White Lotus

by John Hersey

  The preaching was over, then, and there was a sudden stirring of talk in the tobacco house. We left with Peace and his volunteers, and as we walked away the building sounded like a spent pork barrel thrumming with bluebottle flies.

  Auntie, Harlot, and I carried the jugs, with finger loops of porcelain at their stout throats, over to Yen’s water hole. Solemn had a bucket and a dipper, and Tree a basket of bowls. When we arrived it was nearly sunset. I had not seen Yen’s water hole by day; the scale was smaller, more intimate, the trees less grotesquely twisted, the plank walk less a pier, than they had seemed in the hollow night.

  Peace himself poured the spirits from the jugs; Smart diluted the portions with water from the spring. Peace spoke to each man as he handed him a bowl, and he touched every one, putting his big hand on a shoulder, or a forearm, or an unkempt head of hair.

  The excitement of the preaching carried over, and, indeed, as the men drank, it grew. They gave little yelps of what sounded like astonishment at their own boldness.

  After a time Peace said, “We need captains. Whom shall we have for captains?”

  Voices shouted: “Peace!” “Fan the mix!” “Ditcher!” “Judge!” “Candy!” “Sheep Wu!”

  Nothing explicit was said about the war at any time. I tried to imagine its shape, its beginning—but Peace left everything to the slaves’ own minds, until, when the drams were all gone and the slaves had abandoned themselves (at least I had, and I supposed they had) to wildest inner thoughts of insolence, valor, retribution, revenge, revenge, Peace began to give himself over, as I had never heard him do, to puffing and gasconading; he was talking like a master. I intercepted some looks between pairs of the men who had been named as captains—careful glances that meant headshakes. Those looks frightened me.

  “You’re going to see Peace walking around in there.” He had begun speaking of the beautiful yamen, designed by Philosopher Hsieh, which housed the Emperor’s provincial governor and his mandarins in Twin Hills. “Listen! Peace is going to step through the red-flag gate there, and you’ll hear Peace’s heels echo in the Hall of Obeisances, bare feet slapping on the stone floor! And Peace is going to sit at a long silk-covered table, with silver bowls, and silver chopsticks, and incensed candles in the lamps, and wine, right at the same table with Warlord Sun, and Brigadier Chang, and Ts’ao Hsi-kuei, and Third Minister Hsieh, and Feng and Li and T’ang and Wu and…”

  The moment of appalling vanity was saved by Peace’s beginning to laugh. He bent over and raised up and began to howl, hoot, snigger, bay, snort, shake, guffaw, chuckle, slap, gag, bellow.

  The others caught it. I caught it. The woodland cove echoed with our bloodletting seriousness leaking out in helpless laughter.

  Until we realized that it was dark.

  “Captains come over to the Camp of Dan,” Peace said.

  Now this was the summit of recklessness: to go along to a secret meeting just after dark, without a discretionary wait for the deep of night, to walk along outside your own place without an overseer’s pass when you knew patrols were sure to be ranging—the half-drunk squads of poor yellow farmers, hired for this prowling by landowners; resentful, bloodthirsty, bored, on the hunt for night wanderers and gatherings of slaves.

  Auntie hung back, and Harlot and I were with her, for it seemed clear that women should not go to the smithy at this risky time, but—

  Peace called out with a loudness that made me shiver, “My handmaidens!” He wanted us near him. He wanted Harlot to hum as we walked….

  Someone lit the lamp in the blacksmith shop, and before it was hung on the joist, Fan, the mix, said he had something to show us.

  A ring of heads. A hand holding up the lamp. At the center a torn piece of paper from some unimportant official document, with the chop, or printed seal, a stylized picture in a red as dark as dried blood, representing the authority of Sun, the warlord of South-of-the-River Province.

  “What is it? Smart, what is it?”

  Smart bent low. “Sun Hou-tzu,” he said. “The monkey who became a god.”

  I had had only a taste of the liquor, but I felt a slippage of restraint. Smart’s (or Peace’s?) wild allegory of Twin Hills, the pebble in Peace’s cheek, the men volunteering for the unclear war, Peace’s visionary boasting, and now this blood-red hint of transcendence—it all made me giddy with confidence in myself and in these men who were going to fight a war of which I could not see the shape. For me the room whirled with something like hope. The men were milling about, praying and laughing.

