White Lotus

by John Hersey

  “And control your tongue,” he said, thoroughly angry at last.

  “Please, Big Venerable, I mistook you for Old Bow, Big Venerable.”

  I found the master and mistress drained of their strength but plucky still. With two slaves in jail, and steadfastly enforcing a rigid rule that the gateman and male runners were not allowed to set foot in the Pear Blossom Rest, they had lived a sort of camping pioneer life. Madame Shen bravely dusted; the distinguished sub-curator had dived intrepidly into chores. I dared not ask Gull about the disposition of the commode pots, always Old Bow’s task, never Gull’s or mine. Poor stiff Old Bow, in jail to please the master.

  Lo, he was back at work the next day. Big Venerable Shen, having urged Old Bow to confess, but having seen me now set at large, spoke to his fellow authorities and maneuvered the man home, for the master could see that the mysterious tide was turning from flood to ebb, and that he could now recover his valuable property with some assurance of being able to keep it. As to any residual risks of a slave plot, it may have been that our good master would rather be killed in bed than empty the commodes.

  But in truth the master was suffering; had lost five catties from his own waist, he said, and slept driftily at night. His face was drawn, his eyes searched inward. Harm no living creature, Buddha adjured; the Buddha demanded pity, gentleness, self-denial. My master’s flaw was imperfect decency—for he was too kind a man to be wholeheartedly punitive, too halfhearted to be truly insistent on justice. He was sick of the city’s sickness, but too slack to speak out. He looked haunted. He had been to the Coal Hill the afternoon of Nose’s execution.

  The master came home from the Board of Punishments one evening shaking his head, and it seemed he could not stop. At the evening meal it came out that he had assisted that day in the taking of a deposition from Hsu Wei-han, a mandarin of the Board of Rites—“You cannot question the veracity of a man like him, my duck. He told us that a good round month ago a white, K’ang’s slave Small Number Two, had told Hsu and his own master—you know K’ang Hsi-lu, duck; that tall fellow we see strolling with a yellowish chow dog on a chain, from Seventh Hutung—this slave had told those two gentlemen that his confession to the court a few days before, touching on the plot, had all been false. He had accused Wang’s Monkey on account of fear, he said. He had heard slaves saying in jail that the masters would burn anybody who did not confess. His charges against Cheng’s Spade were lies. He had never been to Chao-er’s tavern—did not even know where it was—had never heard of the man Chao-er until it became common talk among the slaves that he was the goat to blame for everything.” One final time the master shook his head. “How many of these false confessions do you suppose there have been?”

  A Feast at Jade Springs Hill

  Ten days later, as if nothing unusual had been happening, our gentlefolk took a summer’s outing to Jade Springs Hill, and Gull and I were among the slaves who were chosen to help serve an afternoon feast.

  We slaves walked out by the northwest highway in the morning beside a train of carts loaded with trestles and planks for temporary tables, utensils for cooking, baskets of charcoal, parcels of chinaware and chopsticks, hogsheads of sea water containing sharks’ fins and fish lips, and hampers of mandarin duck and scallops and turnip cakes and water chestnuts and pickled bears’ claws. A silver-haired man slave belonging to the wife of General Hsüeh of the Eight Banner Corps, named Old Velvet, who had presided over several such outings in past years, an old-style slave, courtly, proud of his yellow connections, contemptuous of the crude-mannered younger generation of smallies, was in charge of us all, and ordinarily this would have been a joyous, playful beginning of the day, until the time when our masters and mistresses would join us, but we were dragged down by the exhausting ordeal that had had the whole city in its grip. In the days since Nose’s execution, we had felt sure that the yellows’ frenzy was tapering off, yet it seemed that they could not stop. Huang’s Cook, Chu’s Magpie, Sung’s Cabbage or Soldier, Widow Kuo’s Card, Tu’s Sheep, Ts’ao’s Braveboy, Yeh’s Heavenly Spirit—all these had been beheaded at a time when it was said that the masters had lost interest in the chalk circle.

