The Promise: A Novel of China and Burma (Oriental Novels of Pearl S. Buck) (4 page)

The General fell silent and sat like a man of stone for a moment. But Sheng saw the veins begin to swell under his ears and on his temples and his clenched fists, which lay out on the table before him like two hammers, grew white on the knuckles and the veins in his wrists swelled. He did not lift his eyes to Sheng’s face and Sheng could not see what was in them. But after a moment this man began to speak in a low voice, thick as though he were choking.

“The men of Ying have treated us like dogs on our own earth! They have lorded it over us since they won those wars against us—opium wars, they called them, but they were wars of conquest. Their battleships have sailed our rivers and their soldiers have paraded our streets. They took land from us for their own. They refused to obey our laws and here in our country they have set up their own laws for themselves, and their own courts and their own judges, and when one of them robbed us and even when one of them killed one of us, there has been no justice. Their priests have paid no taxes. Tax free they have gone where they liked and preached their religion which is not ours. They have turned the hearts of our young away from our elders. They have sat at our customs gates and taken the toll of our merchandise.”

Suddenly he leaped to his feet and his wrath burst out of his eyes like lightning. He paced back and forth in the long narrow room in which they were. “And I am commanded to send my best young men to fight for these men who have despised us and trodden us down for all these years!” he shouted.

Now Sheng himself had lived always in his father’s house outside the city and the few times he had ever seen these foreign men whom the General so hated could be counted on the fingers of his right hand. Once or twice he had seen them on the streets, and once or twice hunting wild beasts in the autumn when the grass was long on the hills. He had stared at them and heard their loud voices and harsh language of which he understood not one word. But he himself did not know of all these hateful things they had done to his people. So now he listened and said nothing, because he had not knowledge of it himself. Moreover, he was a soldier. In these months he had learned to obey the one above him as he made his own men beneath him obey his smallest command, and he did not answer. He waited to see what the General would tell him to do.

So the General walked back and forth a few times, grinding his teeth together under his mustaches, and then he sat down again and slapped the table with both his hands outspread.

“What must be done must be done!” he said still loudly. “For many days I have resisted the One Above and I have held back my men. Now his commands have come down on me as commands from heaven and either I must obey or take my life. What use is it to take my life since then another would obey his same commands?”

He had told Sheng to sit down, but now Sheng rose, and he stood to receive his orders for battle.

“You will prepare your men to go to Burma with the others,” the General said harshly. “I myself will lead you. When we are at the edge of Burma we are all to encamp upon our own soil until we receive orders to march on.”

Sheng put his heels together and saluted and then he waited.

“Where we shall go from there is not yet clear,” the General went on. “It is said some of our men will be sent into Indo-China and it may be we will invade that land. The enemy promised that they would not enter the land of the Thai. But they did enter it. The Thais yielded to them in five hours. Everywhere the enemy is winning. They do not need arms to win—everywhere all are ready for them. It is only we who resist, though we die.”

The General sighed and leaned forward and clutched his hair in his two hands. “We go to fight in a battle already lost,” he sighed. “I know it but what shall we do to make the One Above know it?”

“Let your heart rest,” Sheng said sturdily. “If the battle has not been fought yet, how can we have lost it?”

The General sighed again. He lifted his head and looked at Sheng’s brave and honest face. He remembered this man when he had first come from the hills six months before. In six months it was hard to believe that so great a change had been made. Sheng had come as wild as a tiger, his hair long and shaggy over his eyes, and his garments ragged blue cotton such as peasants wear. Had he been a smaller man none might have noticed him and he might have been put into the common ranks and left there to work his way up. But Sheng was not a small man. He was a head taller than most men, and the strange thing was that he was still growing, though he was more than twenty-two years old. His hands were twice as large as a usual man’s, and his feet were too big for any sandals except such as were made to his measure, and all of his body was large to match. Even his eyes were large and the look he gave out of them was large and clear. Wherever he went men’s heads turned to stare after him and to cry out at his size. Thus because he was so large he was the more easily a leader among his fellows.