  The next I knew Peace was standing at the center of the sooty room, holding up his teeth-edged mule bone, booming in the old language, “With the jawbone of an ass, heaps upon heaps, with the jawbone of an ass will I slay a thousand men.”

  Smart was on his knees praying softly.

  Peace threw the bone down on the ground, his lips drawn back in a grimace. “This place is called Ramathlehi!” Then he put a hand to his throat as if he were half choking. “I am sore athirst. Now I am going to die of thirst, and I am going to fall into the hands of the uncircumcised.” He fell, at any rate, to the ground, and groveled there, and reached for the bone, and seemed to drink from it, and as he did, he gradually rose up on his knees like a man renewed by decency, forgiveness, good food, honorable treatment. “This place is called Enhakkore! Enhakkore!”

  To Twin Hills

  Early one morning a few days later, the first market day in the sixth month, Peace went up to the office and procured from Overseer Li five passes to go to Twin Hills to sell eggs and fowl that we unmarried women had raised—passes for himself, Solemn, Auntie, Harlot, and me—and we set out on foot toward the Yen landing on the canal, through a landscape glistening in pure sunlight after three days of rain.

  Little skies of rainwater still lay in the cart track; I loved to break their mirroring with splashes of my bare feet.

  Auntie, Harlot, and I carried baskets of eggs; Solemn had half a dozen pullets, their feet tied together, hanging upside down from one hand, and the same number of cockerels in the other; Peace carried four fat brown hens.

  Peace told us as we walked through the woods that he would be talking during the day with many key men, and that no matter what was spoken he wanted all of us to cling nearby him, as if we were a group engaged with him and his men in commonplace gossip.

  At Yen’s landing Peace hailed, as it passed along the far bank, a train of four shallow-draft cargo barges, each carrying twenty or thirty hogsheads of prized tobacco, being towed in file by a pair of donkeys and under charge of four white bargemen, slaves out on hire. At Peace’s call the men halted the donkeys, and a couple of them poled one of the boats across to us on the landing, and for one copper cash each we went aboard, and we floated along the canal that way, to the harsh cries of the donkey-drivers.

  Peace, his long, matted hair swinging as he turned his head this way and that, the scar that rode his eyebrow seeming unusually prominent under the luminous sky, pointed out to Harlot and me pretty sights along the way—a heroic willow, the Chi Kuo big house, the ferry for towing-animals across the mouth of the canal where it debouched into the river, and then, going downstream on the river, the landings of farms more famous than ours, the bare-ribbed wreck of a barge, an island’s upstream prow mustached with snags of driftwood. The huge man was calm, sensitive, and tender with us.

  The world seemed new-made under the rain-washed sky, and, feeling the warm sunlight soak to the pit of my stomach and watching the play of Peace’s powerful arms, I thought for a moment of that small, dark room at Chao-er’s tavern in the Northern Capital; suddenly I was overwhelmed with a sensuous aching. I was young, I tilted my face up to the sun and closed my eyes, and I imagined a strong hand slipping between my thighs to spread them wide apart…. Then I opened my eyes again and I looked into Peace’s, and I saw not merely single-mindedness but something more that sent my daydream flying in dis
order across the riverscape: a steely stiffness inside him, a control, an unwillingness to deviate by a hairbreadth from his set way, an absolute inflexibility of mind and spirit.

  “What about the bargemen?” Solemn asked. “Who will enlist them?”

  “Sheep Wu is speaking to the best of them,” Peace said.

  The city’s edge was abrupt on the left bank; crowded trees and small farms gave way to crowded houses all at once.

  The bargemen carried us to the far end of the town, to the Canal Bund, which looked like a fortification from a distance, with its tobacco and grain and timber and merchandise landings and its severe godowns. We disembarked. Peace asked around for a certain leader of the godown boys whom Smart knew, and we finally found him cleaning out the furnace in which tobacco unfit for sale was burned.

  Peace spoke to the man’s bent back. “Are you King?”

