By this time the old soul was out of the room and in the kitchen to heat some water for tea, and the little dog came in wagging its tail, and Sheng leaned over and pulled its long ears. It was nothing but a toy, this small creature, left behind by some mistress fleeing the city when the enemy bombs had fallen in the year just past. He was not used to such little city dogs. The dogs he knew were the village beasts whose ancestors were wolves, and they were still wolves in their fierceness toward strangers. Such a dog had been in his own father’s house, and when a stranger came, he had often as a boy to hold back the dog by the hair of its neck, lest the beast spring at the stranger’s throat. But there were not many of these dogs left now. The enemy taxgatherers and soldiers, coming to villages to rob and to rape, always killed first the dogs who sprang at them so bravely.
“Of what use are you?” Sheng now inquired of the small dog. Its large brown eyes hung out of its small face like dark glass balls, and its body quivered. When it heard Sheng’s voice, it put out a paw and touched his foot delicately, then wrinkling its black nose, smelled him and shrank back. Sheng burst into loud laughter, and at that moment Mayli opened the door. She had put on an apple green robe and her hair was bound in its coil on her neck. On her finger was a ring of green jade.
“Why are you laughing at the little dog?” she asked.
“I am too strong for him,” Sheng said. “He smelled me and drew back afraid.”
“He is a wise little dog,” Mayli said.
She came in and picked up the tiny creature and sat down with him on her knees and Sheng watched her.
“Why do you hold a dog as though it were a child?” he asked. “It is not fitting.”
“Why not?” she asked. “He is clean — I washed him only yesterday.”
“That also,” Sheng replied. “To wash a dog as though it were a child! It makes the hair on me rise to think of it. To treat a beast as though it were human — is this decent?”
“It is a nice little dog,” Mayli said fondling it. “At night it sleeps on my bed.”
“Now that is the worst of all,” Sheng said impatiently.
Mayli did not cease to smooth the silk smooth hair of the little dog which lay curled tightly on her knees. “You should see the foreign ladies,” she said smiling, “how they love their dogs! They lead them on chains, and they put little coats on them when it’s cold—”
Sheng gave a loud snort. “I know that you learned all the ways of the foreigners,” he said. “But of them all this love of a dog is the one that sickens me most.”
Suddenly as he spoke he leaped up from his chair and in one instant before she had time to see what he did he seized the dog from her lap and flung it across the room and out of the door into the little pool in the middle of the court.
“Oh you — you beast, yourself!” Mayli cried and she ran into the court and took the dripping, crying creature out of the water. But now she could not hold it against her silk gown, and so she cried out again for Liu Ma, and Liu Ma came running.
“Fetch a towel!” she commanded the old woman. “Look what Sheng has done — he threw my little dog into the cold water.”
But for once the old woman did not take her mistress’s part. “Let him be dried in the sun,” she said coldly. “I am busy and I cannot take my time to dry a dog.”
“The old woman is wise,” Sheng said.
But Mayli herself ran for a towel, while the dog shivered and looked sadly at Sheng as he stood there, and then Mayli rubbed the dog dry and laid it down on the towel she first folded upon a stone which the sun had warmed.
And all through this Sheng stood watching her as she moved so swiftly and willfully and full of grace. She was as foreign, he thought, as though she had no blood of her people in her body. For the first time it seemed to him that perhaps he was not wise to love her and that if he married her his life would be war at home as well as on the battlefield.
“I came to tell you, before all this foolish noise, that I am to be sent with the armies to Burma,” he said.
She forgot the beast at the sound of these words, and she stopped where she was in the court, and the sunlight fell on her green robe and on her hair. He stood in the doorway, watching her.
“When do you go?” she asked.
“In a few days,” he said, “two or three — perhaps at most four.”
She sat down on a porcelain garden seat and looked up at him. The sun shone down on her fine smooth skin, and he saw each hair of her long straight eyelashes, black against her pale skin, and he saw each hair of the narrow long brows above the eyes. Into her eyes he looked, and the white was white and the black divided from it clearly. But now that he looked into the blackness of her eyes, he saw that there were flecks in them, like light.
“You have gold in your eyes,” he said. “Where did it come from?”
“Do not talk about my eyes,” she said. “Tell me why it has been decided that you go so quickly?”
“It only seems quick to us,” he said. He came out and drew up the stool upon which Liu Ma had been sitting asleep and he sat down, too. The little dog crawled, still shivering, nearer its mistress and away from him, but neither of them thought of the dog now.
“It has been talked of for weeks,” he said. “My own General is against it. But the One Above is for it. And when that one says ‘yes,’ what ‘no’ is strong enough to balance it? We go.”
These words, “We go,” he said so firmly and his face was so stern as he did so, that Mayli said not one word. She looked at him, seeing in a moment what her life would be without this man with whom she quarreled every time he came. But when did she ever wish a quiet life?
“So now we go to ally ourselves with white men,” Sheng said.
“Why is your General against this?” she asked.
Sheng reached to the branch of bamboo above his head and plucked a leaf which he tore to shreds as he spoke, and she sat watching not his face but his hands as they moved, with strong slow strength. The thing they tore was slight and fragile, but he tore it to pieces with precision. His hands were delicately shaped, as the hands of all were in her country, even the hands of the sons of farmers.
He did not look at her. Instead he too watched the bits of green that fell away from his hands. “My General says that already it is written that the white men will fail,” he said.
“Oh, why?” she asked. Her mind flew across the sea to the land where she had spent most of her life. When she was born her mother had died, and before she was a year old her father had taken her to America. The first words she had spoken were in the language of that land, and they were taught her by a dark-faced woman who was her nurse. The Chinese nurse whom her father had brought with him to care for her had grown sick for home by the time the ocean was crossed, and he had sent her back from the coast. And now Mayli thought of those great cities and the factories and the rich busy peoples, and all the wealth and the pride everywhere.
“How can the white man fail?” she asked.
“It is so written,” Sheng replied.
She curled her red lip at one corner of her mouth. “I am not superstitious,” she said. “There must be a better reason for me than the prophecy of some old geomancer who sits on a street corner and wears a dirty robe. Has your General ever spoken to a white man — has he ever been in those countries?”
“I do not know,” Sheng said. “I do not ask him anything.”
“Then how does he know?” she asked.
“He has seen them here on our own earth,” Sheng told her. He blew the bits of green from his hands and then he sat, his fingers folded together, and now as he spoke he looked at her, but she knew he was not thinking of her. He was thinking of his own words and their meaning.