White Lotus

by John Hersey

  I stood between Rock and Runner; Groundnut, Bare-Stick, Mink, and Pigeon were with us. We did not yet see Old Arm.

  Runner, in his red priest’s robe, wore the look of a man who knew something the rest of us had yet to learn; perhaps this would turn out to be his plan for the day, for none of us were even aware that he had one. Groundnut had tried to persuade him to recruit “birds” for this occasion, but Runner, unperturbed by Groundnut’s nervous eagerness, had quietly said we would have to wait and see what Old Arm intended to do. I had the feeling that Runner expected a great deal, though I could not imagine what, from Rock.

  Rock at my shoulder was as tense as the spring of a heavily loaded ricksha. As I wondered what we could do, in the face of this growing mob of Old Arm’s, with our mere handful of adherents, it suddenly occurred to me that Rock was ready, ready to act for himself and for all of us—indeed so ready that he might do anything he was asked to do, even by Old Arm.

  By the middle of the afternoon Four Rivers Road was quite full. The wharfmen were cheerfully on edge. I dare say these roustabouts were in earnest and believed what Old Arm had told them about themselves, but they gave the impression of being merely bored young ragbags needing to let off steam.

  Indeed, as Old Arm postponed later and later his arrival on the scene, boredom seemed to have become the sole theme of the day, until it was dangerous in itself.

  Perhaps this was just what Old Arm wanted; he may have been starving his hounds to make them sharp.

  Inside the wire fence, from time to time, yellow men could be seen stepping out from the factory buildings to look with anxious curiosity at the crowd in the street, then going back indoors.

  A large number of white onlookers, including many women, had come across the bridge from the Enclave to see what was doing.

  Our group was standing in front of the crowd, near the wire fence, not far from the Soochow Creek bridge.

  I noticed in Rock, besides his tenseness, a willingness to bide time, a patience within impatience which seemed new in him—something he had found, perhaps, between the shafts of his ricksha. In other times he would have covered his restiveness with a stream of mocking comments, teasing Runner or Groundnut for teasing’s sake. I knew how he had felt all along about Old Arm; but I knew, too, how he had felt about white men being restricted to the three servile labors: of house servant, wharfman, ricksha boy. He must have been torn, and I felt torn. What were we to fight for—or against? Surely our adversary was the yellow man’s power. Yet was it? Was it Old Arm, a white man? What did Runner want? Did he after all know?

  There was a stir at the far end of the crowd, which now fed some distance beyond the match-factory grounds along Four Rivers Road. Old Arm! Old Arm standing on a donkey cart which was being pulled through the crowd by a “flying squad.”

  A roar went up from the wharfmen.

  Inside the yard several yellows came flapping out from the factory doors to see what the noise meant; then they ran back inside.

  The flying squad pulled the cart through the eddying wharfmen up to the main gate in the wire fence.

  Old Arm held up restraining palms, and the clamor died slowly down. In a piercing high-pitched voice Old Arm began to shout what was probably the first open, public incitement of whites against yellows in the history of Up-from-the-Sea, or of any other yellow city.

  Ai, what a turmoil his speech stirred in me! All that he said about the yellows was true, was straight from my own memory stock. He knew how to speak to my deepest resentments, he stirred my anger. Yet there was something nagging in his voice which roused the crowd in an ugly way and frightened me. His words did not go so far as his tone of voice did. His words urged only “frowns,” “shouts,” “let them know how we feel.” But the whine, the snarl, the grunts, the snuffling—these came from the throat of an enormous cat of hatred, and they worked a primitive, claw-unsheathing stimulus on the men packed in the roadway mob.

