White Lotus

by John Hersey

  I was hypnotized; I wanted to run from this horror but I could not. I hung at the edge of the mob—in terror now but paralyzed by a need to watch, by some lingering grip of mob fever, unable to run away before I saw this bad dream of the truth of these riots played out.

  The mandarin made a scramble deeper into the hutung to a mansion gate and went to his knees and pounded with his fists on the leaves of the door, and just as the mob closed in on him the gate flew open, he threw himself inside, and the gate slammed shut. What followed did not take long. The rioters found a saw-timber and broke down the gates and burned every hall and side chamber of the place, and then they broke into the next-door mansion, and they were for no reason setting fire to it, too, when I finally fled.

  I made my way somehow to the lamasery. Rock was not there. I lay huddled in his cubicle, unable to flush my burning eyes with tears, until, long after dark, he came in. I soon heard that he understood the truth I had learned.

  “I tried to go over to the orphanage—started in time to get there at dusk—to intercept you, White Lotus, to tell you to stay there. I couldn’t make it. The mobs—there were herds of them running every which way—I think most of the yellow turtles from the Outer City had come inside the big wall—ayah, I came up to one of these packs on the way over there, and I could smell the blood thirst on the bastards as if the whole mob were one big slaughterhouse armpit. Hooo! They were burning a tavern near the Temple of Double Pagodas, and they had vats of baigar and Shao-hsing and they were slobbering it down cold, using their cupped hands for wine bowls. You know the cattle market in behind the temple there? It had been shut down for business all day—all the shops everywhere were boarded up as tight as their owners could shut them—but this crazy mob broke into the cattle pens and turned the animals loose in the streets. Just now, coming back, I had to swim my way through a milling panic of bullocks and goats and sheep and pigs, and then it began to rain tile shards! I was in the middle of a storm around Heavenly Peace Gate—the maniacs wanted to get into the Forbidden City. You think they wanted to go after the Imperial family? Ha! Listen—all they wanted was permission from some palace-household eunuch to turn around and kill pigs—kill every one of us, every single white hog and sow that they blame for the war—what they call the hog war. It’s going against us. It’s us they want.”

  “I know, I know,” I moaned.

  The Wheel Turns: Second Morning

  There seemed to be another lull at dawn—perhaps the mob-tongued beast was taking a nap. Rock and I decided to try for the orphanage; we might be safer there.

  We were about to start when a friend of Rock’s who lived at the lamasery, a little slinker named Cricket, came in from outside, pale as rice, shaking all over. He told us the bad part had started.

  “They were out all night,” he said, “breaking into taverns and getting drunker and drunker.” Suddenly he was on the verge of blubbering. “Ayah, Rock, they’re after us whites,” he said, leaning against a wall as if about to crumple.

  “Haven’t you known that?” Rock said. “What did they do—announce it in the Gazette?”

  “It’s no joke,” Cricket said. “We’ve got to get away.”

  “Pig shit,” Rock said, violent in his disgust with Cricket. “When was it ever a joke? What did you see?”

  “I was trying to make my way up to the northwest quarter, Rock. I have a woman up there. I came on a crowd that seemed to be getting a good laugh out of some high official’s sedan chair. But I saw they had four white men on the shafts—four stupid bastards who’d been playing along with the crowds. They were all drunk, the whites, too. They had a big pig, I mean a porker, Rock, a real animal, in the sedan, jogging it up and down. It was giving them some abattoir squeals for their fun. But then one of the whites on the lifting poles lost his temper over something, and he snatched a staff from a yellow man and cracked his head with it, and the man went down. You know hog luck! This man’s mother, the mother of the man he’d hit, was right there in the crowd, and she began to wail, and the white fellow ran for it, ran toward his home, which wasn’t far off, but they caught him at the gate and got him down and jumped on him and pounded him with stones till he was certainly dead. They began to sing, ‘Hang him up, hang him up!’ and someone came in with a rope, and they strung him up from a tree by the feet—sliced his fingers and toes off first. Hacked the body. Then they put the sedan chair right under him where he was hanging and set fire to it with the pig still in it. And they burned the house where he lives in and all the whites’ houses around it. And some woman shouted about the houses and former monasteries down this way where she said hogs live. They’re on their way here, Rock. Burning as they come. And killing if they can.”

