White Lotus

by John Hersey

  Item. Cassia Cloud was infuriated by this upstart’s informing, and her imagination began to trot like a wounded boar crashing into any obstacle in its headlong course. Oh, yes, she had often seen this Hsü’s Quack at Chao-er’s gate in conversation with Shih’s Wolf, Ch’en’s Fish Bait, and Wu’s Nose. Lu’s First Boy was often there enjoying special favors of Chao-er’s daughter, Silver Phoenix. And around the chalk circle were the widow Kuo’s Card, Sung’s Cabbage, also called Soldier by the whites. At the swearing of the plot, she saw in Chao-er’s hand a set of yarrow stalks, the diviner’s shafts, and he made some passes and scattered them on a table and studied their arrangement, and he said, “Now you must keep secrecy about the plot; the stalks say that indiscretion will lead to eye cataracts, stubbed toes, long voyages in storms.” And Nose said, “I won’t lose my eyesight! I will not tell a word of it, even if the yellow people put my head in a cage on a pole!”

  Item. Most depressing of all: The whites in their confusion began to inform against each other. Ch’ien’s Shuttlecock, an elderly slave who was notoriously “good”—we had never seen him in the taverns, and the Imperial beaters and bell-ringers had never convoyed him around the town—this Shuttlecock sanctimoniously told how Hsü’s Quack had tried to enlist his help in setting fire to the Forbidden City, but he, Shuttlecock, had said he was a dutiful man and would not run the risk of a sword at his neck; that he had heard Wu’s Nose say he was going to plant coals in his master Wu’s godown, and he would set some merry fires elsewhere in the city…. And he told tales on Lin’s Strong, Tu’s Sheep, Captain Su’s Jumping Stick, Captain Yüan’s Whitehair, Lu’s Beetle, Ma’s Stupid, Yeh’s Heavenly Spirit, a fiddler, and Wang’s Fortune—all jailed at once. And no sooner was Wang’s Fortune jailed than he gladly told the judges how Weasel, a slave of Hsü, the money-changer, had invited him to a certain kitchen in the Forbidden City, where his wife cooked, to drink a few cups of baigar, and how Weasel on his third cup had said we would soon see great alterations in the Forbidden City….

  Scorpion

  I went on a day when Old Bow’s muscles were knotted with rheumatism to fetch tea water at Yang’s well. Several slaves were discreetly murmuring there. There was no laughter. There seemed to be a heavy weight on our backs in the still setting. The slaves at the well, who had used to pitch pennies, crack peanuts, tell jokes, box, and flirt with any girls who brought buckets, now seemed sluggish and surly. Every recent day had brought new setbacks and amazements. Not satisfied with having found Chao-er and his wife guilty of receiving the goods stolen from Feng’s, the magistrates had tried them for inciting our famous plot, found them in the wrong as a matter of course, and had beheaded them; besides displaying the tavern-keeper’s head, the authorities had trussed up his truncated body in chains and left it hanging as a stern reminder, in an open place in the Outer City near the Temple of Heaven. Sixty slaves, all men save five or six, were in jail, named by the insatiable Cassia Cloud, by Peach Fragrance, and, alas, by their own fellow slaves in hope of mercy. Cassia Cloud’s excesses of lying had become flagrant, but so hysterical was the entire city that it greeted each new invention of hers with new courtesies and honors. She had said under Imperial oaths whatever drifted into her skull: that Shih’s Wolf had given Chao-er fifty taels of stolen silver to go up into the countryside and buy spears, swords, and pistols for the slaves to use in slaughtering their masters; that she had seen in Chao-er’s tavern a bag of shot and a keg of gunpowder; that Chao-er had tried to bribe her to swear the plot, offering her silks and silver rings.