  I looked at my companions. How frightening was Bare-Stick’s face! He was with us, he was one of Runner’s pillars, yet in response to Old Arm’s volleys he was nodding, running his thick tongue over his lips, scowling, letting out yelps of concurrence like the rest of the mob, and his face seemed to be lit up with a yearning for a roughhouse. And I could see that even Rock was on the edge of being carried away by the torrent of the speech. Old Arm was evoking our sufferings, and Rock, too, had suffered. Rock wanted to be against Old Arm, but now and then a flicker of frustrated rage, as of approaching lightning, would fleetingly twitch his face. Mink was in a state of bliss; Old Arm had captured the whole of his attention, so for a few minutes he had lost sight of his pain, as if the speech were almost a pipe. Pigeon’s eyes were round and solemn.

  Runner seemed not to be listening at all. He was staring upward, and following his line of vision I saw a huge bird, perhaps an osprey, in flight toward the ocean, alternating the clumsy, lumbering flapping of its heavy wings with a marvelous patient soaring toward the edible fish of the sea. But as I looked again at Runner I saw that he was listening—with a taut inner attention; he was listening as a hawk watches.

  Old Arm’s speech was accelerating, the yips and bellows of the crowd were growing more frequent and more insistent.

  At a moment of fierce opportunity when Old Arm had just bitten off a kind of peroration and the mob was on a nervous razor’s edge, the day’s-end whistle of the match factory gave out its long, shrill cry. It seemed a provocation; the mob howled at it.

  Then the factory’s doors flew open and yellow workmen began to stream out into the wire-fenced yard.

  The yellows must have been hearing the crowd’s roars from within, and they were curious, excited, and, upon seeing the actual assemblage of whites, angry. They wanted to go home. But they were disadvantaged by being enclosed, and it was easy to see that they were also nervous and probably afraid.

  A group of the yellows came toward the main gate, perhaps with the intention of trying to open it and force a passage out. The mob outside bellowed and pressed forward. Then some yellows—evidently some of the factory’s supervisory staff—came running out of the factory doors toward the advancing group of employees and turned them back. This prudence brought a new roar of confidence from the whites. The bosses shouted and gesticulated to the main body of employees, and they all retired to the rear portion of the waiting area.

  The withdrawal, bringing with it a suspicion that the yellow workers would escape through a rear gate, broke whatever restraint was left in the white mob.

  On his cart at the gate Old Arm himself was making wild gestures of interdiction which somehow had precisely the opposite effect on the men near him. They seemed to take his pushing motions for beckoning; perhaps he subtly meant them as such. The men surged forward. They tried to open the gate, but it was stoutly locked. They swerved to our side of the gate, quite near our group, and grasped with their hands at the wire fence. Some climbed on others’ shoulders and grappled at the crest of the fence with wharfmen’s hooks, and suddenly from nowhere coils of sea rope appeared, sisal lines of a sort the wharf coolies daily used, and were knotted to the hooks, and a half dozen hauling chains were formed. We heard now, first from the men on the lines, then, with an eerie effect, from the entire crowd, the heartbreaking gruntlike heaving chants of white men on yellow-owned docks. The ropes were all hooked to the fence within a narrow span, near us, and soon the fence at that place began to bend and to give out metallic screeches. The crowd interrupted its chants to cheer each yielding of the strong fence.

  Within the yard we saw the consternation of the plant’s supervisory people, who ran here and there like ants when a great shoe has stirred the hill. The workmen, now thoroughly aroused—both alarmed and furious, it seemed—stayed at the rear part of the yard. Either there was no rear escape, or they chose not to make use of it.

  A heave! A bending of the metal! A roar of delight!

 
What was Runner thinking about, with that faraway look? Bare-Stick was oafishly cheering with the roustabouts. Mink was almost asleep in his interested peace of mind. This seemed to me a moment of terrible danger, inviting a whole epoch of retribution from the yellows. What could this crowd do in its excited folly? Surely the municipal police would arrive with their clubs, and even guns, at any moment. I was unable to think in any new way; it seemed to me that the white mob had quite lost its head and had put us all in worse jeopardy than ever.

  And Rock? Rock was watching with a deeply troubled look in his eyes; the muscles of his jaw were working, as if he were chewing some last morsel of bitter hope.

