The Promise

VIII

SHE SAID TO HERSELF that certainly she could not sleep. Never in her life had she lain upon the ground to sleep. The four girls had piled some straw under her and when she had seen that all were in their places for the night, fed and cared for, she had lain herself down with her blankets wrapped about her. They slept in the back courtyard of a temple. The men were in the front, and this back room was very small so that half of the women slept outside, and she had chosen to be among these. The night was not cold and its silence was broken by the small waterfall of a brook which had been led through the court from the hillside above the temple. The tinkle of the water teased her ears for a while as she thought of the day.

“Certainly I cannot sleep,” she thought, but it did not seem to matter whether she slept or not. What did anything matter that might happen to one person? She lay thinking that for the first time in her life it seemed of no meaning what happened to her, no, nor even what happened to Sheng, wherever he was. They were being swept along in the same great wave westward. They might meet and they might never meet, and this, too, was without meaning. To go on, to find the enemy, to defeat that enemy, for them all this had become the whole of life.

… In the morning she woke first. For an instant she could not find herself. Upon the gray morning air, now very chill and damp, she heard the thin struggling crow of a young cockerel. Then she saw lights already lit in the temple and, lying a moment longer, she heard the deep droning chant of the priests at morning prayer. This was a Buddhist temple and the music, though so old that its source was far beyond the memory of any man now alive, still had foreignness in its cadence. It had come from India and India was in its sound. She had never seen India, nor ever thought of it except as a color upon the map at school. In this gray dawn, listening to the chant, she thought of India as the land toward which their faces were now turned. In ancient days men had gone from China to India to find a new and better god. An emperor had told his messengers, “I hear there is a god in India whom we do not have. Go and find him and bring him here to live with us.” So they had gone and found Buddha.

Now they went toward India, soldiers and not priests. Thousands of soldiers went even on foot, dragging artillery behind them by ropes and straps across their shoulders. They were camping somewhere now on the road. Thirty miles was their day’s march and they had set off two days earlier than the trucks, and the trucks had not caught up to them yesterday.

At her side Chi-ling lifted her head.

“Are you awake, captain?” she asked. For captain was the title that Pao Chen had given to Mayli.

“I am awake,” Mayli replied.

She put back her blanket and sat up. All about her heads lifted. They had not been sleeping either, but waiting, and when they saw her awake one by one the young women rose and folded their blankets and packed their knapsacks and bundles, and almost in silence they all did this.

And Mayli was among the first and she went to the temple kitchen. There she found two old priests already behind the great earthen stoves feeding in grass, and there was a cauldron of water very hot.

“Dip in, lady,” the old priest said, not looking at her because she was a woman. “That is water for washing.”

She saw a tin basin there and she dipped a gourd dipper into the hot water and she took the full basin and in a corner behind some bamboos, she washed herself and combed her hair. She had kept her hair long as it was, but at this moment combing it over her shoulders, she thought:

“What will I do with this hair? What can it be but a care to me?” For one moment she thought of Sheng and how he had liked her hair long.

“I like to know that a woman is a woman when I look at her,” he had said once when she had teased him by saying she would cut off her hair as many women now did.

But she thought of him for only a moment. Then she seized the long twist in her hand and went to where she had slept and opened her pack and took out the little scissors that Liu Ma had put in her sewing bag. Holding her hair in her left hand she cut it off at her neck with the scissors. The women watched her, but no one said a word. She went with the long hair in her hand into the kitchen and she went behind the stove where the little old priest was crouched, and before his astonished eyes she thrust her hair into the fire like grass.

He chuckled and she saw his toothless gums. “I swear it is the first time priest’s breakfast has been cooked by woman’s hair,” he said in the little high squeaking voice of a eunuch.

She smiled and went away again, and out in the court she shook her head, and the wind was cool in her short hair. She felt light and free, and from that day she held her head higher than before.

… On this day the Big Road, which had risen beneath them as they traveled it the day before rose still higher upon the mountains. They had come by small roads until a day ago, to escape the enemy’s bombing. But as they had come near to the border, the order came down to move south on the Big Road. Who had not heard of this Road? They all knew how it had been made by men and women whose tools were the spades and hoes with which until now they had tilled only the fields. Those who had no tools had used their hands.

