The Promise

III

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.

“Of what use are you?” Sheng now inquired of the small dog. Its large brown eyes hung out of its small face like dark glass balls, and its body quivered. When it heard Sheng’s voice, it put out a paw and touched his foot delicately, then wrinkling its black nose, smelled him and shrank back. Sheng burst into loud laughter, and at that moment Mayli opened the door. She had put on an apple green robe and her hair was bound in its coil on her neck. On her finger was a ring of green jade.

“Why are you laughing at the little dog?” she asked.

“I am too strong for him,” Sheng said. “He smelled me and drew back afraid.”

“He is a wise little dog,” Mayli said.

She came in and picked up the tiny creature and sat down with him on her knees and Sheng watched her.

“Why do you hold a dog as though it were a child?” he asked. “It is not fitting.”

“Why not?” she asked. “He is clean — I washed him only yesterday.”

“That also,” Sheng replied. “To wash a dog as though it were a child! It makes the hair on me rise to think of it. To treat a beast as though it were human — is this decent?”

“It is a nice little dog,” Mayli said fondling it. “At night it sleeps on my bed.”

“Now that is the worst of all,” Sheng said impatiently.

Mayli did not cease to smooth the silk smooth hair of the little dog which lay curled tightly on her knees. “You should see the foreign ladies,” she said smiling, “how they love their dogs! They lead them on chains, and they put little coats on them when it’s cold—”

Sheng gave a loud snort. “I know that you learned all the ways of the foreigners,” he said. “But of them all this love of a dog is the one that sickens me most.”

Suddenly as he spoke he leaped up from his chair and in one instant before she had time to see what he did he seized the dog from her lap and flung it across the room and out of the door into the little pool in the middle of the court.

“Oh you — you beast, yourself!” Mayli cried and she ran into the court and took the dripping, crying creature out of the water. But now she could not hold it against her silk gown, and so she cried out again for Liu Ma, and Liu Ma came running.

“Fetch a towel!” she commanded the old woman. “Look what Sheng has done — he threw my little dog into the cold water.”

But for once the old woman did not take her mistress’s part. “Let him be dried in the sun,” she said coldly. “I am busy and I cannot take my time to dry a dog.”

“The old woman is wise,” Sheng said.

But Mayli herself ran for a towel, while the dog shivered and looked sadly at Sheng as he stood there, and then Mayli rubbed the dog dry and laid it down on the towel she first folded upon a stone which the sun had warmed.

And all through this Sheng stood watching her as she moved so swiftly and willfully and full of grace. She was as foreign, he thought, as though she had no blood of her people in her body. For the first time it seemed to him that perhaps he was not wise to love her and that if he married her his life would be war at home as well as on the battlefield.

“I came to tell you, before all this foolish noise, that I am to be sent with the armies to Burma,” he said.

She forgot the beast at the sound of these words, and she stopped where she was in the court, and the sunlight fell on her green robe and on her hair. He stood in the doorway, watching her.

“When do you go?” she asked.

“In a few days,” he said, “two or three — perhaps at most four.”

She sat down on a porcelain garden seat and looked up at him. The sun shone down on her fine smooth skin, and he saw each hair of her long straight eyelashes, black against her pale skin, and he saw each hair of the narrow long brows above the eyes. Into her eyes he looked, and the white was white and the black divided from it clearly. But now that he looked into the blackness of her eyes, he saw that there were flecks in them, like light.

“You have gold in your eyes,” he said. “Where did it come from?”

“Do not talk about my eyes,” she said. “Tell me why it has been decided that you go so quickly?”

“It only seems quick to us,” he said. He came out and drew up the stool upon which Liu Ma had been sitting asleep and he sat down, too. The little dog crawled, still shivering, nearer its mistress and away from him, but neither of them thought of the dog now.

“It has been talked of for weeks,” he said. “My own General is against it. But the One Above is for it. And when that one says ‘yes,’ what ‘no’ is strong enough to balance it? We go.”

These words, “We go,” he said so firmly and his face was so stern as he did so, that Mayli said not one word. She looked at him, seeing in a moment what her life would be without this man with whom she quarreled every time he came. But when did she ever wish a quiet life?