  And now, as I stood waiting in the spiritless clump of slaves to draw water, I saw the men suddenly stiffen, as if at the sight of a scorpion, and I turned and saw this same Cassia Cloud running toward Chao-er’s tavern, to fetch some belongings, presumably, for she lived now under the night protection of Under-Sheriff Wu. The slave Cabbage, sometimes called Soldier by his white friends, who had been named to the magistrates by Cassia Cloud but had not yet been arrested, burst from the group at the well and dashed into the street and blocked the bitch’s passage. She looked at him with eyes that were like two little overturned thimbles spilling out their contents of brown liquid dread.

  “You gave my name to the judges,” Soldier said.

  “No!” she cried, raising one hand and fluttering it back and forth, as if to dust Soldier out of her future. “No, no, I never.”

  “You said it. I know from Bone, the slops man at the jail.”

  “I never used your name, Sung’s Cabbage,” she said in a pleading voice.

  “You female turtle!” Soldier cried. “It was not best for you. You’re going to get fire in your crotch under your gown.”

  “No! No!” she wailed, and ran around him.

  The next day Soldier was taken to jail. And Bone, a freedman who swept the jail and poured out the prisoners’ fecal buckets, who had been manumitted by a dying master, a free man though white, a slops-carrier though free—Bone, whom Soldier had inadvertently named, was in jail, too, to stay. They had to find another white freedman to carry out the pails of ordure, for no yellow man in the Emperor’s city would do such a thing.

  The Ultimate Badness

  A seepage of hysteria spread through the yellow community. The yellows apparently believed every word of every informer, and the converted elephant pens grew more and more crowded.

  Our masters went about grim-faced and silent, but our mistresses, strangely exhilarated by the tension in the city, became like magpies: sociable in alarm. The gentle ladies of the Northern Capital had taken up with lively enthusiasm the education of their female slaves, by herding them to trials at the Board of Punishments—tutelage, that is, in docility, virtuous servility, devotion to owners, reverence of owners’ ancestors, and respect for “good swords.” Big Madame Shen had long been saying that she wanted to watch a proceeding, and late in the fifth month she procured, in the name of precautionary instruction, her husband’s permission to take Gull and me to the Board of Punishments to see a trial.

  She had waited for the trial of Nose—who was, as every yellow matron knew, “something special.” I remembered the mistress’s glistening eyes, as she had asked me, that evening of my shame, “Is he strong?”

  The locus of the trial was a sumptuous high-roofed hall, with crimson columns supporting a ceiling on which were pictured reed-legged cranes and herons in effortless flight. The walls bore gilded panels incised with willow leaves. Ai, that stifling sensitivity of our masters’ civilization!

  Big Madame Shen was ushered forward to a section of lacquered armchairs where many yellow mistresses sat in their fine clothes, while Gull and I were shooed like backyard fowl to the rear of the hall into a barricaded area already crowded with slave women, who were standing.

  Three magistrates in embroidered gowns were seated cross-legged on a high dais draped in red velvet. A representative of the Censorate sat on a straight chair behind them on one side, and on the other stood an official holding a banner which was furled and encased in an oilskin cover—the insignia of oblivion, which would not be unfurled except to announce a death sentence.

  At our right, in a thicket of gleaming columns, was a spacious pen, or enclosure, where the Ears of the Court, about fifty courtier-mandarins in splendid gowns, had plenty of room to stand and walk about, and Gull and I could see the head and shoulders, among the others’, of our own master, Shen Ch’ing-wu, scholar and sub-curator. He was wearing his corded-wolf’s-paw bow on his queue; evidently he thought it not too aggressive for this spell of justice. Barristers, chamberlains, clerks, and recorders in gowns similar to those of the Ears, though less grand, bustled about the forepart of the hall.

  A high double door opened on the right side of the room near the Ears’ pen, and four bannermen came in escorting—my knees suddenly seemed made of dry cloth—Nose, who wore, after all, the tunic I had fetched him, which he had said he did not want. He looked wan and listless. He was l
ed to a low wooden stool before the magistrates’ dais.