Mayli rode in the second truck in which she had been the day before, and she was glad of that, for now the young engineer made her see that which without him she might not have seen with understanding. He was in the truck when she came out, after she had been busy with all she was responsible for. It was her pride that not one moment’s delay should be caused by her women, and so she stood waiting at their head outside the temple when Chung came out. He smiled ruefully when he saw her there, for his own garments were hastily put on and his hair stood up unbrushed.

“To get up early,” he groaned in pretended agony, “it is the curse put upon man.”

“I thought you were always earlier than I am,” she said.

He yawned loudly for answer and shook himself like a dog and took a piece of brown sesame bread out of his pocket and gnawed it while he found his place on the top of bales of goods. She took her own place when all her women were in their vehicles, and the young engineer sat waiting, his motor hot, and he very neat and clean and his hair smooth.

He looked at her with the smallest of smiles on his lips. “My name is Li Kuo-fan,” he said. “Called Charlie by the Americans.”

“Charlie?” she repeated. “It suits you better than Li Kuo-fan. Let it be Charlie. And I am Mayli, surnamed Wei.”

He nodded without repeating her name and the truck started.

She could see excitement in his long narrow eyes. “I’ve looked for this day,” he said. “I have wanted to travel the Big Road since it was made. This is my first chance. Maybe this is why I came along.”

The road rose ahead very rapidly, and yet its slope was clever and even. It clung to the sides of the steepening hills like a trail.

“See how it follows the footholds on the hills,” he said. “It was made by men who had walked these hills so long that they knew where foot could cling.”

So it had been. Generations of grass cutters had found the most hidden easy path for the feet, and generations of traders, following their pack mules on their way to the West, where they could sell their goods and find new goods to bring back, had searched out the possible ways, as they climbed the mountain ranges of the western wall.

“They asked foreign engineers how long it would take to make this Big Road,” Charlie said. “They considered their tools and said ‘Years.’ But the Chairman said, ‘It must be months. We will use our own tools.’ So it was months.” His eyes swept up the climbing agile road. “I’m proud of it,” he said, and she, looking at him, saw his eyes fill with tears and she was silent.

They passed in the middle of the morning a great hole in the road where yesterday the enemy had bombed it, and there they saw such men and women as had built the road. They were now mending the hole, and it was nearly ready for their vehicles. Who were these people? When the vehicle stopped she came down to rest herself and to tell her women that they too could come down since it would be awhile before they could go on. She saw the rugged blue-clad crowd busy at their task, and she went over to a woman who sat flat on the earth, pounding rock to pieces with a harder, larger rock. The woman was young, but the rock dust had made her face and hair gray, and it clung to her eyebrows, and it was thick on her shoulders. Near her in an old basket a little child slept, under a torn quilt. When Mayli came the woman looked up shyly not sure whether this was a foreigner or what. But Mayli spoke to her politely. “Have you eaten?” she asked. Now this was the salutation of the north, and the woman answered it as a question.

“I have worked all night,” she said. “And I eat while I work.”

Now that she perceived that Mayli spoke her own language a wide bright smile came over her dusty face and her teeth were very white and even.

“And the child?” Mayli asked, astonished.

“He sleeps here well enough,” the woman said laughing.

“But your family?” Mayli asked.

“There is my man and me and the older two, and we all work here on the Big Road,” the woman said with pride. “We helped to make it.”

“Like this?” Mayli asked.

“I pound rock and my man carries earth,” the woman answered. “The girl pounds rock over there, and the boy carries what we pound.” She nodded to a girl child a few yards away, who had stopped to stare at Mayli.

“Which is your man?” Mayli asked.

The woman pointed with her chin at a man digging with his hoe in another place. He filled his bamboo baskets and lifted the pole on his shoulder and carried them and emptied them where the earth had been blown away.

