White Lotus

by John Hersey

  For Dolphin to suggest that he disliked Hua both as master and as man—this was too much. Hua lunged forward, seizing Dolphin’s throat with his left hand and raising the rod with the other to deliver a blow across Dolphin’s face. But with the agility I had seen in the boxing matches at Sun’s, Dolphin ducked sharply to one side, so the whirring rod missed him completely, and at the same moment he reached down with both hands for Hua’s left knee and lifted it so fast and so far that Hua, losing his grip on Dolphin’s throat, toppled over backward. Twisting Hua’s leg at the knee, and bearing down on it, Dolphin placed a cloth shoe on Hua’s neck and held the master pinned tight to the ground.

  All this had happened so quickly that there had not been time even to realize the enormity of Dolphin’s self-defense. And now that Hua was down, there was an appalling moment, for me, of knowing that Dolphin had made his final choice; a moment at once replaced by another, just as awful as the first, of feeling trapped, like a fly in a drop of amber I had seen on a brooch at a guest’s throat once in the Capital. None of us would ever be able to move; Dolphin would have to keep his foot forever on Hua’s neck; we could neither return to the world we had lived in before nor go forward into the unimaginable hell that must follow.

  But Dolphin simply took his foot away and dropped Hua’s leg, which fell like a length of wood to the ground.

  In an instant Hua was up. His face was orange as a dust cloud coming down the sky from the Gobi. He turned and ran. We saw him go past the compound walls and into the sunken road and along it.

  “He’s gone for help,” Jasmine said. “You’d better get out.”

  “No!” Grin said. “If Dolphin runs they’ll kill him.”

  Dolphin was standing there with a glaze of indifference—the numbness?—over his eyes again.

  Daddy Chick, shaking his head like a mourner, said, “I have never in my life seen such a loss of face for the white people. Well never live this down.”

  “Be still, you fool,” Jasmine said.

  “The abbot,” I said. “Couldn’t we get the abbot at the temple? You know, Old Whiskers? Perhaps Hua would listen to him.”

  Grin had run off toward Limestone Hill Generous Temple for the old monk before I had even finished speaking.

  We had then the most terrifying wait, and we passed it in a curious way. We hoed. Upon a routine call to work from Daddy Chick—“All right! Stir yourselves!”—we chopped like an orderly gang of dutiful slaves at the earth along the rows. Dolphin did his part as if nothing had happened. I felt, besides a grief muffled by waves of numbness, a sharp pain at the root of my belly.

  Grin and the crown-shaven, white-bearded monk in yellow robes returned first. After each of us (even Dolphin) had fallen to his knees and kowtowed to the abbot, we gathered around him all (except Dolphin) babbling at once. The old man looked at us with an expression of sweetness and tenderness, of an inner peace that seemed to glow in his eyes; and my heart leaped with joy and hope at the sight of his benign calm.

  “I have no right to come here,” he said in a quavering voice, and with those words I knew—as perhaps I should have known all along—the foolishness of my hope that Hua’s religious fervor might have been appealed to by this apparently saintly man; for religion here in slave country was nothing but a justifier. “I have made a pledge to myself,” the crackling voice went on, “never to visit a farm without permission—I came this time because this white man told me with great sincerity that one of his companions was being killed. Where is this victim? Listen to me, children, I have nothing to do with the working life of you whites. I will hear no tales from you about your masters or overseers. I am no party to your quarrels. It is my task to cultivate justice, impartiality, and universal kindness.” These qualities shone on his good face, but I knew there was nothing behind the look of love and blissful gentleness but empty words.

  Hua and four yellow men came across the fields. I recognized the others. They were struggling third-rate farmers like Hua; three of them had been in the party walking home from Moon Wall Hill, and the other was a nasty fellow, owner of a large pack of wonks, who occasionally hired himself out as a slave-hunter. These four approached with an almost comical wariness, on springy knees, as if they were placing themselves in great danger.

  On seeing the priest they all kowtowed, and had we been led and resolute this would have been our moment to jump them.

  But Dolphin was in his shell. He seemed not to care what happened. We all stood around waiting.

