The Promise

VII

THEN 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.

“Whose blood is this?” she asked.

Then the girl, shame-faced, held out her pretty hands, and they were cracked and bleeding.

“Come here and let me oil them and bind them,” Mayli said. “What can you do with hands like that?”

Every day thereafter in the morning Mayli oiled and tied them with bandages, and so she came to know the girl, who was always blushing and laughing and crying out that it did not matter about her hands.

The second girl was a thin, pale, small one from Tientsin, a city girl accustomed to wealth, whose parents had escaped before the enemy, and her mother had died from hardship, and her two brothers had been killed in battle and she and her old father were left alone. He, having nothing else to give, and being old and feeble, besought her to go and in some way avenge herself for her brothers. When he found that she was unwilling because when she went he would have no one to care for him, he took a peaceful poison, and she found him dead one morning, and knew that now his command upon her could not be denied. This girl’s name was Tao An-lan.

The third girl was a very pretty one and her name was Sung Hsieh-ying, and she had suffered no hardships of any kind, except when the city was bombed, for she belonged to this city and had grown up here, and her whole zeal was love of her country, unless perhaps she longed for change and travel, but she thought it was love of country.

The last girl was no girl at all but a young widow who had suffered from the enemy in ways she would not tell. But she had been a soldier in the army in the northwest, and had been captured and had escaped, and passing through many ways, she had come at last to this place and hearing that armies were being sent westward, she offered herself. Her name was Mao Chi-ling.

Each of these women had been taught, as all had, the care of wounded and sick men, and some knew more than others, but all knew something.

Besides these four, who attached themselves of their own will to Mayli as their head, there were all the others who from day to day began to look toward her as their head and the one between them and the others above, and this made a change in Mayli. She who all her life had thought of no one except herself now found these young women for whom she must think and plan. She worked all day and in the night she woke to dark fear lest she had forgotten something, which when they were in the middle of the march in the jungle, would be needed perhaps to prevent death. There were no books to tell her anything of the march, and now she began to search out those who had traveled westward and she asked a truck driver or a bearer coolie, a soldier, or a traveling merchant, any and all who had been to the west.

“What is the climate there?” she asked.

“So hot that hot tea is cool,” one said.

“So rainy that the clothes mildew and fall from your back,” one said.

“The insects consider you a gift from heaven,” one said.

“The snakes rise up in the middle of the path before you and greet you as their daily rice bowl,” one said.

“The poisonous vines reach out their arms,” one said.

“The sun peels off your scalp, hair and all,” one said.

“Fever crawls into all your seven apertures and shakes your bones like dice in a cup,” one said.

“The rivers lie smooth and small until you come and then they rise into seas and swallow you. The river gods there are very strong and evil, and they have all been bribed by the enemy,” one old man said. He had fallen into a river somewhere and his leg had been bitten to a stump by a crocodile.

She listened to all they said, finding the truth in their several ways of telling her that the country through which they would march was dangerous difficult country, full of sickness and ill fortune. It would be her duty to guard as she could against these evils. Medicines Chung would take, but she bought extra leather shoes for her women, to each a pair more than they wore, and she rolled wide strips of the heavy cloth woven in the farmhouses of that region, and these were to wrap around the legs to prevent the insects, and she found yards of coarse linen and she tore them into veils, to keep away the poisonous flies and mosquitoes, and she devised and packed boxes of compressed extra foods, each woman to have such a small box of dried bean-curd and salted meat and rock sugar. Everything must be light and small, for if the carriers failed, all must carry their burdens and none must be heavy laden at any time, since to breathe the very air in the jungles was a burden. There were tales enough everywhere of the foreign soldiers who had so much to carry to provide comfort for themselves that they could not march quickly enough to catch the enemy.

An old soldier who had come back from a battle in the south cursed and spat and laughed as he said one day, complaining against carrying a change of garments, “Shall I be like those foreign turtles who carry summer clothes and winter clothes and rain shoes and a rain cloak and bedding and food and a sun hat and a rain hat and everything but a house? A gun, all the bullets I can steal, a second pair of straw sandals, and it is enough. I can feed myself as I go, and why should I be afraid of rain?”

This indeed was the temper of all the soldiers. They were willing to carry only what would help them in the battle. Each man held his gun dearer than himself, and guarded his ammunition even from his comrades, for there were those who would steal bullets who would have considered it sinful to steal anything else.

The day came for which all waited. The General, who had waited with great anger and impatience for the command to come down from above, had declared himself ready for the past eleven days, and everywhere he was cursing and swearing that there must be some trick to delay their going, for why did they not go, seeing that the enemy was everyday growing more strong? In the islands to the south the white men had been defeated again and again, and now they were clinging to the sides of mountains in dens like beasts. Then suddenly one day the order came down, and within an hour he had sent it out, and all knew that the next morning at dawn the great march would begin.

