The Promise: A Novel of China and Burma (Oriental Novels of Pearl S. Buck) by Pearl S. Buck Page B

to come out,” she cried. “If it were in the Mei country, or the Ying, do you think a leper would be allowed to wander among the people?”
    “Why, what would they do with him?” Sheng asked amazed. “Surely they would not put to death a man who cannot help what he is?”
    “No, of course they would not,” she said. “But they would put him into a place where there were others like him and where none would touch those who are not lepers.”
    “Yet that is unjust, too,” Sheng said gravely. “Is a man to be kept in a prison because he has an illness he cannot help?”
    “Oh, you who understand nothing!” she cried impatiently. “It is for the sake of the ones who are not lepers!”
    He looked at her and saw her dusty face and hair and her cheeks, which were always rosy red, now pale.
    “Let us not quarrel when we have only escaped death together,” he said. “You and I, we quarrel whatever comes to us. It will be better perhaps that I go away and leave you. For I begin to see that you will always quarrel with me because I am not what you want.”
    He saw her red underlip begin to tremble and she turned her head away, and then she saw the city. They had forgotten the city for a moment, but there it lay, smitten under the enemy. Four great fires blazed, and the coils of smoke rose against the fair evening sky. Suddenly she began to sob.
    “What now?” he cried, frightened, for he had never seen her weep before.
    “I am so angry!” she cried. “I am so angry that we are helpless. What can we do? We wait for them to come and kill us and we can do nothing but hide ourselves!”
    He reached for her hand and they stood watching the fires. A roar of far-off voices rose as the gathering crowds began to throw water on the fires, but they did not move to go to help. There were people enough—all that the city had was people!
    Liu Ma’s voice came scolding up to them from the street. “Are you staying there in the cold? It will soon be night. I go home to cook the rice.”
    They came down at the call, and followed her, and they felt themselves tired and their hearts were cold with what they had seen and each was weary.
    “I must go back to my men,” Sheng said.
    “Will you come to me again before you go to Burma?” she asked.
    He did not answer. For they were stopped in their way. Here where the street forked to the north a house had fallen under a bomb, and a young man, weeping aloud, was digging at the ruins with his hands.
    “Was it your house?” Liu Ma bawled at him, and her old face wrinkled up with pity.
    “My house, my silk shop, and all I had are buried underneath it,” the man sobbed, “my wife and my old father and my little son!”
    “How are you escaped?” she asked, and now she began to dig too, and Sheng looked about him for something to dig with.
    “I went outside for a moment to see which way the enemy came, and they were there over my head,” the man cried. At this moment he came upon a small piece of red flowered cloth. “It is my little son’s jacket!” he screamed.
    By now Sheng had seen a carrying pole lying beside a dead farmer. This man’s baskets of rice on either end of the pole were as smooth and whole as when his hands had made them so, but a piece of metal flying through the air had caught him between the eyes, and had shaved off half his head as cleanly as a knife parts a melon. So Sheng took the pole and began to dig and Mayli when she saw the flowered cloth fell to her knees on the rubble stones and dug with her hands, too.
    Soon the child was uncovered, and the young father lifted him up in his arms. But the child was dead. Not one of them spoke, and the young man lifted the child up and sobbed to the heavens over them, until none of them could keep back tears from his own eyes. Mayli wiped her eyes with her kerchief, and Liu Ma picked up her apron. But Sheng put down the pole.
    “If this child is dead, be sure all the others of your house are dead,” he said,