White Lotus

by John Hersey

  I thought of a saying we had had at home in Arizona, but of course it did not cross my lips: To the very end the hunter’s name clings to the cougar’s meat.

  “Make Them Feel Young Again”

  That evening there was a stirring in our pens. Reports had sifted to us through the thick walls—from visitors, from the warder, who was not a bad fellow, from the new slops-carrier, a freed slave named Honest, and from, it seemed, the very gnats that flew freely in and out the high slots of the pen—which made us feel, for the first time in weeks, as if a feeble, tremorous ebbing of hopelessness might take place. Men went from group to group, saying and hearing:

  That the crowd at the beheadings that afternoon had been far smaller than at previous executions, for the masters were apparently growing sated on punishments;

  That the magistrates and Ears were almost prostrated and were getting further behind every day; and that these officials were thinking of issuing wholesale pardons and transporting the pardoned slaves far away, to Ili and Turkestan, Nepal and Annam, places said to be warm the year round….

  Dusk had come, but still the pens buzzed. My four patrons sat on their corner of the platform letting the reports come to them. Through the shadows forms crept, and murmurs eddied like silt-brown water.

  Just before dark the slops-carrier, Honest, came into the pens for his evening cleanout, and a few minutes later some electrifying whispers went around:

  The entire madness of the yellows might be at a turning point.

  It seemed that the Emperor’s staff had received a letter from the warlord of a western province, saying that Islam was planning to carry a jihad to the realm of the Dragon Countenance, and that for this purpose had infiltrated many yellow Mohammedans from the outer provinces, disguised as barber-physicians, tutors, copyists, and teachers of swordplay, into the core towns, supplementing the sparse Mohammedan communities already there.

  This letter was said to have had a sensational effect on the magistrates, who had widened their hearings to consider the implications of the letter. Cassia Cloud, who despite her churlish, thick-wristed manner bent like a cowslip to every shift in wind direction, had suddenly begun to accuse some of the guardsmen at the gates of the Forbidden City of being Mohammedans, and of having put their felt-booted feet in Chao-er’s famous chalk circle. Little Yü-li, the yellow teacher of ritual swordplay, who had in fact supplied wine to be sprinkled on our heads during the swearing at the tavern, had had a hot hour of questioning, for Cassia Cloud had hinted that he was not a swordsman at all but an agent of Islam. And she was said to have scuffed up some testimonial dust that even left it unclear whether Chao-er himself, now dead, had been a practicing Mohammedan.

  All this was wonderfully plausible to the yellows! The Mohammedan community in the Tartar City, in the undesirable southwestern quadrant, consisting mostly of camel-herding traders, petty merchants, small shopkeepers, and street vendors, was despised by the rest of the population. Besides being the victims of religious prejudice, the Mohammedans were accused of being clannish, over-thrifty, ill-natured, and tricky. Many were mercenaries in the Banner Corps, and they were notoriously good soldiers—a fact that made them objects of both contempt and suspicion. Indeed, it was well known that special officials were appointed by the Censorate to spy on them at all times. I had heard of a Buddhist opening a pork shop, out of undiluted spite, opposite that of a Mohammedan butcher; and in order to frighten away the sheep brought through the streets to the Moslem shop, the Buddhist had had a fierce tiger painted on the wall across from the Mohammedan’s gate.

  Suddenly I heard Beetle’s voice crackling over the hum in the pen. “Someone tell me. What were the names of those two bullyboy sentries over at the Meridian Gate who used to sell off stolen vases and cloth goods for us? What were their names?”

  “Chang,” a voice shouted in the half darkness.

  “Hsieh,” another called out.

  Beetle stood up. “Feng’s Drum!” he called. “Come here to us, Feng’s Small Drum!”

  Poor Drum, who was to have his neck stretched under the sword the following day, came to our corner through the murk leaning on the shoulder of Lin’s Strong, who was soon to be beheaded himself.

