemy, lest they could not hear a footfall because of the rain. So indeed they did not hear Mayli, and she came upon them before they knew and they put out their hands and drew her into their midst, tears streaming down their faces with the rain. And she put back her wet hair from her face and asked herself what now could be done. Where would they go in this enemy country and how could a handful of women escape and where would they find their own again? The trees about them were vivid green in the rain and small monkeys stared down at them, parting the leaves like humans to peer at them, and Mayli shivered to see those little dark faces, for so the enemy hid, too, in the trees like monkeys, and who knew whether monkeys and men were not hidden there together? So they all felt the presence of the enemy, and this terror passed from one to the other like cold flame, until seizing each other’s hands they ran in blindness toward the road.

Mayli came first to herself and she pulled back and shouted at them, “Stop—stop—we are all fools—where are we going?”

At the sound of her voice they stopped and they all looked at her, and Pansiao began to cry because she was so hot and weary and frightened. Then looking at these faces Mayli knew that indeed she must think for all of them, and she tried to quiet her own panting while she thought what indeed they could do.

The rain had stopped again and around them the wet green light shone deep and soft. If they had been able to see beauty, they could have seen this beautiful, but to them the light seemed only strange and dangerous and the dripping leaves and trees only drenching and shelterless and they were hungry and even thirsty for the rain had sunk through moss and loam and there was no stream near.

At this moment they heard men’s feet crashing through the jungle near by and men’s voices. They shrank together at the sounds, fearing enemy men more than all else. Suddenly they were women, these who had been so strong and ready to suffer, who had shared the hardships of battle and had walked stride for stride beside the men in their army. But when they now heard these voices of men they forgot everything except that they were female and therefore at the mercy of the male. Clinging to each other and motionless and silent they stood close together, staring in the direction of the men.

The path ran near to where they stood, and there was no time to run back, nor did they dare lest they be heard. The voices came nearer and they listened, and what Mayli heard was a complaining English voice, speaking English words.

“I say, you chaps,” the voice said. “I shan’t have any boots left on my feet for tomorrow if we keep this up.”

She put her finger to her lips, and she loosened herself from the others and crept forward, and parting the green branches a little she looked through them and saw sitting on the edge of the path three young white men. They were ragged and empty-handed except for the rifles which each clutched. One of them had taken off his boot and was looking at it sorrowfully.