“So now we go to ally ourselves with white men,” Sheng said.

“Why is your General against this?” she asked.

Sheng reached to the branch of bamboo above his head and plucked a leaf which he tore to shreds as he spoke, and she sat watching not his face but his hands as they moved, with strong slow strength. The thing they tore was slight and fragile, but he tore it to pieces with precision. His hands were delicately shaped, as the hands of all were in her country, even the hands of the sons of farmers.

He did not look at her. Instead he too watched the bits of green that fell away from his hands. “My General says that already it is written that the white men will fail,” he said.

“Oh, why?” she asked. Her mind flew across the sea to the land where she had spent most of her life. When she was born her mother had died, and before she was a year old her father had taken her to America. The first words she had spoken were in the language of that land, and they were taught her by a dark-faced woman who was her nurse. The Chinese nurse whom her father had brought with him to care for her had grown sick for home by the time the ocean was crossed, and he had sent her back from the coast. And now Mayli thought of those great cities and the factories and the rich busy peoples, and all the wealth and the pride everywhere.

“How can the white man fail?” she asked.

“It is so written,” Sheng replied.

She curled her red lip at one corner of her mouth. “I am not superstitious,” she said. “There must be a better reason for me than the prophecy of some old geomancer who sits on a street corner and wears a dirty robe. Has your General ever spoken to a white man — has he ever been in those countries?”

“I do not know,” Sheng said. “I do not ask him anything.”

“Then how does he know?” she asked.

“He has seen them here on our own earth,” Sheng told her. He blew the bits of green from his hands and then he sat, his fingers folded together, and now as he spoke he looked at her, but she knew he was not thinking of her. He was thinking of his own words and their meaning.

“My General has seen the pride of the white men in Shanghai and in Hongkong and he has seen them on the pieces of land they took from our ancestors and made into their own cities. He says they have always considered us as dogs at their gates, and he says that wherever they have lived among the peoples near us, whom they have ruled, they have so held them as dogs, and that now those people will join even with the enemy they hate, because more than they hate the enemy they hate the pride of the white man who has despised them and their ancestors.”

This Mayli heard without understanding it. How could she understand it when all her life until now she had lived in a country where all had been kind to her? Her father had held an honored place in the capital city and she was his daughter, and if the citizens of the city despised the dark ones who were their servants, was that to say they despised her?

“The people of Mei do not despise us,” she said. “They despise only the black-skinned people.”

“Well, we are not going to Burma to fight beside the people of Mei,” Sheng replied. “It is the people of Ying who rule there and it is the people of Ying whom those people hate.”

“There is no great difference between these two peoples of Mei and Ying,” she said.

“If that is true,” Sheng said, “then it is the worst news you could have told me.”

She fell silent, biting her red lip and thinking what to say next. “Perhaps it does not matter whether we are liked or not,” she said. “Perhaps the only thing we need to know is the strength of the peoples against our enemy. If the people of Ying are against the Japanese, then we must be with them.”

“If we can win with them,” he said gravely.

“Who can conquer the peoples of Ying and Mei together?” she cried. She remembered again the great factories, the iron wheels of factories, the terrible precision of the wheels, shaping out iron and steel as though they were wood and paper.

“The dwarfs have conquered thus far,” Sheng said in a low voice. “Do not forget — the dwarfs took them by surprise. Well, you say, any man may be taken by surprise once. But on the same day and hours later, they were taken by surprise again in the islands to the south. Wing to wing, their flying ships sat on the ground again and once more the dwarfs destroyed them. It is not enough to be strong only! One must also be wise.”

He rose in sudden impatience and stretched out his great arms. “Look at me!” he commanded her. “Look at this great piece of meat and bone that I am! Is it enough that I am so huge? Is it enough that I can bend a piece of iron in my two hands? If I am a fool, is all this size and strength of any use to me? No, I must have wisdom here!” He tapped the side of his great skull as he spoke.

