White Lotus

by John Hersey

  One of the bannermen asked for my mistress. Having straightened up, I stood staring at him, unable to believe he had not come for me; then I turned and flew to the Peony Study, where the mistress, with pursed lips, was practicing the lute.

  I followed Big Madame Shen back out to the fore-courtyard and pretended to resume my work on the screen as she greeted the men in the reception hall.

  Their spokesman said, with a strong flavor of memorization on his tongue, that General Hsüeh of the Eight Banner Corps, acting upon the advice of the Censorate, had ordered bannermen to search the whole city, to see whether any goods stolen from about the fires might be found, or whether there might be any suspicious unfamiliar persons in hiding, or lodgers, or strangers, who were perhaps the wicked instrument and occasion of the fires in hopes of opportunities for pilferage, or plunder.

  The soldier sighed then at having ejected that official verbiage from his craw, and he added, “Shen T’ai-t’ai, we would be honored to search your slaves’ quarter—that is all there will be of it. It’s orders, you see, Shen T’ai-t’ai.”

  So this was the way of searching “the whole city”: to look in my miserable brick-bedded corner.

  Glancing across the room, I saw that the spokesman, a tall young man of Tartar lineage, with an odd squint in his right eye, was standing before an exquisite painting by Han Hsü, a favorite of my master’s, the title of which was “Scholar Taking a Stroll in a Light Drizzle,” and which bore a couplet by a poet of the Sung dynasty:

  The mist touches his brow with the dream of spring;

  Beyond the mist lie ten thousand mountains of memory.

  The hypocrites—everything so delicate and sensitive that met the eye! Would they find on my k’ang the pewter mustard spatula I had stolen from Chao-er’s tavern? How could I explain to them that it was a remembrancer for a frightened girl of a half hour she had had in a dingy room alone with Wu’s Nose, who was now in their not so delicate hands? It was a bent little dauber, worth only a couple of coppers. It was in my reed matting somewhere, along with a flea who had tided over the winter there. I hoped this wretched insect would jump on a waxy yellow hand as the hand fumbled in the dirty shredded matting, and that the flea would ride off drinking at a bannerman.

  I heard them troop away to the back courtyards. Soon they returned—empty-handed, and without the flea, as I later found—and I learned from their chatter to the mistress:

  That there were better than thirty slaves in an improvised prison at the elephant stables, and that the magistrates were getting nothing from these white pigs about the fires save stupidity and denials.

  My ears strained for the sound of Nose’s name, but I did not hear it.

  I heard from the spokesman’s voice that this brave winking bannerman assumed for my mistress’s benefit the airs of a mandarin, or even of a magistrate—the tones if not the true grip of police power. Yet I also clearly heard in his voice, and in the others’, too, as they chatted on for a polite time, something that astonished me: namely, that all these official people, and my mistress as well, who was so mischievous and imperious and intimate and tender by turns with me—all were desperately frightened by the very ones they seemed to have most firmly in their fists, their slaves. The round ceremonial tones and the confident tapping of the bannermen’s staves on the stone flooring had a hollow sound. When a ram is brave, Kathy Blaw had used to say long ago, its courage comes from its heart and not from its horns.

  The Master Dresses

  The only mood that stirred Old Bow to a creaky buoyancy was one of sarcasm. We were in the kitchen. This was near the end of the fourth month. Big Venerable Shen had been impaneled, to his delight, as one of the some fifty so-called Ears of the Court who were to act as attendant authorities at hearings in the Board of Punishments on the recent fires, and Old Bow had helped the master to get dressed for the first of these hearings and had just seen him out the front gate; for tonic the master had decided to walk the short distance to the compound of the Board. Gull and I, seeing that Old Bow was determined to give us a full recital of the master’s getting dressed, moved the kitchen chopping table without a word toward the cupboard away from the brick cooking cradle, to give Bow decent room for airs and graces.

