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

rushing through a hole where the cover was broken, tore the laughter from her lips.

V
    N OW THESE ONES ABOVE were no strangers to Mayli. She had heard her father talk much of them. The lady was once her mother’s friend, and the One Above was himself her father’s friend, and the one, moreover, to whom her father looked for direction and command.
    Therefore Mayli prepared herself for the meeting, not only in her looks and garments but in what she would say. The meeting was granted easily enough. Mayli sent a message and a message was returned. It was written in English by the lady herself, and it said, “Come and breakfast with us tomorrow.”
    So the next morning Mayli, having slept heartily in her hotel after the day’s ride through the sky, put on her favorite gown of apple green and bound back her long black hair in its smooth knot and she added scarlet to her lips and a touch of black to the ends of her eyebrows and she hung plain gold rings in her ears. Then, going out of the hotel, she sat herself in a riksha which was waiting at the door.
    “I go to the Chairman’s house,” she said, for the One Above was commonly called the Chairman, and all knew him by that name.
    Without any astonishment, the riksha puller said, “The price is half a silver dollar to the ferry,” and when Mayli nodded, he tightened the girdle of cloth about his middle and set off at the smooth running pace to which his brown legs were used.
    The streets leading to the river were lines of ruin, and there was scarcely a whole house to be seen anywhere, so heavy had the summer’s bombing been in this city of Chungking, but nobody seemed to see it. Indeed the war had gone on so long that there were now children able to talk and to run about and even to work at small matters to help their parents who had never seen a roof whole over their heads, and who looked on bombings as on thunderstorms and hurricanes, and no more unnatural. On these streets the people went about their business of buying and selling, and in some places houses were even being mended while business went on inside them, and children ran and played and fell under the feet of carriers and riksha runners, so that pleasant curses and laughter and the shouts of people at their everyday life filled the air, even so early. There was liveliness everywhere and no sign of fear or sadness, and Mayli found herself smiling out of simple satisfaction that she was alive too and here and on her way to have breakfast with the Ones Above. And as she liked to do, being so full of life herself, she fell into talk with the person nearest, who was the riksha puller.
    “Are you one of those who have come up from under the feet?” the riksha puller asked in politeness.
    Now Mayli knew that that this was the manner in which the people of this city asked whether one were a citizen here or not, and so she said, “I come from far away indeed.” He was willing to talk as all his kind are and willingly told her that the times were good for men like him.
    “I had rather pull a riksha than be a scholar in these days,” he said laughing. “The truth is that so would scholars. Why, I know a learned man who has papers even from foreign schools, and yet he is pulling a riksha because he earns more so than he did being an official. Yes, in times like this a pair of good legs are worth more than a headful of brains and a bellyful of learning.”
    And he went on and told her that his family had escaped without death through two summers of bombings, and that even the smallest child learned last summer to toddle toward the cave in the rocks when the signal went up for the enemy in the skies, and so that his wife would not have to walk so far with the children when he was busy with his trade he had built his hut near the mouth of the cave, and they were very comfortable there.
    “Still, it is not a good life,” Mayli said, “and there must come an end to it.”
    “There comes an end to all things,” the