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

they smell so. I shall know my allies by their smell.”
    He laughed at his own talk, and then waved his hand at the dish. “Take it out,” he said to the cook, “and throw the stuff away and bring me rice. And do not even give this to the dogs. Throw it in the ordure jar where it belongs.”
    So the cook took away the dish of oats and soon he brought back the rice the common soldiers ate, and the General took up his bowl and chopsticks and held his bowl to his mouth and ate down the good food with sighs of pleasure.
    Now all this was quickly done, and yet it had seemed long to Mayli, but still she had let the time pass until the man was pleased again. Then she said, “I daresay you will be going back once more to see the One Above before you go west?”
    He looked up from his bowl. “Who told you we go west?” he asked.
    “I know,” she said, smiling the least smile she could. “And I want to go, too.”
    He put down his bowl. “You!” he cried. “But what would you do?”
    “You are taking women with you,” she said, and she leaned her two arms on the table and would not let his eyes escape her.
    “Well, only those to care for the wounded,” he said. “We take some doctors and with the doctors are the nurses. It is not we who take them but the doctors.”
    “I can care for the wounded,” she said.
    But he shook his head. “It is not my affair,” he said. “I will give no such permission. Why, if my men knew, do you think that they would believe why I took you? Would they not see how young you are, and how beautiful? And my wife—do you think she would not scratch out my eyes and pull out my hair? No, we go to win a war.”
    She seemed to yield to this, and at least she said nothing. But she sighed and then she said gently: “Perhaps you are right. Well, I will ask another kindness of you. Take me with you to the capital when you go to see the One Above.”
    “Whom have you there?” he asked sharply.
    “I must do something,” she said humbly. “I came here thinking I would join an army or be of use, but I am no use. If I go to the capital perhaps I can help the Ones Above. I can work in their orphanages, or use my foreign language for them. I know my father would be willing for that.”
    Now it happened that this General knew her father very well and the more he thought of what she said, the better it seemed to get this handsome, bold woman near to the Ones Above so that they could guard her. It would be a favor to her father, he told himself.
    “That I will do,” he said.
    And this was how it came about that she went with him in his own plane. He had planned not to go before the next day at dawn, but when he found she would not go to her home again, he could not think what to do with her, especially now that the young captains made excuses to come in while he ate and tell him one thing and another and always to look at Mayli until his skin burned hot under his collar. What if one of them should tell another and he another, until mouth to ear his decent wife should know of it? And would she believe him when he said the girl was the daughter of a friend and as much forbidden to him as his own daughter? His wife was so jealous by nature that she always believed what she thought instead of what he told her.
    So he had put off what he planned to do that day and in less than two hours after he had filled himself with rice, they were in the sky.
    Mayli sat behind him, and the little plane dipped and soared and fell into a pocket and came out again, and under them the clouds swelling upward. She felt the sweetest pleasure now in thinking that Sheng did not know where she was, nor would he dream of this. When would she see him, where would they meet and when she saw him what would be their first words again?
    She smiled into the heavens, and the General turning at that moment caught the smile. “I feel I am a dragon,” he shouted at her, “a dragon riding on the clouds!”
    She laughed and the wind