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

Mei, thousands of miles across the sea, and had destroyed them utterly. The men of Mei were full of rage—but helpless.
    Ling Tan sat, his water pipe in his hand and heard this black news. “I will not believe it,” he said.
    But his mouth went dry. For the young man went on with such a close story that Ling Tan saw it might have happened thus to a people unwatching. If the men of Mei were unmindful, it might have been so. And well he knew the cunning of this enemy. He called the young man in and before his sons he made him tell the story over again. Then he sent his sons for the other men in the village and they all came into Ling Tan’s court, and once again the young man told his story. Each time it seemed more possible.
    When it had been told for the third time, Ling Tan knocked the cold ash from his pipe which he had forgotten to smoke. Then he turned to Ling Sao.
    “Get my bed ready,” he said. “I must lie down, and I do not know whether I shall ever get up again.”
    They were frightened at his words and all urged him not to give up his hope. They told him that there were yet the men of Ying who had not been destroyed, but well he heard the faltering in their voices, and he shook his head.
    “Get my bed ready, mother of my sons, get my bed ready,” he said.
    He lay in his bed with eyes closed for eleven days and in all that time he would not eat a full meal nor did he wash himself all over. On the twelfth day Ling Sao came in with ashes on her hands and face and a length of coarse white mourning cloth in her hand and she let out her voice in loud weeping.
    “If you die I will swallow the gold earrings you gave me,” she said, “I cannot live on without you, old man.”
    Then his sons came in and their wives and children, and they wept and begged him for the sake of all to rouse himself and to wash and to eat.
    But it was Jade who said the word that made him move. “Will you let the enemy kill you at last, when in all these years you have been the one to give us courage?” she said.
    He thought for a moment, she looking at him shrewdly. Then he dragged himself up. “You would find the right word to make me live when I long to die,” he said in feeble anger.
    He rose, nevertheless, and his sons leaped forward to help him, and the women went away and with his sons’ help he was washed and dressed, and he ate a bowl of broth with two eggs in it, that Ling Sao had ready, and so he began to live again.
    But he was never what he had been. His withers were weak, and when he walked he clung to the wall or the table or to the shoulder of a son, or he leaned on Ling Sao. Nor did he ever mention the war again, nor the enemy, nor the hope he had lost. From then on Ling Tan was an old, old man, and they all saw that he was, and they took turns caring for him, and never leaving him alone.
    After that day Ling Tan could never remember well again anything that he was told and most of all he fretted because he could not remember where his third son was. He forgot again and again that Jade had read him a letter which had come last from Mayli, and he asked for it each day saying that he had not heard it. So she read the letters to him patiently. One day when she had read for the sixth time a letter which had come six days before, he put out his hand.
    “Give the letter to me,” he said.
    Jade gave him the letter and he took it in his right hand and as he held it his hand began to tremble with that small tremor which he could not still, however hard he tried. It had come on him with his weakness and it always made him angry.
    “Look at that hand,” he now said with scorn, as though the hand did not belong to him. “See, it shakes like an old leaf ready to drop from the tree!”
    Jade moved the weight of the child she held. One or the other of her twin sons she had in her arms all day, and whichever she did not hold, Ling Sao held. Between them they were never without a burden, whatever they did. “It is only one