  Small wonder that on the way, when, as our party was held up by some fodder wagons belonging to the Imperial stables on the road ahead, one of the slaves spotted a squad of bannermen beside them, a wave of high-pitched chattering broke out among us, and many scurried to the far side of our wagons from these figures, as if for shelter—because in our minds bannermen meant arrest, and arrest seemed to lead straight to the executioner’s sword. Even I, who knew that one could survive arrest, was caught up in the little panic.

  And small wonder that when, several miles out on the highway, we came to a crossroads, where our string of carts was to swing left for Jade Springs Hill, each slave crossed himself, spat on the ground and stamped in the spittle, or made a sign of the devil’s horns and aimed it back along the way we had come—for in our mythology from home days, crossroads had been well known to stand for Jesus’ cross, and here in this land of idols and ancestor worship we felt them to be favorite ambushes of yellow trickster spirits, revenants, bogeys, and also (we could easily think now) of specters of vengeful dead bannermen, magistrates, Ears, bailiffs, leather-aproned executioners, kindlers of faggots.

  But soon we had left the dull countryside of farms and entered, through a gate in a high wall, into a kind of enchantment—the Imperial hunting park known as Jade Springs Hill. We climbed through pine woods to the summit, and near the porcelain Jade Peak Pagoda, on a pavilion called Reflection of the Sun on Hibiscus Flowers, from which the city, with its core of sparkling golden roofs, looked like an exquisitely carved toy, we prepared the feast—set up the low tables, lit fires at a distance to cook hot foods, spread out the prepared dishes under dampened cloths, and arranged in their places pairs of old-fashioned ebony chopsticks tipped at each end with filigree silver.

  I was enchanted! Try as I would to think with compassion or sadness of Nose, standing at the huge door of the elephant pen in his filthy tunic that I had brought him, spitting his valediction onto the bricks—try as I would to keep reality in focus, I was elated, overcome with the magic of this setting and of the yellows’ superb artifacts. Once I was sent to fetch water at the spring gushing out through sluices from under the Temple of the Dragon King, and I gazed a long time into the water—like pure ice in a jade vase—in whose deeps every frond and stem of cress and water snowflake and floating heart could be seen. At last I shuddered, dipped my bucket, ran back.

  In early afternoon, as tiny fair-weather clouds printed themselves on an enamel sky, the yellows began to arrive in a procession of two-seated sedan chairs, each carried all the way from the city on poles by eight slaves. The silk window curtains of these palanquins were pulled back, and the men in their conical hats with mandarins’ buttons blinked and nodded at the tranquil views, the ladies were tightened into arch smiles and murmurs—for mixed couples, not husbands and wives, were riding together, and around the flirting pairs the Emperor’s own air seemed soft as midsummer moss.

  But when they saw us, and when Old Velvet and all the other men slaves ran fawning at the sedan doors to hand down their stump-footed ladies, a chill, a severity, a sense of falseness, a dour habit overlaid now with recent perturbation of the nerves, settled down.

  Soon, however, as tea was served, as parties went off to catch butterflies in the garden called Plucking Fragrant Herbs on Mountain Heights, or to sit conversing on outcroppings of rock that overlooked the purple-and-gold toy city, the yellows seemed to forget us, to wipe us out of mind, to root us in the landscape like so many stones and shrubs—though now and then they called to us, without however actually seeing us, to bring them mistress’s fan or master’s long-stemmed pipe.

  Old Velvet—I saw sweat on his face from the charcoal fire over which he was bending, and I almost cried aloud, “Nose!”—was presiding over an enormous cald
ron in which a shark’s-fin soup was bubbling. With a flourish and dancelike steps he uncorked a bottle of herbal wine and dripped a few drops of it, as if offering a libation of amber blood, on the earth in front of his rock fireplace; then he emptied the bottle into the soup.

  It was tasty, when served, so the masters said. They took dollops of Shao-hsing with it, and when tiny gnats, chasing the lowering sun, began to come up from the plain, the gentlemen, mopping their faces after the work of overeating, grew itchy and hot. Slapping at their own foreheads and cheeks, my master Shen and his friend the curio dealer P’an, who was a bit out of his depth in this company of mandarins, began to argue, and while we gathered up the bowls and cups we could hear every word.

  “Exactly what do you mean?” the curio dealer was asking.

