White Lotus

by John Hersey

  The earlier buoyancy of the children had faded now to a mood of hesitation.

  Tiger Ears, the boy who wanted to be nobody, came up to me and said, “Where are we going?”

  “We’re going to join the army.”

  “Will they give me a number?”

  “No doubt.”

  “Good.”

  We would have a long wait. I persuaded him to help me line the others up in pairs and number them off; in this way they would march through the streets.

  Now we began to hear, crescendo, the mass cry of the rioters pouring down Hata Gate Street: a strained, dry-throated, never-to-be-satisfied yearning of many voices. What did the yellows want of us?

  The militancy drained out of our little regiment of elevens when they began to hear this noise. They must have remembered the hostility that night by the fire-spotted lake, and they flocked around me now, begging to know what was happening out there—the great roar had reached our block.

  The nines and tens were in other courts of the orphanage, and I had no way of knowing how the escapes were getting on. I did my best to return my small soldiers to their ranks, with a minimum of explanation.

  At the main gate we now heard a single shrill voice dominating; the mob sound. Ai! A speech! With all my heart I was thankful for the peacock in some men that makes them spout oratory at opportunity. The hum of the crowd abated as the man’s voice fanned out in an ecstatic display of hatred. This stupid vaunter would give us time!

  Rock, coming through the garden, said the line at the postern had reached the eights.

  Over the renewed racket of the crowd, which was now responding to questions from the ranter with swift barks of assent, I heard Rock say, “I’ll see you tonight, or tomorrow at the latest, my flower.” Then he said, “Better move this group to the rear court now.” He turned as if to walk away but then hesitated, swung back to me, and—I craved another word of recognition—he merely said, “Better get them through as fast as you can.”

  By the time my elevens were double-lined at the rear wall, and the last of the tens was on hands and knees in the gutter, we heard a roar go up from the crowd—more distant now, as we were at the far side of the orphanage from it, so the roar was dull, round, and off-trailing like faraway thunder. The speech must have been over. A few stones clattered on our roofs. I started my youngsters through. I heard a thud—a battering ram? My hands turned to ice. I called to the children to hurry. Then, as the refugees crowded behind me, fighting to be the first of the last, I fell to a crawl and then stretched out full length in the putrid ditch. The odor was horrible—everything disgusting and corrupt about mankind seemed to have found its way into that miserable channel, and it was all I could do to keep from retching. As I wriggled through the confining hole I felt the wetness reach my skin all along the front of my body.

  I was through. I jumped to my feet. Tiger Ears—his eyes shone; he had lost his human tag; he was Number One—had put the line in good order on either side of the hutung’s filthy sewage ditch. From the tiny water gate the refugees popped out and ran off.

  One infant was left on the ground in the lane—a pink mouth contentedly folded around a candy nipple; I picked the baby up and clutched it to my piss-wet heart that might break for Rock. We ran off. Behind us we heard a faint crash and a mob’s orgasmic Aaaah!

  With the Banner Corps

  At my first knock the gate flew open. We were beckoned inside by urgent yellow-skinned hands.

  All but Tiger Ears, who loved his martial role, my children were tight with dread, but now something remarkable happened: Half a dozen yellow men, bannermen, took me and my orphans in charge, and as they led us through three outer courtyards they were courteous, gentle, and respectful, even toward eleven-year-old white bastard urchins. These were keepers of the Emperor’s order, and for the first time in my life under the yellows I realized that law could be impartial.

  The bannermen led us through, at last, into the great parade ground of their compound, where hundreds of white refugees were already herded. Many were crumpled on the ground like lifeless parcels; most had taken flight, as we had, carrying nothing but the burdens of their hearts.

  Against a far wall I saw our orphanage crowd, and I asked the soldiers to take us to it.

  A surprise as we approached: Here were Benign Warmth, Belted Persimmon, and Wood Pillow! I learned that Rock—and with this my fears for him pumped harder than ever—had slipped the big three out the orphanage gate the previous morning; he had done this in secret, letting it be thought that they were hidden, in order to forestall others of the staff from wanting to flee then also. He was back there alone!