  Beetle put it to Drum that his one hope of being spared the sword was to offer to inform on Mohammedans. “That is what they want now. Their ears are itching for it. Tell them Chang of the Meridian Gate was in it, and Chang’s wife; that Chang used to wash his arms up to his elbows and bow to the west in a room there at Chao-er’s. Tell a good story on them. Tell them Hsieh knew how to set fire to the palace wing, he told Quack to use cotton wadding that would make no smoke. Come on, Old Drum, tail up, small boy! Mix in some old slave names so they’ll feel good. Make those yellow masters feel young again, Drum, give them some mutton-eaters, you give them Chang and Hsieh now, say they were mutton-eaters, and Chang’s wife, too.”

  Weakly Drum said he would try that, he would try anything.

  All this had stirred up in me a tumult of revived feelings. Could it be that in their hysteria the yellows might think the plot was deeper than they had dreamed—and not really ours? If one man could wangle being spared the sword, might not another wriggle away from the faggots? I felt nervous and jumpy. I wanted to go to Nose and shout to him, “Stir yourself, man! Go on to the authorities and lie to them.”

  We were all restless, and within an hour we heard a strange twanging music—a kind of Jew’s harp!—and then some low voices and, in the black closeness of our pen, the spreading humming of a hymn. “How Firm a Foundation.” It was sung too fast, with a crazy lilt, and someone beat a rhythm on the bottom of an empty upturned shit pail.

  “Leave Me Alone”

  God, God, I had been in that damned hole five days before I even spoke to Nose.

  The day after Feng’s Drum was hanged—whatever he may have said about the Mohammedans did him no good—a list came to our pen from the Board of Punishments of forty-two slaves who had been commended to the magistrates for pardon and transportation, when it could be arranged, to an outlying dependency. One of them was Lu’s Beetle. We celebrated on our corner of the platform with a game of jumping sticks at merchant stakes.

  At noon Honest, the slops man, told us he had seen the bannermen Chang and Hsieh led into the warder’s gateroom and, later, taken out in chains—so we knew that Drum’s testimony had, after all, had some effect, even if it had not saved him.

  We later heard that for the magistrates Cassia Cloud had corroborated all—and more. “Yes, yes, many times I saw the said Chang, Meridian Gate Chang, at Chao-er’s talking with Shih’s Wolf and those others of the plot. He bowed to the west four times a day in the back room. Ai! Yes, Hsieh was there, and Fan, Kuo, and Hu, all I think Mohammedans, all of the Meridian Gate. Which Hu? I mean Hu Lin-fu, tended the Emperor’s stable at that gate, the hostler Hu, Masters….”

  Hearing this, Beetle slapped his legs, threw back his head, and bared his teeth in hissing laughter.

  In midafternoon I was slumped on the floor in our corner with my eyes ranging the moldy ceiling, thinking: Nose, with all his badness, is more of a man in every way than this Beetle. Nose is going to die; Beetle will go, a slave but alive, to a winterless country. How can I make sense of that?

  With this, confused feelings suddenly flew up in me like dry leaves in a smart twist of autumn wind, and before I knew what I was doing I stood before Nose and said, “Ai, Nose, why do you just sit there?”

  His sallow eyes came up to mine. “White Lotus. What are you doing here?”

  I laughed—ayah, I could be “worthless,” too—and said, “What has happened to your blinkers, man? I have been here five days.”

  “Go away,” he said.

  No. This was wrong. He was not supposed to say that. I had come over to help him. I was suddenly trembling and felt short of breath. “You weak pig,” I said. “You sit here and do nothing for
yourself. Nose! Why don’t you go around and lie to them? Lick their dirty cloth shoes! Save yourself, you fool!”

  “Leave me alone,” he dully said, not even looking at me.

  I was in a sudden fury at his not having seen me all the time I had been there, while men had taken me night after night, and I began to abuse him. I called him a coward, a lazy turtle, a titful of goat’s milk—back and forth from the old Arizona speech to slavey yellow talk.

  Slowly, almost languidly, he arose, and with not even a flicker of the old fire in his eyes, he slapped me hard. “Go sit down on your elephant platform,” he quietly said, “with your four pimp friends.” And that, rather than the blow, telling me that he had seen me, all along, all along, set me to bawling in loud gasping sobs.