  “All right, Cricket,” Rock said. “Stop your tongue and start your feet.”

  And we, too, got out.

  It was not easy to move now. There were barricades across the bigger streets, of broken-up carriages, furniture, barrows, sedans, split gate planks, all sorts of trash and rubbish heaped up shoulder-high. Ayah, the wine-soaked monsters! Had I felt a common cause with them? I blushed as I ran; I’d been unable to tell Rock of my real feelings the previous morning. We dodged around through side streets; some had dead ends: Turn back! Try another! We were keeping away from the knots of people. At a distance we saw a spear charge of bannermen, and we skirted a cackling crowd of yellow boys of about fifteen or sixteen who were sacking the mansion of one of the royal princes, Ch’en. Mobs had been ripping down the boardings of shops and gutting the stores of their goods, some of which lay like vomit in the streets. We went along under the Tartar wall near the Gate of Peace and Harmony for a short distance, and some invisible malevolence up there showered down bricks, chunks of wood, and even things like kettles, but luckily nothing hit us. Bannermen up in the tower at the next gate were singing out an impotent proclamation from the Emperor.

  We reached the orphanage gate and both of us pounded on it with our fists. Through the gate tube we heard scurrying within—a pause—then someone puffing right in the tube—then Benign Warmth’s voice: “Go away! Leave us alone! We are all peaceful here! All this has nothing to do with us!”

  I could hear Rock’s hoarse fractiousness rolling into the tube mouth: “Open up, you turtle dung! I have White Lotus here. Open up!”

  Thinly through the tube we heard a hesitant discussion within. A voice that sounded to me like Belted Persimmon’s spoke of Rock’s good behavior beside the lake, the night of the Spirit Festival.

  We heard the gateman lifting out the timber locks.

  At last we were inside. The timbers were replaced.

  Rock faced Benign Warmth, and he said, “May I stay here?”

  All Benign Warmth could do was clear his throat.

  “Will you allow me to stay here?” Rock asked again.

  The superintendent tried to wrap his lips around a refusal. “This is,” he said with a laboring tongue, “an orphanage—”

  “You’re going to need some grown men,” Rock said.

  Then Benign Warmth’s face suddenly cleared. “You may stay,” he said, “as my messenger. You must go to Madame Hsüeh’s. I will tell you where she lives….”

  By the Postern: Second and Third Days

  Within a few hours Rock had become more than messenger. Three times that afternoon he risked his life in the streets, to carry Benign Warmth’s supplications to Madame Hsüeh, Madame Huang, and Madame K’ung. The answers came back in identical terms: “We are deeply concerned. Lock the gates. Take good care of the children.” In other words: Expect nothing from us; you’ve grown dangerous.

  Before nightfall of that second day of the rioting Rock had taken over, in effect, as superintendent of the orphanage. The more absurd Benign Warmth’s faith in his yellow patronesses proved to be, the more desperately he clung to it. He kept telling us that the bannermen would be coming any moment to escort us out of the city.r />
  Rock told him roughly, at last, to go and swill some tea behind the silk-glass screen in his reception chamber, and Benign Warmth, trying to clothe himself in a few last tags of pompous dignity, withdrew. Rock set about preparing a plan for the protection of the three hundred children. The matrons acknowledged that Rock had taken charge. Toward evening Benign Warmth, openly sulking, had evidently suffered a kind of collapse, a deflation, and he was happy to be treated like an orphan himself.

  As for Rock, I saw, beneath his moves, a firmness and serenity that spread about him like a radiation, calming us all. This was the man I had watched irritably rattling the dummies of roosters on the end of the long pole before Bad Hog!