  There ensued a flurry of kowtows, obeisances, nods, pumping of clenched hands, and salutes of infinitely subtle degrees of humility, involving every official person in the hall, which would have been irresistibly comical had it not been for the sight of Nose, at the bottom of the heap, knocking his forehead on the marble floor in every direction. How strangely eager to please he seemed!

  I suddenly remembered the great Mort Blain and his retinue crawling on their bellies across the dusty courtyard in Palm Springs toward the Syndicate bosses, and with a shudder I realized that it had not been beyond whites to imitate (but rather badly) the hypocrisy of yellow power. It was the powerful man’s love of his place and his fear of losing it that set the stamp of hideous falseness on this polite ceremony.

  As the trial progressed I was more and more horrified by the elaborateness of the ritual before me, which seemed to hide, as the jewel-like enamel of cloisonné hides the base metal underneath, the ugly truth of the trial. Clerks cried, “Make proclamation for silence!” Chamberlains hinted at the unmentionable name of the Dragon Countenance. Bailiffs chanted formulas announcing successive phases of the proceeding. Mandarins shot their wide sleeves, the magistrates sipped tea.

  What did this rigmarole mean? I saw that Nose was looking blankly around the hall, listening not at all to the drone of the proceedings.

  At one point it seemed necessary to interrupt the depositions of witnesses and informers, in order that the Ears might erupt from their pen and present themselves, one by one, falling to knees and kowtowing, to the magistrates. How strange! When Big Venerable Shen kowtowed with his splendid wolf’s-paw bow whipping uppermost, I felt some sort of disgusting pride, as Gull also apparently did, and we informed our neighbor slaves that that one, with the fiercest queue of any, was our master. Our neighbors nodded, seemed impressed by our connection with the corded wolf’s paw, and passed along the word, and other white women leaned forward to look around at us, smiling and bobbing their heads. I felt important. I also felt slightly sick.

  The catalogue of Nose’s crimes. Lawyers’ modulations! Wicked, malicious, willful, felonious, conspiratorial, voluntary…

  “And so forth, and so forth.” Over and over! The phrase in the yellows’ language was teng-teng-ti, which pounded on my ears like physical blows. Was this chain of and-so-forths to be Nose’s claim to be remembered?

  Hai! Here was Cassia Cloud! She was kneeling on the deponents’ stool, which was slightly higher than Nose’s, and a fat mandarin was walking back and forth giving little verbal prods to her “memory.” How she had changed in manner from the squat girl stopped in the street by Soldier! She was composed, chin-tilted, alert to her prestige—yet helplessly vulgar.

  “Did the prisoner Nose ever threaten you in any way?”

  Cassia Cloud wrung her hands in what must have seemed to her a gesture of delicacy. “Yes, yes. He. Wolf and Fish Bait. And all them. To burn me under my gown, in that particular place.” She almost fell off the stool producing a prim shudder.

  “Can you tell me of an occasion when this Nose imposed upon your person?”

  “I remember there at Chao-er’s one night after the swearing. The whites were talking about their plot, and someone said perhaps she would inform on them, meaning myself. But Nose, he said that no, she would not tell, not she, he intended to have her, meaning myself, for a wife, and he ran up to me with his hand out to grasp at my gown below and feel me. I had a dishrag in my hand, and I dabbed it very smartly in his dirty pig face. He backed off, believe me.”

  As she elaborated her story of Nose’s leadership of the plot, Cassia Cloud invented many new details. Cassia Cloud was good of her kind. She was like certain natural gossips, who are unable to see, and so are unable to talk about, anything but the evil, the macabre, the stunted, the malicious, the purely diseased in their fellow beings.