She did not answer. Instead she sat looking up at him as he stood against the sky above her, and she was filled with the sense of his power. How many times she had asked herself if this man had power in him! Had he not? She trembled and she felt the blood run up her body to her face. He dropped his arms and stood there, looking down on her, and she rose quickly and slipped sidewise as though to escape him. For not once did she dare risk his power over her. He must not touch her.

She walked back and forth in the little court once and twice and the small dog dragged itself to its feet and walked after her, still shivering. Then she stopped and sat down on the edge of the pool and she put her arms about her knees. She did not look up at him but he could see the reflection of her face in the still water of the pool. He sat watching this clear reflection. Since it was winter there were no lotus leaves, and the pool was a clear mirror under the sky.

Liu Ma came out, her under lip thrust far beyond her upper one, and she set down the tray she carried on the garden table near the porcelain seat. She poured the tea from a blue and white teapot into the bowls and then to show that she did not approve of these two sitting together in talk, she did not hand them their bowls, but went away again into the kitchen. In a moment the quick smoke of grass-fed fire poured out of the low chimney and hung above the court like a cloud. Mayli laughed.

“Liu Ma hopes that the smoke will choke you,” she said to Sheng.

“I am too good to that old crone,” Sheng said with heat. “I give her very often a silver coin to make my way here easy.”

“She is old,” Mayli said, “and she loved my mother, and she does not think I am good enough to be my mother’s daughter. She thinks I am too foreign.”

“And it may be that you are,” Sheng retorted.

He saw the painted reflection of her pretty head shake itself in the water, and then he saw her reflected face grow grave.

“Whether one is foreign or not,” she said, “today what does it matter? It is not sensible any more to hate something — or some one — because he is foreign. It is better to ask ourselves whether we should not ally ourselves with the strongest people in the world, and these are still the peoples of Ying and Mei.”

“Are they so strong?” he asked. “Then why have the dwarfs beaten them so easily, and us they have not beaten although we have fought all these years?”

“Do not take a trick for a victory,” she said. “I know so well those people of Mei! It is quite easy to believe that the enemy tricked them. They are so rich, so used to their own skills and power, that they would not believe they could be tricked. But now in their fury they will be twice as fierce and ten times as wary. In one day they learned what it might have taken them a year of usual war to learn.”

“It is a pity for us that it had to be learned at such cost to us also,” Sheng said grimly. “With a few of those airships that were destroyed in an hour or two, we could have driven the enemy out of our land. It is not only they who were the losers.”

Mayli dipped her hand into the pool and stirred the water gently in small circles. “All that you say is true,” she said, “and yet when I remember them — I know they cannot lose — no, whatever has happened, and whatever will happen, they will be the victors in the end and for this we must stay with them.”

“What do you remember?” he asked. The tea grew cold in the bowls but neither of them thought of it. The small dog had lain down on the folded towel and now it rose again and whimpered beside its mistress but she did not hear it. She let her hand lie in the water, as she remembered, and she sat gazing across the court, seeing only what she remembered.

“It is the most beautiful country,” she said. “I do not love it as my own, and yet I can say that. The great roads go winding over the hills and the mountains and the deserts and the plains. The villages are so clean, and the people are so clean and fed well. Upon the land the farmhouses are clean, too, and there are no beggars with sores and no hungry wolves of dogs. The forests are deep and the streams are clear—”

“These will not win a war,” he said sternly.

“No, but there are the factories,” she said quickly, “the factories make ships and automobiles — everybody has automobiles, and they know all the strength and the secrets of machines. Why, they can make enough airplanes to cover the earth!”

“It is strange they have not been able to send us a few,” he said bitterly.

“No, but they have not begun yet,” she cried. “You do not understand—” she cried. “A people who are so happy and so well fed — they cannot wake up in a moment. They must suffer and feel the war on their own bodies first—”

“We have been feeling it now for five years,” he said. “Are we not flesh and blood to them?”

“You must understand,” she said, “that we are very far away from them. They do not know us.”

“If they are so far away from us, will they help us?” he asked.

“I tell you they will help us,” she insisted. “You do not know them and I do. It will be to their interest to help us. Will it not be to their interest to use our soil for their airfields to attack the enemy? But you must give them time to waken — you must give them time to understand—”

“They have had time,” Sheng said somberly. “And can we wait now when in a few days we march westward to fight on foreign earth? It may be too late when they have taken their time to waken. No, a few airplanes now might save us all, and thousands may be useless when it is too late.”