  Benign Warmth was comfortably in command again. All had turned out as he had predicted; thanks, no doubt, to his patronesses, the Emperor’s bannermen were taking good care of us. We were safe. Every single orphan. Every member of the staff. He puffed his cheeks and wagged his head—and acted as if Rock had never existed.

  Near the end of the afternoon a field kitchen was rolled out onto the parade ground, and the multitude was fed—polished rice!. Ayah, I had not tasted such rice since the feasts brought us by Rock and Groundnut’s pigeons! With continued firmness and correctness, the bannermen kept the famished refugees in order, fed our children first of all. My clothes were still damp and foul, and the clinging odor and my concern for Rock choked my appetite. The children ate like gulping puppies.

  In the milling about the field kitchen I saw a stooped figure: Mink—Mink who had been so thrilled by the opening passages of the riot, and whose thrill to my shame I had shared. I had lost track of him since our escape, and I was glad to see him, and told him so. He looked up at me from his crouch with hard eyes and said, “Help me get a bowl of rice. They won’t let me close enough. People don’t understand what it is to have a bad back.”

  Stunned by Mink’s self-absorption, I said, “Have you asked a bannerman to help you?”

  “Hai! They’ll jump for a soft girl—do you think they’d lift a finger for me? Slanthead bastards!”

  A bannerman standing close to us heard Mink spit out this epithet, and first I saw a flash of astonishment on the tall yellow soldier’s face, then I saw an abiding loathing lurking behind the propriety that the man pulled with visible effort, like a split-bamboo awning, back down across his face.

  With alarming suddenness it was dark; I had lost all sense of time.

  The orphans, blessed with the suppleness of innocence, fell fast asleep on the ground. Some of them started up from dreams and cried out, but with caresses and murmurs from us they melted again into slumber. Best and most profound of the sleepers, however, was Benign Warmth; he slept the sleep of the justified. The smell of the ditch was in my nostrils; I could not drop off. Rock hid in my mind.

  Late at night—in what quarter of it I could not tell—I heard, first as a distant growl, then swelling like the oncoming edge of a rain squall beating on dry earth, the same mob noise as had borne down on the orphanage in the afternoon.

  Soon, in response to the unmistakable approach of this muffled roar, the large crowd of refugees on the parade ground was stirring—except for the oblivious children—and we heard bustling, stamping feet, and orders being shouted in the outer courts of the bannermen’s quarters.

  I had a bad thought: Was the mob only now coming away from the orphanage?

  In a short time the noise had risen to an ominous din—greater, it seemed to me, than we had heard at the orphanage—which was centered at the gates of the Banner Corps compound. We could only guess that the rioters, enraged by the thought that whites were being shielded from them by the Emperor’s troops, intended to try to ravage the place.

  Then I heard—once, twice, three times—like a huge slow drumbeat, the pounding of a timber butt against the gates.

  But three times was all. A burst of explosions! The bannermen were firing! The throat of the mob
outside uttered a cry of frustration and despair, and then we heard the great hiss of its flight, like the sound of a spent wave pulling sand and crunched shells back down a beach.

  At that a new voice made itself heard—that of the press of refugees in the enclosure, which, though it dared not openly cheer, gave out an eerie whispered sigh of relief, surprise, and half-believing satisfaction. But I—I was weeping for Rock.

  The night persisted endlessly, as if it were a fever that would not break from my forehead.

  When at last an inapt rosy dawn came seeping up the sky, I felt drowsy, but the stirring and groaning of the refugees prevented me from drifting off. I leaned against the wall with a foggy mind, trying to summon back the courage which had so elated me the day before; but it would come no more than sleep or wakefulness.

  For perhaps a long time, as half thoughts lurked behind my hooded eyes, I half watched two men sitting at some distance in the throng talking in earnest. They half seemed to be dear friends to each other, and perhaps even to me. One’s head was strangely streaked and smeared; the other, three quarters turned away from me, was stiff-necked, and his gestures were a farm boy’s, of grasping tools, weeding, and striking a stubborn donkey’s flank. They fascinated my half attention, those two; there was some dim pull for me about them. A whisper came sweeping across the parade ground, of unknown authority, that the rioters in the city were flagging; there were no more whites at large to catch and kill; the mobs were scattered, sleeping like wild dogs in the streets; their rage was spent—so the whisper said, but the report swept across an indifferent me and flew on. I lay there dazed, staring at nothing—a nothing centered on the two men, who were arguing.

