The Promise

XI

IN THAT PART OF the town where the women were quartered Mayli was busy. She who had never had to work in her life was now finding it was pleasure to have to work, though more than half her pleasure was in feeling upon her the ordering of all these other lives. She liked to tell others what to do, and laughed at herself secretly because she knew she liked it, and so partly to excuse her own pleasure she saw to it that none could complain against her because she only told others what to do and did nothing herself.

Therefore if there were a filthy room to clean or a courtyard fouled by animals before they could use it, she commanded her women, “Fall to, every one of you, and clean away this filth!”

But even as she commanded it, she led the way, and from morning until night she did not take off the cotton uniform she wore. And somewhere, always close beside her, was Pansiao, who was happy and complained of nothing if she could be near Mayli.

This Pansiao was one of those who would never be anything but a child. What the war was for she did not know and she cared nothing. She had almost forgotten her old home and her parents, and when Mayli discovered this, she took care to speak sometimes of Ling Tan and Ling Sao, of the brothers and of Jade and the little children. Pansiao’s round pretty face lit itself with smiles whenever Mayli spoke of these whom she knew were her own, but soon the smiles gave way to a strange listening gravity.

“Do you remember,” Mayli said one day as they stooped together beside a pond to wash their clothes, “how there is a pond near your father’s house? They told me it was made by a bomb, but when I saw it, there were already fish in it.”

“Was there a pond?” Pansiao asked, puzzling. “Did I see it?”

“Ah well, perhaps you did not,” Mayli said quickly. “But do you remember the little pool in the court where there are goldfish?”

Pansiao did not answer. She stopped beating out her coat on the stone where she had folded it and looked quietly at Mayli.

“Do you not remember the court and the table there under the reed mats and how cool it is in summer?” Mayli asked her.

“Of course I remember,” Pansiao said slowly. Then a look of pain stole out of her eyes. “I cannot remember their faces,” she said in a low voice. “I remember my third brother’s face because we used to ride the buffalo together when we took it to the hills for grass, but my father’s face — I try to think how it looks. I know my mother is a strong thin woman and she has a loud voice. But I cannot remember her face. It seems to me I cannot remember anything before we ran out of our house that night and took shelter with the foreign woman.”

The young girl’s eyes strained through the distance, as she forced her memory, and then Mayli knew that indeed Pansiao’s memory had broken itself off at that certain moment. “Do not try to remember,” she said gently. “Some day you will see them all again and then it will come to you.”

Pansiao laughed with sudden childlike laughter. “Of course it will,” she said, and she fell to beating the garment again so that little droplets of water fell everywhere, and glistened on her pretty eyebrows and hung on her cheeks like tears. “But my third brother — Sheng, you know. Now I remember him so well. He had a bad temper when he was little and we all gave in to him. I was afraid of him, too, and yet when we were on the hills alone, he found red wine-berries and gave them to me. He used to tell me that one day he would run away from home.”

Mayli swirled her wet blue coat through the pond water to rinse it. “Run away and do what?” she asked.

“That he would not tell me,” Pansiao said, laughing. “I think he didn’t know — I think he pretended he had some plan and he had none.”

“It is just as well,” Mayli replied. “Since all young men now must have the same work to do — to fight until the enemy is driven off our land.”

“Yes,” Pansiao said gaily, and by her look and voice showed she had no feeling or knowledge of the war.

For this young girl had learned to escape what she hated and feared, which was this war, and she escaped by willfully not knowing what happened around her. She busied herself cheerfully and with full content in whatever Mayli told her to do. She helped the cooks and she washed and mended and she took most faithful care of any who were sick, and soon all loved her and laughed at her, but let the war be mentioned, and blankness came over her face like sleep and her eyes stole away to one side or another.

She had one more strangeness. This floating mind of hers knew no difference any more between right or wrong. If she saw some small thing she liked she took it for herself. The first time Mayli discovered this was one day when she and three out of her four aides and Pansiao went out on the streets together to buy thread and new cotton socks and such small useful things. In a little wayside shop they paused to look at paper flowers for the hair — not to buy, for what use had they for such ornaments now in their life? But they looked for a moment, being women, and indeed the ornaments were very cleverly made, and there were butterflies hovering over the flowers, twisted out of gold wire and blue kingfisher’s feathers. Then, when they had admired them enough, they went on their way. In a moment they heard a great outcry behind them and they turned and saw the woman who had been in the shop running after them and screaming and pointing at Pansiao.

“What now?” Mayli demanded of the woman. But how could she understand what the woman said, who spoke only her own language? Nevertheless the woman pulled and jerked at Pansiao and tore at the buttons of her coat, so that they all sprang to defend the girl. But at that moment the woman pulled off a button of Pansiao’s coat, and there in the pocket underneath there peeped out two of the ornaments.