  While the children were having their evening meal and so could be left more or less unattended, Rock, having inspected every court and corner of the orphanage, called together the whole staff in Benign Warmth’s reception chamber, and he spoke to us—bursting, I could see, with impatience at his own awkwardness, his inability to convey his real feelings:

  “The yellow people have turned on us—we won’t ask why it was the Number Wheel and not something else that started them off; there isn’t time to wonder. When I was in the streets yesterday I saw a crowd of yellow women drag an old white woman, a white-haired white woman, from a courtyard gate, and they beat her about the head until she fell. Why? Why? We have to think of the children here in this orphanage. I remember that as a slave, when I was a boy, on a tobacco farm, I never knew my father, I used to dream of having a father, a man who’d take my part when things were bad. He would keep them from beating me. I imagined him always beside me. When they punished me, I called, ‘Father! Father!’ There’s a boy here I’ve talked with, Tiger Ears. Every time I speak to him, he lies to me. I’m not surprised at that. I grew up arguing and I still argue. He will always lie—I don’t blame him. I’m trying to say…Now listen to me. It’s only a matter of time before the mob will remember that there is an orphanage for white children here….”

  And then he outlined his plan. We would brace the gates with shores as well as we could, but of course that would only delay the mob when it decided to enter—they could break any wooden thing down, or burn it. Rock said he had found the place where the drainage ditch from the kitchens and baths and urine pits evacuated—a tiny water gate under the rear wall that went out into the stinking ditch in Golden Cloud Hutung, behind. The hole had a hinged wooden screen to keep wonks and cats out, and when the time came he would open that. All the children and most of the women would be able to escape through that little passage; so would Wang, the gate boy. Only Wood Pillow, Belted Persimmon, the superintendent, and he himself were too bulky to be able to squeeze out that way; he had found places for those four to hide inside the asylum. Those who took the children out would have to rush with them to the headquarters of the Bordered Red Banner Corps—not far, around by the hutung against the Imperial Canal. With only this tiny culvert for escape, our people must be in order at every step. Youngest first. Snow Bug would assign matrons and helpers to each year group. With the children we would have to make a game of it. If we were lucky, it would be daylight…. “Now you had better go back to the refectory.”

  I ran to Rock and begged him not make me go through the gutter gate but to let me hide with him.

  He shook his head. “The piglets need you.”

  I began to weep. “Show me where you’re going to hide.”

  He refused. “I’ll get away,” he said. “They’ll find the children are gone, and that will take the fun out of it for them, and they’ll leave.”

  “They’ll burn everything.”

  “I have a nice cool place.”

  In his self-possession Rock was remote, and I had a moment of thinking I might arouse the familiar quarreling roustabout in him by cursing him, but I could not. I felt instead a flow of mild happiness that surprised me, for it seemed ill-timed and even improper. I went back to my duties, and the perverse good mood lasted.

  Early the following morning, the third day of the rioting, there came an urgent thrumming of fists on the compound gate. Through the peepholes our gate boy, Wang, could see that some whites were seeking refuge; they had a wheelbarrow carrying all their goods—but where flee, with the city gates locked? They had thought of the orphanage, and their pleas for shelter, which they wailed at the cracks of the gates, seemed a plaint we had heard for ever and ever—the lifelong cry of our cursed race.

  Rock had the shores taken down and the gates opened. There were six, a family. All were small of frame, small enough to escape by the drainage-ditch postern, and Rock ordered that they be admitted.

  Others came during the morning, and they were accepted or turned away on one basis only—their size. To those few who were too large and had to be refused, Rock explained the reason. To those who were allowed to stay he laid down the rule that, if the storm came, the children and their caretakers would be the first to escape, and they the last. By the middle of the day we had about forty of these refugees camping in the courts.

