White Lotus

by John Hersey

“Well, get off my behind,” I said.

  “Who’s on it? Nose, tell this little girl to run home.”

  In a calmer tone I asked, “What did Cassia Cloud say?”

  At this new mention of Cassia Cloud, Nose stood up with a groan and began pacing.

  Moon Pot said that Cassia Cloud had spitefully reported Chao-er’s receiving the stolen goods.

  “Ai, the bitch,” I said. “Paying off her bond! What did the old slanthead say to that?”

  At first, Moon Pot said, confronted by Cassia Cloud’s accusations, Chao-er had tried to discredit her. “Called her vile, said she had a wonk’s temper, said she told lies all day.” But on being pressed closely with a threat of jail, and therefore fearful of angering his accuser, he suddenly whirled right about and “declared she was a good child, long-working and faithful,” and that in the hardest weather of the winter she had dressed herself in a man’s clothes and had put on foot rags and had gone with Chao-er in his cart to the eastern groves to help him gather firewood.

  Nose suddenly said, “I’ll kill that bitch fox.” His voice was harsh, and he slapped the back of one hand into the cup of the other with a high, wheeling blow. The force of the blow shook his flap-eared cap forward over his forehead and onto the bridge of his nose. Moon Pot and I both laughed.

  To Moon Pot he was an everyday man. “Hah!” she said. “You! You talk them dead. You sit there—sneeze and sigh. You’ll never kill a yellow man, or woman either, Old Nose. Your blood is thin, you turtle.”

  Already smarting over Moon Pot’s teasing of me, I began now to run up some anger on Nose’s behalf, but to my distress he acted out her rebuke: deeply sighed and sat down.

  Under hard questioning, Moon Pot told me, Chao-er had finally confessed to having the stolen goods at his tavern, and had gone home and brought the bolt of Honan linen and the pieces of money and put them in the bannermen’s hands.

  “What about the Peach Fragrance part?”

  “That again? Yes, sweetheart—all about it. Not a thread on him; naked as a snake on her k’ang there. Hai! She spilled it, all right.”

  Now I did not know what to do with my anger. I turned and saw Nose looking at me with wide eyes. For a moment I felt that we did have a relationship after all. His eyes were limpid and tender. He was just a youth from my village. He was homesick, and so was I. His eyes said, Take my head and hold it against you, cover these bloodshot eyes!…But suddenly these illusions passed. He was absurd in his wobbling cap. He sighed again, and his eyes drifted dully away from mine.

  A Secret with Young Venerable

  In the following days I felt painfully restless. On every errand I looked for Nose in the streets but never saw him. Had that brief shaftlike look in his eyes, that afternoon when I had run to his master’s house, really been there, or had it been in my eyes, which printed what I wished on his? I was strangely comforted in those days by little Young Venerable, who had decided to like me, reserving, however, the right to torment me, too; he would lean against me while I sang a soft song from back home, mysterious to him, “Stormy Weather,” or “For You,” pressing his cheek to my arm. I responded to his sulky advances with an outpouring of tenderness which astonished and embarrassed me. We would peer, head by head, at the grotesque goldfish that Big Venerable Shen had bred, with froggy eyes, transparent scales, and waving calico fins. There was one called Celestial Telescope, with eyes on top of its head. Another, Five Shimmers Dragon, had double tail fins like two masses of shot-silk drapery which he sometimes folded forward so as to wrap his entire body in a trembling delight of vanity. On errands I filched Big Madame’s coppers to buy Young Venerable foolish gifts. I found a street stall where one could buy tiny papier-mâché toys—farmers’ carts, bannermen on horses, vendors with wheelbarrows—which, when tied with fine silk threads to the backs of big black beetles, moved about with funny frantic urgency; the boy greeted these with bursts of laughter that made his throat seemed lined with silver. But I did not want Gull or Bow to see me favoring the yellow boy, who could be so cruel at times, and I think that he sensed that the intimacy between us was somehow conspiratorial. He was only a child!

