Pearl Buck - The Promise

“Think of comin’ this far to find a lot of women!” the short one remarked.

“Shut up, Rick,” the first Englishman replied. There was a long moment of shy silence, then he shouldered his gun. “Well, come along, everybody,” he said, “we’d better be on the march again.” He tramped off in the direction in which they had come, the men taking the lead and the women falling in behind, single file.

Now these two kinds of people, men and women, light and dark, walked hour after hour in the sultry dusk of the jungle, each kind dubious of the other, and therefore continuing in silence. Once and again they muttered together concerning each other. Thus the Englishmen, glancing backward at the women, spoke in low voices:

“The little one doesn’t look more than seventeen,” one said.

And another one said, “They’d be pretty if you didn’t remember your own girls.”

“They’re too yellow, too thin, and I don’t like their eyes,” the third one said.

“Still they’re girls,” the first one said.

“I suppose you’d call them that,” another answered.

The women spoke freely, knowing the men could not understand them in their own language. “Are all Ying men tall and thin and bony like these?” Hsieh-ying asked Mayli.

Mayli could still smile, hot and tired though she was. “Ying men come fat and thin as any other men do,” she said.

“They scare me,” Pansiao said plaintively. “Their eyes are cruel blue, and their noses are like plowshares. Why need they have such noses? Do they smell as dogs do?”

“They come from their mother’s wombs with those noses,” Mayli replied.

“They looked like peeled fruit,” Siu-chen said. “Why should their skin be red?”

“The sun burns them red instead of brown,” Mayli said.

And then being women they fell into yet more intimate talk. “Are these men as other men are?” Hsieh-ying asked, for she was one who had a warmth toward men and this she could not help, although for shame’s sake she hid it as much as she could.

“Certainly they are,” Mayli said with coolness.

“My flesh pimples to think of sleeping with such gawks,” Hsieh-ying said.

Mayli smiled drily. “I am glad to hear that,” she said and the women laughed.

Yes, they could laugh, looking at these Englishmen and seeing their knobby bare legs and tall lean bodies and lank necks burned crimson, so young were these women even after the sorrows of the battle and the plight they were now in.

“It is their hairiness which I cannot bear,” An-lan now said. “I never did like hairy things such as cats and dogs and monkeys, and these Ying men are covered with hair. Look at their beards!”

“They could not shave for all these days,” Mayli said.

But An-lan said, “How can they shave themselves all over? Look at their arms and their legs, as hairy as their chins, and did you see their bare bosoms? The hair was as thick on them as the hair on a dog’s breast. Have they hair all over their bodies under their garments?”

“I have never seen a Ying man without his clothes,” Mayli said shortly. “Nor any other man. But I think white men are not as hairy as dogs.”

With such talk they lightened some miles of walking, but it could not go on forever. They must think of food and shelter and as night came on of sleep. So when afternoon wore on to evening Mayli called to the Englishmen and she said,

“Had we not better talk together and decide what we should do about food and shelter? There is no end to the jungle yet, and somehow we must eat and sleep.”

The men stopped at that, and waited for the women to come up.

They sat down on fallen trees and they wiped their faces with their sleeves and plucked broad leaves and fanned themselves. The gnats and midges were thick about their heads and they needed to keep the leaves moving against them.

In a moment the short Englishman leaped up, “God, I can’t stand this,” he shouted. He slapped his bare legs and knees. In the orange red hair that grew on him there were entangled dozens of small insects. Now Hsieh-ying had been staring at him with large eyes, and she had smelled the leaf she held and it was very pungent, and she perceived when she crushed it that it gave out a yet stronger, hotter odor. So she went over to the man and motioned to him to rub the leaf up and down his legs, which he did, and the insects disliked the rank smell of the leaf and so he had a little peace from them.

“You’re a good girl,” he told Hsieh-ying and Mayli translated it and it made Hsieh-ying laugh behind her hand.

Yet so poisonous was that leaf that he had scarcely said this when his legs began to itch, and he began to scratch and yelled, “Damn, I believe that leaf was poison!” and they all looked at his leg and Hsieh-ying stopped laughing, and what between this and the insects, they all decided against staying and so they took up the march again. But now Mayli and the tallest Englishman walked side by side to talk, since they were the leaders and the others walked behind, together, too, and no longer separate.

The more the Englishman looked at Mayli the more he liked her. “It’s luck that we should fall in with someone who can speak English,” he said. “Perhaps we can help each other.”

“It is not easy for women to travel alone in this inhospitable land,” she replied.

“Shall we make a sort of plan?” he asked her next.

“I have been thinking what we could do,” she said. “If we could strike the great road which leads into India, it might be best for us all to go in that direction for I know there are no main roads into China. But I have often heard that there is a great road leading into India.”

He pressed his swollen lips together. “You are wrong,” he said brusquely. “There is none.”

“No road to India?” she exclaimed.

He shook his head. “That is why the retreat is so hard—” he said slowly, “the roads are narrow, old winding roads and they are clogged with people. Besides, nothing leads directly into India.”

For a moment she could not answer, so astonished she was. She had heard many times of the fabulous road into India, a hundred feet wide, hard as a floor, fit for great armies to march upon. “What incredible folly of your generals,” she cried, “to bring into this country armies too few for victory, and knowing that there was no way for retreat!”

“You don’t say anything that I do not myself say,” he told her. “I’ve said it over and over. But that’s the way it is. Dunkirk was easy compared to this. I was at Dunkirk, mind you. It was only a few miles of water we had to cross and all England turned out to help. We knew England was there, you see. But here — hundreds of miles of this horrible jungle — and England thousands of miles away. Even India—” he broke off and Mayli saw that he was fighting against tears.

She asked herself, “What are we here for?”

But he cried aloud, “What are we fighting for in this damned country? That’s what all the fellows said. If we win the war we’ll get this country back with all the rest of it. If we lose the war we’ll not have this anyway. This isn’t the place to fight. Why, we can sink men into this hole by the tens of thousands and never win. It isn’t a fit battlefield for white men!”

This she heard, and she did not answer. She looked around the jungle. No, it was not a battlefield. The trees trembled above their heads, and vines swung in the branches. Around them the underbrush spread in a thicket. Great grasses stood high above their heads wherever the trees parted enough for the sun, grasses wet with rain, and leaves as huge as plates. She paused now beside one such big leaf that held water from the last rain like a bowl and kneeling she drank the water from it. There had been three rains in the hours during which they had walked and they had drunk thus again and again. No, it was not a country for a battlefield. But how many had died upon it! She thought of the General and of Chung, and of all those others whom this morning she had left dead and yet she had not the heart to reproach this tired and confused man who walked beside her. He was no more to blame than she was. He had been sent here and he was here.