“But I cannot stay here safe and be happy when the East-Ocean people are taking our country,” Mayli now told her father in that foreign country.
She spoke her own language badly, but she had recently determined to speak it. This, her father observed, was only one of the many signs of her purpose to return to her own country. She had also stopped wearing the foreign dress to which she was used and now wore only the long narrow robes of the modern Chinese women. He had said nothing while these changes were taking place, but he saw them all.
One morning at the breakfast table he had dipped his delicate aging fingers in a silver bowl of water before answering her. They were finishing breakfast together and there were no servants in the room for the moment.
“I cannot imagine what you think you will do if you go back,” he said in English. “They need men, engineers and military experts, but scarcely a young woman who has not yet finished her education.”
She looked like her mother, he thought, and yet he was glad that something, perhaps this foreign country, had given her a look that to him made her wholly different from that one he had buried long ago, and yet who had remained alive in him, so that although he had often thought he ought to marry and have sons he had never been able to come to it. It was not as necessary in this country as it would have been in his own.
“I will find something,” Mayli said firmly.
Her big black eyes flashed at him in a way he knew only too well, and he said no more. It would be a waste of his life force to argue with her and he had given it up when she was fourteen. Since then she had done exactly as she liked. There were times in the night when he, Wei Ming-ying, first secretary to the Chinese ambassador in this foreign capital, had lain awake half through the night because of his failure to make his daughter possible for a man to marry. So far as he could observe, in nothing was she fit to be a wife. He shuddered to think of his future son-in-law one day turning bitter reproach upon him.
“I swear I cannot help it,” he often muttered to that man in his imagination. “I did my best. She early became too strong for me. I could not waste my life in useless struggle. Besides, I have had to support her and pay for her education. I have had no time for anything else.”
And yet no such son-in-law had appeared. Young men had fallen in love with Mayli, but she herself had refused them, and her father had had nothing to do with it.
“Then you are going,” Mr. Wei now said, sighing. He lifted his mild brown eyes in one last appeal. “What of me, left alone in a foreign country?”
Mayli laughed too loudly for a Chinese girl. “That you are alone is only your own fault, father,” she said, and rose from her chair as she spoke. “Are there not at least three ladies who long to comfort you?” She could not remember her mother, and so she did not spare her father from her teasing. He was a very handsome man and his natural courtliness led him often to go further than he knew. A strain of malice in her took pleasure in the discomfiture of those ladies whom he thus innocently deceived.
“At least tell me when you leave,” he murmured hastily. She knew so much more always than she ought to know!
It was only a matter of weeks before she was actually on her way across the ocean. There had been no trouble in finding a place when the Chinese Embassy knew she wanted it. The only trickery her father had practiced in the matter was to keep from her that he had allowed nothing to be offered her in a danger zone. He wished if possible that she be put in a mission school as a teacher, so that her surroundings would be the strictest and most old fashioned. Luckily a girls’ school in the caves of the high western range of mountains in inner China had seemed romantic to her, and in her own opinion she was able to teach anything.
Thus she came one cold clear morning to Pansiao’s school. The ice was crusted on the small rickety airplane that had brought her here. That it had been ready to bring her at all was another arrangement her father had made in the capital of that foreign country far away. It had seemed simple enough to her. When she stepped off the ship a pilot was waiting for her. When he had escorted her from the landing field up the mountain to the caves he told her that he had orders to be ready to take her back whenever she liked, and he gave her his secret address.
“I do not go back,” she said haughtily.
“Nevertheless, take it, so that I may have done my duty,” the pilot said hastily. He was terrified of this tall and wilful young woman who knew every moment what she would and would not do, and he was glad to be rid of her. Suppose she had wanted to fly the plane herself, then what would he have done? But she did not propose it. She had sat motionless and in silence, the west wind blowing her short black hair from her face. Midway she ate heartily of a large package of bread and meat and fruit that she had brought with her and did not offer to share it with him, so he ate his cold rice and fish.
Nevertheless at this moment of parting she opened a bag of foreign leather that she carried in her hand and took out a sum of money three times the amount he had hoped for and gave it to him. So he liked her better when he left her than he had at any time. He bowed and went down the mountain on foot as he had come up, though she had ridden in a mountain chair of bamboo, and he hoped he would never see her again.
Mayli was full of pleasure at the room that was given her in a cave, with one window toward the south. The openings of the caves were boarded and had doors and windows in them, and the outlook from her little window was wild beyond her imagination. The bare mountains rolled on like great waves of solemn music, thundering in their silence.
She had thrown the window open, although it was a day of piercing cold, and now she stretched out her arms in a gesture that seemed false and was not.
“Mine!” she murmured. “It is all mine. Mountains, I come home to you!”
She stood a moment, then remembered that she was very hungry and that the old servant who had led her to the room from the gate had told her the classes would be out in a few minutes. But first she must go to the office to see the foreign principal who was now teaching, and after that there would be food. She turned and examined herself in a small thin mirror which stood on the table. She brushed up her strong black hair, wiped her face with a wet towel, and then powdered and rouged it a little. Her lips also she made red but to the exact shade that suited her. Her gown she left as it was. It was a robe of dark red foreign wool and the warmest she had.