  The yellow men scrambled to their feet. With exaggerated caution they approached Dolphin. He either had decided that resistance would be foolish or, in regaining his unconcern, had lost the drive to protest. The abbot stood by watching; the men had not spoken a word to him. The men grabbed Dolphin’s arms, tied his hands, and wound a rope several times around his chest, binding his arms against his sides. They walked him away from us.

  An hour later Hua sent Grin and Daddy Chick out with a cart to fetch Dolphin’s unconscious body from the pine tree beyond the Goat Field irrigation well where it was hanging by the hands.

  “Are the Cloth Soles Firm Enough?”

  Nothing was said; no signal was given. But Jasmine and I understood now that it was only a matter of waiting until Dolphin’s bamboo cuts were healed.

  I felt a constant pain in my vitals, which I interpreted as an agony of fear, of anticipated loss, and of overwhelming disappointment at the way things always turned out for one who had white skin. It seemed to me that the pain was held at bay, in the area of my body where a new life was trying to establish itself, by the now familiar numbness, which inhabited all the rest of my body and pushed at the pain from all sides, making a tight sphere of it.

  Dolphin recovered with surprising rapidity. As the day of escape approached, Grin developed cold feet.

  One day in the fields, in the presence of Dolphin, Jasmine, and me, Grin announced that he hadn’t the nerve to go. “I had a dream last night,” he said. “I dreamed I was in the work space, and I heard a strange rushing or roaring sound. I ran out to the gate and there in the road was an army of wonks—just a river of yellow fur; the fur at the necks was bristling, and the roar was a snarling of all those dogs, a river of wonks, Dolphin. The dogs were all different sizes. They were running toward the east—toward…toward…I couldn’t think of the mountain in the dream, I just knew they were running toward something frightening. Then I think I was hiding under a pile of kaoliang stalks, and I could still hear a noise like a wind, but now it was a sniffing sound. This wind of sniffing sucked at the kaoliang stalks, and I could feel the stalks stirring, and I heard the rustling noises as some of the stalks were sucked off the pile by that gigantic sniffing. I tried to be smaller and smaller…. I can’t go, Dolphin. I want to go but I…”

  Perhaps it should not have been a surprise that Jasmine was deeply disgusted by this turn of Grin’s. As for Dolphin, I saw relief on his face: He wanted to go alone!

  “It was a going-to-sleep dream, Dolphin. You have to be careful about a dream at the beginning of the night. There’s something to it. There really is, friend, I’m being honest with you. Really, friend, watch out for a dream that tries to tell you something when you’re dropping off.” And Grin went on, at great pains to justify himself.

  I could tell when the final day had come by Dolphin’s manner. He was suddenly restored, for that one day, to his true self—the indifference all shucked away, full of jokes and bravado, his braggart manner thinly concealing a sweetness, at least to me, that drove both the dead feeling and the pain out of my body. He called me “monkey,” “dearest,” “little cat.” He teased Jasmine all day about her program of sabotage. He persuaded me to write characters on a slip of paper which, when Hua was out of sight, he pinned on his hat, turning the sense of Daddy Chick’s hat sign, of which the old slave was so proud, inside out:

  DO NOT TOUCH THIS TIGER

  OR H
OG WILL EAT YOU

  He was exceptionally tender with Grin; many times during the day he put a hand on Grin’s arm or shoulder, expressing without words his love for this friend who had gone weak with funk.

  To me the day—despite the shadow of irrevocability that lay over it—was one of the happiest of my life. I was puzzled and even, at times, chagrined by my lightness of spirit. I felt everything so strongly! My laughter was genuine, I appreciated my friends. And Dolphin’s touch, whenever he brushed against me or caressed me, as he casually did many times during the day, caused surges of feeling to flow through me that reminded me of the period when I had first fallen in love with him.

  After dark Dolphin took me for the last time to the Sun graveyard. By that time apprehension and desperation had begun to crowd aside the delightful feelings of the day, but I nevertheless felt, as we merged ourselves, an abundance of yielding fondness, of fierce pride in Dolphin’s manliness and courage, and of joy. I realized that my happiness all day had been an aspect of my surrender to him, of the first selfless and altruistic love of my life: I was deeply happy for Dolphin that he would soon be free.