  The man straightened up; he smelled like Overseer Li’s foul pipe. “My name is King. They call me”—he smiled—“Mandarin King.”

  Peace set his hens down in the dust, and Solemn his young fowl; the creatures flapped their wings two or three times but, finding themselves helpless in their fetters, subsided, lying on their sides, heads up, seeming to swallow and blinking their waxy lids over their astonished eyes.

  “I often heard my friend speak of you,” Peace said. “Yen’s Smart.”

  I saw this slave arrogantly eying Harlot. “I know Smart as well,” King said, “as I know my hand fingers and foot toes.”

  “Would you like a dram with me?”

  To my surprise Auntie, chewing her tongue with carefulness, pulled a bottle of millet liquor—it was nearly empty—out from under her eggs.

  “I can’t drink it unless you have water,” King said.

  “We’ll get some. Harlot, get me some water.”

  Harlot went shooting off to ask for a well. Peace and King remained silent the entire time until she returned cautiously balancing a rusted tin pan of water.

  The men drank. The sharing of the spirits seemed to be a kind of bargaining and dealing between them; they shook hands after it.

  Peace said, “Are you a true man?”

  “I’m a truehearted man. Yes. I am. Your friend Smart knows me if you don’t. What business is it of yours?”

  “I’d like to take you to a Lamaist temple down our way.”

  “No,” the other said, “not King. Not Mandarin King. They say Lamaists never get to yellow heaven.”

  “Well, I don’t really mean a Lamaist temple. Listen, Mandarin King, if that is what you call yourself. Smart says you can keep a proper secret.”

  “I can do that.”

  The two big men reminded me of boys bristling on the edge of a fistfight.

  “You going to swear to me you’ll keep your word?”

  “I don’t know. Depends.”

  “Can you keep a close mouth?”

  “You are talking to a fox,” King said. “Fox doesn’t talk, he bites.”

  “I like that,” Peace said, looking as though he did not. “I am going to tell you something.”

  “How many drams have you had?” King jeered.

  “I tell you this, you godown boy: The smallies are going to fight the yellow people. We have captains. We are going to fight them and get free of them all. Are you willing to be a captain, King?”

  The most violent storms flew in an instant across King’s face, for he saw that Peace was in homicidal earnest, he grasped at once the danger in those short sentences, his heart must have leaped with hope and hatred, he was terrified by the importance of the secret and by its despair—all this in a blink, a twitching pull of one cheek.

  Then, with a too grand coolness that made Peace frown, he said, “I never was so glad to hear of anything in my life—why, son, they ought to have taken that consideration a long time back. Oh, I am, and I will be—I am ready to join you any moment. I am ready, son. I could cut the yellow peoples’ throats like sheep for meat.”

  “My name is Peace, not ‘son.’ Don’t you forget my name, Captain.” Peace’s face was sullen.

  “I rejoice you came along here, Captain Peace,” King sunnily said.

  “I am going to send you messages, King. Maybe you will get to be a captain.”

  The men shook hands again, and it was clear that both were now bound by an iron contract, a good faith squarely based on the misery each had seen in his time.

  “You can hold your tongue,” Peace said. “If you know any sound or steady-hearted men, you can speak to them about this, King. But know them well first. Don’t speak a word of this in the presence of any house slave or any woman.” King’s head turned in surprise and protest toward the three of us. Peace said, “These are not women, King. They are Peace’s handmaidens.” And Peace’s eye was suddenly so clouded by his dreadful prophetic look that even this arrogant King seemed to cringe.

  So it went all day: Peace seeking out reliable slaves he knew, or had heard about, and, with a directness that took for granted whole volumes, whole preachings, night meetings, drafty hovels, seas of millet meal and rancid pork fat, years of yes-venerable, lifetimes of aching—plunging right in, and leaving all details to later “messages,” he proposed the general fight against the yellows, and one by one the men, after nothing more than brief breaks in the weather of their faces, took in the thought and promptly agreed to go wherever it would lead them.

