Only I Understand His Gentle Heart novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: The Dog at Gate Four

Wanning visits the base, sees the feared captain sit a crying recruit down with his own lunch, and he reads her notebook and invites her to dawn drill, which no civilian has ever been allowed.

On Wednesday morning Wanning took two buses and a rattling shuttle to an army base an hour outside the city.

She had written to Fang that scene forty was her draft and that Wen Zhe had taken it from her drive.

Fang had replied in four minutes: Let's sort it out on Friday, dear. Go and do your research, the captain asked for you.

Wanning read the last sentence twice and told herself it meant the series.

At Gate Four, Sergeant Luo was waiting with his hands behind his back.

"Miss Qiao! I'm your escort. Captain says you're to see everything, and I'm to talk as little as possible."

"Are you going to manage that?"

"No, miss," he said happily, and he opened the gate.

Inside, the road was wide and very clean, and every soldier she passed stopped talking.

They did not stop for her. They stopped because a tall man was crossing the courtyard in front of the barracks.

Captain Ji walked without hurrying, with his hands at his sides.

Forty recruits straightened as he passed, and not one of them looked at his face.

"What did he do to them?" she whispered.

"Nothing, miss. That's what's so frightening," Luo whispered back. "Last month a recruit lied about a missed meal, and the captain only looked at him. The boy confessed to three other things."

"Three other things?"

"A stolen sock and two more I won't repeat."

She laughed before she could stop herself, and Luo looked delighted.

The captain walked her through the training yard, the mess hall and the guard post, and answered every question in as few words as possible.

At noon he got a call and left her alone in a corridor outside the dormitories.

She sat on a bench with her notebook open.

Down the hall, a recruit sat on the floor with his back to the wall and his cap over his face.

He was crying, quietly, the way a boy cries when he has been told not to.

Footsteps came, and he scrambled to his feet.

Captain Ji stopped in front of him.

The corridor went silent.

"Sit," the captain said.

The boy sat down so quickly his cap fell off.

Captain Ji put a metal lunchbox in his hands.

"Eat."

"Sir, my mother is in the hospital and I can't..."

"I know. The doctor called me, not you. She is out of the operation and awake. Eat."

The recruit stared at him, and then he began to cry harder, and he ate rice between sobs.

Captain Ji stayed in the doorway with his arms folded, looking at the far wall, until the lunchbox was empty.

Then he picked up the cap and set it back on the boy's head.

"Wash your face. Roll call is at one."

He did not say anything else.

On his way out, a three-legged brown dog limped up from behind a pillar and leaned against his boot.

He crouched.

He took a bone wrapped in paper from his coat pocket and held it flat on his palm until the dog took it.

Wanning wrote all of it down, fast, without looking up, until a shadow fell across the page.

"Give me that."

He held out his hand.

She gave it to him, because she could not think of a reason not to.

He read for a long moment.

She saw his jaw move once.

"I am not gentle," he said. "Take that out."

"I didn't write gentle."

"You wrote that I stood in the doorway."

"You did stand in the doorway."

"Until the boy finished."

"Yes. That's what I wrote. Until he finished."

Captain Ji looked at the page again.

The dog had finished its bone and was leaning on his leg with its whole weight.

"The rank on the man in your third paragraph is wrong," he said. "A first sergeant wears the double bar on the left collar. The right is for the colonel's staff."

He took a pen from his breast pocket, crossed out the word, and wrote the correction in small square characters.

Then he handed the notebook back.

"Come on Thursday," he said. "Zero six hundred. Wear shoes you don't mind ruining."

He walked away.

The dog looked at her, sighed, and followed him.

Luo appeared at her elbow with his mouth hanging open.

"Miss Qiao," he said, "I have been at this post for three years."

"Is something wrong?"

"He has never once let a civilian past Gate Four. Not the general's niece. Not the man from the news."

He looked at the corridor where the captain had gone.

"And he's never touched anyone's notebook in his life."

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