“We live not far from here,” she said, pointing again with her chin, “and when they call for the road to be mended, we lock the door and all come together. Let the enemy blow their holes — we can mend them.” She laughed and again her white teeth shone out of her gray and dusty face, and she began pounding. Men and women, they worked with the unhasting speed to which they were used and in less than an hour more there was a bridge of earth and rock, narrow but firm.

“These are the people to whom I belong,” Charlie said when they went on again.

“Were your parents really like these?” she asked.

His thin lips grew more thin. “The people are my father and mother,” he said shortly. It was all she was ever to know of his forebears.

This day was one like the many that came after it. If she had been timid or afraid, she would have been often afraid, for that road now soared so high that to travel upon it was more like flying than riding upon rock and earth. More than a few of her women were sick and they leaned over the side of the vehicles where they rode and vomited heartily. But they did not complain and they would allow no delay. Once when the road marched along the top of a high ridge between higher mountains, Mayli chanced to look back, and she saw An-lan, her pale face set in terror. Indeed it was a cause for fear to see how the ridge dropped down on both sides of the narrow rough road. She called back, “An-lan, An-lan, can you go on?”

The girl could not answer. Her lips were stiff and when she put out her tongue to wet them her tongue was dry. She could only nod her head.

“All right?” Charlie asked.

“An-lan is green with fear,” Mayli said. “But this is no place to stop.”

“It is not,” he replied, and could not take his eyes for one instant away from the perilous trail.

It was indeed a dangerous spot. At the foot of the precipices on both sides of the road they saw the wrecks of trucks and cars which had slipped and fallen to one side or the other. But the wrecks were surrounded with men who were taking them to pieces and packing the metal into bundles which they could carry. Metal was precious, and at a certain town on one of the days, she found one place where this metal was very precious. This town had for hundreds of years been famous for the making of scissors, and today, in the midst of the war, the scissors makers went on with their trade.

Now they had all stopped here for their noonday meal, and Mayli and her women were very curious to see these scissors. They were wrought with skill and so delicately chased that each woman was anxious to buy a pair, and they were willing to go without their meal if only they could buy a pair of the scissors.

Mayli bought scissors, too. She found a small sharp shining pair upon which butterflies were chased, and though she had the pair Liu Ma had given her she could not resist these. The edges were sharp as little knives.

“How sharp the edges are,” she said to the old man who sold them to her. He had a little wayside shop, open to the street, and he had nothing but scissors for sale.

“It is the foreign steel,” he said. He put on his brass-rimmed spectacles and took up the scissors to explain them to her.

“But where do you get such steel?” she asked.

“How impatient are women!” he said, and he reproved her with his little solemn eyes. “I am about to tell you. The steel is from the trucks that slide over the side of the Big Road. You must know that these trucks are made in the Mei country. The steel there is mixed with many metals and it is very hard — harder than any iron we can make. I wish I knew the secret of those makers of steel. Now because of this we make the best scissors we have ever made, although for hundreds of years our scissors have been famous in these parts.”

“I have been in the Mei country, America, they call it,” she said smiling, “and I have seen the great steel furnaces where the metal is mixed.”

Then to his hanging jaws and wide eyes she told him how she had gone to see great steel works as indeed once she had when she went home with a schoolmate who lived in Pittsburgh.

“That was a sight,” she said. “The furnaces were bigger than a house and the metal poured out like living water, white hot, but what the alloys were I cannot tell you. I only thought what a wonderful and fine sight it was.”

He wrapped the scissors for her in soft paper as he listened and then he shook his head gravely.

“Those foreigners,” he said. “They know everything that has to do with metals and steels, and they can fly their airplanes as though each man had made his own. I see them sometimes fly over our heads. They come out of the mountains and their cloudships are enough to frighten any devil, with their grinning jaws. How the enemy shrieks and flies when they come! Who are these men who drive such monster machines? I thought, once, that such men must be ten feet tall and winged like eagles. But no, I see them now sometimes, for there is an airfield for them in a town not far from here. They are only young men, foreign, but full of temper and noise like any other young men. They come down out of the sky and bellow because they are hungry.” He laughed silently and folded away his spectacles. “Children,” he said gently, “children — playing with magic!”

