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

know nothing and there is nothing in me. All I know is what I saw, that she had her little box and she went with it in a riksha.”
    Sheng pawed the earth with his foot like an angry beast. “But what direction did she take?” he bellowed.
    “Since our street is at an end three houses away,” she said calmly, and with secret pleasure to see this big soldier teased, “she could only go one way and you know the street turns there and so beyond it I did not see.”
    “But she told you when she was coming back,” he said.
    “She put some money in my hand and told me to feed myself from it and that before I had eaten it all up she would be back.” Liu Ma said.
    “Let me see how much money she gave you.” Sheng commanded her.
    So the old woman put her hand in her bosom and brought out ten silver dollars wrapped up in brown paper.
    “How many days will you eat from that?” he demanded of her.
    “I can eat it up quickly if I eat well,” she said. “Or I can eat poorly and make it feed me for a month.”
    He would like to have pushed her old face against the wall, it was so calm, but if he did she would tell him nothing. So he only kicked the small dog that came smelling at him timidly, and the beast howled and fled.
    “Kick the dog if you will,” Liu Ma said. “I do not love that dog.”
    She pulled the silver ear-pick from her coil of hair and began slowly to pick her right ear. A look of dreamy pleasure came over her face and after a moment she yawned and put the ear-pick back into her hair.
    “It is very quiet with her gone,” she said. “I fall asleep without knowing it.”
    But he did not answer. He stared about the empty court and then thrust his hands into his girdle and turned away. But at the gate he paused to shout at Liu Ma.
    “If she comes back, tell her I have gone away to war.”
    She had sat down and already her eyes were closed, and she opened them a little at this.
    “Eh!” she murmured, and she folded her hands over her belly and closed her eyes contentedly as a cat does.
    … At that moment Mayli was swinging high above the mountains in the General’s own airplane, and the General was beside her.
    She had gone straight to his headquarters, and because the guards knew her they had let her pass them. The General was at his breakfast when she came in, and she laughed when she saw his wry face. For what he ate was not the rice and dried fish, the sweetmeats and the dainty salted vegetables he liked. He ate a foreign gruel made of oats because he had heard it gave strength to men’s bodies.
    He rose when she came, being a courteous man with some knowledge of the new manners toward women, and then he said:
    “I would ask you to eat some of this food, but I swear it would be no kindness in me. Now I know why the white men look so grim until noon, if this is what they eat when they get up.”
    She laughed and took a spoon and dipped it in the main bowl that stood in the middle of the table. Then she too made a wry face. “But it is burned bitter,” she said, “and it has no salt, and it is meant to eat with sugar and with cream.”
    “What cream?” he asked.
    “The cream of cows’ milk,” she said.
    But he looked at her aghast. “Am I a calf, to eat milk from a cow?” he cried.
    She laughed so much at this that her cheeks grew red and he was pleased with himself, for he was still a young man.
    Then he grew solemn and he clapped his hands and a soldier came in and he shouted to him, “Bring in the cook!” and so the cook came in and he roared at him, “You have burned this foreign gruel and put no salt in it and no sugar and why did you not tell me it must be eaten with a cream made from cows? You told me you understood everything about it!”
    The man turned pale under his skin, and he faltered. “But I knew you did not like the smell of milk, because you always say the white men stink.”
    “Is that what they smell of?” the General cried. “Well, I say that it is a good thing