  No one even looked up at our scrap.

  Holding my cheek and fighting the sobs, only to have them triumph over me with ever more humiliating loudness, I was about to turn and flee back to the platform when I felt Nose’s hands on my shoulders. Through the blur of my tears I saw that he was shaking his head.

  I settled to the floor in a heap, and Nose crouched on his hams beside me.

  “That man Beetle gets on my nerves…,” he began.

  Stirring, I put my face near to his and whispered, “Did you light the fires—or some of the fires?”

  But Nose was off on a gallop of his own. “Do you want to know the one who got us into all this? That bastard Chao-er. He pretended to be a friend. ‘Yellow men and white men…’ Ayah, Mei-mei, what a two-faced man! Maybe he didn’t even know he was two-faced. Remember the night we swore? ‘I’m the yellow man,’ he says. ‘I’m the yellow man here!’ Remember that? Ai, there was a friend to the smallies! I hate to think what he told the magistrates.”

  “Was the oath serious, Nose? Did everyone mean it? Was it meant to be taken seriously?”

  “Ai! The oath? Serious? Ha! Are you serious? What’s serious? Listen, Mei-mei, this is a slanthead world. Everything in it is slanty. These turtle-shit fires were all slanty. This pen is supposed to be for elephants. Serious! Listen: Cassia Cloud is—pfutt!” Nose cranked a forefinger at his temple. “And she’s not the only one, d’you know that? My master—Big Venerable Pfutt! Your master—Big Venerable Pfutt! You know what’s the slantiest thing of all?”

  “What’s that?”

  “Ai, Mei-mei”—the hoarse tone of wild, raving disgust had vanished, and Nose spoke now with a confidential sincerity—“it’s me.” He pointed to his own chest. “It’s Shit-Nose. I’m worse than a yellow man. Ayah, Mei-mei”—his voice was barely audible—“I’m no better than a filthy bastard slanthead myself.”

  I was weeping again. I saw that Nose had come, in the end, not only to being worthless, but to the outer limits of hatefulness. He had turned his loathing of the yellows, at last, against himself—and now he called himself the worst he could, worse than a yellow man. Poor Nose! Poor Nose!

  When I returned to the elephant platform, Beetle said, “What, baby fox? Won’t that big fool promise to give it to you?”

  I did not answer. I thought I had no anger, or pity, or love, or hatred left. I sat sniffling at the edge of the platform.

  What Was the Oath About?

  Two days later Nose’s time came. A bannerman swung open the high thick door of the pen and called out, “Wu’s Nose! Are you ready?”

  Was he ready? Was I? I saw him, down against the wall, raise his head and look toward the door, but his eyes were casual, incurious, as if he had heard someone else’s name called, about whom he cared nothing. Soon he dropped his forehead again to his up-gathered knees.

  The bannerman at the door nodded over his shoulder and four of his company, huge Tartar hulks, capable escorts, in Banner Corps uniforms, entered the pen. They seemed to know Nose. They made their way to him through the tangles of human flotsam scattered across the floor. They stood over him, and one of the soldiers spoke softly to him.

  Nose looked up again, but for some time he remained crouching. A bannerman’s leg blocked his face from my view. Was he going to defy them or was he simply detached from whatever was happening? Would the guards have to haul him out? I could not tell. I craned to see his face.

  Prisoners who had been dozing stirred themselves and sat up, and the large dim-lit chamber fell silent. This gloomy hall, which for so long had echoed and re-echoed with our chatter, our desperate jokes, our nightmare grunts, our throat-clearings, snores, guffaws, and groans—the place was suddenly silent but for the subdued hiss of our breathing: the shush of the inside of a huge seashell. Nose was the only one condemned to fire; the prisoners were impressed by that. The peak of the yellows’ hysteria had passed, and the danger was waning, yet they were going through with fire-for-fire; the prisoners must have been impressed by that, also.

  Nose stood up, and the bannermen, not touching him but placing him in a box of their presences, started him toward the door of the pen. The four tall soldiers and the powerful white man high-stepped and tiptoed among the forms on the brick floor, murmuring and nodding polite apologies for the disturbance; even Nose in his extremity was excusing himself.