“Pansiao!” Mayli cried sternly. “How is this? I did not see you pay for these.”

Pansiao’s red lips trembled. “But I have no money,” she said, opening her eyes very wide. “Nobody has given me any money!”

“Then how could you take these ornaments and shame us all?” Mayli asked her. The three aides were very grave, too, for the strongest command had come down from the General to all, men and women alike, that none was to take anything without paying for it, since they were in a strange city, whose citizens were not their own people. Only the young widow, Chi-ling, put out her hand and took Pansiao’s.

“Tell us why you took them,” she coaxed the young girl.

Now Pansiao began to cry. “They are so pretty!” she gasped, “and I have nothing pretty — no one little pretty thing of my own!”

“Who wants pretty things now?” An-lan asked bitterly.

But Hsieh-ying burst out at them. “Why shall she not have the miserable small things if she wants them? Here!” She turned to the woman. “What do they cost, accursed?”

She took some coins from her pocket and the woman pointed out a small bit of silver, and Hsieh-ying gave it to her, scowling at her hugely as she did so, and she had heavy black brows which contradicted her red-cheeked merry face. So the woman, being quieted by the scowl went away, and Pansiao sobbed softly and Hsieh-ying took the ornaments and put them in her hair and soothed her. “Never mind, you have them now, and they look very pretty,” and in a moment Pansiao put her hand up and felt them and stopped crying, and so they went on again.

All this time Mayli had said nothing more, but after this she watched Pansiao and more than once she saw the girl take some small thing that did not belong to her, a comb or a bit of thread, and once Mayli missed her own little sewing bag that Liu Ma had made for her and went to Pansiao and asked her, “Will you give me back my sewing bag since I need it to mend my coat?”

At that Pansiao gave it back to her so promptly and innocently, taking it out of her knapsack, that Mayli saw indeed the young girl had no knowledge of wrong in taking what was not hers and thereafter she told all who had to do with Pansiao that none was to blame her but only pity her and put back secretly what she took, for some are wounded in body by war, but this one was wounded in her mind.

And Pansiao when she found no one blamed her was happy and full of willingness to do anything she was told, and only when she heard talk of war did the look of sleep come into her eyes.

In such small ways the days slipped past, one after another, and the women were not near the men, and not once did Sheng and Mayli meet or know where the other was. But each in his own place dreamed of the other, though not with any longing. For war is to the heart like pepper upon the tongue and it dulls every other feeling. The sour, the sweet alike are lost in the mere sharpness. So neither Mayli nor Sheng knew that within a mile or two the other was.

… Now though it is easier for women to wait than men, the restlessness of the armies began to filter through even to the women. Chung, the doctor, was restless and to while away the waiting days he began to see the sick and diseased about him in the city, and there were many. Since he came every morning to inspect the nurses, and it was part of his duty to see that all the living places of both soldiers and nurses were cleaned and healthy, he saw Mayli as part of his duty, and it was to him that she made report if any nurse were ill. To her he said one day:

“It chafes me very much to have so little to do, and I see around us here in this city many children with bad eyes and scrofulous persons and beggars with ulcers. We have no right to take the medicines we may need for the wounded when the battle begins, but we could brew some medicines from herbs and at least wash the sores we see.”

“It would be a good thing,” Mayli answered.

Thereafter each morning for three or four hours she opened the gate and let in the sick, and Chung came and said what their diseases were, and what could be done was done. The diseases were for the most dysenteries and malaria, eye troubles and sores, and these could be healed without too much medicine. Sometimes a man came with a leg that needed cutting off, or he had a cancerous bag hanging from him, or a woman had a torn womb, or childbirth delayed or some such thing, and then the doctor was tempted to use what he had for the soldiers and save a life. But he was saved from his temptation, for none was willing to be cut.

“Cut this off?” a man with a rotten leg shouted. “I come to be healed and not to lose a leg!” And all agreed that they could not enter into their tombs with a member gone, for how then would their ancestors recognize them?

And from Chung, too, Mayli caught the deep restlessness because the battle did not begin.

“This is not my work,” he said gloomily each day when he had washed sore eyes and scraped out ulcers. “I could do this at home. I came here to take part in a war.”

“Why do we not march?” Mayli asked wondering.

“Why not, indeed?” he asked and shook his head.

As for Pao Chen, he neither spoke nor heard. From morning until night he sat in the small room where he had a table and bed and he wrote down his complaints which he sent to the General and to the Chairman and to the American, and to the newspapers and to whatever he could, and since he sat cross-legged on the bed, and pulled the table near him, to write, men called him the Scribbling Buddha.

But it was Li Kuo-fan, called Charlie, who came to Mayli one night and said, “Tomorrow I shall be gone, but I shall be back in seventeen days or so.”

“What if we march before you come back?” Mayli asked.

