“Give him to me,” Mayli said. “I will buy him a coffin and see that he is buried for you.”
“Good,” Sheng said, and his eyes fell warmly upon her when she said this.
So the young man gave her his dead boy, and Mayli took the child in her arms. In all her life it was the first time she had ever held a child so close. By some strange chance this girl had been near no child. Alone she had grown up in her father’s house and in a foreign land where she had no cousins and cousins’ cousins. She took this little creature and he crumpled in her arms and lay against her so helplessly that her heart swelled in her breast and she could not speak. She could only look at Sheng.
Over the dead child they looked at each other and though neither of them had ever seen him in life, this death of a child made them suddenly tender toward each other again.
“I will come to you as quickly as I can,” Sheng said.
“I shall wait your coming,” Mayli said. It was only a courteous sentence, such as any one uses for an expected guest, but she made her eyes speak it, too.
So he understood, and he went his way, the man following, and she went hers.
“Let me carry the burden,” Liu Ma said.
But Mayli shook her head. “I am younger than you,” she said, “and I am stronger.”
And so she carried the child home, and there the house was as they had left it, though on the south side ten houses had fallen in a row, and a cloud of dust was everywhere. Inside the court her little dog stood trembling and waiting, and when she came in it smelled the dead child and lifted its head and whimpered. But she went on without speaking and laid the child on her own bed.
He was a fair little boy, about three years old, and his face was round and smooth. So far as eye could see there was nothing injured in him, and she took the little fat hand, wondering if by some chance there was still life in it. But no, she could feel the stiffening of death begun already in the delicate fingers, dimpled at the knuckles. So she laid it down again and sat there a while, not able to take her eyes from this child whom she had never seen alive. And for the first time it came to her what this war was and what it meant in the world when a child could be murdered and none could stay the murderer. Anger grew in her like a weed.
“I wish I could put out my hands and feel an enemy’s throat,” she muttered.
At this moment Liu Ma put aside the red satin door curtain and peered in because she heard nothing so long but silence. There she saw her young mistress sitting on the bed, gazing at the child.
“Shall I go and buy the coffin?” she asked.
“Yes,” Mayli said.
“But where shall we put the grave?” Liu Ma asked.
“We will find a little land outside the city,” Mayli said. “A farmer will sell me a few feet somewhere for the body of a child.”
“To rent it will be enough,” Liu Ma said. “A child’s body does not last long, and this child is not even your own blood.”
“Every child whom the enemy kills is my own blood!” Mayli cried with such passion that the old woman hid herself quickly behind the curtain.
So Liu Ma went away and after a while Mayli rose and drew the curtains about the bed and she went out into the court and lay down in a long rattan chair that she had bought and kept under the eaves of the house. She lay with her hands over her eyes and the dog came and curled beside her. The little dog was alive and the child was dead. There was no meaning to this. For the first time she understood something of Sheng’s anger that she had valued a dog so much. If she had come back and found the dog dead she would have mourned for a pretty thing but she would not have wept. But the child was a life and now she, too, almost hated the dog.
She did not weep again, for she was not given to weeping, and when Liu Ma came back with the coffin in a riksha, she helped her to carry it in, and together they laid the child in it. The riksha man waited for his fee, and he found another man, and then they all went outside the city wall, Liu Ma and the coffin in one riksha and Mayli in the other.
A mile or two beyond the city they found a farmer, an old man whose sons had gone to war, and for some silver put in the palm of his hand first he dug a hole at the far end of a field and they laid the coffin into the earth.
“You are to guard it that the wild dogs do not dig it up,” Liu Ma told him, but he chuckled at her.
“Do you think the dogs need to dig up graves nowadays? No, they are better fed than any of us!” He sighed and spat on his hands and lifted up his hoe and went back to his work.
And Mayli and Liu Ma stepped into their rikshas again and went back to the city.
IV
IN THE NIGHT SHE woke. For a moment she listened to hear what had wakened her. But there was only silence over the weary sleeping city. Nothing had waked her — nothing, that is, from without. She lay, listening and aware suddenly of everything, of her body and her breath, of the room and the bed she lay upon, where today she had laid the dead child. All was real and yet nothing was real. She had waked to the blackest melancholy she had ever known, a sadness so heavy that it stifled her.
“Did I dream an evil dream?” she asked herself. But no, her mind was empty of everything except this desperate sense of loss. Yet what had she lost? The child was not hers. Could his death alone have made this melancholy? She sat up in fear. Was there some one in the room and had she waked because she felt an evil presence near her? She leaped from her bed and lit the candle that stood on the table and she held it high and threw its light toward the door. But there was no one. She went to the door and opened it. There Liu Ma slept on a couch, and she was not awake. She lay sleeping with her mouth open, her old face the picture of peace. And yet everywhere in the house was this deep emptiness.
“What does this mean?” she asked herself. She went back to her room and closed the door and stood there, the candle in her hand. Everything about her seemed suddenly foreign and she longed for some home she did not have, that she might escape the disaster that was everywhere around her. But what home? She had no one except her father far away.
At the thought of her father all her longing welled up. She thought with sudden sickness of longing of the cheerful room in the American city, where he lived. She thought of the clean bright curtains, the blue carpets on the floor. Why had she left him? Why had she left that good place?
She had left it because she wanted to share in the war in her own country.
“You will be sorry,” her father had warned her. “You will wish you had not gone. You are not used to troubles.”
“I cannot go back,” she thought. The red line of her full lips grew straight. “I will not go back,” she thought.
She blew out the candle and crept back into her bed and pulled the red flowered silk quilt over her head and cowered under it for shelter. But what shelter was it? Liu Ma had bought it made at a shop and it was cut for the usual small woman and not for a tall woman, and so when Mayli pulled it over her head it left her feet bare, and when she pulled it down over her feet, her head was out, and she could not curl herself small enough.
She grew impatient at last and got out of bed again. And all the time the knowledge of desolation did not leave her. She sat on the side of her bed with the quilt over her shoulders and gave herself up to the misery she did not understand. And now she thought that there was no place for her in her own country. There was no place here for such women as she was. Peasant women tilled the soil as the young men did, or if they had been to school they made themselves into nurses and caretakers of the wounded. But what could she do who had never done work of any kind? She had left her father to come back to her own country and he did not even know now where she was.