When she did not answer this, he said, “I speak as a soldier.”

“And yet,” she said, after a moment, “soldiers do not always speak with all wisdom. For you think in battles and a war is not only made of battles.”

“What else?” he retorted.

Now at this moment the little dog threw up its tiny head and shut its eyes and howled. They stopped their talk and both looked at the beast.

“What does this dog hear that we do not?” Sheng asked. He looked up to the sky and around the court.

“Listen!” Mayli whispered.

They listened and heard the rising wail of a siren.

Sheng leaped to his feet. “It is the enemy!” he shouted.

In all the time that Mayli had been in Kunming no enemy planes had come over the city. She had heard talk of their coming and she could see the ruins of the times that they had come before, but still it was but hearsay to her. When she went into a shop and saw a broken roof, or a wall that was still a heap of rubble, the shopkeeper would tell her with zest and horror how he and his family had escaped, and this one or that of his neighbors had been killed or maimed, but still it was all hearsay.

The noise grew louder and more loud and the little dog was in an ecstasy of pain. It groveled on the ground, moaning.

Liu Ma came running out, wiping her hands on her apron. “Now, now — where shall we go?” she cried. “Big Soldier, think for us — be of some use to us — we are only two women!”

Sheng ran to the gate and threw it open. In the street the people were already running, some here, some there. The keepers of shops were putting up the boards in front of their houses as though it were night. He heard the slamming of doors and the barring of gates.

“If we were outside the city! To be caught in the city is like being in a pen!” he shouted over his shoulder. And he remembered how when the first bombs had fallen in that city near his father’s village he had grown sick at the sight of men and women and children crushed and scattered into scraps of meat and bone, blood and brains mingled together in refuse. But Mayli did not move from where she stood. She could not fear what she had not even seen.

Then he considered quickly. It was perhaps a mile to the south gate. If the gates were not closed, it might be they could gain the countryside before the enemy came. Outside the gate they could take refuge in the bamboo groves. At least the beams of the roofs and the masonry of thick walls could not fall upon them and crush them. They would have only the danger of the chance of a bomb falling upon them.

“Come!” he shouted. The two women ran to follow him. But Mayli remembered the little dog and she ran back to pick him up, and now even at this moment the two must quarrel. For when Sheng saw she had the dog in her arms, he cried out at her a name for her folly, and he wrenched the dog out of her arms and threw it on the ground. Then he pushed her out of the gate and held her to his side so fast that all her struggles could not free her.

“Oh, you daughter of an accursed mother!” he shouted. “When your two feet must run faster than a deer’s four feet, you stop for a dog — a worthless dog that does not earn its food—”

But she was wrenching and twisting to be free of him, and the more she wrenched and twisted the more he held her and all the time he was hurrying her down the streets to the south gate, and a few people even in their haste wondered at this tall man who forced the struggling girl. Behind them Liu Ma called and panted, but Sheng would not stay to hear her.

“Her feet are not bound,” he muttered, “and let her use them.”

Once an old man shouted after him, “Do you force a woman at such a time as this, you soldier? Give over — give over — lest you be killed and enter hell—”

For he thought that Sheng had seized a young woman against her will as soldiers sometimes did, and that Liu Ma was the girl’s mother, screaming and calling behind. But Sheng only shouted at the old man, “You turtle!” and hastened on. And at last Mayli gave up her struggling and went with him in silence, and only then did he let her go, except that still he held her hand in a great grasp and he did not let that go.

By now they could hear the drone of planes coming nearer and still they were only in sight of the city gate. But they could run freely enough for the streets were empty. The people had hidden themselves in their houses to wait for whatever came down out of heaven. But the great gate was ahead, and in a moment they had entered the cold shadows of the city wall thirty feet thick which arched over the road, and at the end of this long arch was the gate.