  In the middle of the brick floor Bow struck a pose, and by it we knew, somehow, that he (the master) was naked, bed-ruddy, and chilled, and before the old mimic had laid onto his canvas ten bold strokes we saw, breathing and blinking before our eyes, our double master: the man well known for probity, decency, liberality, and a sharp memory for aphorisms from the great teachers, explaining to a slave whom he considered boy-minded the nature of the hearings at which he was to assist; and, on his other side, the cranky, impatient, despotic owner of living flesh, commanding that flesh to fetch and truckle and button and pin. Old Bow caught, with all the malice of years of his bitterness, the inner tension of this contradiction.

  “The Chefoo one, Old Bow, on the shelf above. Above, above!…Some might think, inasmuch as the hearings take place under a body called the Board of Punishments, that there is a prejudgment here—that these prisoners are known to have set the fires, and must be chastised. Not at all. The Dragon Countenance is said to feel—hai! Turtle! Be a little more careful, Small Bow—those pins have points!…On the other hand, a great city can tolerate just so many frights and alarms, and then—the red velvet undergown, Small Bow—what? you forgot to brush it down?—you are a simpleton!—how many times?—all right, the camlet, then—and then the Emperor simply must find out whether there has been premeditated malice, for though we have the fortune of living under a majesty who exceeds all others in the gentleness of his laws and regulations, yet if those to whom—I think, let me see…yes, I’ll wear the Soochow bow on my queue, with the matching purse; my corded-wolf’s-paw bow is too aggressive for this particular occasion, you agree?—ayah, it is the second one, how many times have I given you the order of those bows?—one, pigeon’s wing, two, Soochow, three, negligent, four, tiger’s ears, five, wolf’s paw, six, summer fountain. Can’t you count to six, Small Bow? Let me hear you count to six…. I maintain only six bows at a time, Small Bow…. But if the authorities to whom is granted the power to discipline designing persons with wicked purposes—Minister Ts’ao calls such authorities the life and soul of the Emperor’s justice—if these are not conscientious and adept—gray lining, Old Bow, gold will not do in the Board of Punishments, you know that as well as I….”

  Through all of this I laughed till the tears ran down my cheeks, yet I was also waiting for one small word, or a gesture, or a sniff about us. This was all about us, after all. They said we had robbed, we had lit. We were rising against them. We were the “designing persons,” ours the “wicked purposes.”

  Then—whether just as it had happened or not scarcely mattered, for Old Bow gave the passage a conviction that froze my blood—the old man dropped the hint for which I had been holding my breath.

  With exaggerated gestures that themselves lectured on the grandeur of the Emperor’s punitive system, Bow-Master tied the mouth of his Soochow purse and slung it in his sleeve, and he shook jasmine water onto his round hat as if watering a cabbage, filled his snuffbox, and then, with a decorous sneeze at the haze of snuff in the air, said, “I shout at you, Small Bow, I shout at you all day, but I believe you would walk through pikes and swords to protect me. You would” (the eyes were like those of a bull terrier: vigilant, half-tamed, patient, famished), “wouldn’t you? You say, ‘Yes, Big Venerable.’ Five thousand times a day. ‘Yes, Big Venerable.’ But are you sincere, Old Bow, in your acquiescence? Are you sincere?” With the slave’s assistance, he slid into his wide surcoat with a silver-braided border and embroidered flowers on gray silk, and he shook out the inner sleeves at the wrists. “ ‘Yes, Big Venerable! Yes, yes, Big Venerable!’ I’d like to know the truth of it today. Do you mean it? We have thirty and more of your people locked up. I don’t like these arre
sts by simple seizure, I’ll tell you that, Small Bow, I don’t like the way that was done. But—”

  The old slave abruptly ended his performance on that word, drawn out long, into which single sound he threaded a delicate tremor of their terror, and of ours.

  A Matter of Being Rattled

  Having served a dish of shredded pork with sea slugs and bamboo shoots, I took my place behind the wooden screen and overheard the master’s account of the day. Before my eyes on the screen was a dreamlike scene of ivory deer, jade clouds, jasper rocks, agate trees, and ebony bridges—for even the backsides of the yellows’ furnishings had this monotonous perfection of sensitivity—while my ears took in a story of real life, ayah, that was not so pretty.