“There is no danger,” he said grimly. “I think we are stuck here like camels in a snowstorm.”

Now these two had kept a sort of rough friendship ever since the days when Mayli had sat in his truck to come over the mountains, and once in every two or three days he sauntered in and sat down near Mayli, and talked while she went on with what she did.

“Where are you going?” she demanded of him now.

He put his hands together and whispered through them. “I am sent,” he said.

Mayli lifted her brows and he went on.

“The General is angry with waiting,” he said. “Yesterday he sent for fifty of us to go out and see what is to be seen.”

Then the red came up in his face and he said suddenly in English. “Keep an eye on that little sister of yours.”

“Little sister?” Mayli repeated, wondering. Then she saw his eyes go to Pansiao, who sat on a bench sewing, and she made a little face at him. “So that is why you come here!” she said saucily, “and I thought it was to see me!”

“I would not dare to come and see you,” he said impudently. “You are a lady and what have I, who am a son of common people, to do with ladies?”

At this she kicked up the dust from the ground at him with her right foot and took the apron she wore and shook it at him and he went away laughing. But after he was gone she thought over what he had said, and knew that he went because he, too, was restless. She stood thinking, and her eyes fell on Pansiao, and as though Pansiao felt the look she lifted her long-lashed eyes, and blushed.

“Do you see Charlie Li when he comes here?” Mayli asked her.

“Sometimes I see him,” Pansiao said, and blushed more deeply still.

“Ah ha!” Mayli cried softly, and going over to Pansiao she struck her lightly on one cheek and then the other and laughed at her.

“But he looks a little like my third brother, I think,” Pansiao whispered, to excuse what she had said.

Mayli stopped and stared down at the young pleading face.

“No, he does not,” she said quickly. “He does not look at all like him. Sheng is much better looking than Charlie.”

“Is he?” Pansiao murmured. “Then I have forgotten him, too,” and she sighed. But Mayli only pulled Pansiao’s little nose gently between her thumb and forefinger and laughed again.

… Seventeen days later Charlie Li came creeping through the border post where an English sentry stood on guard. To deceive this man was easy enough. No Englishman, he had discovered in these seventeen days, knew the difference between Chinese, Burmese or Japanese, if their clothing was the same. Englishmen had bade him take off his shoes so that they could see his feet and because his big toe did not stand out from the others they let him pass, since he wore Burmese garments. But the enemy had already mended this defect, and had found ways of pulling their toes together. Four times Charlie had found such an enemy and out of the four times he had killed two of them. He had disguised himself well enough to pass any Englishmen, for he had darkened his skin, because the men of Burma are darker than Chinese, and he wore a priest’s saffron robe. He was about to pass when the Englishman stopped him and pointed his gun at his breast.

“Take your bloody hand out of your chest!” he said. “What’s that you’ve got there?”

Charlie brought out the alms bowl with which he had begged his way.

“Thabeit,” he said with a false smile, for that was the name of the begging bowl in Burma.

“Get on, you beggar,” the Englishman said, and let him pass.

And so Charlie went on his way over the border, his heart swelling with anger. How easily he could have passed had he been an enemy — how stupid were these white men who would trust none but themselves and they so ignorant that they did not know friend from foe! The old foreboding fell upon him. With such allies, could they win?

So brooding, he walked into the border town by the time it was midnight and went straight to the General. He had decided that he would rouse that one if he were sleeping, but now he saw a light streaming out of the window and he saw the General bent over a map on the table and around him were his young commanders, Sheng and Pao Chen and Yao Yung and Chen Yu, their heads in a black knot together.

“Halt!” the soldier at the door cried when Charlie came near.

“Do not halt me,” Charlie said, “I have news.”

“Give the password!” the soldier demanded.

Now this password was changed from day to day and how could Charlie know what it was today? Instead he lifted up his voice and roared out the General’s own private name, and at the noise the General came to the door himself.

“What is this noise?” he shouted into the darkness, and then the light fell on Charlie and he knew him and told him to come in and so Charlie went in and stood there before them. A cry of laughter went up from all who saw him, for indeed he looked like any traveling young priest of Burma, with his begging bowl in his hand.

“It is like a play,” Sheng said grinning. “They come in, these spies, first one and then another.”

“You are the sixteenth to come back out of the fifty,” the General said. “Now let me hear what you have that is new.”

He sat down behind the table as he spoke and he bade the young men sit down where they could, and so looking from one face to another Charlie told his tale.

“I went to Rangoon,” he said, “because there is the heart of the battle.”

The General nodded, and lit a cigarette. His smooth face tightened under the skin.

“Sir, you must know that Rangoon is a city owned by the white men,” Charlie said. His voice was gentle, and his eyes were fierce. “There are many great houses of business but they are all the white men’s. There are many schools, but they are for those who would be tellers and clerks and servants of the white men.”

“Go on,” the General said.