  Handing Buckets

  One noontime, in the yellows’ second month, after a thaw had made mud of the town, on a gray day, as the master and mistress were at their midday meal, we heard the great curfew drum booming and then a shuddering bell sound—the Drum Tower and Bell Tower in a daytime alarm!—and soon a clamor of bells and drums and gongs broke out from the many gate towers of the outer and inner city walls, all out of time and tune in a way that hurt my ears. The Shens and all their slaves ran together into the street, where we found many others, yellow and white, asking what was being warned against, and then some man shouted that smoke was to be seen going into the sky to the northwest of us, and shortly a yellow man in a leather apron came riding crazily through the streets on a tiny bay Manchurian pony which had lather all down its neck and flanks, and he was shouting, “Fire in the Forbidden City! Fire in the Forbidden City!”

  It had been so long since I had felt a rapture that at first I did not know what knot had been untied in my stomach and what warmth it was that radiated from that loosened place to my breast, my shoulders, and down my arms to my hands. The cobbled street, and the people shouting back and forth from one house gate to another, and the stripped plane trees whose closely pollarded crowns looked like upraised fists holding handfuls of brown bones, and the gray brick houses with bluish curved roofs—all blurred when the joy, dammed at my mouth, brimmed in my eyes.

  The Forbidden City was on fire!

  I vividly remembered leaning into the chalk circle on the brick floor of the tavern, laughing and coughing, as the oath to burn and kill was intoned over my shaking shoulders in Chao-er’s crackling tenor voice.

  When my sight cleared I saw that the tip of my master’s queue was whipping on his shoulders in the easterly wind, and his eyes were—I must admit—like those of our Syndicate bosses that time in Palm Springs, fierce yet bored, arrogant and frightful. I felt for a moment I should fall to my knees. He roared above the shouting in the street that Bow (whose winter-joint was stiff as a crab’s claw) should stay in the house with Big Madame Shen and the boy, and that the rest of us should run for capes and then follow him to the gates of the Forbidden City to join the bucket lines that surely would be forming.

  For a moment, as I ran through the Shens’ courtyards to the slave quarters to fetch the faded red-lined Harbin wool cloak the mistress had handed down to me, I wondered how one set fire to a master’s house—charcoals in a corner?—but then I lost all traces of the oath on seeing Gull’s worried face, for she, though a cook, was terrified of fire, dreamed of it night after night with twitches and groans; together we ran out to the main gate, whence at once the master led us and Bean and On Stilts and Cock off at a jog with his long queue thumping and blowing like a kite’s tail. Many others were running along with us, masters and slaves, and poor yellow workmen, and rounding into Meridian Gate Street we saw a huge canted column of smoke, pale blue against the threatening clouds overhead, blowing westward over the lakes of the winter palaces.

  A large crowd of people were already gathered in the great plaza outside the Meridian Gate, milling about, shouting, getting in each other’s way—hoping, no doubt, that this emergency would oblige the authorities to admit the populace inside the Forbidden City to fight the fire. The elephants were kneeling stolidly; the way to the gate was open. Our tall master stood on tiptoe in his embroidered cloth shoes, trying to see over the heads of the crowd; his face was like an orange-papered lantern in the cutting wind. We could see smoke breathing through the tiles of one of the highest of the golden-roofed buildings within the purple walls. The running had given me a pain in my chest, but I was so happy I hardly felt it.

  The master, his eyes no longer calm, shouted down to Gull and me to edge toward the gate, inside which water lines would pro
bably be formed, either from the Golden Water River or from the lakes to the west; and when the lines were made up, to fall in and work. He broke forward through the crowd and, waving his official credentials wildly over his head, he passed within the Meridian Gate.

  Seeing the master swallowed into the smoky gateway, I remembered a surf of fire hissing through the dry rabbit brush outside our village hedge, once, and some of our village men beating at the flames with house brooms, and we who were urchins standing behind the chevaux-de-frise afraid either to look or to turn away; then for some reason I thought of a recurring dream I had often had, of a column, wide as I was tall, of black ants, like a dark stream of water, coming toward me, as irresistible as the sun’s climb up the sky, across a newly worked field, I standing paralyzed until the pointed nose of the seething dark stripe was six feet away from me and then turning to run screaming into wakefulness. I huddled now against Gull. It had been a joke, the oath. The men were drunk. I did not want to be punished, either for burning and killing, or for not. Gull was right; keep a clean nose. The shrill voices all around me added to my confusion and anxiety. A sudden burst of flame leaped up from one of the golden roofs. Then a new bell rang.