  Afterward Dolphin took some dust from one of the grave mounds and put it in his shoes. “Wonks can’t track you if you have grave dirt in your shoes,” he said.

  As we walked back arm in arm to the slave hut we heard Daddy Chick, still up, playing on his fiddle the tune of a slave song whose words were:

  The fruit on the branch is ripe;

  The climb is steep.

  Are the cloth soles firm enough for ten thousand li?

  Ai! See the sunset’s streaks beyond the heights!

  I felt my flesh crawl with fear and excitement, and I said, “Do you suppose even old Daddy Chick knows you are going?”

  “Of course he knows.”

  “Aren’t you afraid he will tell Hua—or has already told him?”

  “Never! He’s an ‘old good.’ Listen! He wishes he could go himself.”

  It was true. There were sounds in those harsh fiddle strokes of ineffable longing—the longing in the heart of every white man who lived in slavery.

  Late in the night Dolphin changed into the unfamiliar suiting Jasmine and I had made for him.

  All of us, including Daddy Chick and except for the children, were still awake.

  I heard Dolphin clap his hands onto Grin’s and his anxious whisper, “I have a queer feeling. Hua knows. I have a feeling he’s waiting for me.”

  “Ai, man, that’s strange!” Grin whispered. “I just thought I heard something.”

  “Daddy Chick…” Dolphin began in a suddenly threatening tone.

  “Huh? What’s that? Did someone call me?…Hrrumph…. What was that?” the old man jabbered, perhaps pretending he had been dozing.

  Then I saw Dolphin’s form in the doorway, and suddenly the barely visible rectangle was empty. He was gone. He had not spoken a single word of goodbye.

  For four nights we knew that Dolphin was lurking somewhere around us. At times Grin went out and met him, according to plans they had had, quite near the cabin. Dolphin came nightly to the Huas’ drinking well to fetch water in a cedar bucket Grin had stolen for him. One night I heard the well arm squeaking; I had to bite my hand as I lay on the k’ang to keep from calling out.

  On the fifth night Grin stayed in, and I knew that Dolphin had left.

  On the eighth day a messenger came from the slave hunter Hua had hired, saying that the hog had been caught but that the dogs had killed him. The body was lacerated almost beyond recognition. Did Hua wish to have the corpse as proof?

  Hua said no, let the wonks have the remains.

  The pain in my womb began to pulse, and I miscarried.

  The Salt Inspector

  As I slowly recovered I found that my main struggle was not against physical weakness but against the numbness which more and more seemed to blank out all my feelings. There were times when I could not, for the life of me, have said that I missed Dolphin. I grew fearful that I would become like Moth—who lived for the mere physical sensations of each moment, and whose apparent gaiety was trivial, insensitive, and absurd. I let Grin, who flew kites like any other man, take me to the graveyard one night, and (to show how involuted my feelings had become) I did not like it that my body was not numb under his yet I felt totally numb just before and just after our joining. Hua appeared to be relieved, and at times I would even have said that he was immensely buoyed up, by his loss of Dolphin; he began, as soon as I was on my feet, to ogle me, and I found myself more than once wondering whether he would find me lifeless if he tried me again. Each time I had such a thought I raged at myself, not because of any sense of moral right or wrong, for I had no use whatsoever for a baggage of ethics, but simply because I felt I was going the way of the enslaved white man: that I was losing my sense of myself.

  My inner battle, then, was to find some way of taking hold of my worthless life. In this battle I was aided, as the picking season began, quite by chance, by a visitor.

  For several years the Emperor’s Ministry of Salt had been shaken by scandals. The trade in the life-giving stuff had been riddled, all the way from the administrative chambers in the Forbidden City in the Capital down to the most humble bowl of mien-fan in a mean house like Hua’s, with graft, bribery, squeeze, false measurements, crooked weighing, adulteration, loose packing, thievery, syndication, poisoning, murders, and whispering in insiders’ ears. The Emperor had set up an elaborate machinery of surveillance; no one knew whether His Inexpressible Perfection had done this in order to clean up the foul business or in order to insure that all dishonesty should lead to exclusively Imperial profits. At any rate, a Salt Inspector came in the tenth month to our district.

