White Lotus

by John Hersey

  Yes, I have come to take fear of open cruelty for granted, I have learned how to stifle that fear, to push it down. But it is harder for me to deal with covert cruelty, implicit cruelty—with the massively threatening conditions of life that the yellows have imposed on us: the oppressive fitness, in the yellow scheme of things, of the conversion of the Peking elephant pens to a jail, where white men waited for capricious sentences with equanimity, betting on cricket fights; the rage and hunger that drove sturdy young men in Up-from-the-Sea to become “sweepers,” stabbing rice bags on street carts and brushing up the spilled rice on the dung-dusty pavement and racing off with it. It is the generality of our existence that has filled me with a dread I don’t know how to subdue. Not the specific bamboo blow, but rather the great accumulation of affronts, the taking their total for granted, even as the conditions of life “improve”—this is what is intolerable, because this seems to us whites to get worse, not better.

  In this sense I made a mistake to turn left to face this petty disturbance surrounding the vendor. I am not afraid of the cruel pranks of the young men in this crowd; I am afraid of the abstraction in the yamen.

  The young man who twisted the dough and dropped the raw crullers into the boiling oil cannot wait to savor more of his triumph of miming, and he runs out to the vendor’s kitchen—I could have told him that the crullers would not be done yet, for they must be brought to a crispness so delicate that they seem to be made of some delicious vapor—and he hooks one out. He is standing on one leg. He sees that it is not quite done, but he wants to get a laugh from the crowd, and foolishly he squeezes the cruller between forefinger and thumb, and he burns himself and drops the cruller to the ground and begins to hop on the one foot and to flip his hand, trying to shake off the pain as if it were a wetness. This is in earnest, but it looks like a burlesque; he gets a laugh he doesn’t want. Then, when the hurt has drained away somewhat, he gets another by hooking up the now dirty cruller and plopping it back in the oil. Then he is satisfied and runs back to the crowd. But when he turns around I see that he is flushed, and I suspect that the burn hurts more than he dares to show.

  My eye moves to the vendor. All this time he has not moved, and I think: Our party has come from beyond the borders of the province, we have nothing to lose here, for we are, as Excellency K’ung spitefully says, outside agitators; whereas this poor vendor is staking everything. Has he a family? What powerful emotions he must contain in that still, still form of a sleeping bird! What risks he is willing to take!

  The sight of him stirs in me a familiar melancholy feeling, a pity-sadness that is surely one of the most common sensations of our depressed race—a feeling that does no one any good, yet one in which I soak myself, almost as if it were enjoyable, a luxury. I felt it powerfully that day long ago when Peace, Auntie, Mink, Harlot, and I stood beside the show ring in the Scholars’ Garden at Twin Hills while the nearly naked white equestrian acrobats hurtled in somersaults from the broad hips of their horses, and the yellow showmaster came at us with his long whip to chase us away; and at Provisioner Lung’s, on our first visit to him, while he kissed at his talented lark, and Rock and Groundnut and I stood there knowing in our guts that this was a prelude to one more vile cheating of whites; and at a contemplation of the long row of frail white girls standing all day at the steaming copper basins in the silk-reeling filature.

  Yet there is anger at the heart of this melancholy. The sadness is a modulation of the anger. We can’t stand the anger, so we run it off into sorrow. I must hold on to the anger that I felt on the vendor’s behalf before I lowered myself into this emotion; I will need the anger to support the courage I will very soon have to display—display, I mean, to my own inner eye in order to finish my work.

  A yellow youth runs out to the vendor’s cookstove. I have no more time for preparation. Here it comes, whatever it may be.

  Not the same young man as before, this boy has an elegant style; he moves smoothly, with dramatic understatement. He lifts a cruller out on the hooked wire, examines it, and sees at once that it is done to perfection. His job is to dip out all the crullers and spear them on the spike, and he does this with swift, neat, flowing probes. Incapable of slapstick, he seems serious and thoughtful, as if he realizes the gravity of these events. Then why does the crowd howl at him? Because all through this pensive activity he is standing on one leg.