  This ringing, which came from the way we had come, caused me the utmost fear. Had some slave taken the oath seriously? Had Nose? Had I the courage to turn my head and see whether another tall subversion of smoke was leaning over the compound of one of the Imperial boards, or from the Imperial ancestral temples?

  But the clanging was coming nearer, and the people around us began cheering, and to my immense relief—yet disappointment, too—I saw that the bell was on a huge water-pump cart pulled by six mules.

  The crowd surged around the engine, and soon the mules were forced to stop, and the captain of the pump company stood on the platform of the engine beside the handles of the pump screaming for passageway, and the driver cracked his long whip again and again over the heads of those who were blocking the way because they wanted to help. We could see that flames by now capped the whole of the one roof, whose tiles had fallen through below, and had worked against the strong wind along the ridge of the next building, evidently from beneath. Slowly the wagon moved toward a ramp leading up to the Meridian Gate, and now the firemen and numerous yellow dignitaries were all shouting commands at once, and the crowd swayed and eddied to no purpose. The rapid spread of the fire and the danger that sparks might leap to houses in the crowded city made every yellow man feel that he was in charge, and slaves ran here and there trying to do whatever they were asked.

  Gull and I were swept toward the gate in the wake of the pump wagon, and before we knew it we were inside the Forbidden City. Two enormous bronze lions frowned down on us.

  The common yellows among us who had been pushed within to form bucket lines were awed by this sacrosanct refuge:

  The chain to which the Emperor whose reign was called K’ang-hsi had used to tether the small black donkey he rode when he made his incognito trips out into the city! The carved marble box in which petitions to the Dragon Countenance were placed! The Hall of Proclaimed Intellect—on fire! The Pavilion of Literary Profundity—ablaze!

  Two long lines were being formed. I saw Nose in one of them, not far from the fire cart. He was with Fish Bait. I tugged at Gull’s sleeve and made her join me in the return-buckets line not far from those two.

  When Nose saw me, he shouted, “Ai, White Lotus!” and he pulled off his mangy fur cap and made a low bow with a circling sweep of the hat. It was clearly a tease. I was annoyed. I supposed he had been drinking. He and Fish Bait were both noisy.

  I myself felt a perverse joy at the sight of the palaces in flames, and I was inclined to giggle, talk loudly, and playfully jostle Gull.

  At last the lines had formed, all the way from the engine, through gates in two walls, to the South Sea of the winter palaces, and before long hundreds of wooden pails were moving along the chains, one of which, all men, conveyed full buckets to the big staved reservoir on the cart, while the other, women and boys as well as some men, passed the empties back to the lake.

  Teams of six yellow pumpers at a time swayed the great seesaw handles on the engine wagon, and soon narrow streams began to play feebly on the roofs from hoses held by yellows in uniforms.

  I could not help glancing over at Nose, and I happened to be looking once when Fish Bait passed him a bucket of water, and Nose, with a clumsiness I could not believe, fumbled the handle so the bucket fell to the ground and spilled.

  “Oh! Suffering Jesus!” Nose shouted in English with mock dismay, and he danced about in the most comical way, splashing up the water with his bare feet.

  I tried not to giggle. I tried, indeed, to take my mind off Nose. Gull was on one side of me, and on the other was a thickset, apricot-cheeked yellow housewife, obviously too poor to own slaves, of a class that felt a need to be particularly contemptuous of whites, yet obviously a hearty and cheerful woman, whom I found, as we were drawn into the irresistible co-operative spirit of the bucket line, joking with me, jollying up my spirits—in condescending terms but in an undeniably endearing tone. (I heard a cackle from Nose.) We three women swayed in the rhythm of the chain, and I wanted to work harder and harder, yet I also wanted the palaces to burn faster and faster; I felt that I loved the yellow woman beside me—our hands touched at every bucket handle—yet I also wanted her to feel loss, humiliation, and bitterness, and I wanted some retributive power—my Methodist God or a Buddhist avenger, if there was such a being—to sear the condescending tongue out of her throat.