  The master confessed to his duck that he had misgivings. This inquiry was being poorly handled. He had had, all day, “a bad feeling.” Partly it was ennui—the Ears of the Court, fifty distinguished men, had been kept on their feet all morning simply waiting, and Secretary Wei had been such a bore with his everlasting games: “Come now, Elder-born Lu, silver spurs are just for show, one wants steel, a fighting cock needs a lance, Elder-born Lu, not a toothpick….” Battledores, ritual swordplay, horn-goring, whipping tops! All day, polluting the air with his vigor that was as offensive as a beggar’s pipe smoke.

  But that was not the master’s real worry. What troubled him, he said, was that the authorities seemed rattled. Everything was being run through on nerves. Old Hu, the Chief Mandarin of the Board, was as skittery as a stung pony. “After all,” my owner said, “these white people are our slaves. We ought to be able to be calm, at least.”

  The day’s hearing had been taken up mostly with the slaves Wolf and Fish Bait, the ones who had been caught boasting about setting fires—hooo, how a vague supposition had grown into an assertion! Behind the screen I trembled for those two—until suddenly I heard the name for which I had been fearfully waiting.

  “Toward the end of the day,” the master said, “we took up another case, and here was where Old Hu showed the rawness of his excitement. This case concerned that ruffian belonging to Wu of the Revenue Board, you know.”

  “Which one is that?”

  “Called Nose, Wu’s Nose: they thought they saw him at the fire of his master’s godown, don’t you know, and some of our self-chosen strong men carried him off to prison.”

  “Is that so?” says the mistress, innocent as a pussy willow. “I had not heard of that.”

  “He, this Nose, was kneeling on the prisoner’s stool there opposite Old Hu, surrounded by a handful of rapscallion deponents—paid liars, I suppose, pulled in off the streets. This slave is a vicious proud white, eye like a wild boar’s—dirty torn tunic half off him—glared defiance at the top men of the capital. But odd: his speech was low, untrembling, respectful, and…yes…plausible—though of vile grammar.”

  The slave, said my master, had sworn that he was at home—three streets away from the godown—all afternoon, all through the fire. Claimed he had handled buckets at the earlier fire next to Mandarin Huang’s that morning, and then he had gone home and worked there till dark.

  Now the deponents—all contradicting each other. A small yellow boy, some indentured workman’s spawning, teeth missing in front, said he’d seen Nose at Wu’s house sewing a long streamer of red cloth bearing Old Wu’s device onto a hame to mark his master’s carthorse, just before the bell for the fire. Then a neighbor, a yellow man, said he’d seen Nose lounging out at Wu’s gate shield shortly before the alarm. Another: after the bell, when it was known to be a fire in Wu’s godown, said he met Nose in the street and asked him if we were not going to pass buckets and the insolent turtle said he’d had enough buckets that day. Worst of all, they next had an old gaffer, a yellow do-nothing, who said he sunned himself daily near the Drum Tower, knew Nose like a pet dog, yes, yes, saw him watching the fire; asked Nose why no buckets—at which the slave had run over and joined the bucket line.

  But then it turned out the old ragbag was too nearsighted to count his own fingers at arm’s length. Blind as a mole!

  The upshot, Big Venerable said, was that Old Hu concluded and summed up—with total disregard for what the deponents had said—to the effect that Nose had been inside the godown at the time the fire was set.

  “Do you see, duck, what I mean? This is not the way to proceed. This is a matter of being rattled. I don’t like it.”

  There was a long pause.

  “Are you thinking of taking the slaves’ side?” the mistress finally asked. There was a lacquered screen between the mistress and me, but I could almost feel the slightest curl of an ironic smile at the corner of that small mouth.

  I heard the master’s hand slapping at grains of rice that had spilled on the table. “Misgivings, I only said I had misgivings,” the master’s voice said with some annoyance. “I trust the trials themselves will be conducted in a more orderly way.”