Yet had he been stupid or timid, of what use would his size have been to him? He would have been only a bigger lump of clay. But he was sensible and high-tempered and he learned eagerly, and he obeyed faithfully until he had learned. When he in turn taught another, he saw to it that he himself was obeyed, and while all his men liked him, still they were afraid of him, too, and so men should be of the one who leads them.

Besides all this there was yet another reason why he had risen so quickly to be a commander. He had proved himself well in this war. In the eighth month of the year the war was pushed into many new places, and Sheng had fought through that campaign, always well. He had come out with his life, too, and with only small wounds, and so when those higher than he were killed, he was moved quickly upward. Then in the ninth month in that great battle of Long Sands, it was he who led his men and another officer’s who had fallen, and had driven the last of the enemy out of the city. Behind that young giant the men gathered and followed with fresh courage, and he was so tall that he could be seen above them all and always at the front. When at last the battle was won it was the men left alive that day who sent their messengers to the General and begged him to give them Sheng for their leader. This wish was granted and these men were put, Sheng at their head, with others into that division which was famous for its bravery. And the General was so proud of them that he saw to it that these men had the best of everything, the best food, the best guns.

As for Sheng, he learned to cut his hair short as his General did, and he kept himself clean, and he wore a uniform, not better than his men had, for all dressed alike, but better that the ragged blue garments he had worn in the hills.

And still besides all this there was Mayli. Mayli had taken trouble to know the General, and to speak good words for Sheng here and there, gay words, half fun, so that none might think she cared whether this tall fellow lived or died. But she praised him sometimes where the General heard, and she told of the brave things he had done in the hills.

“I come from the city near where he lives,” she told the General, “and he is famous there for his strength and his bravery. Why, it is told there that wherever he met a small company of the enemy he would capture them alone with his two hands and an old gun. And his skill at surprising the enemy made him the talk of all the countryside and the children and the common people made songs about him in the streets.”

This was true, and she sang one of these songs which she had heard on the streets of Nanking.

          
“A dragon sits upon the hills,

          
He sleeps by day, he hunts by night.

          
His belly fills

          
With what he kills

          
He wins in every fight.”

The General laughed at the rough song, but still the next time his eyes fell on Sheng he remembered it and it made him think even better than he had of the huge young soldier under his command.

And be sure that Mayli had something too to do with Sheng’s looks. She could by her laughter send him away determined to change himself, though at the time he might refuse to do what she wished. He swore to her always that he would stay what he was and that if she would not love him as he was, then let it be so. But as long as she did refuse to love him, when he left her he made the change she wanted, and she was clever enough when he came back to her with some change she had wanted, not to speak of it or seem to notice it, so that he would think she had forgotten it. But she was kinder to him by a little each time that he did what she had wanted him to do.

And yet she knew that she could never rule him. He loved her and told her he did, but she knew that he would never love her better than all else. Yet she knew that she must love him better than all besides or else she did not love him enough.

Here was the middle of the road where these two stood on that day when the General told Sheng to prepare to lead his men to Burma to fight by the side of the men of Ying.

“I have only one thing to ask,” Sheng now said to his General. “How shall we get to Burma?”

“How can we, except on our own feet?” the General retorted. “There is no railroad. We go by the Big Road.”

Sheng considered this awhile. “And our food?” he asked.

“We will get it where we can as we go,” the General replied.

Sheng considered again. “And when do we go?” He inquired.

“In four days,” the General answered.

Now as soon as Sheng had received these orders, he saluted his General again and turned and went out. It would take two days to prepare his men for the long journey, but not more, for they were hard and ready. But they ought to have some hours in which to tell their women good-by and to eat a good meal or two of the sort they would not get while they fought, and a few more hours to make an extra pair of sandals apiece, and all such things that men must do when they prepare for a journey which is new to them and from which they may not return.

