Pearl Buck - The Promise

He rose when the girl stopped singing.

“Where are you going?” Charlie asked him.

“Upon my own business,” Sheng said shortly, and he wound his way among the men, sitting and lying upon the ground as they listened. He went beyond the outermost edge of them. Then under a little tree he took the blanket he had with him and rolled himself up in it, head and all, and lay stolidly enduring his inner loneliness.

HE WAS AWAKENED BY some one stumbling over his body. Before he could rise another fell over him and another. He sat up with a roar.

“You big turnip!” he bellowed and flung his arms out and grasped a leg. The man fell on him and they fought for an instant and then together staggered to their feet.

“Your mother!” the man cursed. They glared at each other. “You an officer!” the man shouted when he saw Sheng’s shoulder signs. “Asleep, when the command has come down to march instantly! Our allies are in a trap, you sleeper! Where are your men?”

Sheng’s jaw went slack and he rubbed his face with both hands. Then without a further word he put out his two elbows and made a battering ram for himself and so he charged his way through the running crowd of men.

How long had he slept? Not surely for more than an hour. The sky was glittering with stars, and the silence of night was deep over the valley. He seemed still to hear the echoes of music in his ears.

“I am an ox,” he thought, in shame. “How was it I fell asleep?”

He caught sight of one of his own men and pushed his way to him.

“You, Little Crab!” he shouted. This man was called Little Crab because he was one of two brothers and because he had once received a wound in battle which had shortened his left leg so that he walked as though he were going sidewise.

“What is all this noise?” Sheng went on. He pulled Little Crab aside and they left the others and went a rounder way to their tent which was still shorter because it was out of the crowd.

“How do I know?” Little Crab retorted. “I am only a small soldier and nobody tells me anything. But when the women were making a play about how a girl student was captured — how she killed six of the enemy by poison upon her lips before it was discovered — in the midst of this a messenger came running from the General to say that we were marching within the hour, for the white men are trapped southward beyond the river, and there they are, all mixed together, advance and rear and troops, and the dwarf-devils are attacking on all sides. The white men have no food and no water, and unless we can reach them in time they will die like beasts.”

Sheng’s answer to this was to push ahead and leave Little Crab to limp on. In a few minutes he had reached the General’s own headquarters and there he found the other commanders gathered already and waiting. If there was any doubt in the General’s mind now he showed no shadow of it on his face. He stood behind his desk, in his hands papers which he read as he gave his commands in a low sharp voice.

“You, Pao Chen,” he said, “are to form your men into the middle ranks. Yao Yung and Chan Yu, your men are to be the two wings.”

He looked up and his darting eyes caught sight of Sheng, and a flicker of laughter shone in them for a moment.

“You, Sheng, look as thought you had been asleep in a briary bush,” he said, in exactly the same voice.

Sheng put his hands to his head. In his haste he had left his officer’s cap on the ground where he had fallen asleep, and he felt dried bamboo leaves in his hair. He combed them out hastily with his fingers, and his face was scarlet.

“I am a water-buffalo,” he muttered. “Let there be quiet around me and I fall asleep like a beast.”

“There will be no quiet for the next days,” the General said grimly. “You are to be the vanguard. Your men must leave within this hour. You are to lead south and then bear west. You will cross the next river at the first ford, and that must be as soon as you can, for it is not trustworthy that the bridges further down still hold. The enemy is in a circle, or so it is said, around the white men.”

“I am willing enough to obey you,” Sheng replied and saluting, his hair still on end, he turned and walked quickly from the room. When he had reached the door he broke into a run, and nearly overturned the doctor who was hurrying toward the General. Chung’s face was as pale as the handful of papers that fluttered in his hands.

“Is the General there?” he shouted as Sheng ran past him.

“Where else?” Sheng bellowed back over his shoulder. In the darkness a woman stepped quickly and lightly along behind the doctor, but Sheng did not turn to look at her.

As for the woman, it was Mayli, and at the sound of that voice she stopped and stared after the young man’s hurrying figure. A flickering lamp swung over the doorway of the General’s door, but its light was lost here. Upon the threshold Chung turned and called back to her, “Don’t delay — there’s no time! We cannot start until we have our orders clear.”

She pulled back her wondering mind. There was no time indeed, and indeed why should she wonder? There were thousands of young men with loud voices in the army, and why should she think of Sheng?

“I do not delay,” she said firmly, and entered the General’s room.

… Before midnight the march was begun. Whether or not the white men could be succored before it was too late was now the question, but every small old enmity was put aside and each man and woman thought only of the honor of his own people, that now it was they who went to rescue those who had always behaved as lords and masters to them.

“They look to us for once,” the General had said brusquely to them all. A scornful pride had glittered out of his eyes and made his voice harsh. “We have never been fit for anything before, but now that they are trapped on all sides by the East Ocean dwarfs, they need us. Well, let us show them what we are!”

In this spirit every man did his duty and so the march began. It was not to be made in one day or even two or three. The terrain was their enemy, and the roads were few, for the white men had built few great roads through this land in the days of their rule. Small old country roads had now to be followed, roads rough with dried mud and broken ancient cobbles and rutted with the wheels of rude farm carts. Sometimes there were only paths, so that they had to walk singly, and twice they struck through the jungles with no paths, but this at least was in full daylight because of the snakes and the leeches and such hateful creatures. And it was not enough to watch what crawled under their feet. The skies must be watched for the enemy planes that went to and fro among the clouds, trying to discover just such aid as this to the beleaguered white men.

“We are safer in the jungle with the snakes,” Sheng told those men who followed him.

Now all put on their green coats and wound branches of trees about their heads so that from above they would be the color of the earth and so less easily seen. And Mayli, walking with her women, bade them, too, wind branches about their hair. They were very pretty, she thought, watching them, and so young that they made a game even of this trick against death, laughing at each other, and one bending to twist another’s crown of green more gracefully, and some were careful what leaves they chose, and Pansiao found scarlet jungle flowers on a vine and twisted them into her crown, and her round merry face under the flowers made them all look at her and smile.

And Sheng was in the vanguard, pushing on ahead of all the others, and Mayli and her women were in the rear, and still those two did not meet or know that they were part of the same battle. Across the grave business of the day and the night, even through the weariness of the march, each thought for seconds, for a moment, of the voice and the look that had been like, and yet how could they be one another’s? And still the war carried them on, a part of itself, and separating them with the heavy duties each had to do, so that there was no time for thought or dreaming.