White Lotus

by John Hersey

  The mistress asked, “How did the fire start? Do we know?”

  I felt my hand, in the act of setting a dish of bean sprouts down on the table, begin to tremble. The mistress poised her chopsticks over the bowl, ready to dip some out, waiting for the master’s answer.

  Oh yes, the master said, that was well known but would not restore the wings of the palace. The Imperial household had that morning given orders to a gutter-solderer, a stupid man, one Ts’ui, to seal the drains on the roofs of the Hall of Literary Glory, in preparation for the Feast of Classics, and the idiot had carried up his firepot with charcoals to keep his sealing iron hot, in that wind, and sparks had blown down between the tiles onto roof timbers.

  The fire had not been set by a slave.

  I felt as if I had been struck in the midriff—as if the very last of my pride had been stolen from me. I put a dish of salted goose feet and duck gizzards that I was carrying down on the chest at the side of the room and leaned for a moment’s support on the solid wood.

  Alarms of Bells and Drums

  A fire, said to have been caused by an overturned brazier, broke out a week later in the house of a wool merchant named Hua, near the Imperial University to the east of the Forbidden City. It was extinguished without much damage to the building.

  Another week later, as the willows along the city’s chain of lakes became fountains of yellowy green, a godown, an old structure storing deal planks, belonging to another merchant, Sun, in the Outer City north of the Temple of Heaven, caught fire, apparently because of the carelessness of a workman smoking a pipe while malingering alone. The building and its contents were lost, but great exertion in hauling water from the sacred fishponds outside the temple grounds saved the neighboring warehouses.

  Three days later another alarm of bells and drums broke out—fire at the house of a Mandarin of the Bannermen, named Han, in our southeast quarter, not more than an arrow’s flight from us, near the Examination Halls.

  Later that same afternoon fire broke out in the mansion of a high functionary of the Board of Rites, Huang, and we heard that it had been discovered in his slave quarters in a straw paillasse on which a white girl slept.

  Early the very next morning the bells and drums sounded yet again, but this turned out to be a minor blaze in an outdoor haystack.

  We had not had a single fire all the winter through, and in these few days we had heard six alarms, counting that for the Imperial palaces. In all the excitement I had not dared go back to Chao-er’s, and I remained anxious (who had no particular right to be) about Nose’s parole. I stayed mostly at home, and I was starved for the warmth of the tavern and for a sight of Nose and of Old Pearl, and for gossip, for entertainment, for wine, for peanuts, for a boxing match; that morning, after the sixth alarm, I was moody and several times broke into tears over trifles. The yellows could talk of nothing but the fires. Our masters were convinced that they had been set by an organized gang of wretches who wanted to steal under the pretext of rescuing household belongings from fires—for after these alarms the victims and their neighbors had made many complaints of losses of goods, and even of large pieces of furniture, that had been carried out to the streets during the fires.

  Up to this time there had been no suggestion that the arsonists were white.

  I thought often, in fear, of the oath at Chao-er’s, but always came back to these reassurances: the oath had been in fun; Nose and the other men had been drunk; we had laughed and laughed.

  Scorch, Scorch

  That afternoon Venerable Shen’s bosom friend the curio dealer P’an came to play a game of “surrounding pieces,” and he arrived in a great flutter of excitement. I heard what it was about as I served tea and sesame cakes.

  It seemed that a certain lady named Madame Liang, airing her sleeve dogs at her mansion gate and chatting with a cousin, Madame Ho, had seen three white men walking up Hata Gate Street.

  One of the slaves, suddenly doing a queer breakaway dance with flashing eyes, had said to his companions in the yellow language with explosive stresses, “Scorch, scorch! A LITTLE smoke! Hai! Hai!”

  One of the other two had answered, “A little today, but ayah! Wait till TOMORROW!”

  Then the first had lifted up his hands and spread them with a wide vaporing gesture over his head, as if to encompass the entire city, and he and both the others had burst into loud laughter, bending at their waists, tossing up their fur caps, slapping the air, hugging each other.