  He would pass near our group. Would he speak to me? I raised myself on my knees. He had called me, here in the prison, Mei-mei, his little sister; yet I hardly knew if he thought of me as a dear person. At this moment every trembling nerve in me was alert, receptive, tender. Now he was nearby; I could almost have leaned forward to touch him. I felt I must not cry out to him, or I might choke. It was obvious that he was not even going to look at me. His eyes, fixed on his footing, were neither sharp nor dull; he did not seem to be inwardly stirred at all.

  As the party picked its way to the great door, I became conscious of my patrons, near me on the platform, murmuring to each other.

  Beetle, the cynic, the readiest laugher of all, destined for a new life in a faraway place, was deeply impressed. “That pig has a stomach I Ai!”

  White Scholar, whom I had thought a timid man with a broadly sarcastic slave name, for he was both stupid and inelegant, said, “What’s so special about him—except what they’re doing to him?”

  Card chimed in on that note: “Yes, what’s so particular? That bitch made up a good story about him. He just sat here like a toad the whole time.”

  Beetle said, “I’d like to see you walk out of here like that—to where he’s going!”

  Ticklebowl said, “I was over there at Chao-er’s, the night they swore. I didn’t like the way he fondled that bastard yellow cobbler.”

  “What was that oath about?” White Scholar asked. “Did you swear?”

  I missed Ticklebowl’s answer, if he made one. Nose was at the door, which was swinging open, and he turned and looked at all of us who were watching him. I thought he looked suddenly startled; a vein stood out on his forehead. What was the oath about? What a question! Here we were all together in the pen of our utmost degradation, and there could be a white man who did not even know at what point, in what way, with what meaning, if any, it had all begun. What was the oath about? If Nose had any claim to being special, it had to do with his having stood by the chalk circle to swear us to that—that what?…He hesitated at the door, put his head down, spat on the bricks, and turned away. Was this our leader? Was this his farewell to us—a gob of spittle on the floor? No! Old Pearl had been wrong! He was not “in front.” He did not have whatever was needed; thought of himself as a slanthead; was self-soaked; was not moved by the suffering of his fellows. What had happened to that flashing idealism, energy, zest—the real leadership he had shown in those long-ago days at home? I was filled with disgust and leaning over the edge of the platform I, too, spat.

  Yet that afternoon, as time, which has no kindness in it, crept at its most contrary pace, I felt, at first, restless, then impatient, then angry, then—with a sudden flood of sobs—bitterly deprived, bereaved, lonely, love-starved, shattered by a loss I did not un
derstand. I lay on the bricks and poured out my salt sorrow for hours on end. No one paid any attention to me.

  When Honest came in to empty the buckets that evening he reported that nothing was known of the execution. It had taken place on the Coal Hill, in the Imperial grounds. The public had not been admitted.

  The Master’s Pains

  For four days officialdom seemed to be at a standstill, then a new list came to the pen, of slaves forthwith released to their masters’ houses, and I, never even having been flattered with an examination by a low-grade mandarin, or mere bannerman, was on it. They led me out and turned me loose in the street.

  On returning to the Shens’ house I hurried into our quarters to get out of my jail-soiled clothes. Going headlong around a turn into our slaves’ courtyard I almost collided with Old Bow, who was bent over carrying out the mistress’s dirty bath water, and I half jokingly said, “You blind ass, you nearly drowned me.” This was my new rough jail personality.

  The figure straightened. It was the master! Buddha’s flower! Old Bow was still in jail.

  Himself was in a short tunic; in the dim place his face appeared to be greenish, covered with dewdrops.

  “Excuse me,” he said in automatic response to my rebuke, then, suddenly realizing who we respectively were, exclaimed, “What! You home?”

  “They let out twenty just now,” I said. “No explanation.”

  “Here,” he said, beginning to sting from the greeting I had inadvertently given him, “take this out.”

  “Yes, please, Big Venerable,” I said, the new harridan side of me in rapid flight.