That night in her little house Mayli could not sleep. Twice and three times she got out of bed and examined her garments. Everything lay upon the chair ready for her, the heavy shoes, the uniform that was like a soldier’s, a pistol, her pack. Once she opened the pack, counting everything that was in it. She had a belt made with pockets for her money, to wear under her coat.

In the middle of the night the door opened and Liu Ma came stealing in. She had a small bag in her hand, not much bigger than her own palm, and she gave it to Mayli.

“What if a button tears off?” she whispered solemnly. “A small thing may cause great trouble.”

Mayli took the bag and inside she found short Chinese needles, and yards of fine strong silk thread wound small about paper spools, a pair of small steel scissors very sharp, and there were two brass thimbles, some foreign bone buttons, six foreign closing pins, though where Liu Ma had found these luxuries who could tell?

“I had not thought of this,” Mayli said. “But indeed it is what I might need very much.”

“Why should you think of a small thing when I do all your sewing?” the old woman said. “But now who knows whether you will ever need me again?”

Saying this she burst into loud tears, and sobbed. “You are a troublesome child to me, but it will be more trouble to live without you!”

“I shall be back,” Mayli promised her. “You must wait here for me and see — I will come back, I promise you.”

“Only Heaven can fulfill promises,” the old woman said and went away wiping her eyes on the corner of her jacket.

In the darkness Mayli lay down again upon her bed. Now that she was about to leave, and indeed perhaps forever, her mind seemed to be one vast confusion. Why was she going? The will to go had begun half idly as a wish partly made of loneliness, partly made of her reluctant love for Sheng, partly out of a true longing to be useful to her country. Now all of these parts had become a whole. She was going. She knew that Burma had become the single gate for China to the rest of the world. The gate must be kept open, for only through that gate could help come against the enemy.

… This purpose to hold open the gate of Burma was indeed the purpose of every man in those three divisions of soldiers, the purpose in every heart, man or woman, who set out the next day at dawn upon the march. The singleness of their purpose tied them together closer than a family, and they all felt their closeness. Yet who put it into words? The start was made like any other start, in a confusion of noise and bawling shouts, of complaints against loads too heavy, of small stubbornnesses and sudden quarrels. First the trucks were loaded to go as far as they could go. Goods and women were loaded into trucks and then men crowded in where they could. To one man in each truck a plan was given of where the route lay and where all must wait for each other at the end of the road.

Mayli, in her stiff cloth uniform, her pack strapped to her shoulders, stood ready at the head of her young women. They were dressed alike, and as she was dressed, and in their gravity each young face looked strangely like the next. Next to her stood her four aides. Their hearts were like her own, beating with excitement and fear and will for victory. Siu-chen’s round red-cheeked face was like a solemn child’s, and An-lan was paler than usual. Chi-ling, the young widow, looked sad and a little weary, as though for her the march had already begun. But Hsieh-ying, the girl who had suffered no hardships yet, was smiling and gay and her eyes were black and shining and her lips red because she kept biting them.

“Watchers of the wounded!” a man’s voice yelled. “Protectors of the sick! This way — this way!”

A little lieutenant waving a sheet of paper shouted at them and hastily Mayli stepped forward and with her all the others, and they marched forward to the trucks that had been set aside for them, and they began to climb in, the girls courteously waiting for Mayli to climb first into the seat beside the driver, who was a big common-faced fellow with small eyes set close under bristling brows of stiff black hairs.

A moment, a scream or two, some excited laughter, and they were ready to start. Now the truck where Mayli sat was the first in the four that carried them, and when the driver pushed a handle, it would not start. He stamped both feet and pushed another, and still it would not start. At that he cried out to heaven and beat the sides of his head with his palms and cursed his vehicle heartily.

“You who slept with your own mother!” he roared at the truck. “Have I not stuffed you full of foreign oils and poured water into your belly? Did I not burn incense for you to the gods yesterday? Now what more will you have?” He jumped down from his seat and kicked the truck well in its under parts and then leaping into his seat, pushed yet another handle.

All was of no use. The vehicle groaned and hissed and roared inside, but it did not move. Then Mayli who had often sat in foreign cars abroad saw a small handle and she pointed to it.

“Let that fly back,” she told the man.

He grinned at her and let it fly back, and the truck moved at once. He was not in the least abashed that he had forgotten to do this one necessary thing, and he complained as the truck bounced and leaped along the rough road. “The trouble with these foreign inventions is that none go far enough, in my opinion. If these foreigners are so clever at such things, why not go something further and add a self-releasing brake, so that the vehicle can remember its own needs? This cursed brain of mine, how can it think for me and for a vehicle, too? Must everything rest upon me?”

