White Lotus

by John Hersey

  As before, the hearing was badly managed. They sent bannermen out to fetch the whore, and the men were gone half the morning. “So we stood there. They would not allow us to smoke, or to leave the hall. We got to talking of the old war against the whites just to keep Wei Lin-tu off dog-baiting. Tedious! These are busy men, the Ears of the Court, duck, you don’t hang them out to dry on the bank of the stream like that!”

  At last they had her in, a short, thick girl with a broken-out face and a sulk—a pout—as if someone was cheating her—tugging and wringing a greasy gown in which she had come. Her name was Cassia Cloud….

  And ayah! I had known even before hearing her name who it was. Cassia Cloud from Chao-er’s. I remembered that malice-darkened face looming over the crap table to tell me about Nose’s robbery, about Nose naked in Peach Fragrance’s room; the pink tongue darting out again and again.

  “She was extremely uneasy, yet brazen and defiant,” the master said. “She swore by the Dragon Countenance himself that she would not swear in for us. You can imagine how this excited the magistrates—made us all think she knew more than the grimace on that dull face showed.”

  The Recorder read aloud the Emperor’s proclamation offering fifty taels, good current silver money, to any yellow person who would discover to the authorities the arsonists of the fires….

  This stubborn girl appeared to despise money, and threats did no good; she simply looked bruised and put upon, and would not talk.

  So Magistrate Hu ordered her jailed, specifying the elephant stables, and they led her off—the morning apparently quite wasted!

  But hai! When the bannermen took her into the elephant enclosure and she saw boxfuls of white slaves there, she underwent a change—one of the bannermen said the rouge patches on her cheeks went the color of liver sickness and the rest of her skin turned shiny like a candle, and she said, have mercy, she’d talk.

  Here she was kneeling again on the stool before the magistrates—and she went stubborn again! Like a tree stump. You could see under the bluff that she was terrified—of something to do with the whites, or with what she knew.

  “Magistrate Han—you know him, duck—that giant with the long, narrow warrior mustaches drooping down on either side of his mouth? picture of the anger of war itself? upper arms big as oak barrels?—you do, but in any case, he turned, soft at first, then like an awful autumn windstorm, to considerations of Imperial vindictiveness: …the melting of the fat off your bones in a hot room if you remain guilty of the crime of withholding knowledge of the fires we have had. Heat for heat: that would be His Merciful Presence’s method…. Until those murrey cheeks of hers went sickly greenish again and the candleskin began to drip. I was a bit afraid myself!”

  Whereupon she agreed to testify if they would only stop tormenting her. It was hard to believe how agreeably, and with what alacrity, she warmed to her work.

  She spoke first about her master, a miserable cobbler named Chao-er, and how he used to receive stolen goods from the dirty white pigs, and she reminded the magistrates of the case of the slave Nose—

  At the sound of that name I leaned my forehead against the screen. It seemed to me that in telling the story the master was shouting at the little mistress; he sounded as fierce as the barking wonks in the streets that wakened me each morning.

  —of the slave Nose who stole from a yellow woman and gave his loot to a yellow prostitute: not this Cassia Cloud but another in the same tavern. And reminded the magistrates, too, that Chao-er had admitted to the authorities receiving stolen goods on that occasion.

  “All right,” the witness then said, and her eyes were now gleaming. It was clear that she had begun to realize that she might be a person of importance. “All right, now I shall tell it. One night they formed a plot, and this pig Nose and my master put twenty or thirty whites, turn about, in a circle of chalk on the floor and made them swear to burn and kill. They were going to commence with the Forbidden City, and they were to burn their masters’ houses, and they were to kill yellow people. Some would gladly have avoided swearing but dared not refuse such powerful men. Wolf and Fish Bait, they were in it, too. My master, Chao-er, was going to help them. He wanted to be Emperor, that’s what he said, and Nose wanted to be the General. I heard this Nose declare and mutter that some people had too much and other people had too little.”

  Nose! Nose!

