Pearl Buck - The Promise

“You are come,” she cried, and put down her bowl and made haste to fetch tea and food. Soon the place was quiet no more, between the dog and Liu Ma and Mayli herself, who, being full of health and pleasure, could not keep from singing and calling out to Liu Ma. She made no secret to the old woman of her wish to know whether Sheng had come while she was gone.

“Did the Big Soldier plague you while I was gone?” she shouted to Liu Ma in the kitchen.

And Liu Ma shouted back, “Did he not? I am sorry for you, young mistress!”

“Why?” Mayli asked. She had put her porcelain basin of hot water at the window and there she stood washing herself, the steam coming off her lovely skin, and her lips red.

“He is roaring like a tiger,” Liu Ma shouted back. “He bellowed north and south, east and west, because he did not know where you were.”

“And you could tell him nothing!” Mayli cried gaily.

“Nothing, nothing!” the old woman cackled, coughing in the smoke behind the stove. Now that her young mistress was back she felt excited and alive again, and she made haste and dropped this and that and broke an egg on the floor and called in the dog to lap it up and tried to do everything at once.

As for Mayli she had never felt so filled with joy in all her being. Not so long as she lived would she forget the Ones Above and especially the lady whose eyes and ears she was to be. Nothing she could have been given to do could please her more than this, and she knew she could do it well, and she trusted in herself. She sat eating heartily of rice and egg and fish and tearing a strip of brown baked sesame bread apart with her hands, biting the tiny sesame seeds with her white sharp teeth, and throwing bits to the dog, and all the time her mind leaped across the miles of land and the mountains, to the battlefield.

“Surely we will succeed,” she dreamed, “and the enemy will be stopped by our men and before all nations it will be seen that we are brave and we stopped them. When our allies see our success they will honor us for it and redeem their promises.”

So her great thoughts went on, leaping from crag to crag of the mountains and making the hardships of the battlefield easy and the armies victorious, and in those armies would not Sheng be the bravest and the best of all the young leaders? She and Sheng together, could not they be two like the Ones Above some day? Then since she was not a dreamer by nature, she laughed at herself and pulled the dog’s ears.

“You will be ill if you eat any more bread, you mouse,” she said, and she rose and paced about the court restlessly and thought whether or not she would tell Sheng that she was going or whether she would let him find out for himself. This she could not decide for nearly an hour. There would be pleasure in telling him, for how could he forbid what the lady had commanded? And yet she was a mischievous creature and she could not forbear the thought of her laughter when he saw her the first time on the march with him. The nurses would be taken in trucks as far as these vehicles could go, doubtless, and she imagined herself riding past him, and she imagined his face when he saw her. This so tempted her that she decided that she would not tell him. No, and she would not tell him even that she was come home.

Then she remembered the General. She knew he had come back before her, for the Chairman had said he was sending the generals quickly to prepare for battle. Would he not tell Sheng immediately when he saw her name upon the lists? Then she must go quickly to his headquarters herself and beg him to keep her secret.

This no sooner came to her mind than she did it. She combed her hair freshly and thrust red berries into the coil, and put on her red wool gown and her long black cape, and smoothed perfume into her cheeks and palms, and was ready to go.

“Where are you going now?” Liu Ma shouted to her through the kitchen window.

“I have business,” Mayli replied, “and if that big soldier comes while I am gone, you are not to tell him I am here.”

This comforted Liu Ma, who did not put it at all beyond her mistress’s mischief that she would go to visit a man in his own rooms. Liu Ma often said aloud that once a woman steps over a broken wall she makes a road over it, and by this she meant that walls ought to be about women or they go anywhere and do anything without heed to decency.

So Mayli took a riksha and went to the General’s headquarters, and she thought, “It will be my usual evil that Sheng is there, too,” but no, he was not. When she gave her name to the guard at the gate, he took it in and the General who had come back the day before her ordered that she was to be brought in. He was alone, and he welcomed the thought of her company. Although he was a man who would never have looked at any woman except his wife with thoughts of intimacy, yet he relished a chance to talk to pretty young women, knowing his own inner safety.

So now he laid aside the paper plans he was studying and straightened his collar and looked at himself in the open window which was good as a mirror and smoothed his hair and rose when he heard her footsteps. She came in swiftly, not knowing she unconsciously imitated the lady in the way she walked and moved and in her warm quick smile.

He bowed when he saw her but she put out her hand in the foreign gesture which was natural to her. He hesitated and then put out his own hand and touched hers quickly. She laughed at his cool touch.

“I forgot that to shake hands is not natural to us,” she said frankly. “I have been too long away from home.”

“Sit down,” he said and himself sat down.

The smell of her perfume was in his nostrils and he breathed it in deeply. His wife was a good woman and he loved her and she had borne him two sons, but his parents had chosen her and he never forgot that this was so. Now with vague longing he looked at the fresh beautiful face. She had sat down and thrown back her cape and she leaned her arms on the desk, and looked at him frankly. He was made shy by that frank gaze and yet he enjoyed it. “These new women,” he thought, “though perhaps troublesome to a man, yet have their charm.” He had no wish to marry one of them. A man did not want so much charm in a wife. But still it was pleasant to look at one like this so long as he had no responsibility for what she did or said.

“I come always to ask you to help me,” Mayli said coaxingly. She never coaxed Sheng. With Sheng she was ruthless and teasing and she spoke out her mind, but her instinct taught her that she must not let this General think she knew herself his equal.

“I am always glad to help you,” the General said smiling.

“Have you seen the lists of those nurses who are to accompany the three divisions to Burma?” she asked.

“I have not,” the General replied. “I have been too busy with other parts of the campaign.”

“Then I am in time,” she said. She leaned forward a little more closely. “You know that I went to see the Ones Above,” she said in a low voice. “Did they speak of me to you?”

“I did not see the lady,” he said, “and with the Chairman I spoke only of military affairs.”

“The lady has appointed me to go as the one in charge of the young nurses,” Mayli said.

The General smiled. “The lady does what she likes,” he said. “But are you not young to be put in such a place?”

Mayli smiled a most mischievous smile. “I am young, but very strong,” she said. “I can walk for miles, I can endure heat and I can eat whatever there is to eat.”

“A good soldier,” he said. “Well, what else? Your work is not under my direct command, you know. You must report to another.”

He began to search through the papers and he found one and read out the name, “Pao Chen is your superior.”