  Errand Within Errand

  The mistress sent me to the farmers’ market, beyond the Hata Gate in the Outer City, for some pork, and I had started out at a trot, when, bewildered, scarce knowing what I was doing, I found myself scudding like a leaf driven by the wind off my course. I ran westward, to the elephant stables. I strode straight up to a bannerman who guarded the gate of a section of the stables, no longer used for elephants, that had been converted to a slave prison, and I heard myself say, “Big Venerable, can a woman see her man? Wu’s Small Nose?”

  The soldier, a tall, round-cheeked man, may have been tickled to be addressed with an honorific title. He leaned down good-humoredly toward me and said in a thick Honan accent, “What? What you say, small sow? Want to see a prisoner?”

  “Nose. Wu’s Nose. My husband.” I really did not know what I was saying or doing; my heart was like a squirrel caged in my ribs.

  “Ayah, did they snatch your man right out of your bedtick, small sow?” He laughed, overcome by his own jollity. Then he patted my shoulder and said, “Wait here.”

  In time the man returned and led me inside the elephant enclosure, where I saw six rows of large buildings, each apparently containing several stables, and he took me into one of them, through a timbered door in a brick wall as thick as my escort was tall. This building, which now housed the bureaucracy of the prison, had been divided into wooden-walled offices and cubicles, and in one of the smaller rooms, which had no furniture at all, I found Nose temporarily chained to a wooden post. He had been led out to see me.

  He was astonished by my visit. Had the bannerman told him I had called myself his wife?

  He spoke to me sharply: “Stay away from here. Why have you come here?”

  I could not answer because I did not know why.

  “Stay away,” he said. “You can’t do anything here.” And he snapped out a succinct saying that was current among the whites in the capital: “A slave is guilty.”

  Suddenly there were a great many things I wanted to ask. Had he lit fires? Why had he turned himself into a rowdy? What had happened to him? Did he not care what the yellows did to him? Was the oath a joke? Did roughness, drunkenness, stealing, arson, and surly silence give any satisfaction? What should a white girl do with her life? Why was he so severe with me? Why could he not speak to me about what our awful days meant—if anything?

  As if he could almost hear my mind crying out these inward questions, Nose modulated his manner and tone. He hooked a thumb under the filthy loop of rag that held what was left of his tunic up on one shoulder and said, “Fetch me a slave coat.”

  Without even answering I ran at once out from the elephant enclosure and, with a feeling of being tested and trusted such as I had not had since the errands of our village at home, I flew to Wu Li-shih’s slave postern, and Wu’s Moon Pot took me to the squalid toolhouse shed where Nose had had his k’ang, and she rummaged, and she handed me a blue coolie tunic, and I ran back to the elephant stables. I think I expected, if
my mind was working at all, that I would run in and Nose would still be waiting in the little room.

  But at the gate my soldier was gone. Another—a thin creature with several days’ stubble of sparse beard—spread his legs and barred my way. Absolutely prohibited per order General Hsüeh. No matter husband.

  “Please, Big Venerable! Give this to Wu’s Nose, he’s caught in prison.” I held up the tunic.

  Disgustedly the soldier took the garment and went inside. I stood dumbly waiting. He came out again still holding the tunic and more annoyed than ever. “He is a nervy turtle, that smally. Says it won’t do at all. Wrong one, he says. Says it is no good to him. Turns his bloody red pig’s eye on me, he does, and says it is no good to him. Here!”

  But I had not the time. I turned and fled, leaving the tunic in the soldier’s hand.

  As it was, when I finally got home, carrying some pork meat wrapped in lotus leaves, the mistress said, “Where have you been, you bawd?”

  I said, as soft as Swatow silk, that the butchers had been cutting the hogs. That I had no idea why they were so slow that day.

  “One Night They Formed a Plot”

  I stood behind the screen listening. Big Venerable Shen could not bring himself to give an account of his day at the Board of Punishments until he had put down five little bowls of steaming tea.

  “My tongue,” he said, “is all dried up.”

  At last he told this story:

  An informer, whom the master did not name, had whispered to someone in the Censorate that matters of interest could be learned from a certain prostitute in a mean tavern near the Drum Tower—a disgusting swillhouse that catered to slaves.