And then, when he came out of the room where the General was, when he had passed the guards who saluted him, it suddenly came to Sheng that he, too, was one of those who might never return. For he knew very well that this would be the bitterest battle that he had ever fought. To lead his men a thousand miles by foot over mountain and river, dragging their field guns with them as they went, carrying their guns on their backs, eating as they could find food, and then at last to fight on foreign soil, their comrades men of strange blood and unknown temper, this was gravest hazard.

He stood for a moment outside the gate and the people passed him. The street was bright with the hard clear sunshine of winter, but it grew gray before him. It would be a long time before he could see again that woman whom he loved. What if he never saw her again? He turned to the left instead of the right and strode through the crowd, head and shoulders above them, toward the south of the city where Mayli lived.

M
AYLI’S HOUSE, AT THE
end of the narrow street, was very still when Sheng entered it. It was mid-afternoon. In a corner of the court under the scattered shade of a clump of bamboos, Liu Ma sat asleep. She had fallen asleep as she sewed, and over her left hand was drawn one of Mayli’s long foreign silk stockings. On the right hand she wore a brass thimble like a ring about the middle finger, but the needle had dropped from this hand and hung dangling by its thread. A small dog, which Mayli had found lost one day on the street and had brought home with her, lay asleep on the flag stones beside the old woman. It opened its eyes at Sheng and, seeing who he was, went back to sleep again.

Sheng smiled at the two and tiptoed across the court and into the main room of the little house. Perhaps Mayli was asleep, too, for the house was as quiet as the court. He entered. She was not in the main room and he was about to sit down and wait for her when his eye fell on the door into the room where she slept and which he had never entered.

The door was open, and through it he saw her standing before the window. She had washed her hair and was tossing it, long and wet, into the sunlight which streamed in, and she did not see him. He stood watching her, and his heart beat hard. How beautiful a woman she was, how beautiful her black hair! He was glad she had not cut her hair as the students and girl soldiers did. She wore it coiled on her neck, but not oiled, so that the fine black hairs sprang out about her face.

His heart suffocated him. “Mayli!” he called roughly.

She parted her hair with her hands and looked and saw him, and instantly she leaped forward and slammed the door between them. He heard her push the wooden bar into place. “Oh, you big stupid!” he heard her breathe through the cracks of the door. And in a moment she was calling for Liu Ma.

Sheng sat down quickly at the right of the table, laughing to himself. Liu Ma was stumbling across the threshold, rubbing her eyes.

“How did you get in, Big Soldier?” she asked crossly. “I swear I did not see you come in.”

“What would you say if I told you I have a magic dagger?” he asked to tease her. “I carry it in my girdle, and when I say ‘Small!’ I am so small I can blow myself over the wall in a particle of dust and when I say ‘Big!’ I blow myself over the wall like the west wind.” This he said knowing the old woman must often have heard the wandering story-tellers tell their tales of such daggers.

But she thrust out her lower lip at him and would not smile. “We ought to have a better watch dog,” she said. “This dog is only a sleeve dog, and it is no better than a cat for barking at a thief when he comes in.”

“Do not blame the dog, good mother,” Sheng called after her.

By this time the old soul was out of the room and in the kitchen to heat some water for tea, and the little dog came in wagging its tail, and Sheng leaned over and pulled its long ears. It was nothing but a toy, this small creature, left behind by some mistress fleeing the city when the enemy bombs had fallen in the year just past. He was not used to such little city dogs. The dogs he knew were the village beasts whose ancestors were wolves, and they were still wolves in their fierceness toward strangers. Such a dog had been in his own father’s house, and when a stranger came, he had often as a boy to hold back the dog by the hair of its neck, lest the beast spring at the stranger’s throat. But there were not many of these dogs left now. The enemy taxgatherers and soldiers, coming to villages to rob and to rape, always killed first the dogs who sprang at them so bravely.