  Judging by the pattern of the pranks up to now, it is my guess that this young man will not eat any of the crullers but will go back to the audience as soon as he has fished them all up; that there will be a pause; and that then another will come out to eat the first new cruller. I will make my move in the pause.

  Yes, the last of the crullers is on the spike, the young man stirs the hot oil with the hook to make sure there are no more. Then in his quiet mode he hangs the hooked wire on its loop and walks back to the crowd.

  The vendor is as immobile, as serene, as ever.

  How much time will I have? I cannot speculate. I must move.

  Now.

  I put down my lifted foot, which prickles, half asleep, but I cannot linger to favor it. I walk forward toward the portable kitchen.

  The moment I start the crowd of young men reacts. Such hoots and whistles! They greet my approach with a jubilee of air-kissing and obscene invitations. If noise could rape I’d be defiled a hundred times in the course of taking fifty steps.

  I am more excited than I thought it possible to be. I can walk well, and indeed I have a bizarre thought, that I am beautiful—not because the yellow rowdies think I am, but because I have managed to hold on to some of my earlier anger. I think of the vendor. I am furious—for the vendor, for Rock when he had to pull rickshas, for myself with my fingertips in boiling water lifting out a cocoon when I was a reeler.

  I did not realize how close to the mob I would have to approach. I station myself in front of the portable kitchen, between the spiked crullers and the crowd, not more than five paces away from the first of the yellows. The anonymities fade; each of these is a personality. Each man has a separate pair of lips that curl in a particular way, and I see pimples, broken front teeth, and laughter in one man’s eyes.

  Now I perch.

  Ai! Was I thinking a few minutes ago that the Sleeping-Bird Method has passed the peak of its effectiveness, and even that it may be absurd?

  I have not been standing here long enough for my racing heart to beat a hundred times when the shrill indecency of this whole crowd of hooligans has died out to utter silence. A sleeping bird has shut them up—or at least changed their mood so sharply that they have chosen silence. I have to be impersonal, my eyes are downcast, I cannot search their faces now, but I feel sure that they are all put down. Their fun is over. They are in for a period of meditation. Their pricks are subsiding. They may never have believed in the teachings they have heard since infancy—the five aggregates of grasping are pain; hurt no living creature—but they are at least now briefly gripped by those precepts as if the kind words were policemen or angry fathers.

  In the midst of my relief and triumph I suffer a pang of doubt. Will it last? Will that hold on the crowd last? Will the hoodlums not recover their phlegm very soon? Should I not break the spell while I have the best of it—go back to my perch before the yamen? But if I do, what happens then?

  The vendor comes to my rescue, in a sense. He puts his foot down and walks to his portable kitchen, behind me. I hear him checking it over. The little door of the pantry canister clacks shut. He makes the sounds of putting some charcoal on the fire. I hear him setting the shoulder pole, and there is a creaking sound, and he utters the understood grunt of everlasting weariness and submission of the poverty-stricken white underdog as he lifts his kitchen up. I wonder: Is he going home? The crowd is silent.

  He is looping around to my left; I sense this. He comes now into my field of vision, and I see that he is really a brave man: He is going to pretend
that nothing has happened, he is a cruller peddler, he is going to sell fresh-cooked crullers to any in this crowd who may be hungry. He is going to act as if he is glad a crowd has gathered; it is easy to sell soybean crullers when a crowd has gathered.

  He makes a sale; money changes hands. A young yellow man eats. The vendor thinks now to take out some dough and shape and twist new crullers and drop them in the oil to cook. Another sale. There is an air of normalcy; quiet talk spreads like a moisture through the crowd. I still stand perched. The vendor is doing a good business.

  It is time, I conclude, to go back out to my proper perch. I feel that my strength is renewed. I stand on both feet for a moment and look squarely at the vendor, and I see that he is even resuming his playful behavior of earlier. I turn and start out to the center again.