  “My mistress, Chao-er’s wife, she said she would poison me if I mentioned anything about those stolen goods, and those dirty white pigs were going to burn me under my gown if I breathed the plot. Now I’ve done it, and, Honors, you must keep me close, you must…. The only yellows in the plot are my master and mistress Chao-er. And—ai! ai!—I nearly forgot, the one called Peach Fragrance was there. She was in it, the one they call the Taiyuan Beauty, a whore…”

  The master said with mounting vehemence that Chao-er had been arrested, and that this Nose…

  I felt that I was…my left foot, in an old black slipper, which was too large and was scuffed at the great toe, was in the chalk circle, and I was bent forward, looking down at the shoe, being sworn: If the Forbidden City caught fire, I, though small, weak, and pierced with pain in my rheumy lungs, I would burn and I would kill! I began to laugh! It was a lark! A moment’s manumission. It was a joke—a dream—an unbuttoning! Old Pearl beside me was in tears from laughter, and I was laughing and coughing. My shoulders shook with laughs and coughs as I waited for the dousing of wine…. I perceived through my heaves that there was no circle on the floor; that I was behind the door screen, half choked with laughter and hacking coughs; that I had just now heard Big Venerable Shen beyond the screen shout at his gasping wife about a plot. Suddenly the end flap of the screen, flying outward from the dining chamber, cracked my forehead and caused me to take some stumbling backward steps, and I saw over me the swarthy, ox-eyed face of himself, my master. The laughter became a solid lump in my neck, and I began to cough in earnest.

  “Whatever possesses you, girl?” the yellow man barked at me.

  Yes! For once the suave tongue in the whiskerless yellow lips spoke with a terrible accuracy. I must have been possessed—like that heavy-limbed girl on the deck of the East Garden. But not by God. By some devil. Had some trickster devil come into my head to make me swear the comical oath again, laugh again, and cough again, as I eavesdropped in back of the pantry screen? Had a devil come on me to show me—but not the master—the enormity of the yellow man’s belief in the story the disappointed, stumpy, pimpled country girl had blurted out to the authorities? Plot! Old Pearl, her tough vine strength gone brittle and crumbly as if the vine shaft was nothing after all but bark—this ruined Pearl in a plot? And I, White Lotus, scarce knowing the difference between a laugh and a cough—I in a plot? And Nose…Nose!

  The thought of Nose’s danger struck me with such force that my coughing was driven out of me as though by a thump between the shoulder blades.

  “I swallowed down the wrong throat, Big Venerable,” I weakly said, tears in my eyes from having relived the absurdly funny oath.

  “What are you doing, eating now? You are serving at table!”

  Had the trickster devil in my eyes told him that I had the habit of standing behind the screen listening, listening? “Yes, Big Venerable,” I said.

  He sadly shook his head and withdrew.

  Talk of Home

  My fears for Nose grew day by day, and with them my homesickness. There came a rainy morning; my chest hurt. Big Madame Shen ordered me to go to the grain market to buy some millet flour, and knowing that the carpenter Kao, who owned Old Pearl, had his shop in Sixth Hutung, not far from the Imperial Granaries near the grain market, I ran all the way under a torn oil-paper umbrella, spattering mud on my leggings, to have some time to steal with my friend from home. I had never dared visit her because of the wormwood character she had attributed to her master, but that day I felt near the end of my resources
and I needed support of a kind that my fellow slave Gull could not give me.

  Asking the way of passing slaves I found the shop, and, having invented a false errand in case carpenter Kao, in a mood to heave board ends, should overhear my arrival, I made my way to the compound entrance and rang the pull bell.

  A slave woman came to the gate. I almost turned away, thinking I had after all the wrong house. The woman was gaunt, dirty, with a surly, peckish eye. She was not even the wasted and discouraged Old Pearl I had seen at Chao-er’s; this woman seemed to be incurably ill. But it was my friend, or what was left of her, and recognizing me she stepped forward in a sudden flood of tears into my arms.

  She drew me inside, assuring me that the carpenter was away with his cart, delivering a chest he had made.

