Pearl Buck - The Promise

“The people of Mei do not despise us,” she said. “They despise only the black-skinned people.”

“Well, we are not going to Burma to fight beside the people of Mei,” Sheng replied. “It is the people of Ying who rule there and it is the people of Ying whom those people hate.”

“There is no great difference between these two peoples of Mei and Ying,” she said.

“If that is true,” Sheng said, “then it is the worst news you could have told me.”

She fell silent, biting her red lip and thinking what to say next. “Perhaps it does not matter whether we are liked or not,” she said. “Perhaps the only thing we need to know is the strength of the peoples against our enemy. If the people of Ying are against the Japanese, then we must be with them.”

“If we can win with them,” he said gravely.

“Who can conquer the peoples of Ying and Mei together?” she cried. She remembered again the great factories, the iron wheels of factories, the terrible precision of the wheels, shaping out iron and steel as though they were wood and paper.

“The dwarfs have conquered thus far,” Sheng said in a low voice. “Do not forget — the dwarfs took them by surprise. Well, you say, any man may be taken by surprise once. But on the same day and hours later, they were taken by surprise again in the islands to the south. Wing to wing, their flying ships sat on the ground again and once more the dwarfs destroyed them. It is not enough to be strong only! One must also be wise.”

He rose in sudden impatience and stretched out his great arms. “Look at me!” he commanded her. “Look at this great piece of meat and bone that I am! Is it enough that I am so huge? Is it enough that I can bend a piece of iron in my two hands? If I am a fool, is all this size and strength of any use to me? No, I must have wisdom here!” He tapped the side of his great skull as he spoke.

She did not answer. Instead she sat looking up at him as he stood against the sky above her, and she was filled with the sense of his power. How many times she had asked herself if this man had power in him! Had he not? She trembled and she felt the blood run up her body to her face. He dropped his arms and stood there, looking down on her, and she rose quickly and slipped sidewise as though to escape him. For not once did she dare risk his power over her. He must not touch her.

She walked back and forth in the little court once and twice and the small dog dragged itself to its feet and walked after her, still shivering. Then she stopped and sat down on the edge of the pool and she put her arms about her knees. She did not look up at him but he could see the reflection of her face in the still water of the pool. He sat watching this clear reflection. Since it was winter there were no lotus leaves, and the pool was a clear mirror under the sky.

Liu Ma came out, her under lip thrust far beyond her upper one, and she set down the tray she carried on the garden table near the porcelain seat. She poured the tea from a blue and white teapot into the bowls and then to show that she did not approve of these two sitting together in talk, she did not hand them their bowls, but went away again into the kitchen. In a moment the quick smoke of grass-fed fire poured out of the low chimney and hung above the court like a cloud. Mayli laughed.

“Liu Ma hopes that the smoke will choke you,” she said to Sheng.

“I am too good to that old crone,” Sheng said with heat. “I give her very often a silver coin to make my way here easy.”

“She is old,” Mayli said, “and she loved my mother, and she does not think I am good enough to be my mother’s daughter. She thinks I am too foreign.”

“And it may be that you are,” Sheng retorted.

He saw the painted reflection of her pretty head shake itself in the water, and then he saw her reflected face grow grave.

“Whether one is foreign or not,” she said, “today what does it matter? It is not sensible any more to hate something — or some one — because he is foreign. It is better to ask ourselves whether we should not ally ourselves with the strongest people in the world, and these are still the peoples of Ying and Mei.”

“Are they so strong?” he asked. “Then why have the dwarfs beaten them so easily, and us they have not beaten although we have fought all these years?”

“Do not take a trick for a victory,” she said. “I know so well those people of Mei! It is quite easy to believe that the enemy tricked them. They are so rich, so used to their own skills and power, that they would not believe they could be tricked. But now in their fury they will be twice as fierce and ten times as wary. In one day they learned what it might have taken them a year of usual war to learn.”

“It is a pity for us that it had to be learned at such cost to us also,” Sheng said grimly. “With a few of those airships that were destroyed in an hour or two, we could have driven the enemy out of our land. It is not only they who were the losers.”

Mayli dipped her hand into the pool and stirred the water gently in small circles. “All that you say is true,” she said, “and yet when I remember them — I know they cannot lose — no, whatever has happened, and whatever will happen, they will be the victors in the end and for this we must stay with them.”

“What do you remember?” he asked. The tea grew cold in the bowls but neither of them thought of it. The small dog had lain down on the folded towel and now it rose again and whimpered beside its mistress but she did not hear it. She let her hand lie in the water, as she remembered, and she sat gazing across the court, seeing only what she remembered.

“It is the most beautiful country,” she said. “I do not love it as my own, and yet I can say that. The great roads go winding over the hills and the mountains and the deserts and the plains. The villages are so clean, and the people are so clean and fed well. Upon the land the farmhouses are clean, too, and there are no beggars with sores and no hungry wolves of dogs. The forests are deep and the streams are clear—”

“These will not win a war,” he said sternly.

“No, but there are the factories,” she said quickly, “the factories make ships and automobiles — everybody has automobiles, and they know all the strength and the secrets of machines. Why, they can make enough airplanes to cover the earth!”

“It is strange they have not been able to send us a few,” he said bitterly.

“No, but they have not begun yet,” she cried. “You do not understand—” she cried. “A people who are so happy and so well fed — they cannot wake up in a moment. They must suffer and feel the war on their own bodies first—”

“We have been feeling it now for five years,” he said. “Are we not flesh and blood to them?”

“You must understand,” she said, “that we are very far away from them. They do not know us.”

“If they are so far away from us, will they help us?” he asked.

“I tell you they will help us,” she insisted. “You do not know them and I do. It will be to their interest to help us. Will it not be to their interest to use our soil for their airfields to attack the enemy? But you must give them time to waken — you must give them time to understand—”

“They have had time,” Sheng said somberly. “And can we wait now when in a few days we march westward to fight on foreign earth? It may be too late when they have taken their time to waken. No, a few airplanes now might save us all, and thousands may be useless when it is too late.”

When she did not answer this, he said, “I speak as a soldier.”

“And yet,” she said, after a moment, “soldiers do not always speak with all wisdom. For you think in battles and a war is not only made of battles.”