  The two ladies had been greatly agitated by this behavior, and they had run to the gate of a neighbor, Madame Fan, and had told Madame Fan what they had seen. All three agreed that these eccentric shouts must have had to do with the fires.

  Mesdames Liang, Ho, and Fan lingered, chirping excitedly, at Madame Fan’s gate. In about an hour the three slaves walked downstreet again, showing signs of having been drinking. Madame Fan recognized the two men who had uttered the strange lines: a man called Small Wolf, belonging to her friends the Shihs, she said, and one called Small Fish Bait, belonging to Ch’en.

  Together the three ladies hurried to the nearest yamen of the Blue Banner Corps to inform of these ominous capers. News of them was now traveling around the city, said curio dealer P’an, with the speed of runaway horses, and causing great consternation.

  Wolf and Fish Bait! Clearing away the cups, I anxiously wondered if Nose, their inseparable comrade, had been the third. He needed new trouble about as much as he needed a new ermine purse for the riches he would never own. Ai!

  The Whites Are Rising!

  The following day—we were in the early part of the third month—three more fires sprang up, and the sky came down around our ears.

  The first alarm was in midmorning, at a small house belonging to one of the officers of the White Banner Corps, opposite the Lama Temple; this was easily got in hand.

  Shortly before noon a fire broke out in the eaves of the house right next to that of Mandarin Huang, which had burned two days before, and near a deep hole burned in a timber officers had found scraps of hemp tow that had been dipped in tar. A cry of arson was raised. Someone in the crowd shouted, “The Coal Hill Boys!”—the slave gang to which Gull’s friend Mink belonged; it was dreaded in that neighborhood. One of its members apparently belonged to Mandarin Huang.

  The bucket brigade and the onlooking mob took up the accusation. “The Coal Hill Boys! The Coal Hill Boys!”

  Within an hour five slaves from the gang had been led to jail on suspicion of arson.

  News of these arrests reached our street gate within minutes of their occurrence. Yellow housewives, their necks corded with excitement, were stumping on their bound feet from house to house with the reports.

  One of these hysterical couriers told us that Wolf and Fish Bait had been arrested, on account of their famous eccentric behavior of the day before.

  After the midday meal I was on my knees at the outer gate polishing the master’s brass nameplate, which was embedded in a low stone monument at the base of one of the gateposts, and I was trying to scribe the gray incrustations of polish out of the beautiful characters, and I was worrying about Mink—when the bells and drums struck up their horrible clamor yet again. I crumbled into a crouching position, my head on my knees, and groaned out loud, “No! No! No!”

  Big Madame Shen, who, I believe, had not enough excitement in her life (she talked so much at meals about this woman’s pock-marked face and that one’s warty hands), was out at the gate, with a heavy cloak around her shoulders, before the clanging and thrumming had spread to all the watchtowers of the city.

  “Come, come,” she impatiently said, reaching a hand down toward me where I was still on my haunches. According to her husband’s strict orders, she could not venture into the streets without an escort, and she wanted me to go with her.

  We saw the smoke toward the granary, and we sped in its direction without waiting for word
just where it was. I was in my dirty work gown, my hands were milked over with dry brass polish, my wavy brown hair was wild. The mistress jarred horribly on her feet crippled for beauty.

  We rounded from Hata Gate Street into a side street, and I saw with a flash of fear that the fire was in one of three large timber godowns belonging to Wu Li-shih, Nose’s owner, some three blocks from the Wu home. The pump wagon was already there.

  “Buckets! Hand buckets!” my mistress excitedly commanded me, and when I took my place in the line she stood beside the line giving me infuriating bits of encouragement and advice. The source of water was a miserable sewage-filled rivulet, and the buckets full of this liquid smelled of slave ships.

  I saw that a chain of firemen was climbing up the roof at the end of the godown away from the fire, breaking out tiles to make a hole for the hose.

  Suddenly one arose from a crouching position, waved his arms, and shouted words I could not hear; then, cupping his hands to his mouth, he called toward our lines, “A white inside! White man down there!” He was pointing down through the hole in the tiles.