  It seems to me after I have walked a few paces that the murmur of the crowd has suddenly swelled. Then almost at once I am struck by an appalling realization which must also, I think, be flying through the crowd.

  The vendor is selling the yellows crullers made for him by yellows. Someone will buy and eat the cruller that burned the yellow youth’s fingers and fell in the dirt and was tossed back in the oil.

  The vendor knows what he is doing.

  I have an impulse to turn back, to hasten back and resume the perch I have just left before it is too late. Still walking I inwardly hesitate; I tell myself that it would be a mistake to return, it might even incite the yellows somehow….

  Behind me I hear a rush. There are grunts, blows. I do not turn, I cannot turn now, I walk on. I hear thumps, wood splitting, a metallic banging, a hiss. Much scuffling.

  Then there is quiet again. I am still walking. I cannot look back, but I know that the vendor’s form lies motionless on the ground, his kitchen is broken to pieces and scattered.

  The crowd is silent again. I have reached my post. I turn and perch, facing the brutal block of the yamen, my blood boiling in a need for revenge, revenge.

  The elation I felt a few moments ago, the peace, the inner strength—all are flown. I will never know whether, by returning to the edge of the crowd and resuming my perch there, I could have averted this outcome, for it might be that the yellows would have attacked the vendor even if I had been there, indeed even if I had been standing there as a sleeping bird the whole time and had never shown my back at all. I will never know. I can only stand here in a helpless folk-fury that seems to burn my body.

  With my head lowered I see the cluster of guards and policemen near the yamen gate. They are looking toward the place, to my left now, from which I heard the noises come, and they are animatedly talking; I realize that none of them has lifted a finger to intervene.

  It is clear, as time drags itself unwillingly along, that nobody in this throng, either official or idle, is going to do anything about the vendor and his ruined kitchen. They are going to be left lying where they are.

  I wonder if the vendor is alive. I wonder what would happen if he stirred.

  Now a party emerges from the yamen gate. At its heart is a brisk fellow in the uniform of an officer—not splendid, rather drab, for the tone of the new regime, reacting against the pomp of the old court, is dun-colored and cotton-quilted.

  The officer seems to be barking orders, though I cannot hear them, and he points here and there with a stiff arm.

  The policemen have been waved off, and they disconsolately pull away, as if they have been told they cannot play with the other schoolboys. They saunter along the fronts of the onlooking crowd, still without formation or parade bearing; it seems as if they have been strictly drilled in awkwardness.

  The military detachments at the gate drift into patterns, and slowly these rigidify into ranks. The regular gate guards are in squads flanking the main gate and its brick-checkered spirit screen; they are armed only with staves. The provincial militia, with clubs and revolvers, form a double line. The rifle-bearing troops make a square directly in front of the gate: directly in front of me. And now the banner-bearers remove the oilskin covers from their flags and unfurl them, and I experience a surge of relief, for these are not the unanimous white banners of death, such as I saw at Nose’s trial in the Northern Capital; they are nothing worse than varicolored guidons of Excellency K’ung’s military units.

  Now we wait. I say “we.” I have a feeling that I am an onlooker with all the rest of this crowd.

  The forming up at the gate has caused a drowsy murmuring in the crowd, which is curious but not thrilled and horrified as it was a few moments ago, when they—and I—were participants; now we are all watchers, for the abstraction in the fortlike seat of power has taken some sort of initiative.

  A sharp order rings out, which even at this short distance seems thinned by the dry air so as to sound not manly but falsetto.

  The slapping of hands on rifle stocks, a presentation of arms.

  Around the spirit screen comes a squat figure in brilliant blue. The sunlight is bright, the man’s hand goes up to shade his eyes—or perhaps that is a disenchanted salute. No, he holds the hand there: he wants to see the enemy. Me.