  “It is a matter of tone and shading,” my master said, as if he were discussing a scroll painting. “Be so good as to understand me: I do not say that this turtle Chao-er was blameless. I say only that his denials to the very end were firm, earnest, and—to me—affecting. I cite you the day he sent a message that he wanted to speak to the magistrates, wanted to kowtow and swear by the Dragon Countenance that he hadn’t been a party to any plot. I thought him sincere.”

  “But what about all the circumstances brought out by that girl servant of his?”

  “Cassia Cloud? Chao-er’s indentured servant, don’t forget,” my master said, “bonded to him for four years. Don’t forget she might have fancied she had good reason to weigh against her bondholder…. And listen, that other yellow girl from the tavern, Peach Fragrance—”

  “A whore, laid herself down to white men! In heaven’s name, Shen!”

  “Yes, a filthy girl, perhaps, but stanch all the same, better-spirited than Chao-er himself, and what sticks in my throat is her taking it all back—did you hear about that? Two or three days ago. Said she’d lied in all her evidence about a plot at that other tavern, all of it imaginary, to try for a reward. I don’t like our acceptance of her accusations but not of her recanting.”

  Two or three men in the group seemed to be with Venerable Shen, but most seemed to be shoring up the cinches of their trousers under their gowns to wade in against him.

  “Ha! Shen Ch’ing-wu!” cried one of them, a certain Mandarin Ts’ao, as if he had a triumphant point to make. “Did you see that shameless Chao-er in the cart going out to get his neck stretched?” Several men laughed. “Did you see him, Shen? Standing up in the cart, looking around as if expecting to be rescued, with one hand raised as high as his pinion would reach, the other pointing forward. Ha ha ha! What a sight of martyred virtue!”

  “His wife did well at the block,” another man said.

  “Did you see her afterward—like a short log?” another said. “I agree. She was brave.”

  Now the curio dealer P’an could not keep quiet in this party of his betters, and he said, “They should have held that burning in a public place—what was the name of that hog they burned?”

  What was the name of that hog they burned? I almost fell with a stack of bowls.

  “I disagree,” my master said. “I witnessed that execution and I emphatically disagree.”

  “I say there should be more burnings—out in the open. What kind of a lesson is it in the Coal Hill grounds, where only a party of the Imperial household can watch?” Suddenly one could see that the curio dealer realized he had exposed himself: his bitterness stemmed from his being an outsider. But he could not withdraw, and he went on to further excesses of vulgarity; “What kind of lesson is that for the public—for the dirty white pigs?”

  “It was a lesson for me,” my master said in a quiet voice, and what he said now froze my limbs. “I think we got the wrong man. I don’t think this fellow Wu’s Nose was the chief man in their plot at all. The burning was supposed to be reserved for the mastermind. Let me picture it for you, P’an. The setting is private, a place steeped in the idea of punishment—on a shoulder of the Coal Hill, near the ancient sophora tree that is wrapped in heavy chains as chastisement for its allowing Emperor Ch’ung Cheng of the Ming Dynasty to hang himself in its branches—do you know about that tree?” (I saw that my master was not above rubbing it in that P’an was an outsider.) “A party of not more than fifty witnesses. They bring the man up—unshaven: you know how hairy the whites are: disgusting. Clothing caked in dust. They tie him to the post, pile chunks of wood around him. Then Magistrate Lin tells him that he can get himself off if he will give a full confession of the plot. Straightaway he begins to babble—‘confess’—but it’s gibberish! It is obviously all improvised. He doesn’t even mention the Mohammedans’ role. His details are at variance with the consistent story all the other whites have been telling. But there is more to it than that, friend P’an. On the basis of his bearing, what he shows in his eyes, this man is simply not at the heart of their plot. Oh, he’s surly. Capable of whining and shirking—and stealing. But he hasn’t the moral force to defy us. He is not it…That’s why a public lesson would have been a mistake, P’an. Everyone would have seen that we had the wrong man.”