She went through a winding dark passage and back to the point where the servant had told her was the office. Without shyness she opened the door and went in. At the table sat a stern, large white woman whose look was nevertheless not unkind, though more than usually plain.
“Are you Miss Freem?”
Miss Freem thought it was a foreigner who spoke and she looked up astonished. She was the only foreigner in hundreds of miles and none of her girls were able to put more than four foreign words together. But the moment she looked up she knew who this was.
“I won’t like this woman,” Mayli thought.
“If I am not careful, I shall have trouble with this bold-looking girl,” Miss Freem thought.
In this mood their life together began.
… In the main cave where the girls ate their meals, Pansiao looking up saw the new teacher with love instant in her heart. The new teacher had come in with the foreign principal to whom Pansiao had never yet dared to say a word, and she was talking to the foreigner as easily as though she had lived with her in childhood. Pansiao put down her chopsticks and stared.
Whispering rippled over the crowd of girls, “It is the new teacher—the new teacher.” They rose as they always did when the principal entered and remained standing until she sat down. But as for Pansiao, she rose only for the new teacher. They were all staring at her now, at her color, at her height, at her ease, at her quick foreign movements and at the foreign stuff of her gown. Yet she was one of them, for her hair was black and her skin, though fair, was still their skin. Pansiao was dazed with her beauty. Under the bare board table h
er small chilblained hands were clasped together. She felt the sweet hot love from nowhere rush into her bosom.
And then with simplicity that could only be in one so simple as she, Pansiao thought, “Heaven has sent me one for my brother!”
This was a strange return. Mayli, rising in the mornings from her bed, looked from her window over the wild and tempestuous country. Mountains tossed together as far as eye could reach. All that was human was contained in one village, clinging to a creviced valley, a village at this distance so small that the palm of a hand might have held it.
From this outer vastness she turned to a pattern of days within so minutely planned, so empty of present meaning that she wanted to tear it apart like a cobweb in which she had been caught. “In these great times in our country,” she thought with waxing anger, “to teach these girls exactly as though they lived in some small American town!” Impatience came to be her constant mood. Thus one morning coming early to the class room she found Pansiao, bent over a book, murmuring to herself, her little face twisted with effort.
“What do you study, child?” Mayli asked carelessly. She had not yet learned to know one of these faces from another, but she thought, surely this is one of the smallest girls in the school.
Pansiao had of her own intent come to this room early. Here in a little while her adored would teach her the mystery of numbers. If she came early she might be the first to see her. But she had barely hoped for such fortune as this, to be alone with her. Meanwhile she must learn her English, which Miss Freem taught. Now with this beautiful face over her, this voice asking her the question, she was speechless. She could only hold up the book.
“ ‘Paul Revere’s Ride’!” Mayli said with scorn. “I cannot believe it!” She took the book. “Yes, it is so! You have to memorize this?”
Pansiao nodded. “It is very difficult,” she murmured. She was confounded when her beloved threw the book down on the floor.
“What trash—what nonsense,” Mayli cried out. “ ‘Paul Revere’s Ride’—when every day our own guerrillas fight like heroes!”
Pansiao stooped to pick up the book, understanding nothing of this fiery English. But Mayli forbade it. She put her not too small foot on the book and stamped on it. Then she stooped and picked up the book and strode from the room.
Behind her Pansiao trembled. “Now I have made her angry,” she whispered. Her heart caught in her breast and she wanted to weep. “Of all things I wish not to make her angry,” she thought, and was bewildered by her ignorance.
But Mayli went straight to Miss Freem’s office and without knocking entered. Miss Freem was reading her Bible for the morning, but Mayli gave no attention to that. Upon the Bible she put the book she had taken from Pansiao. The floors of the caves were damp and the imprint of her own foot was still upon “Paul Revere’s Ride.” Miss Freem sat back and looked at her. Within a month she and Mayli had quarrelled at least ten times. Both of them were frank and fearless on opposite sides of every question.
“See this!” Mayli said without respect for Miss Freem’s position. “I found one of the girls learning this thing by heart!”
Miss Freem straightened her spectacles and bent to see what it was. “That is the lesson assigned for English today,” she said. “They have been learning it for a fortnight and today the whole is to be finished.”
“Why have they had such a stupid assignment?” Mayli demanded. “In these days, in these times, in a war infinitely greater than any that has ever been fought for freedom, here in her own country, why should a Chinese girl learn by heart ‘Paul Revere’s Ride’?”
Miss Freem was now shocked and somewhat frightened. There were times when she wondered if this girl had her right mind.
“But it is in the curriculum,” she said firmly.
Mayli shouted laughter. Then she told herself she would be reasonable. “Listen, Miss Freem, do we have to go by an American grade-school curriculum, here in these mountains? Think, Miss Freem, where we are! We are two thousand miles in the interior of China, in caves, hiding from the bombs of the invaders. We have a handful of Chinese girls here educating them for who knows what? But not for this!”