  A series of deponents gave various pictures, some of which burned my mind. An informer—a white man!—from the elephant pens, for instance, told how Nose “sits off in a corner by himself, won’t speak to anybody, hums songs sometimes, weeps often.” An Imperial pumper swore he had seen Nose inside Wu’s godown while it was on fire. A guardsman told of Nose’s spilling the buckets in the chain at the fire in the Forbidden City, slapping his bare feet in the mud he had made. The gutter-solderer Han, asked if his firepot could have ignited the roof of the palace, said, “I doubt that, Honors, for it was an enclosed pot, like a chimney lantern, with a little mouth here, you see, to put in my irons, and I was careful to put this part, the back, you see, toward the wind. It was not my fire that did it, Honors.” Several whites told lies about the palace fire—for what? for money? for safety?—against Nose; stories that I knew to be lies.

  Then for the first time I saw Nose’s owner: Wu Li-shih of the Revenue Board. This mandarin was not obliged to kneel on the deponents’ stool; a special chair was brought for him.

  The fat questioner asked, “The day of the fire, Elder-born Wu, what were Nose’s movements?”

  “I set the man to sewing a pennant on a hame. That’s all I know of it.”

  “As to his character in general, Elder-born Wu, what can you say?”

  “I would best not speak as to that.”

  The loyalty of the master! I wondered just what Big Venerable Shen—or, for it would be more interesting, the mistress—would say about me to the magistrates. I was her sweet child; I was so good to her; her trust in me was absolute; dear child; sweet White Lotus! …I would best not speak as to that….

  And yet, come to think of it, Nose had dedicated himself to the cause of worthlessness. He was bad. How fiercely, for a moment, I envied him!—for I had no answer to the yellows. Nose was at least, for good reason, bad all the way through.

  And then, as if he were indeed so bad that he wanted to take away from me even these shreds of comfort, of admiration, of love of his nihilism, Nose, being questioned, turned out to be docile, abject, respectful, apologetic—all that a man with any sincerity in his badness would utterly scorn.

  “Come, come, Wu’s small slave, speak. What do you say for yourself? What have you to offer?”

  Nose, in a low and civil voice: “I have nothing to say.”

  One of the magistrates, thunderstruck by this quiet tone from the tiger he had heard so much about: “You did all this that they’ve been saying? You lit the fires?”

  Nose: “If you say so, Big Venerable Honor.”

  The fat questioner, suddenly seeming blown up to twice his former size, his cheeks and his grammar both ballooning with astonishment: “What? What? We understood you have been offering all along nothing but peremptory denials of the totality. Nothing to say?”

  Nose: “I will say whatever you wish me to say, Big Venerable Honor.”

  The authorities were all furious at him, and I saw that Nose, shrewd to the marrow, had sensed that the ultimate badness might be gentle goodness. Beautiful man! How he had tricked them!

  The chief magistrate, addressing a summary to the Ears, was venting his rage at Nose’s submissiveness, though in a voice as flat as the Eastern Plains: “…this dirty white criminal on his stool has been indulged with the same sort of proceeding as is due to free men of our own yellow race, though the Merciful Dragon Countenance might well have moved against him in a more summary way. The depositions of whites, in the manner in which we have admitted them here, are warranted by special decree of the Merciful Dragon Countenance….”

  I saw the bearer of the flag of death lower its staff and begin to untie the oilskin covering.

  “But, Worshipful Ears, the monstrous ingratitude of this white race is what exceedingly aggravates their guilt. Their slavery among us is generally softened with great indulgence and solicitude; they live without cares and are commonly better fed and clothed and are put to less labor than the poor people of most countries. They are ind
eed slaves, but under the protection of the impartial decrees of the Merciful Dragon Countenance, so none can hurt them with impunity, and they are really happier in this place than in the midst of the continual plunder, cruelty, and rapine of their native land. Yet notwithstanding all the kindness and tolerance with which these people have been treated, we see these heinous crimes, these proven plots to kill and burn….”

  The flag was unfurled—it was pure white!—and the bearer was slowly waving it back and forth. I partly wanted to cover my ears, because behind and under the words of the chief magistrate I had begun to hear echoes of a crowd shouting, “Good swords! Good swords!”