  From the Canal Bund we went up East Dragon Street, the main thoroughfare of the city, with Hsing Temple Hill ashine on our right, sloshing and squidging up the middle of the muddy, unpaved street, picking our way in single file at certain bad crossings along dikes of ashes and cinders that merchants had put out for pathways, which pricked the soles of our mud-caked feet and made Harlot and me giggle as we quick-footed along, until we came to the market, a great open shed, crowded with poor yellows and country and city slaves buying and selling and bartering.

  Here we sold our eggs and fowl, and bought a bottle of Shao-chiu spirits with the proceeds, and here we spent the better part of two hours as Peace, moving through the crowd with narrowed eyes, found men he wanted to see and took them, with his retinue always following, out for privacy of talk into the open field that sloped beyond the market shed down to High Thoughts Creek. This green pasture, considered a common, was a dazzling patchwork sight, for women, both yellows and slaves, washing clothes in the stream after the several days’ rain, were spreading out their clothes to dry and bleach on the grass; we could hear their open-air shouts and laughter on the one side and the contained hum of the market on the other as Peace put drams and the war to man after man.

  Peace drank with each one, but there was no change in him, unless it was a deepening of his obsession in his throat, a surer note of authority with each successive proposal as he became invisibly drunk, more, it seemed, on astonishment at the universal acceptance of the risk he asked than on raw spirits.

  From the market we went down to the Rock Landing, a wharf built around a broad, flat rock at the mouth of High Thoughts Creek, where scores of small craft were tied up, and where Peace spoke to three cormorant fishermen’s slaves, and then we went back up to the Creek footbridge, and across it, and along West Dragon Street, and to the prisonlike bulk of the Ho Ch’in Silk Company godown, where Peace knew a gateman slave, and then a block further, across a freshet that ran shamelessly across the face of the street, to the Swallow Hostel, a series of courtyards forming four sides of a square around a cobbled inner plaza, with an entrance for palanquins and carriages through an archway on the south side of Dragon Street. Peace boldly led his barefoot party of country whites into the plaza, past a number of yellow men, dressed in a new fashion of blue pantaloons and black tunics and with buttons on their hats of the nine official grades, walking in and out in pairs and trios, and Peace drew aside the inner-gate porter, a big man perspiring in a braided coat, shabby si
lk breeches, and muddy cloth boots, and the Porter, accustomed to hiding his emotions, nodded gravely at what Peace proposed, even without a dram. “Indeed,” he said, unwaveringly genteel, “I am in accord. Kindly maintain contact with me.”

  So we moved through the city. I was dazzled by Peace; by the headlong thrust of his obsession, by his passion, by his strong sweetness as he proposed the slaughter of all that was not sweet. I loved him, I belonged to him, I was his handmaiden with all my heart; in short, I was hypnotized by him, as every white he approached was.

  At the bulge of the afternoon, with the sun at a three-quarters slant, by which time I was footsore, hungry, and thirsty, we found ourselves at the corner of Dragon Street and Eleventh Hutung, and following Peace we started up a deep-rutted cart track that climbed at a meandering angle across an unfenced common onto a hillside gashed and marred with ravines and weedy patches and goat-galled places, sparsely tufted with scrub pine and chinquapin, and brightened in the most improbable way with white trumpets of datura, which practical Solemn said would brew into a kill-a-man tea, and the yellow disks of mayweed, which he said would set a woman to bleeding when she was late.

  Then, as the track turned, and a big cart came down with its oxen mud-stockinged to the knees and its wheels solid between the spokes with oozing reddish clay, and we came around a lone white oak, I looked up and gasped as I saw, beyond a row of brilliant flags, shining like a carving in ice in the full flood of the westering sun, the most beautiful building, surely, ever built—so it seemed to me; the whited yamen with many curving roofs, cap on cap on cap.

  Peace was now well ahead of us, striding with powerful steps uphill, almost running, his head lifted to the breathtaking seat of power.

  Along either side of the great building was a long horse rack, and numerous horses were tied there now, and carriages were standing under the charge of well-dressed slaves, and a pungent steam of horse urine drifted our way; I hurried, not wanting to be seen in my field-hand clothes. In the distance, within the yamen, we heard mournful blasts of ceremonial horns, and deep gongs, and drums: officials, Solemn said, in the Courtyard of Advisers.