She seized the book and tore it in half and threw the pieces in the waste basket beside the desk.
Miss Freem did not move. Long ago as a little girl her father had warned her about her temper. “If you are not careful, Ellen,” he had said, “some day you will kill someone. You must ask God to keep you from sin.”
All her life since then she had been frightened, because she knew that what he had said was true, and every day she had asked God to help her to control her temper. That was why she kept always on her table the very Bible her father had given her. When she felt the hot thick rush of rage to her head she reached out her hand and put it on the Bible. She did so now, her hand pressing its pages, seeking for help. When she felt she could speak she did so, her voice rough and choked.
“I am the principal of this school. I decide what the pupils are to learn.”
“I am a fool,” Mayli thought. She sat down on the chair opposite Miss Freem and leaned on the table, her beautiful impetuous face much too near Miss Freem’s. How could she know that nothing frightened and repelled Miss Freem so much as too pretty a face, a face like this one?
“See, Miss Freem,” Mayli began, “I am only saying—do not rob us of our own greatness! This is our fight for freedom—you had yours! We ought to be teaching our girls our own poems, our own songs. Why do we always sing hymns? We ought to sing the songs of our own people, the new songs—Can’t you see how wrong it seems to me to come home in the midst of this”—she swept a long powerful arm toward the window, full of craggy mountains—“and singing—what? Oh, well, ‘Abide with Me,’ and—and ‘From Greenland’s Icy Mountains’—” She began to laugh loudly. “Can you see what I mean, Miss Freem?”
Miss Freem rose to get away from that strong, too beautiful face. There was passion in it of some sort and she was terrified of passion. “I think of this place as a refuge,” she said solemnly, “God has made us a refuge.”
“We want no refuge!” Mayli cried. “We are in the midst of war!”
She rose, and between the two women there mounted every barrier, though neither spoke. Then Mayli turned and left the room and Miss Freem stooped and picked the torn book from the wastepaper basket. Books were precious and this one could be mended.
But Mayli was tramping in full fury back to the classroom. “I cannot stay here,” she muttered. “I will not be paid to stay here. I must get out.”
She had forgotten the girl she had left in the classroom and she burst in, frowning and muttering to herself. Then she saw the girl sitting there exactly as she had left her, but her face was pale and her brown eyes frightened.
“What is the matter?” Mayli asked.
“I have made you angry,” Pansiao whispered. The tears filled her eyes. “I, who would have died before I made you angry with me!” Her adoration shone like a candle through her tears. She put out a timid hand and took the edge of Mayli’s robe.
“Why, you are only a child,” Mayli said. “How did they let you come so far from home?”
“I am nearly sixteen,” Pansiao said. “That is not to be a child. I worked on the loom for three years. Then the enemy came and my father sent me out.”
And in her simple way she told Mayli the story of her home and near what city it was and she told even of her sister’s husband, Wu Lien, who had gone over to the enemy and lived in a rich house in the city where the enemy had showed themselves so evil. Before she was finished other girls came in and so Mayli said, “I must hear this for my mother was born in that city. Come to my room, child, this evening, before you sleep.”
Pansiao nodded, worshipping. She went through that day in a daze. Once or twice Mayli caught her eyes and smiled at her. Then Pansiao stopped breathing without knowing she did, until she was almost faint.
“How can that child have suffered so much?” Mayli thoug
ht.
What Pansiao had told her remained with her all day. She forgot that she had quarreled with Miss Freem again and spoke so pleasantly to her in passing that Miss Freem thought God had answered her prayer and had given Mayli a change of heart, and she let the day pass, thankful for peace. As soon as God showed her what to do she would do it. “O God,” she prayed silently that night at her bedside, “show me a way to get rid of this girl!”
… In the evening Mayli awaited her visitor with eagerness. She always read every paper she could find, she listened nightly on the forbidden radio which she had brought with her from abroad, escaping search because she traveled with a diplomatic passport, but the story that Pansiao had told her was one she had not yet known. When she heard a delicate cough at her door, she called, “Enter!” The door opened and she saw Pansiao and she smiled one of her lavish rich smiles, and welcomed the child.
“Sit here,” she said, pulling a stool to the brazier full of charcoal. “It is so cold. And see, I am going to give you a sweet I brought all the way across the sea. I have been saving it for a special hour, and I think this is the hour.”
Then Pansiao felt herself placed on a cushioned stool by the fire, a fire such as she never saw elsewhere, and then she found in her hand a sweet square of some sort of brown sugar.
“It comes from a tree far away,” Mayli told her. “Taste it—it is good.”
She tasted it, licking it with the end of her tongue, and Mayli laughed. “Your tongue looks like a kitten’s little tongue,” she said.
Then Pansiao laughed too. Mayli’s voice seemed to come from a long way off. She was so dizzy with happiness, so drunk with love, that there seemed to be a cloud about Mayli’s head.
“You do look like Kwan-yin,” she murmured.
Dragon Seed: The Story of China at War (Oriental Novels of Pearl S. Buck) Page 32