  The carpenter’s house, like his person, was mean, obdurate, and morose. The kitchen was faced with smoke-darkened mud plaster, the cooking pit was narrow, and Pearl lived in the merest lean-to shed, like some cold storeroom for cabbages, which jutted out from the kitchen into the shop courtyard. Pearl told me that Kao’s hammering, his rattling of gluing clamps, his slapping of board on board woke her before each dawn and prevented her sleeping after dark; he worked late by lantern. His shop was his tavern, sweat his wine.

  We were helpless; we talked of home. Old Pearl’s voice, which at first was feeble and cough-jointed, like an old chair creaking, began slowly to gain strength, until, as she recalled incident after incident from our sweet Arizona past, it became something like her storytelling chant at home, and I had the eerie feeling that the commonplace events of our lives within the village hedge had been great fables, legends, stories not of limited men and women but of glorious, powerful, free spirits of the past. We began to laugh as she talked. She stood in the middle of the kitchen floor. I heard the richness of the bygone in her, and no future. Her eyes now had the ferocious tale-telling glint, and I thought of her leaning her hand on my shoulder that day after Agatha was abandoned at the trailside; I thought of her beside me on the deck of the slave ship calming the panic of hundreds of women with her story of the donkey and the jaguar. A flood of laughter poured out of me, and it tasted in my mouth like bitter spoiled fruit, because it stood for grief, horrible grinning grief.

  I suddenly asked, “What has happened to Nose? Why did our Gabe turn into such a madman, so drunk all the time?” There was still laughter in my throat, but there was an urgency, too, that I could scarcely keep in control.

  “No surprise, child. No, no. It was the direction in which he had to go.”

  “Why?” I was abruptly on the edge of tears.

  “Would you want him to be a ‘good’ slave, child? That man has to be in front.” But it was Pearl who was weeping! “Listen,” she said, “being bad is the only revenge. They put a value on you, they buy you—the only answer you can give is to be worthless. That’s the way to cheat them, girl! Be so bad that you’re not worth a dirty copper. Ayah, I love Nose. Nose understands all that.”

  “Do you think he lit fires?”

  “Hai, I don’t know. I doubt it, child. The spirit of revenge is only a kind of make-believe. We’re too weak. It’s something we pretend. Do you know those poor white storytellers you see, just better than beggars, with the little shadow lamps they use? That’s Nose. Nose is one of them. Make-believe—by being worthless, worthless.”

  “Why won’t he do anything for himself? I saw him the other day at the prison, and he has lost all his spirit. What do you suppose has happened to him?”

  “Ai, child, after you pretend you are worthless for a while you become so…. Fah! I don’t want to talk about any of that. Look here, listen to this!”

  My dying friend, her eyes like hot charcoals, began another tale. She chanted, standing with legs spread, arms raised, fingers clutching at the dense material of her story….

  A door slammed in the shop court, signaling the carpenter’s return, and under my watchfulness this woman crammed with wild memories and vivid feelings suddenly shrank, became desiccated, and a senile voice and trembling hand sped me to the gate. As I ran down the alleyway I heard the old woman’s feeble coughing behind me.

  On the way home the pain in my chest felt like rage, and once I dropped the meal bag, and part of the flour was dampened.

  Good Swords

  The mistress took me to the beheadings for the betterment of my soul. I think she felt I needed a spiritual purge; that she considered Old Bow too creaky and Gull too solid and Bean and the runners too stupid to be mixed up in plots, but Small White Lotus had an evasive eye!—or some such. She hired a street chair carried by two flea-bitten white freedmen, and I followed behind.

  Wolf and Fish Bait were to have their heads cut off for what some yellow women thought they had heard the slaves say in the street about the fires.

  The execution ground was in the Outer City, in the geomantically ill-favored southwestern quarter, and when we reached the Gate of Direct Rule, giving out from the Tartar City to that quarter, Big Madame Shen dismounted from the chair and paid off the bearers, who clamored bitterly for more money, but she waved them away with the back of her hand. We would walk the rest of the way. The crowd was too thick for sedan chairs. We were part of what seemed a holiday throng—a large press of yellow men and women, dressed as if for a temple or a reception, with many slaves in smart livery being taken along for an education. The crowd walked down the middle of the street, past the great factory where the exquisite glasslike tiles of gold, blue, green, and red were made for the palaces of the inner cities, and through a district of elegant shops, with gilded signboards, where paintings, scrolls, books, and curios were sold. It was a cheery bright day. The buds were swollen on the late acacias lining the street, while certain willows already had silvery leaves swimming in the air like great shoals of minnows.