  He turns his head and says something. Three or four petty officers scramble to him with anxious faces. He waves a hand over his shoulder in a vague gesture of something left behind in the yamen. Two men run in.

  The fat man chats with the officer in command. The latter turns at one point and with the throaty contralto of an aging actress puts his soldiers at parade rest.

  The two men return helter-skelter from within. One is carrying a sword in a scabbard, which he hands to the fat man. The stubby man hooks the scabbard to his belt on his left hip. The two soldiers who have run the errand are panting; the officer flicks the back of his hand and they fall back.

  The fat man draws the sword from its sheath with his right hand and steps out onto the parade ground, and he walks straight toward me.

  The Trembling Blade

  His progress is a hybrid of a waddle and a march. Although he has a fat man’s handicap of not being able to keep his feet close together in their swings from step to step, so they glide forward in little arcs around his center of gravity, nevertheless he also has a spinal erectness, a tucked chin, a tight rhythm of paces—a bearing of martial command. The sword is in his right hand, point forward.

  Not for him the modest uniform of the new regime. He is gorgeous in the old style of warlordism—vivid blue satin, a touch of ermine at collar and cuff, gold cords and braids, metal buttons that glisten in the sun, as if to advertise many plunders, vaults of squeeze, a wealth that both derives from and becomes power.

  I cannot tell anything yet from his face, except that he keeps it inflexibly aimed at me. He has not looked once at the crowds that flank him and me, and I doubt that he has even noticed the prostrate vendor and the debris of the kitchen.

  I do not want to think explicitly about the sword, yet it keeps attracting my attention by sending forward to my eyes piercing gleams of reflection of the sun, as though the blade can project its stabbing power to great distances. I push the sword aside in my mind as just another accouterment, a symbol of authority—a fat creature’s assertion of his manly power. I look away from it, but ai! It cuts me again with an upstroke of razor-edged sunlight.

  He is approaching me with a rapidity for which I am grateful. I haven’t much time to wonder what is going to happen to me.

  He is wearing a conical hat of the old-fashioned mandarin style—even to the spray of red-silk threads that falls from the apex. He dresses out of, as he lives for, the past.

  Now I begin to see his face: it does not look as fat as his torso. From this distance, bobbing atop his strides, it surprises me by its lack of harshness or brutality; I have the impression rather of a cool, complacent arrogance.

  He is not more than twenty paces away. I suddenly see, as separate entities, his lips, his eyes. There is an illusion, grotesque as the seemi
ng smile on a dead face, of some pleasantry unexpressed, a fleeting joke. The thin lips are drawn back (he’s short of breath?), the eyes sparkle (so does the sword).

  I feel my body tightening, as though, without thinking it through, I dimly expect him to lunge at me with that blade as soon as he is close enough.

  He stumbles. He has failed to sense some minor unevenness of footing, and his left ankle seems to crumple under him. He falters only slightly, however, and I see that he is a man of unusual agility; he has that grace so often seen in the obese, who turn their hateful tonnage into a lovely weightless floating. His recovery is on the instant, and it seems to me possible that the crowd standing at distances may not even have noticed his false step. But I have. He knows I have. There has been a quick whipping of the sword, which he has used as the tightrope walker uses his long bamboo pole; he drops his eyes to the sword blade with a swift pout of his mouth, as if the misstep had been the sword’s fault.

  This incident, small as it was, has given me great encouragement, for I have had a glimpse, which Governor K’ung surely did not want me to catch, of fallibility. I feel my body, which had grown so tense, relaxing, and I am able to raise my left leg a little higher. (I have not the slightest thought of weariness.) I see that Governor K’ung, coming on, has noticed the movement of my thigh, and I believe I see a shade of surprise on his face, and it occurs to me that he has noticed for the first time, watching my leg move, that I am a woman. Had he not been told this?

  By now, if he were indeed going to rush at me, he would have to be quickening his pace, leaning his stoutness into the start of the assault. But he marches still.