In that moment when he entered the shadows Sheng saw that the city gate was closed. Many a time he had passed through under this city wall to go out into the country, for he was one who had not lived for many days inside encircling walls. It had always been a pleasure to him, when he entered these shadows where the cobbled road was wet from year’s end to year’s end because the sun never shone here, to see the shining countryside through the open gate beyond. Now there was only darkness, and into this darkness they entered. It was full of other people who had come here for shelter, people who had no homes, travelers caught in the city and beggars.

In the chill dimness under the wall Sheng and Mayli now saw these people, crowded together, the ragged beggars pressed against the others. At such a time none drew away from any other except that one beggar, who had his cheeks rotted away with leprosy, of his own accord drew as far away as he could. But still this was not very far, and it happened that he had been the last to come in, and so he was nearest to the entrance when Sheng and Mayli came in. And Mayli before she took thought cried out at the sight of this wretched man.

“Oh Sheng, look at the man — he has leprosy!” And she turned to run out again.

But by now the airships were over the northwest corner of the city and already the heavy thunder of the bombs had begun. Sheng put out his arms and held Mayli, and yet he, too, was torn between his horror at the leper and his fear of the bombs.

“Wait,” he cried, and he put himself at least between her and the man, though himself careful not to touch him.

Now there were voices that cried out against the leper that he ought not to come in where other people were, and one voice after another complained at him.

“Is your life worth saving, you rotted bone?”

“Are we all to escape from the devils outside only to come upon another here?”

Such things were called out and especially the mothers of children were harsh in their anger against the leper, and Liu Ma’s voice was loudest of all.

“Stay far from us, turtle’s egg!” she cried to the leper. “Fair flesh sickens as well as foul!” And she cursed the leper and his mother, and his ancestors.

Through all this the leper said not one word. His lashless eyes blinked now at this one and now at that one. In the midst of the unrest in the gateway, and some were for going out because of the leper and yet the bombs were now thundering down all around them, there came out from the far end of the tunnel a Buddhist priest. He wore his gray priest’s robe, and in his hand he held his begging bowl and he was a young man, and only a new priest, for the nine sacred scars on his head were still red and fresh.

As for the leper, though indeed he felt himself vile and unclean, yet he clung to his life, for it was all he had, and he made no move to go outside where the bombs were. By now the noise was so loud that none could hear a voice, and so without speech the priest put the leper against the wall and himself stood between him and the others, and so all stood, their heads bent, while the fearful rain from heaven came down.

The air in the gateway under the wall grew thick with dust and once or twice the old wall shook around them. A thousand years before this day the wall had been built, and who of those whose hands had built it could have dreamed of such an enemy? Yet because they had laid the foundations so deeply and so well, the old wall stood, and by heaven’s kindness, no bomb fell directly upon it as it went curving in and out between the hills about the city. So now it did not fall upon the heads of those who took shelter under it, and they stood speechless and gasping under this rain.

Then it was over. The enemy flew away, and Sheng stepped out of the shelter to see them go. He had seen them come in a line drawn against the sky as clearly as though a painter’s brush had drawn wild geese flying. And that he might see them go he climbed quickly up on the wall. They flew home again as evenly as they had come and as full of grace. And Sheng felt such bitterness in his heart that he could not swallow it down. There had been nothing that any could do that could so much as break the perfect line of those ships in the sky. They had come and done their evil work and gone away, maintaining even their shape.

And as he watched he remembered what Mayli had told him, how the machines and the factories in the land of Mei could grind out such ships by the score every day, and yet they would not send a few hundred across the sea to beat off the new enemy. A day’s harvest of airships would have been enough! And as Sheng stood watching from the city wall he thought to himself how earthbound he was and all his men were, and he longed to be able to fly too, so that he could follow after that enemy. But no, he was earthbound. Upon his feet, plodding ahead of his men, he would have to march a thousand miles to do his share of the battle, while here, where she whom he loved must live, the enemy came on wings and did what it willed.

He leaned over the edge of the grassy inner side of the wall and shouted to Mayli that she was to come up. Now all the people were going back into the city whose homes were there, and those who were travelers went on their way, for the gate was opened. Only the leper sat down beside the gate, for he had no home. As for the priest, he went outside the gate toward his temple in the hills, for he had only come into the city that day to beg. But before he went he took out some coins from the bosom of his gray robe and dropped them into the palm of the leper. When they fell there they made a sound as though that palm were of metal, so hard and dry and white it was with leprosy.