  Hooo! Nose spilled another bucket. The same prancing. Fish Bait hooting.

  We were working near a door of one of the burning wings of the palace, out of which, so far as we could see, the Emperor’s chests and beds and chairs and lanterns and Imperial nightgowns and Imperial undershifts had been vomiting, and we saw yellow gentlemen running in and out of the doorway, gesticulating in their wide sleeves and shouting to others outside. Then soon the ones within began to throw out bundles of scrolls and books and records and papers, and the ones outside caught them as best they could and carried them off into heaps near one of the bronze lions.

  At this time the wind sprung unexpectedly into a whirling gale, and documents that had been disgorged from the doorway were caught up like an enormous scolding of sea gulls, and they swirled into the sky, swooped around us along the line, and flapped along the ground.

  Ever since Nose’s first accident I had felt a swelling impulse to laugh, and now the gentlemen’s faces—I saw Big Venerable Shen, who loved good order in his own dressing chamber, with his pigtail askew, watching the birdstorm of documents—were so grotesquely dismayed that I could barely control my throat, hard as I tried to be cautious. The housewife beside me began to chuckle. I heard Nose and Fish Bait loudly laughing, and I gave way. At first Gull angrily shook my shoulder and shushed me, but soon even she had started to snigger discreetly, and before long both lines, yellows and whites together, were laughing all the way to the lake.

  In the midst of this Nose upset yet another bucket. The yellow man beside him sharply chided him, but Nose hallooed and flapped his feet in the mud he had made.

  The wind remained gusty, and it began lightly raining; the fire still gained from peak to peak along the wings. The Hall for the Reverence of the Master, not far from our lines, caught fire, apparently from sparks that had dodged the sparse raindrops on the wind. Many were afraid that this fresh breeze would carry the fire into the city. There were shouts that we should redouble our efforts.

  A bit later I saw the man next to Nose halt an Imperial bannerman, and this guardsman spoke to Nose, frowning and gesticulating, and for a while Nose was quiet. But soon I heard his laughter again, and that sound, too raucous, suddenly filled me with an inexplicable depression that stayed with me the rest of the day.

  Then in the rain we saw a tall man, in a ferocious uniform as white as the documen
ts that swooped around his head, and wearing a polished steel helmet with long ear lappets, standing on the pump wagon shouting to the people in the lines, and grinning in an unconvincing way. The yellow woman beside me said with great excitement that this was General Hsüeh of the Emperor’s personal bodyguard. Men in the bucket chain began to shout for silence so we could hear him.

  All that reached us was the word for gunpowder.

  A gasp ran along the line in pursuit of the word, and toward the east from us, where the lines were closest to the burning palaces, they suddenly broke, and soon we had all dropped our burdens and surged away from the building, leaving two long lines of buckets on the ground.

  Now bannermen came screaming toward us that General Hsüeh had been assuring us that there was no gunpowder in these wings of the palace, and slowly we began to move back into place. The lines had scarcely been restored when a series of explosions, rebuking the lies in the chief bodyguard’s grimacing mouth, rumbled from one of the buildings that was on fire. This time all of us, and the yellow gentlemen, too, and his eminence General Hsüeh besides, ran away to the very wall where all stood uneasily watching.

  A great aaah and a jubilee of sparks went up when the roof of the Pavilion of Literary Profundity collapsed….

  During the evening meal at home, Big Venerable Shen told the mistress the story of the day. He could not sit steadily at the low table, but arose from time to time and strode about, once bumping straight into me as I was carrying a bowl of water chestnuts in my hands—as if he truly had not known that I existed. The golden roofs of all the buildings in the Wing of Literary Glory were down, he was saying just then, and burning timber ends obtruded from the walls, and the high wind was blowing sparks off them, and a nightlong watch had been set. His Ineffable Tranquility in person had been safely removed early in the day to the winter palaces. The crowd was made up of fools; they had been frightened away by some ceremonial fireworks exploding. And General Hsüeh—a madman! so subject to agitation!—had beat his Imperial bannermen to arms throughout the city, the master said, to scout all the streets of every quarter the whole night through: to what end?