Now at this moment Mayli saw that the hood of the truck had been removed, and that all the inner parts of the engine were open to the dust and the rain. “Is it not very unwise to have the cover off the engine?” she inquired. “If it rains, we may be stopped, or if the engine clogs with dust.”

The driver pulled his little cap sidewise over his eye that was opposite her to leave his eye clear that was next her. “What am I that twenty times a day I must heave up a cover and put it down again?” he said. “I took the cursed thing off.”

This he said in the gayest and most careless manner, and all the time he talked he drove that vehicle like a wild animal down the road. Soon Mayli was speechless, and all she could do was to cling to her seat and brace her feet against the floor, for she was thrown from side to side, and up and down, and the man said grinning at her, without staying in the least his fearful speed, “Lady, it would be better to put another soldier on the other side of you, so that you would have us both for cushions.”

“Can you — can you — not go a little slower?” she gasped.

But he shook his head to this. “This accursed son of an obscene mother,” he shouted at her above the din and rattle. “If I let him go slower than this he thinks it is time to rest. No, once I let him know it is time to go, I must keep him going until I myself am too hungry and must stop for food. Besides, in the afternoon he never goes as well as in the morning. Do foreigners not work in the afternoon?”

She shook her head and did not try to answer except with laughter for by now what breath she had was not for talking.

How welcome was noon of that day! Without a word to prepare her the driver stopped the vehicle suddenly and seized her by the shoulder to keep her from shooting out over upon the ground, for the glass was gone from the windshield. The stillness was dazing. She sat for a moment in it to collect herself, but the man had already leaped down and he was pushing his way into an inn and shouting for food. Then when she had rested a moment she was compelled to laugh again and so she climbed down.

“I feel I have already marched a hundred miles,” she said to Hsieh-ying who ran forward to help her. They clustered around her and Hsieh-ying said:

“This afternoon I will change places with you, for I saw how your driver paid no heed to any clod in the road. Now the man in our truck was a student and he is very clever and escaped the ruts and the clods.”

But the truth was that Hsieh-ying, being a hearty woman, had liked the heartiness of that soldier who had driven the truck. This Mayli divined and let pass with a smile.

So when they had eaten of what had been prepared for them, great bowls of rice and meat, and cabbage, nothing could prevent Hsieh-ying from climbing in beside the big-faced fellow and Mayli found herself beside a pale thin young man who nodded to her without smiling when she took her seat.

It was true that this was a very different fellow. He knew his vehicle like a brother, and he handled it with care and the vehicle moved along as smoothly as a cat. It was the same road and no better than it had been, but how different it was! Mayli said, “You drive this, car as though you knew it.”

“I do know,” the young man said. “I am an engineer. I have a degree from an American college.”

“Then why are you doing this?” she asked.

Without knowing it she spoke in English and in English he answered her. “I was studying in America — my last year — and then I couldn’t go on. I had to come home and get into it. Well, I went to Chungking and waited and waited. Months. Nothing happened. This chance came and I took it.”

“Nothing happened?” she repeated.

His lip curled. “I hadn’t what it takes to get through to the big fellow,” he said.

“What it takes?” she repeated.

“Pull — money to open the gates — politics — something.”

“But it takes nothing,” she said. “I have nothing and I went in and saw them both.”

He shrugged his shoulders and kept his eyes on the road and was silent for a long time. Then, without moving his eyes from the road, he began suddenly to talk to her.

“Ours is the most beautiful country in the world. Look at those mountains! They are the most beautiful in the world. I was sick to get back home.”

Indeed all around them was very beautiful. The hills, bare of trees but covered with ruddy winter grass, were purple in the evening, a rich purple against a gilded sky. In the valleys the farmhouses clustered in villages, which lay before the mountains, and the hills were terraced into fields. Blue-clad farming folk stood at their doors to watch the trucks go by, and little children ran to the roadsides to shout to them and wave their arms. Bamboos were still green in the hollows of the hills, and now and then a temple roof lifted its high pure curve.

“This is what I came back for,” he told her, still in English. “I came back for this land and these people — not for any big men at the top.”

“Are you a communist?” she asked out of a second’s instinct.

“I don’t know what you mean when you say communist,” he retorted. “I’m a man of the people.” He was silent again for a long time and then he said, “Of the people — by the people — for the people.”

She recognized the familiar foreign words without knowing why he used them now. Nor did he explain them. They rode another half hour in silence, and he drew up smoothly outside the gates of a small town. “Here is where we camp tonight,” he said and leaped out.

She climbed down then and saw him, before she turned away, examining the vehicle as tenderly as though it were a living creature that belonged to him.

“Tomorrow I must ask him his name,” she thought, and she wondered that she had not asked it today. But she had not. Names seemed meaningless. They were all moving forward together and the name of any one was nothing.