He looked so wise in his age that she felt humble before this old man, who had done nothing but make scissors all his life, and she took her purchase and went away.

But she did not forget what he had said. On the afternoon of the next day when they were winding along a very hazardous part of the road, their hazard suddenly increased. Seventeen enemy planes appeared out of the sky behind the mountains. The day was clear and blue, and there was no hiding place anywhere. Below them the precipices fell away for a thousand feet and above them the mountain soared on. There was no cave nor rock big enough for them to creep under. Nor had they time. The enemy rushed out like dragons.

Who could decide whether to halt or to speed on?

“Even if we stopped and crawled under the trucks, what use would that be?” Charlie groaned and he pressed his foot and the truck darted forward, swaying over the edge of the narrow road.

Those vicious enemy planes dropped down and now the valleys roared and the mountains crackled with their noise. Mayli gripped the side of her seat with her hand and braced her feet against the sloping floor. She knew instantly the full meaning of their peril. It might be that at any moment they would be fragments of steel and wood and human flesh flying down the precipices.

Then as swiftly as the enemy had appeared there came four other planes from heaven and they attacked the enemy so swiftly that eye could not follow them. She saw them close, now high, now low, now weaving in and out among the fire from the enemy guns. Such a battle went on as she could not have imagined. The enemy forgot its attack and turned against the four planes, but who could catch those skillful creatures of the sky? Six enemy planes crashed into the valleys, and without loosing a single bomb the others went away.

Now Charlie stopped his truck, for the four planes were driving the enemy beyond, and it was better to stay back, and the whole long line of vehicles stopped and they all watched.

“The Flying Tigers,” Charlie said. His lips were quivering and his eyes were shining. He was panting as though he were running.

“Get ’em,” he had muttered all through the battle. “Get that one — good boy — there goes another. Oh, you good boys — oh, you great fellows—”

It was over in less than ten minutes, but when the skies were clear again, her whole body ached, as though she had been hours in the one tense position. She felt her hand hurt her suddenly, and when she looked at it she saw she had pressed the metal side of the seat so hard that she had cut into her own flesh.

But before she could speak she forgot it. She heard a sudden roar of wings, and there at her side hanging over the emptiness which fell away to the plains below, she saw a small plane for one second very near her, and out of it leaned a laughing American face. She saw him wave his hand, then he flew upward again and on over the mountain’s head. Then she remembered what the old man had said yesterday when he sold her his scissors. Children — playing with magic!

… And yet nothing was so strange as one more thing which happened on the last day of their journey on the Big Road. Their eyes were filled now with the beauty of this journey into the height of mountains and the depth of valleys, with waterfalls flying hundreds of feet through the air. Their eyes were stretched with all they had seen. When night fell they camped in majestic sleeping places, in little towns caught high above crags, or in temples built in cuplike valleys upon mountain tops. They grew silent because of the grandeur of their days. A laugh could echo across ten valleys, a shout could shake the rocks of mighty cliffs. Without knowing it they spoke in soft voices and kept their laughter low. Then slowly as days passed the mountains sank to hills and the chill dry air softened. Bamboos grew again and lilies and ferns, and now they were coming down the mountain walls, into the lowlands which led to Burma.

Here was the strange thing. A certain town, scarcely more than a village, lay waiting for them at the end of a day. Mayli had settled her young women into their places as she always did and then she had a little time for herself, and, being eager to see strange things, she went to the gate of the temple which they had hired for a stopping place, the men this time being in tents outside the city, and as she stood there she saw a handful of young women come by who were not hers. Now she knew that there was another encampment in this city, for when she went to make her usual report to Chung, her superior, he said,

“There is a contingent of sick men here, left from the other army. They are men who have been struck down by the black malaria, and tonight I shall go there to the south of the city where they are encamped, and see how they are. I purposely directed our men to camp on the north, for there should be no coming and going between us.”

“Black malaria?” she repeated.

Then he told her of that disease more swift than any human enemy which hides in the lowlands about the mountains and it is so hateful because it seizes men’s brains as well as their bodies.

