“English?” Sheng asked, not understanding the foreign word.
“You call them the men of Ying,” the shopkeeper said. “The English! They govern us for their own good, and the Chinese steal away our business. The truth is we hate you all.”
The man said this with a great burst of laughter and he spat freely on his own floor and rubbed his head and stamped his feet and felt better. And Sheng took his sweetmeats away and chewed them thoughtfully as he went, though the taste of them was foreign on his tongue.
It was true, as any eye could see, that behind the counters in the shops along the streets, if they were prosperous, the owners were nearly always Chinese. He stopped at one of these to buy himself some cotton socks, because his left heel was rubbed sore by walking, and behind the counter was an old man, but not too old, who was Chinese, and Sheng fell into talk with him. After greetings he found the man came from the other end of the Big Road and that he was new here, having only come a few months ago.
“You have prospered quickly,” Sheng said looking about the shop, which though small was very well stocked.
“Any one can prosper here,” the man said. “The people spend their money easily and they like bright toys and luxuries and they are lazy and love food and sleep and laughter. They are children.”
But mischievous children, Sheng told himself. For when he reached his camp that night one of his men cried out, “Are you bleeding, Elder Brother?”
“No, certainly I am not,” Sheng relied, “but why do you ask it?”
“You have a great spot of blood upon your coat in the back,” the man said. Sheng took off his coat then, and there upon the back was indeed a big blood-red stain, but when he examined it he found it was only spittle stained scarlet with betel nut. Some one with his mouth full of betel had spat upon him in a crowd and Sheng, seeing it, cursed and swore but what could he do but wash it off as best he could? He had no second coat.
That night he spent studying the map of Burma which the General had given him as he had given one like it to all his officers. He had studied it often enough before, but tonight he studied it with new care. For this day or two had already taught him that when they entered Burma it would not be with welcome from the people of the land. “English and Chinese, we hate you all,” the Burmese had told him. What would this mean? he asked himself soberly.
He sat far into the night pondering the map with its small, closely printed names. He had learned in the last year to read, and he read the words beneath the maps, too. It might have been two countries, so different were the two halves of Burma. In the north, where the great river Irrawaddy had its upper reaches, there were mountains and hills, and these hills ran like long lines north and south. These hills, the maps said, were filled with tribesmen and they lived there amid great forests. The tribesmen, what were they and would they be friend or foe? Sheng cursed maps and notes that told such things as that there was oil in the mountains of upper Burma and that gems were found there, great emeralds and rubies and the finest green jade, and yet did not tell what the men were who lived there and whether they were friend or foe.
And in the south where the Irrawaddy opened its wide mouth there was another country, filled with rich farmlands, and growing the whitest finest rice in the world. This southern country spread for a thousand miles along the sea, and flung out a thousand islands, but what were its people he had no way of knowing, for the maps did not speak of the people.
He folded the booklet away at last and in the darkness he lay down in his blanket, thinking of what he had read. This town was almost at the juncture of these two parts of Burma, and yet were they to go north or south, they would go into unknown country. A great weight of fear fell upon him out of the night. What would befall them in this unknown country where the jungles were deep and the roads few? They went in as allies of men who were hated by the people, men who had ruled here for years upon years, but what people can love foreign rulers? In his fear he longed for the coming of his General, and he made up his mind that he would go to him the moment he came and tell him of the dangers ahead. Yes, whatever the General had done, whether or not he had persuaded Mayli beyond what he ought, this was now no time for men to think of women.
He heard the loud whine of mosquitoes beginning to swing about his head and though the night was hot he covered his head with his blanket. He had heard that mosquitoes brought malaria, and though he doubted it, having all his life been bitten heartily by mosquitoes from spring until winter in his father’s house, yet it might be true that these mosquitoes so far from home had poison in them.
He lay sweating under the blanket, sleepless, his mind sifting fragments from his past, himself in his father’s house, his brothers, Jade and his mother and his sisters, and Orchid who was killed so mercilessly and Mayli, again and again Mayli in her little house in Kunming. There she was doubtless at this moment, playing with her dog. He remembered her as he had seen her that day at the window of her room, her long black hair hanging in the sun, and for a moment all his healthy young body sprang alive. He ached and suffered his ache, and then he put the thought of her out of his mind. He might never see her again, and it was better for him to reckon that he might never see her again. Well, let it be so. He had sworn that he would not think of a woman until the victory was won, and among his men almost all had taken a like vow. Those who had not were only a few and they were sheepish when the others found them near a woman.
Remembering his vow, he felt his body suddenly eased again. His longing passed, and he fell asleep.
With the next day word came that the General himself had arrived, and Sheng made haste to go and report to him all that happened. In the middle of the afternoon he had heard the news and he first spent an hour washing himself clean in a bath house. In this bath house the serving men were all Burmese, or men with mixed Burmese blood, and they were nearly all lively, beautiful boys, laughing and gay with each other, and heedless about their work. When Sheng came in a very young serving man came forward and a red flower of some kind that Sheng did not know was thrust behind his ear and his teeth were red with betel and his skin shining with oil. About his head he wore a striped silk turban of red and yellow, but when he went into the steaming air of the bath he took this turban off and to his surprise Sheng saw that the young man’s hair was long and fell about his shoulders. When he saw Sheng stare at his hair he gave it a sharp twist and knotted it on his head.
“I belong to the brotherhood,” the young man said in broken Chinese and Sheng let it pass at that. Next the man took off his short cotton top garment, to be ready for his work, and then Sheng saw that his body was marked with tattoo marks. But he supposed this too was a sign of the brotherhood and so he said nothing of it. But the young man’s slender smooth arms were strangely strong. They were almost like a girl’s arms to see, yet he lifted the buckets of hot water as though they were nothing.
“Can it be inquired what is your brotherhood?” Sheng asked after he had been scrubbed with a brush and had sweat and shivered under hot water and cold.
The young man did not answer for a moment. Then he said, “Have you heard of Thakin?”
“I have heard of nothing,” Sheng replied. “I am newly come here.”
The young man said nothing more for a while. Then with a strange sort of bitterness he exclaimed to Sheng, “Why have you Chinese come here to help the English?”
At this Sheng was so taken back that he could not answer without thinking what to say. Was this bitterness even in the humblest of people? After a moment he said, “We have not come here for any other purpose except to drive out the East Ocean dwarfs and they are your enemies as well as ours.”