  Then, having a dawn of my own, I stirred, felt my mind swept clear, looked more closely across the way in the growing light, sat up, heard a cry of surprised life in my own throat, and then was on my feet staggering and sobbing through the jammed yard in a rush toward the two men.

  They were Rock and Groundnut.

  Our White Way

  I threw myself down and grasped Rock’s knees, weeping. His trousers were filthy and sour. He greeted me as casually as if I were coming home to him from work at the orphanage and we were alone in his lama’s cubicle. “Hello, sweet girl.”

  I wept harder at the sound of his voice; in time I recovered some composure and sat up.

  Groundnut was dressed in his beggar’s pickings, and the smears on his head were of his vile cosmetic ills, partly pulled and wiped away. He had been earning his rice bowl at the Hata Gate when the riot had begun, and at the closing of the gates his curiosity—together with a white man’s hope that a public disaster might bring change, which could not be for much worse and might be for better—had made him decide to stay in the inner city.

  I urged Rock to come and join the orphanage party and to tell us what had happened after our departure.

  He refused. “I might kill that pompous mandarin’s wife’s pap-kisser.”

  “Then tell me.”

  “There’s not much to tell. I hid. They came in and tore the courts apart. Then they left. I waited a good long time and came out and ran over here—that’s all.”

  “But tell me more. Where did you hide?”

  “You wouldn’t want to know that.”

  Ayah, this was my old Rock back. I had to pitch in. “What makes you think I wouldn’t want to know this or that? You arrogant rogue hog. You white bastard. I’ll give you a fingernail if you don’t tell me.”

  Hai! His eyes began to dance with pleasure. “Listen, sow,” he said. “You come over here interrupting a perfectly good quarrel I’m having with Groundnut, and begin telling me what to say and do. Hold your tongue! What’ll we do with this saucy little sow, Groundnut? Shall we crank her tail? What? What do you say?”

  Groundnut laughed. “Ai! He’s a bastard, all right,” he said to me. “I’ll tell you where he hid: He hid in a night-soil jar—just where he belongs.”

  And at this Rock laughed, too. Indeed, this was exactly where he had hidden, he now told me. A perfect place, too.

  The latrines at the orphange, for defecation but not for urination (which latter was done if possible into pits draining out by the postern of our escape), consisted of brick-lined wells, into which huge jars, high as a man’s chest, were lowered to catch the inmates’ excretions, so precious to outlying farmers that it was bought by honey-cart drivers for good cash; slabs of slate with raised foot-shaped standards, straddling ample holes, covered the jars. In the time while we had waited for the mob’s approach, Rock had scoured an empty slop jar standing in one of the orphanage’s storage rooms at the back, and had lowered it into one of the vacant toilet wells.

  “And when the mob broke in,” he said, grinning, “I let myself down into the jar, and pulled the slab over me, and I was as safe as a turtle in his shell. Ahai! I took one of those peony plants in the garden out of its glazed urn, and I wore the urn on my head down there, just in case some filthy rioter—but I was lucky. Not one! I even took a little nap after the mob left. It wasn’t bad at all.”

  And what had happened to the orphanage?

  “Ripped open, sacked from corner to corner—the only thing I could find was one of those cloth shoes for a baby made with a tiger’s face on the toes that some son of a turtle had dropped because his arms were too full; it was lying in one of the courtyards, just the one solitary shoe. They burned whatever they could. The place is a shell.” Rock suddenly looked glum. “The only thing I regret,” he said, “is that I let that wind-filled superintendent slip out yesterday morning. I had a jar knee-deep with orphan dung to put him in.”

  I asked then if those two had decided anything.

  They had agreed, Rock said, to get away, to leave this garbage city as soon as the gates were opened. “You can come, too.”

  To where?

  To anywhere. Anywhere away from this war and this Number Wheel. “The war,” Rock said with one of his sneers, “stinks to the sky.”