“But the white men are not there now,” Charlie said, looking from face to face. “They have left the city and they are in the hills, safe — waiting, they have told their servants, for a few weeks until the war is over.”

His voice was singing smooth and quiet. A loud laugh went up from the young men at these words.

“A few weeks, until the war is over!” Chen Yu repeated with scorn.

“Go on,” the General said.

“There is a great golden shrine in that city, where there are two hairs from Buddha’s head.” Charlie went on. “The pilgrims go up and down the steps without let, all day long. They take off their shoes, for even the steps are sacred. But they say there are not above half as many pilgrims now as before.”

“Leave off about the shrine,” the General said. His cigarette was already gone and he lit another. “Tell us about the harbor. Is it well defended?”

“It is scarcely defended at all,” Charlie said. “There are but poor defenses ever built or planned. Yet it is a very great harbor. I was told that when the rice harvest is ripe more people come in and out of that harbor from India than go in and out of the American port of New York in a year. Indeed that whole region is very precious to the white men for its rice and oil and metal and fine woods, teak and—”

“Is there no defense at the city?” the General demanded again.

“None,” Charlie said. “And I heard many other things not good. Along the docks I saw barbed wire barricades with gates and great locks upon the gates. I supposed that these were defenses against the landing of the enemy, and yet I wondered, for surely even the white men know the enemy will not come by sea but by land. Then I was told that these barricades are not against the enemy but against the coolies who carry the cargoes off the ships. The white men feared that when the city was bombed these ignorant working men would flee into the hills and there would be no one left to carry the goods. So they ordered these barricades made and when the enemy came over the city they ordered the gates locked, so that the coolies who were on the docks could not escape.”

“Were they not killed?” Sheng cried.

“Are not their bodies flesh and blood like ours?” Charlie replied.

No one spoke for a moment.

“Go on,” the General said at last.

“They are a miserable people in that region,” Charlie said slowly, “and they die often of lung sickness. I was told that more people in the city of Rangoon die of rotting lungs than die by bombs, although in one day’s bombing in the twelfth month more than a thousand were killed.”

“Go on,” the General said, “go on! Can we talk of men dying in these days? Tell me, did you see goods piled up for our men on the airfields?”

“Hundreds of tons,” Charlie said, “goods from America, planes packed and waiting to be sent up the Big Road.”

The General lit another cigarette and this time his right hand trembled. “It will never get there,” he muttered. “It must all be lost — that precious stuff we have been waiting for all these months! The enemy will take Rangoon first. Of course they will take Rangoon first, where all their airships circle like crows around the carcass of a cow. It is the heart of Burma.”

“It will cease to be in a few days,” Charlie said in a low voice. “In a few days it must be lost. They will not hold.”

The General’s cigarette glowed crimson and burst into a tiny flame as he sucked in his cheeks. “How — they will not hold?” he asked.

“The white men will not hold,” Charlie said. His voice suddenly broke and lost its smoothness. “They will retreat!” he cried.

Groans and curses broke from the listening young men. The General crushed out his cigarette in the palm of his left hand.

“It is what I said would happen,” he said shortly. “We are not surprised. Let us not be surprised.”

“But do we go on?” Yao Kung asked. He was a thin young man and at home he had a young wife whom he loved and three little sons.

“Wait,” the General said. His voice was suddenly so thick that they all looked at him. “These white men,” he said to Charlie. “Is there not one left in the city?”

“There are a few,” Charlie said. “I heard of one who stays at the docks with his men. He has a young wife, and she has two small children. They are there. So long as he is with his men they still unload such ships as come in.”

“Are the white men cowards?” the General demanded.

“They are not cowards,” Charlie said slowly, “not cowards, but are they fools? They have prepared nothing — the people they have left in confusion thus—” He leaned forward, his hands upon his knees. “The enemy sent their messages over the air in the language of the people of Burma, telling them that they come to free them from the white men’s rule, telling them not to be afraid. What did the white men do against this evil? They sent out their messages, too, to reassure the people and tell them not to listen to rumors — but these messages were in English, which the people could not understand!”

Rueful wry laughter went up from the young men. “I had rather they were cowards than fools,” Sheng said. “Cowards only run away but fools stay to do their folly.”

The General did not speak. He was sitting now with his head between his hands.

“Go away,” he said, “go away all of you, and leave me to think what I must do. Pao Chen, you shall stay and write down a message to the One Above. I will beseech him once more to — to think what he does.”

The young men rose and saluted and went away. Charlie followed them, and the General let him go until he had reached the door. Then he called him back.

“I shall not forget you,” he said with meaning.

“Then send me out again,” Charlie said gaily and he saluted again, his priest robes fluttering in rags.

The General laughed. “Get on your soldier’s uniform,” he said. “You deceive no one who knows the difference between a priest and a soldier!”