But now Mayli was climbing up the wall and soon she was beside Sheng and he saw distress in her eyes.

“I must go home and wash myself,” she said. “I shall not feel clean until I am washed.”

He was astonished that she made such ado about this leper and told her so. “You did not touch the man, and he cannot hurt you if he is not touched,” he said. “I took care, too, that my body did not touch his, and it is only that priest who touched him, and he is holy and no hurt will come to him.”

“But a leper ought not to be allowed to come out,” she cried. “If it were in the Mei country, or the Ying, do you think a leper would be allowed to wander among the people?”

“Why, what would they do with him?” Sheng asked amazed. “Surely they would not put to death a man who cannot help what he is?”

“No, of course they would not,” she said. “But they would put him into a place where there were others like him and where none would touch those who are not lepers.”

“Yet that is unjust, too,” Sheng said gravely. “Is a man to be kept in a prison because he has an illness he cannot help?”

“Oh, you who understand nothing!” she cried impatiently. “It is for the sake of the ones who are not lepers!”

He looked at her and saw her dusty face and hair and her cheeks, which were always rosy red, now pale.

“Let us not quarrel when we have only escaped death together,” he said. “You and I, we quarrel whatever comes to us. It will be better perhaps that I go away and leave you. For I begin to see that you will always quarrel with me because I am not what you want.”

He saw her red underlip begin to tremble and she turned her head away, and then she saw the city. They had forgotten the city for a moment, but there it lay, smitten under the enemy. Four great fires blazed, and the coils of smoke rose against the fair evening sky. Suddenly she began to sob.

“What now?” he cried, frightened, for he had never seen her weep before.

“I am so angry!” she cried. “I am so angry that we are helpless. What can we do? We wait for them to come and kill us and we can do nothing but hide ourselves!”

He reached for her hand and they stood watching the fires. A roar of far-off voices rose as the gathering crowds began to throw water on the fires, but they did not move to go to help. There were people enough — all that the city had was people!

Liu Ma’s voice came scolding up to them from the street. “Are you staying there in the cold? It will soon be night. I go home to cook the rice.”

They came down at the call, and followed her, and they felt themselves tired and their hearts were cold with what they had seen and each was weary.

“I must go back to my men,” Sheng said.

“Will you come to me again before you go to Burma?” she asked.

He did not answer. For they were stopped in their way. Here where the street forked to the north a house had fallen under a bomb, and a young man, weeping aloud, was digging at the ruins with his hands.

“Was it your house?” Liu Ma bawled at him, and her old face wrinkled up with pity.

“My house, my silk shop, and all I had are buried underneath it,” the man sobbed, “my wife and my old father and my little son!”

“How are you escaped?” she asked, and now she began to dig too, and Sheng looked about him for something to dig with.

“I went outside for a moment to see which way the enemy came, and they were there over my head,” the man cried. At this moment he came upon a small piece of red flowered cloth. “It is my little son’s jacket!” he screamed.

By now Sheng had seen a carrying pole lying beside a dead farmer. This man’s baskets of rice on either end of the pole were as smooth and whole as when his hands had made them so, but a piece of metal flying through the air had caught him between the eyes, and had shaved off half his head as cleanly as a knife parts a melon. So Sheng took the pole and began to dig and Mayli when she saw the flowered cloth fell to her knees on the rubble stones and dug with her hands, too.

Soon the child was uncovered, and the young father lifted him up in his arms. But the child was dead. Not one of them spoke, and the young man lifted the child up and sobbed to the heavens over them, until none of them could keep back tears from his own eyes. Mayli wiped her eyes with her kerchief, and Liu Ma picked up her apron. But Sheng put down the pole.

“If this child is dead, be sure all the others of your house are dead,” he said, “and you alone have been saved for some will of Heaven. Come with me. I will give you a gun for revenge.”

Now the man could see easily that Sheng was a soldier and a leader of soldiers, and so he turned blindly, the tears still running down his face, and made as if to follow Sheng with the dead child lying in his two arms as though on a bed.

