Pearl Buck - The Promise

… Now they stayed at this village three days in all until they were rested and washed, and all tried to help the villagers as best they could. Mayli used her skill to tend the festering sores the villagers had, and this made them grateful. She had no medicines, but she boiled water and washed out the sores and used a sort of wine they made from soured cooked rice, and she motioned to those who had these sores that they must wash them with boiled water and then with wine and allow the sun to shine into them every day, and they understood her and even in three days she saw these sores begin to heal. Be sure the mothers brought sick children to Mayli, and an old man pointed to his chest and rumbled a deep cough to show her what was wrong with him, but she could not heal them all.

Yet in less than three days she began to be anxious to be gone from the village, for the two white men could not contain themselves but must act as though they were lords of the village. And one began to follow about a pretty girl of the village and Mayli was frightened when she saw this and went to the tall one.

“You must tell this fellow to stay away from the girl,” she warned him. “These people will not allow it.”

“I’ll tell him,” he promised.

But of what use is the promise? She saw that these white men without meaning ill, nevertheless angered the villagers in a score of small ways. They did not believe such small brown men were altogether human as they themselves were, and the brown men soon saw this and grew sullen, and on the morning of the third day Mayli said to the tall Englishman, “It is time that we went on before trouble breaks out between them and us.”

“They’re hot-tempered beggars,” he said. “I believe it’s their peppery food. They eat too much of it.”

At this she lost some of her patience. “You treat these villagers as servants,” she said. “You forget we are only guests.”

At this he said in a very cold voice, “After all, Burma does belong to us, you know.”

She laughed aloud. “Will you never know you are beaten?” she cried.

And suddenly she remembered all that Sheng had said against the white people and at this moment she agreed with him and she went on furiously, “How is it that you cannot understand even now that our lives are dependent on the people? Will nothing ever teach you? Do you wake up only when you are dead, you English?”

Over this honest good young face, so very young, now that he had shaved it with a razor he borrowed from a Burmese that day, she saw a bewildered stubborn surprise. He did not know her meaning and she saw that anger was no use, and scorn was no use, for he did not know why she was angry or why he could be scorned. The words went into his ears but they beat against a wall in him somewhere and came back again without entering or leaving an echo. “Come,” she said, “we must be on our way — there is no other salvation.”

Nor did she want to stay behind with her women in this village, for what would happen to them if they stayed? No, the white men were their allies after all and they had no others.

So she went that day to the old man who was, she knew by now, the head of the village, and she made signs and asked him for the path, and he understood and made signs that one would guide them out of the jungle to the roads, and so that day they left the village which had treated them so kindly and went on their way again, though what that way was who could tell?

… Now Sheng had been traveling too, and those with him. This journey had been made harder by a curious thing. That Indian had begun to show a mighty hatred of the solitary Englishman, so much so that Sheng saw it and he said to Charlie, “This man of India will do harm to the white man if he is left alone with him. Do you see how he has his hand always in his bosom where he keeps his knife?”

That Indian did have a knife, but it was a strange short one, not more than four inches long, but the edges of it were ground very fine and sharp.

“I have seen his hatred when he looks secretly at the white man,” Charlie said. “It is an evil thing that none of us speak his language to ask him what his hatred is.”

“We must keep our eyes on him day and night,” Sheng said. “Not for love,” he added, “but for justice.”

This they did although their task was made harder because the Englishman lived altogether ignorant of the Indian’s hatred and came indeed to treat him in small ways like a servant, and the Indian obeyed him when he pointed at something he wanted done, but his eyeballs swelled with fresh hatred when he did so.

Now they pressed steadily north, and though none knew it, the jungle ended much sooner northward than westward, and they struck a clear road which led toward the west. They halted there and took much thought as to whether they would go east or west. Eastward Sheng would have gone if he could, but the first village toward the east was full of the enemy, and luckily they found this out before they went far, because Charlie, who was ahead, saw a handful of enemy men drinking tea at a small roadside inn and he fled back to the others and immediately they all turned westward.

This was the same road to which the villagers had led Mayli and the others, but how could anyone know this? Yet so it was, and so all traveled the same road. But Sheng and the men with him went more quickly than Mayli and the women could go, and each day Sheng came nearer to Mayli, so that the time must come when they would meet. This came about one day near midday at a certain small town, and this was the circumstance.

By now Mayli and her women and the Englishmen had come to a good friendship. That is, each knew the other’s faults and could bear with them. Mayli indeed had come to know the English very well and it seemed to her through those men that she knew entirely why the battle of Burma had been lost, and yet why they were not to be wholly despised because they had lost it. She had come to this knowledge by watching and by talk. Thus she saw by watching that these men never lent themselves to any time or place with understanding, but they were as they had been born, men of England. They were good and they were honest. Never, she told herself, would she have believed that men could be so honorable toward women as these were toward hers, and this in spite of lust enough in them at any time to have done what was evil had they been evil in heart. The short one, indeed, could not keep his eyes from following a woman wherever she walked but he could keep his lust only in his eyes. As for the tall one, and this was the wisest one, he was such that she could not but like him. He was learned, for he had been taught in good schools. “Oxford,” he told her when she asked, “and my father and grandfather before me.” There was so much delicacy in this man, so much troubled reasoning and so much blindness that sometimes thinking of him in the night she sighed.

“It would be easier for those who live under their yoke,” she thought, “if they were all evil.”

But no, for every evil white man, she thought, there were a hundred who were only blind, and of the two the blindness was harder to bear. Thus, probing this one with her skillful questions as they walked along the road together, she heard him say, “We have a responsibility to this country.”

When he said the word responsibility, he lifted his head and looked over the greenness of Burma through which the road cleft like a silver sword.

“Why,” she asked, “why do you feel responsible for this country?”

“Because,” he said soberly, “it is part of the Empire.”

“But why the Empire?” she persisted. “Why not let these people have their own country to hold and to rule?”

“One cannot simply throw down a responsibility,” he said gravely. “One has to fulfill it.”