  With the greatest of effort I continued the outward motions of some kind of work, though I could not have said what I was doing. I was absolutely crushed by my agreement with what my master was saying. Nose was not it. I knew no white man who was, but he was certainly not. And yet—how glorious he had been at times! Closing my eyes, I saw him for a moment that day in Chao-er’s just before he led me off to that small, dark room—pounding dust from his quilted gown, blowing into his hands, approaching our circle: his eyes dancing with life, full of the best of himself, strong, cheerful, willing to make what he could of a very bad lot. A sob caught at my chest; horrified at the thought that the masters might have heard it, I quickly pretended to stumble; I dropped a small bowl and broke it. The masters’ heads turned for a moment, but they thought nothing of a white girl’s minor clumsiness. They went back to their talk.

  “So you went ahead, even though you had the wrong man,” P’an, shifting ground, sarcastically said.

  “We had to. His ‘confession’ was a tissue of last-minute lies. He’d been condemned. We had to.”

  “I heard he was shouting something at the end in the whites’ old language—what was that?”

  “I’m told the words meant: ‘Water! Bring me water!’ ”

  The palanquins were lifted, and the mixed couples left, the curtains half drawn this time, so the flirting they began the moment they were seated had a kind of gravity to it. You could see that the yellows were glad to ride away from us. Our masters in that chat had almost spoiled the outing. Big Venerable Shen rode with P’an’s wife, and I saw his eyes glint as they started to sway down the path, for he had passed his little agony of conscientious doubt, like a bit of gas, and he felt much better.

  Dogs, Hawks, Owls, Lambs, Swans

  We slaves should have been relieved, I suppose, a few days later, to hear that little Yü-li, the professor of ritual swordplay, had been arrested.

  To be truthful, however, we were exceedingly puzzled by the way the wind was blowing, because we heard that Yü-li was indicted, not for leading the slaves’ plot to burn and kill, but for “being,” as my master said at table, “an ecclesiastical person, made by authority pretended from Mecca in Arabia,” who had no business, on pain of death, being in the Northern Capital of the Dragon Countenance. Yellow witnesses were said to be giving depositions that, while ostensibly teaching ritual swordplay, he was training Moslems for the day when their holy war would begin; that he maintained contacts with bannermen who were Moslems, and with some who were not; that during one winter month he fasted. He asserted that there was only one God. A weird story was told that he had gone to the confectioner K’ung and had asked for small rice-paper wafers in the shape of cash—of a sort certain magicians of a black-art cult were said (this part of the story was vague and often garbled) to place on their tongues, or perhaps under t
hem, while performing certain rites, or while blaspheming against the Emperor, or while bribing—and K’ung, thinking the teacher wanted sweets to give away to children, said he had malt wafers pressed in the shapes of dogs, hawks, owls, lambs, and swans, but not of money, at which Yü-li had insisted he wanted the little circlets with square holes in them. The slaves, completely nonplussed by this drivel, as it seemed, rushed to the magistrates to be heard on the subject of Yü-li’s fetching wine for the ceremonies at the chalk circle, but our masters the magistrates appeared bored with the scene at Chao-er’s tavern, and they cut short all such talk, and they seemed weary of the whole topic of white slaves. They preferred now to listen to bannermen of Mongol descent, on what they had heard said about little Yü-li at Kuan’s fighting cocks, and how the man was said by Ts’ai, a carpenter and house joiner, to be a muezzin in disguise, and how he had once been heard intoning the first sura of the Koran to a roomful of kneeling bannermen.

  How strange the weatherlike terrors of the yellows were!

  Little Yü-li was tried one afternoon and condemned to be beheaded.

  A Bad Smell

  The day after the execution of Yü-li, in the early part of a still, hot, muggy summer afternoon with the barest suggestion of a southerly breeze, a horrible sudden stench passed like a patch of sick fog through the streets of the town. It caught me on my hands and knees washing the huge sill stone at our front gate, and I thought at first that I could not rise, feeling that the abominable vapor was in me, that I was putridly ill, but then I saw yellows in the street calling to each other, holding their noses, coughing, and making gestures of revulsion.

  We heard that night that the stink had crept, as if the foul air knew where it wanted to go, into the inner hall of the Board of Punishments, and the magistrates in their robes had pressed their wide sleeves over their noses, and that this was what it had been: Chao-er’s swollen corpse, exposed in chains on its gibbet near the wall of the Outer City, had burst, and many pailfuls of the inner fermentation that had blown it up so huge had erupted onto the ground.