“I have been in the Mei country, America, they call it,” she said smiling, “and I have seen the great steel furnaces where the metal is mixed.”
Then to his hanging jaws and wide eyes she told him how she had gone to see great steel works as indeed once she had when she went home with a schoolmate who lived in Pittsburgh.
“That was a sight,” she said. “The furnaces were bigger than a house and the metal poured out like living water, white hot, but what the alloys were I cannot tell you. I only thought what a wonderful and fine sight it was.”
He wrapped the scissors for her in soft paper as he listened and then he shook his head gravely.
“Those foreigners,” he said. “They know everything that has to do with metals and steels, and they can fly their airplanes as though each man had made his own. I see them sometimes fly over our heads. They come out of the mountains and their cloudships are enough to frighten any devil, with their grinning jaws. How the enemy shrieks and flies when they come! Who are these men who drive such monster machines? I thought, once, that such men must be ten feet tall and winged like eagles. But no, I see them now sometimes, for there is an airfield for them in a town not far from here. They are only young men, foreign, but full of temper and noise like any other young men. They come down out of the sky and bellow because they are hungry.” He laughed silently and folded away his spectacles. “Children,” he said gently, “children — playing with magic!”
He looked so wise in his age that she felt humble before this old man, who had done nothing but make scissors all his life, and she took her purchase and went away.
But she did not forget what he had said. On the afternoon of the next day when they were winding along a very hazardous part of the road, their hazard suddenly increased. Seventeen enemy planes appeared out of the sky behind the mountains. The day was clear and blue, and there was no hiding place anywhere. Below them the precipices fell away for a thousand feet and above them the mountain soared on. There was no cave nor rock big enough for them to creep under. Nor had they time. The enemy rushed out like dragons.
Who could decide whether to halt or to speed on?
“Even if we stopped and crawled under the trucks, what use would that be?” Charlie groaned and he pressed his foot and the truck darted forward, swaying over the edge of the narrow road.
Those vicious enemy planes dropped down and now the valleys roared and the mountains crackled with their noise. Mayli gripped the side of her seat with her hand and braced her feet against the sloping floor. She knew instantly the full meaning of their peril. It might be that at any moment they would be fragments of steel and wood and human flesh flying down the precipices.
Then as swiftly as the enemy had appeared there came four other planes from heaven and they attacked the enemy so swiftly that eye could not follow them. She saw them close, now high, now low, now weaving in and out among the fire from the enemy guns. Such a battle went on as she could not have imagined. The enemy forgot its attack and turned against the four planes, but who could catch those skillful creatures of the sky? Six enemy planes crashed into the valleys, and without loosing a single bomb the others went away.
Now Charlie stopped his truck, for the four planes were driving the enemy beyond, and it was better to stay back, and the whole long line of vehicles stopped and they all watched.
“The Flying Tigers,” Charlie said. His lips were quivering and his eyes were shining. He was panting as though he were running.
“Get ’em,” he had muttered all through the battle. “Get that one — good boy — there goes another. Oh, you good boys — oh, you great fellows—”
It was over in less than ten minutes, but when the skies were clear again, her whole body ached, as though she had been hours in the one tense position. She felt her hand hurt her suddenly, and when she looked at it she saw she had pressed the metal side of the seat so hard that she had cut into her own flesh.
But before she could speak she forgot it. She heard a sudden roar of wings, and there at her side hanging over the emptiness which fell away to the plains below, she saw a small plane for one second very near her, and out of it leaned a laughing American face. She saw him wave his hand, then he flew upward again and on over the mountain’s head. Then she remembered what the old man had said yesterday when he sold her his scissors. Children — playing with magic!
… And yet nothing was so strange as one more thing which happened on the last day of their journey on the Big Road. Their eyes were filled now with the beauty of this journey into the height of mountains and the depth of valleys, with waterfalls flying hundreds of feet through the air. Their eyes were stretched with all they had seen. When night fell they camped in majestic sleeping places, in little towns caught high above crags, or in temples built in cuplike valleys upon mountain tops. They grew silent because of the grandeur of their days. A laugh could echo across ten valleys, a shout could shake the rocks of mighty cliffs. Without knowing it they spoke in soft voices and kept their laughter low. Then slowly as days passed the mountains sank to hills and the chill dry air softened. Bamboos grew again and lilies and ferns, and now they were coming down the mountain walls, into the lowlands which led to Burma.
Here was the strange thing. A certain town, scarcely more than a village, lay waiting for them at the end of a day. Mayli had settled her young women into their places as she always did and then she had a little time for herself, and, being eager to see strange things, she went to the gate of the temple which they had hired for a stopping place, the men this time being in tents outside the city, and as she stood there she saw a handful of young women come by who were not hers. Now she knew that there was another encampment in this city, for when she went to make her usual report to Chung, her superior, he said,
“There is a contingent of sick men here, left from the other army. They are men who have been struck down by the black malaria, and tonight I shall go there to the south of the city where they are encamped, and see how they are. I purposely directed our men to camp on the north, for there should be no coming and going between us.”
“Black malaria?” she repeated.
Then he told her of that disease more swift than any human enemy which hides in the lowlands about the mountains and it is so hateful because it seizes men’s brains as well as their bodies.
“How can I guard my women from it?” she asked in great alarm.
“They must not be bitten by mosquitoes,” he told her, and so she had spent her evening telling her women this, and a certain old priest came by while she spoke, and he said, “Let them sleep near burning incense for the devils which bring the disease hate incense burned to the gods.” So he went and brought back handfuls of incense and spills made of brown paper which he lit and blew upon to light the sticks of incense.
It was after all this that Mayli had gone to stand at the gate for a little while to watch the street and the people who came and went here. And thus she had seen the handful of young women who were not hers.
Now this was the thing which happened while she stood, and it was the sort of thing which men hearing it would say could not happen but it did. Among those young women she heard a voice she thought she knew and she looked and saw a face she did know, and who was it indeed but Sheng’s younger sister, that little Pansiao whom she had left months before this in a school in the mountain caves where she had taught for a while?
She stared at the girl, and thought, “It is she, Pansiao,” and then she thought, “It cannot be Pansiao, for she was so young and tender and how could she be here?”