  Big Madame Shen greeted her many acquaintances with deferential bows and the gesture of humility—clenched hands placed together and pumped up and down. More than once she expressed herself to friends, with a sweet trill of laughter, as most apprehensive over what we were about to see.

  The execution ground was a large area enclosed by a spirit barrier with a clear opening only on the western side, so that the ghosts of dead criminals would leave the city at once. With the help of our master’s friend the curio dealer P’an, whom we met, and who had two slaves along to study the day’s teaching, we found a place to stand with a fair view of the executioners’ platform, near the mat shed where the officials of the Board of Punishments would sit when they arrived.

  I stood behind the curio dealer and my mistress with P’an’s Goose and P’an’s Hairy Devil. We whites knew enough to remain silent and to take on a bullyragged look, as if to show that the lesson was striking deep even before it was taught. I thought at first that I could keep myself from being frightened; I had seen a troop of heads carried in soldiers’ hands, so this was not much—two men to die. I had a brief glimpse in my mind of Wolf: sitting in Chao-er’s with Peach Fragrance on his lap, his magician’s hands fluttering around her slit gown, a grin frozen on his half-drunk, acne-scarred face—a man ferociously alive and careless of consequences. Fish Bait I scarcely knew; a large man, Wolf’s hanger-on.

  “Enlighten me,” the curio dealer said. “Why are they chopping off only two heads, when I understand they have rounded up so many of the dirty pigs who were in the conspiracy to…to burn us and slaughter us?” The vehemence with which P’an spat out these last words made me shiver.

  “As I understand it,” my mistress began…and how she enjoyed being an expert! The master’s friend was not deaf, yet she spoke in a shrill, firm tone, so ears all around could take in her special position, which her husband, engaged at the Board of Punishments, was fortunately not present to dim in any way…. “The magistrates themselves pushed the going ahead with these two executions, their logic being: these two men were of turtle-shell temperaments, either they were
blockheads or they were resolute, and nothing, you see, had been, or ever would be, dragged from them about the plot—though the proofs against them were strong that they were parties to it”—yes, this was Big Venerable Shen’s declamatory style; she had a nice little ear—“so it was urged that the example of punishment, through the immediate beheading of these two, might lead others to unfold what they knew of the plot and recommend themselves for the clemency of the Dragon Countenance. So, at least, Shen says.” In truth his pompous phrases turned stickily in her mouth, like a greedy bite of malt taffy.

  Big Venerable P’an was well satisfied with this answer.

  And I? I had the strangest mixture of feelings: of dread at the sound of this plodding, methodical, maggoty inanity that my mistress mouthed; of a self-protective conviction that all this had nothing to do with me; and of a righteous fury that gave me a queer inner quiet, a complacency almost, a feeling that these haunted people were at a disadvantage before us their slaves, for they were harried by a shame that drove them deeper and deeper into shame itself. At the same time I kept turning over in my mind the change in Nose. What had Pearl meant by his having to be “in front”? Were drunkenness and outlawry and purposeful worthlessness the essences of some kind of leadership? Could they lead anywhere but to this platform draped in crimson cloth?…I wanted to get away. Fear for Nose’s safety was suddenly, vividly, fear for my own. I looked this way and that, but I knew I could no more get away than if I were bounded by walls too thick for an elephant to butt down. I was quickly in control, sustained by that weirdly calm undercurrent of anger I had been feeling at the hypocrisy of which human beings seemed to be capable.

  There were official delays, it seemed. There was no sign yet of the procession of the authorities and the condemned.

  A yellow family near us took a picnic lunch from baskets and sitting on the dusty ground they ate it.