“Leave the child,” Sheng ordered him.

But the young man looked piteously from one face to the other. “I can leave the ones that are buried under the house,” he said, “but how can I put down my little son? The dogs will eat him.”

“Give him to me,” Mayli said. “I will buy him a coffin and see that he is buried for you.”

“Good,” Sheng said, and his eyes fell warmly upon her when she said this.

So the young man gave her his dead boy, and Mayli took the child in her arms. In all her life it was the first time she had ever held a child so close. By some strange chance this girl had been near no child. Alone she had grown up in her father’s house and in a foreign land where she had no cousins and cousins’ cousins. She took this little creature and he crumpled in her arms and lay against her so helplessly that her heart swelled in her breast and she could not speak. She could only look at Sheng.

Over the dead child they looked at each other and though neither of them had ever seen him in life, this death of a child made them suddenly tender toward each other again.

“I will come to you as quickly as I can,” Sheng said.

“I shall wait your coming,” Mayli said. It was only a courteous sentence, such as any one uses for an expected guest, but she made her eyes speak it, too.

So he understood, and he went his way, the man following, and she went hers.

“Let me carry the burden,” Liu Ma said.

But Mayli shook her head. “I am younger than you,” she said, “and I am stronger.”

And so she carried the child home, and there the house was as they had left it, though on the south side ten houses had fallen in a row, and a cloud of dust was everywhere. Inside the court her little dog stood trembling and waiting, and when she came in it smelled the dead child and lifted its head and whimpered. But she went on without speaking and laid the child on her own bed.

He was a fair little boy, about three years old, and his face was round and smooth. So far as eye could see there was nothing injured in him, and she took the little fat hand, wondering if by some chance there was still life in it. But no, she could feel the stiffening of death begun already in the delicate fingers, dimpled at the knuckles. So she laid it down again and sat there a while, not able to take her eyes from this child whom she had never seen alive. And for the first time it came to her what this war was and what it meant in the world when a child could be murdered and none could stay the murderer. Anger grew in her like a weed.

“I wish I could put out my hands and feel an enemy’s throat,” she muttered.

At this moment Liu Ma put aside the red satin door curtain and peered in because she heard nothing so long but silence. There she saw her young mistress sitting on the bed, gazing at the child.

“Shall I go and buy the coffin?” she asked.

“Yes,” Mayli said.

“But where shall we put the grave?” Liu Ma asked.

“We will find a little land outside the city,” Mayli said. “A farmer will sell me a few feet somewhere for the body of a child.”

“To rent it will be enough,” Liu Ma said. “A child’s body does not last long, and this child is not even your own blood.”

“Every child whom the enemy kills is my own blood!” Mayli cried with such passion that the old woman hid herself quickly behind the curtain.

So Liu Ma went away and after a while Mayli rose and drew the curtains about the bed and she went out into the court and lay down in a long rattan chair that she had bought and kept under the eaves of the house. She lay with her hands over her eyes and the dog came and curled beside her. The little dog was alive and the child was dead. There was no meaning to this. For the first time she understood something of Sheng’s anger that she had valued a dog so much. If she had come back and found the dog dead she would have mourned for a pretty thing but she would not have wept. But the child was a life and now she, too, almost hated the dog.

She did not weep again, for she was not given to weeping, and when Liu Ma came back with the coffin in a riksha, she helped her to carry it in, and together they laid the child in it. The riksha man waited for his fee, and he found another man, and then they all went outside the city wall, Liu Ma and the coffin in one riksha and Mayli in the other.

A mile or two beyond the city they found a farmer, an old man whose sons had gone to war, and for some silver put in the palm of his hand first he dug a hole at the far end of a field and they laid the coffin into the earth.

“You are to guard it that the wild dogs do not dig it up,” Liu Ma told him, but he chuckled at her.

“Do you think the dogs need to dig up graves nowadays? No, they are better fed than any of us!” He sighed and spat on his hands and lifted up his hoe and went back to his work.

And Mayli and Liu Ma stepped into their rikshas again and went back to the city.