  Whatever progress was being made otherwise in the elimination of the scandals, one minor piece of graft was still strictly honored. This was a convention that the farmer in whose house the Salt Inspector lodged should lend this dignitary the maid service of his female slaves during his stay, in return for which hospitality the Inspector would see that the farmer was amply provided with salt throughout the subsequent year. This was called, by slaves, in their secret language, “pickling the white mice.”

  One would have thought that under these circumstances the Salt Inspectors would have elected the richest farms, best stocked in likely sows, such as Sun’s. But not at all. In recent years the rich farmers had been striking such hard bargains for “annual provision” with the Inspectors, and had by collusion with each other so universally agreed not to pay surface bribes, the purpose of which was the non-reporting of subsurface bribes, that the Inspectors had decided rather to profit piecemeal at the expense of the smaller gentry. “Ten thousand caraway seeds are worth more than one watermelon.”

  So it happened that Salt Inspector Feng came to stay twelve days with us. Jasmine, Moth, and I were assigned, on daily rotation, as his maidservants.

  Our first impression of Salt Inspector Feng was that he was a younger son of a wealthy family in North-of-the-River Province who had failed in the court examinations, and who was, like many such failures, cynical, dissolute, and inclined to accept a rather seedy way of life. His attitudes were, from our point of view, insufferable. At meals (while we crouched on our hams in the work space, hearing every word) he talked loudly, usually with a mouth crammed with food, about hogs, pigs, sows. He told stock jokes about the laziness of white men and the promiscuity of white women.

  That first night he started talking about runaways, and Hua told him he had lost a slave to the wonks only a month back. “Gar-r-r,” Salt Inspector Feng said, choking down too big a mouthful, “there’s nothing more stupid than a hog when the dogs are on his trail. You know a story they believe? They believe a hare can shake wonks by doubling around to its starting point, and there it jumps very high in the air and licks all four paws before it comes down again—goes off in a new direction and the wonks
can’t follow. Ha! Ha! Ha! They really believe that. Try to pretend they’re rabbits themselves. What? Oh, friend, that’s good wine. Just a half a cup. Did you warm it enough? Another belief: They believe that if they sprinkle some grave dust in their shoes the wonks can’t smell their footprints.”

  At that Hua roared with laughter, and even at such a great distance as the opposite end of the house I felt a fiery blush of anger and hatred suffuse my face.

  Moth was his maid that first night. We made up a bed by laying boards across the loom. The maidservant was supposed to fetch and brew tea and carry toilet water, to undress and dress the man, massage his legs if he had had much standing about during the day, entertain him by singing or telling some of our slave tales, and bear in mind at all times that a year’s supply of salt was at stake. The maidservant was provided with a bedroll in a corner of the room.

  The next day I could get nothing but giggles from Moth. She seemed to be suggesting, by her airy-fairy laughter and her batting eyelids, that Salt Inspector Feng was a most peculiar man, whose demands were bizarre, to say the least. It was also possible, however, that Moth was trying, above all, as she often did, to make herself seem mysterious.

  That night Jasmine was on duty. In the morning, as Grin crowded in hungry for bad news, she shrugged and said Salt Inspector Feng was not an objectionable man. He had not touched her, she said.

  “Hai! You expect me to believe that?” Grin squealed.

  “Think what you want. The camel thinks the horse has humps!”

  I believed Jasmine.

  During the day, when he was in the house, Salt Inspector Feng continued his loud, loathsome talk, yet Jasmine reported that he had been mild and considerate of her. Apparently he was a man of some inner contradictions. Could it simply have been that he thought Jasmine unattractive? She was older than Moth and I, her nose was sharp, deep lines were incised in her forehead, yet she had liquid brown eyes, thick lips, and a sturdy, youthful figure. The hogs at Sun’s always flirted with her; this made her proprietor, Grin, strut, though I suspect she may have deceived him many times.