  Their eyes were the darting eyes of mice in the shadows of hawks’ wings, and their cracked lips told us this:

  The mobs, possessed of the energy of madness, ran through the Tartar City day and night. Sometimes an exhausted cluster of rioters could be seen in broad day sprawled in widespread disarray in the archery grounds of the Central Park, resting heads on one another’s thighs, snoring, pale, their faces wretched in repose; but they would start up after an hour and go baying off. The mobs had coagulated; on the first day they had roamed in packs of low hundreds, whereas now they were joined into sluggish throngs of thousands. The Emperor had caused them to smart, and they were chary now of attacking his properties, for one crowd, approaching the gates of the winter palaces, had received canister shot from a great brass howitzer, and it was said that twenty-two had been left dead and scores had been hurt. Accordingly the rioters had turned more than ever against the easier mark—against us. Whenever a pack stalked down a person of white skin, whether man, woman, or child, it sank its fangs in the helpless victim. A hutung in the quarter of the Examination Halls where many whites lived had been scoured, and every white had been beaten to death. A dozen white men had been decapitated. Several had been bambooed until their ribs were crushed. This wolf mob was insatiable—each taste of blood increased, rather than slaked, its thirst.

  Late in the morning some of us realized that Benign Warmth, Wood Pillow, and Belted Persimmon, the three large ones who were going to have to stay behind with Rock, had disappeared. Someone asked Rock: Had he hidden them already? All he would say was: They were—and would be—safe.

  The children, aware of our icy calm before them, behaved, that morning, rather well, though one could see a suppressed excitement in their eyes, an innocent anticipation of some kind of outing they dimly sensed they were going to have: Would it be like the walk to the lake on the night of the Spirit Festival?

  I saw Rock near the screen at the main gate, and I ran to him and begged him to tell me where he planned to hide. “I want to be able to picture you as safe.”

  “I’ll be safe, White Lotus,” he said, and he put a hand on my shoulder. “I’ll join you afterward at the Banner Corps compound”—spoken with arrogant assurance.

  I felt at once, again, that up welling of some aspect of happiness which I had experienced the day before, and which had puzzled me then by its apparent inappropriateness. Now, scarcely daring to believe my good fortune, I put a name to it: courage, given me by this rough Rock. Courage was new in my life. In slavery there could have been no courage, only desperation, a degraded drive for revenge, a search for a means of escape, a hopeless desire for change. But this, pouring into me from that hand on my shoulder, was of a different order—of an order beyond daydreams. We may be low as dirt, the grip of the hand seemed to say, but we are talking in hushed voices about the future…. I felt that I could face separation, anxiety, uncertain
ty….

  At the middle of the day we fixed a meal of millet gruel; the children grumbled.

  In midafternoon we heard new knocking at the braced gates.

  A white man—one of those, too large, whom Rock had turned away!—had come to warn us: He cried at the crack of the gate leaves that he had been scouting, and he had seen a large crowd turn down Hata Gate Street in our direction. Four or five thousand, he thought. He did not know their plan…. Then he was gone.

  Yes: courage! A courageous man without even a name!

  Rock decided not to wait for the mob to arrive. He called Snow Bug to have the children lined up by ages, and he ran to the rear wall and opened the little postern.

  I had a double assignment. I was eventually to be with the last group, the elevens, but I was detailed to help at first with the infants, who would have to be passed out through the low culvert from hand to hand. We had about twenty of these little helpless bodies; the plan was to lay them down in the hutung outside while the older children scrambled out, and then, as the groups made off for the Bordered Red Banner Corps barracks, the accompanying matrons, the women attendants, and the gate boy—we were fifteen adults altogether—would each take up one or two little lives and carry them along in arms.

  All the babies soon were howling; we gave them dusty sticks of malt to suck. Snow Bug was first to go out, and the gate boy, Wang, knelt inside the postern and handed the wriggling infants through to her. I was one of those who relayed babies to Wang’s skinny hands. The ditch smelled. The city outside was so far no noisier than usual. With a sinking heart I saw how long it was going to take to get all the orphans out through the one foul hole; I was to be in the last party.

  The older year groups were being assembled in the various courtyards, and when the infants were all out I went to the peony garden, where the elevens were herded.