  Then I saw a flash of blue near the ground at the far end of the godown, and it seemed to me that a figure skimmed through the lacy shade of a locust tree and vaulted the low wall beyond the building and—yes, a swift wink of blue again, into the hutung beyond. The Wu house was in that direction—or was it? or was it?

  My head was whirling. Like gunshots around me in the bucket lines, the single word White! was detonated again and again. White!

  Then some man (White! White!) lost his head completely and roared like a braying donkey, “The whites are rising! The whites are rising against us!”

  I felt the mistress’s hand grip my arm. Women nearby were gasping. One shrieked.

  Another man shouted, “Yes! The whites! The turtles!”

  The bucket lines broke and the mob was in a frenzy of chattering and crying out.

  A fireman ran toward us from the other end of the burning building. His swelling eyes were about to split his head. “I saw the bastard,” he shouted. “Wu’s hog. Wu Li-shih’s white bastard hog! I know him! I saw the bastard!”

  Had not the mistress been holding my arm with a clamp of bronze I would have fled. I think I tried to break away.

  The man who had raised the first crazy halloo now bellowed, “Let’s get him! Come on! To Wu’s!”

  A large number of men ran from the bucket lines toward the Wu mansion, and very soon we saw these men swinging down Hata Gate Street in the direction of the Board of Punishments carrying Nose on their shoulders. I could not see his face, but I could tell it was he; his head was bobbing loosely as he was jolted by his bearers. He was not in blue. His white tunic was half torn from his back.

  Why Did Nose Run Away?

  After the evening meal—at which the master had reported that a mob of yellow men had caught, one by one, a score of slaves wandering in the streets after the alarm of an uprising, and had carried them off to jail; that Wolf and Fish Bait had been interrogated at the Board of Punishments; that General Hsüeh of the Banner Corps had ordered a perpetual night watch throughout the city—after all this the mistress complained of feeling faint and asked me to support her to her chamber and to help her get undressed.

  As we made our way to the Pear Blossom Rest, I could hear, outside and overhead, the prolonged wailing of a bamboo whistle tied to the tail of a pigeon which, soaring over the city, was writing across the sky a melancholy account of its flight; this lament edged my fear with hopelessness.

  When she was seated before her dressing table, and when I had taken a taper light from our candle and had lit a lantern by her face, I saw in the mirror over her shoulder that she had lost all trace of her weakness; she was in fact almost vivacious.

  She whirled around with sharp eyes and said, “Tell me, small child, about Wu’s dirty hog, this Nose, the one they caught at the fire. Do you know him?”

  My stomach felt all at once as my hands and feet had been ever since autumn, bloodless and clammy. Might the mistress have heard somewhere that Nose and I had come to the platform in the farmers’ market in the same parcel of slaves? Did she know about the dark room at Chao-er’s? “No, mistress,” I said. “I have never talked with Wu’s slave.”

  Big Madame Shen drew a preserved litchi nut from a jar and after she had eaten its smoky sticky meat and spat out the pit she licked her fingers with loud sucking noises.

  “Do you think he started the fire? Do you think that slaves have started all the fires, White Lotus?”

  I fell to my knees, I think to plead in some way for Nose. “Ai! No, Big Madame,” I almost groaned. “No, no, Big Madame.”