  Where was the man who had saved us all? Where was the courage I had felt under that firm hand on my shoulder? I did not need it; I felt a glow of comfort. I had Rock. The sound of the mobs was dead in my ears. Ai, I agreed with those two. We would take care of our own skins: if too hard to stay, we would leave; if too hard to fight, we would adapt. This would be our white way.

  The Double Edge of Memory

  Three days later the gates opened and we left. We became scavengers, we avoided the war. The sound of cannon fire, wherever we heard it, drove us on the veering course of hares across the countryside with many others who were playing the same thin game. We went hungry dodging battles. And in a ditch one day, after many months, we heard of the Emperor’s victory, and of the death of slavery in all the provinces, and we guessed that the greatest flux would be in the outer provinces, and we headed toward them. Our passage was a slow one. Even within the core provinces the roads were flooded with restless yellows and whites: home-going soldiers, soldier-searching relatives, and people simply moving on—all those bitter dreamers who imagined that a change of era and of air might produce a magical change of self. The farther we walked toward the provinces of the defeated Sedition, the deeper into chaos we felt we were plunging. Dispossessed yellows sat on the gate steps of ruined houses with hollow eyes; swarms of refugees pecked and scraped in lawless packs; yellow profiteers wheeled about like buzzards; freed slaves roamed in a delirium of self-importance that was quite mad, absolutely unreal; the riffraff of disbanded armies of both sides stayed on in old camps. Hungry, tattered, and dusty-haired, we went from city to city, from camp to camp. For a time we lived in a palisaded enclosure, once a Sedition camp which had degenerated into a filthy, anarchistic, disease-ridden village of torn tents where former soldiers of both sides, freed slaves, uprooted widows of war dead, children of murdered slaveowners, nondescripts of every kind, indeed anyone who could bear, or after a war craved, utter degrad
ation, half-lived in a hopeless wait for the Emperor to come to their aid; and in this mire Groundnut was ecstatic, for the whole world around us was a-begging, and he set himself up as a professor of begging, with all the kudos and perquisites of the chief of an academy—no more need of disguises.

  But Rock grew restless in that fenced-in mudhole. He was still obsessed by the Number Wheel riots, in a double-edged way—on the one side by the memory of the sounds of those hate-poisoned crowds, and on the other by thoughts of the brief chance he had had to do something for a handful of his race. At his urging we left the camp and drifted on, deeper and deeper into the outer territories; every cart wheel and barrow wheel that Rock saw started him nattering about that other, larger, more fateful wheel of death and opportunity.

  BOOK SEVEN

  The Lower Hand

  The Headman

  WE STOOD WAITING in the village headman’s courtyard. A little boy with a shaved crown and a milky walleye had run to the fields to summon his father.

  Rock and Groundnut, both wearing queues (as did all white males in the postwar period, for it was an assertion of freedom to dress the hair in the style of the former masters), looked haggard, weatherworn, dirty, sullen, and rather dangerous, after our long period of vagabondage.

  With nods, chin thrusts, and thumb pokes, we silently pointed out to each other the signs of the leaf-thin frugality of this headman’s life: a scrawny vegetable patch, one pig in the sty, a stack of corn roots saved for fuel, a conical pile of human manure outside the shoulder-high walls of the open latrine.

  Hai! This village was where we had drifted, and this was where we would stay.Here the man came. I felt, and suppressed, an impulse to laugh—not at him but at ourselves. Seeing the actuality of this white village headman, I wondered whether we had become drunk on an idea—of settling in the worst place of all, in the so-called Humility Belt, which lay like a scalp infection across Hunan, or South-of-the-Lake Province, having come on strangely mixed motives, for we wanted to live in a society crowded with whites where nothing mattered, where we could be weeds among the rankest weeds, yet we also wanted to do what we could to raise the level of the poorest whites’ lives. Rock’s experience in the riots lay at the root of this idea; and I could read and write. We were hardened whites, we had a road-weary arrogance, we thought we could teach some of the world’s better ways to the people of our race in the Humility Belt, of whose sorry condition we had heard so much.