“How can I guard my women from it?” she asked in great alarm.

“They must not be bitten by mosquitoes,” he told her, and so she had spent her evening telling her women this, and a certain old priest came by while she spoke, and he said, “Let them sleep near burning incense for the devils which bring the disease hate incense burned to the gods.” So he went and brought back handfuls of incense and spills made of brown paper which he lit and blew upon to light the sticks of incense.

It was after all this that Mayli had gone to stand at the gate for a little while to watch the street and the people who came and went here. And thus she had seen the handful of young women who were not hers.

Now this was the thing which happened while she stood, and it was the sort of thing which men hearing it would say could not happen but it did. Among those young women she heard a voice she thought she knew and she looked and saw a face she did know, and who was it indeed but Sheng’s younger sister, that little Pansiao whom she had left months before this in a school in the mountain caves where she had taught for a while?

She stared at the girl, and thought, “It is she, Pansiao,” and then she thought, “It cannot be Pansiao, for she was so young and tender and how could she be here?”

The young women were passing very close now. They were all in uniforms and they were laughing and talking. As they came near, Mayli spoke in a low voice, but very clearly “Pansiao!”

The young girl whom she was watching stopped, turned, and stared at her with rounding eyes. It was Pansiao.

“Oh,” she cried. “You!”

She sprang out from among her fellows and seized Mayli’s hand in both hers and stared at her and laughed and pressed Mayli’s hand to her breast. “Where did you go?” she cried. “Oh, how I missed you when you were gone! It was because of you that I ran away. Yes, because of all you said to us. Do you remember how you would not let me learn ‘Paul Revere’?”

“I do remember,” Mayli said laughing. “Come inside the gate.”

“This is my friend,” Pansiao said joyfully to the other girls, who were standing fixed with astonishment. “This is — she is my teacher — or she was.”

“Come inside, all of you,” Mayli said. So they came inside, and sat down on the marble steps in front of the temple, and there Pansiao told how she had run away from Miss Freem and the school in the caves.

“Six of us ran away,” she said, “and some went one way and some another. Well, it was so easy. I just ran away one day, and the army was not far off and there were enough people moving southward and I went with them. They let me eat what they ate when they heard I went to join the army.”

She looked so naive, so fresh, with her red cheeks and her soft brown eyes, so much a child, though thin and hard-fleshed with walking, that Mayli could not but smile her tenderness. And added to her natural tenderness was this, that Pansiao was Sheng’s sister and it was Pansiao who had first told her about Sheng, and had wanted her, childlike, instantly to be his wife.

“Do you know your brother is somewhere on the way to Burma?” she now asked Pansiao.

Pansiao clapped her hands and then put her hands to her cheeks. “You mean my third brother?”

“I do mean that one,” Mayli replied.

Pansiao leaned close. “You are not — are you?”

“I am not married,” Mayli said, and could not prevent the heat rising to her face.

“Nor is he, yet?” Pansiao asked gently.

“No, he is not,” Mayli said.

She felt her face very hot under the young girl’s clear gaze, but what more could she say and what could she do but speak of something else?

“Where do you go now?” she asked Pansiao.

“I have not been told,” the girl replied.

“Would you like to join us and go west?” she asked.

“Oh, I would like to go with you,” Pansiao cried.

“Then I will see what I can do to bring it about,” Mayli replied. It would be sweet to have this child with her who was Sheng’s sister. She put out her hand and touched Pansiao’s hand. “Go back,” she said, “and come again tomorrow morning with your things. Tonight I shall talk to those who are above me and ask them to let you come with us — with me.”

“Oh, what if they will not!” Pansiao cried.

Mayli smiled. “I think they will,” she said. Her eyes and voice were those of one not used to being refused.

Pansiao jumped up. “I will go and pack my things now,” she said. She dropped to her knees before Mayli.

“Let me come back tonight!” she pleaded.

Who could refuse such adoration? Certainly Mayli could not.

“Very well, tonight,” she said. “It will be best, for we start the day at dawn.”