  I could not look in the mistress’s glistening eyes, and my gaze turned to a dark corner of her room, where I saw in turn a dark corner of a tavern room, and a crude brick k’ang with straw ticking on it, and a pair of bloodshot eyes, bloodshot, bloodshot, and a strong trembling hand dropping an old green silk gown to the floor. My eyes, afraid of being flooded, fled to the flame of the lantern, and at first I saw a fire licking at a warehouse roof—but suddenly the brightness is sunlight itself, and I see a squad of men going across a compound, and Gabe is with them, telling them how they’ll proceed. A truck stands beside the pile walls of the new Coteen shed, on which the men are working; we hear radio music from the open windows of the Coteen house, “Juanita.” The lumber is cut and ready. Gabe is stripped to the waist, and he bangs a hammer on a mudguard of the truck to get the men’s attention…. The wall plate and tie beam are up, and the face rafters. I hear Gabe’s slightly off-tune voice now, “We are watching, we are waiting, For the bright prophetic day…” He is everywhere; now he runs from side to side on the ground; now he is at the ridgepole calling down to a man who is slow at tying in the purlins. His eyes are aflame…. Then it’s all done. The villagers who are watching cheer as Gabriel climbs a ladder and nails a big leafy cottonwood branch to the king post which transforms the covered house into a living thing. It is a moment, for me, of soaring happiness. His shoulders as he draws back the hammer!…

  “White Lotus, small child!” the voice of the mistress said. “Do not be afraid of me. You look so…feverish. Get up off your knees, small girl…. You have a look—I think you know him.” Her eyes had what seemed to me a teasing glint. “Is he strong, White Lotus?” She spoke in a tone of some incredible mischievousness.

  I was afraid. I said I did not know this Nose. I said there were numerous slaves called Nose or sometimes Big Nose. I said the yellows complained of the ugliness of all white people’s noses. I did not know this Nose or that one, they were all the same to me.

  “But why would he light a fire in his own master’s warehouse? I trust you, White Lotus, ai, White Lotus, you have been like a child to me.”

  Then I stood up. I said slaves lit no fires. I said the Big Venerable had said a careless yellow gutter-mender had lit the wing of the palace.

  “But why did your friend Nose run away?”

  “That was not Nose, Big Madame! The slave who ran away was not the Nose you are talking about. That was not Nose!” My voice had run away with me; it groveled and begged, over and over.

  “But why did the man run away?” The mistress’s triumph was so frank it seemed to spread like a blush of pleasure on her face. She did not even have to say, “So you do know him.”

  How could I have forgotten Gull’s very first warning to me? Show nothing. Have a porcelain face in front of the yellows.

  “Why do you think he ran away if he did not set the fire?” the mistress insisted.

  I said nothing to that. I thought of the chalk circle on the tavern floor, and I fell to my knees again, trying with all my puny draining strength not to weep.

  “We will not tell Big Venerable we went to that fire this afternoon, will we, small child?” the mistress said, standing to dismiss me. “Run off, now. I see you are more
upset than I imagined. Off to your quarters. I am quite able to get myself undressed.”

  A Search

  With tung oil I was polishing a wooden screen in the reception hall in the first courtyard, some days later, when the plunger bell at our front gate gave me a start. Since the series of fires, the sounds of bells—even of the tiny finger bell that the mistress tinkled here and there in the mansion to summon us—caused me to tremble as if with an echo of the tower bells’ jangling alarms.

  From where I stood I looked out at the gate for a moment, half expecting some evil yellow spirit to float right through the marble ghost screen and come and choke me; it would wrap icy fingers of my own panic around my thumping neck.

  An impatient hand pulled at the plunger, and the thin tocsin pierced me again. Suddenly I remembered that Bean, the gateman, was out in the city, helping to carry the master in the Flying Commode, and I ran to the gate with my rag in my hand.

  Outside stood three bannermen. It took all my will to stand ground.

  My first thought was that the soldiers had come to question me about Nose. Ever since his arrest I had felt deaf and blind. We slaves dared not go to Chao-er’s; we certainly could not gather at the farmers’ market or under the Drum Tower; even visits to neighbors’ gates seemed risky. I had heard nothing. As I stood facing the three tall, stern men, the idea that the slaves were rising up against the yellows, that I might be a threat to these three brutes, seemed utterly mad, yet in that moment before any of the bannermen spoke I was struck by a sudden realization—that though the oath at the tavern had seemed hilarious, it had perhaps not been a joke at all. Underneath our peals of laughter had lain a desire for revenge that surged up in me now and caused me, of all things, to giggle, as I bent in a deep bow. I wondered, with my head humbly lowered: Had Nose started a fire?