  Then a stretch of the fence gave way with a tearing sound. So sudden was the collapse that all the men on all the lines fell down backwards, and at this the enraptured mob gave in to laughter. A tornado of laughter!

  It was Rock who led us in. Rock had the presence of mind to take advantage of the slapstick moment. He snatched at Runner’s sleeve, and he beckoned to the rest of us, and he jumped up on the sagging curve of fence and danced down the bouncing wire slope into the yard. He ran forward four or five paces and stood on one leg; he was a sleeping bird.

  In a rush we were beside him. Pigeon was agile, and even Mink moved with a clearheaded alacrity. There were soon seven of us, sleeping birds, within the fence.

  At the sight of the fall of the fence and of Rock’s hurdling within, the crowd of yellow workmen had surged a few steps forward. But Rock’s sudden assumption of the awkward pose, and our joining him—even a woman and a little girl!—caused the workmen to stop. What was this?

  And on the outside the white wharfmen, too, were caught for a while by astonishment, and the laughter, which had been caused by the collapse of the heaving lines, persisted.

  I distinctly heard Old Arm screaming, “No! No! Don’t let them! Stop them!”

  Ahead of us the yellow workmen held their ground, waiting to see what would happen.

  With a pounding heart I heard the metal fence behind us creaking as someone leaped on it and ran down it. I expected the human flood to overwhelm us first from that direction. After that I could hear that another man was on the fence, and a third.

  Then I saw a new arrival take his place on the end of our line and lift one knee. It was a beggar!—one of the crowd of beggars from the postern of Groundnut’s temple, surely. The second man, another tattered scarecrow, joined us. Now others were coming across the fence. I dared to look around. Out from the huge crowd—how had we not seen them there?—was it that they were only one remove in shabbiness and degradation from the wharf coolies themselves?—were coming first a handful, then a score, then a huge flock of beggars. They crossed the bowed-down fence and came to us and stood as sleeping birds. Scabs and tatters, feigned and real. Jug, the leper! Maimed men, figures of hunger and loneliness. Here came one, helped by two others, who only had one leg. More beggars than I had ever seen in one place. Bedraggled birds! Birds of the dust storm!

  My glance brushed across the faces of my companions. Ail Groundnut! What a look of a man who has had a good meal! On Rock’s face, something I had never seen there before—a serenity to match Runner’s.

  As neither crowd, neither the white nor the yellow, could seem to bring itself to stir, but held back in amazement, amusement, or perhaps even some sort of respect, I felt a sudden flow of the greatest joy I had known in all the time since the day my friends and I had been marched like goats from our Arizona village—a joy of triumph. There was still great fear mixed with this exultation, for I expected that the joy would be as short-lived as it was incredible.

  No, it was not simply triumph. I had a sense so new that it was not easy to put a name to it—perhaps of dignity. These wretched companions were good company—eloquent, eloquent. We all stood on one leg, with bowed heads, peaceable, vulnerable, utterly reproachful.

  Ahead of us there seemed to be a new mood in the crowd of yellow workmen—yes, a peculiar bewilderment, and shame, and anger that must follow shame: The workmen were grumbling, slowly advancing.

  And behind us I could hear Old Arm’s screaming commands to his flying squads to cross the fence, push the birds—he called us birds!—aside. What was to take place beyond that he did not specify. But Old Arm had apparently lost his own men; there was a lull behind us.

  Now the supervisory personnel came at us in outrage, shouting that we were, of all things, trespassers.

  This flurry of the bosses seemed to have an immediate effect on the mood of the yellow workmen, who stopped advancing and fell to looking at each other with baffled faces.

  No one among us answered the employers. They could not shout long at dummies. They stormed off toward the gate, perhaps believing that we had been sent in by Old Arm, and they began to call through the wire to him.

  Then I heard once again the creaking of the fallen fence behind us as someone—then several weights of men—landed on it and jounced forward toward us. For a moment I was terrified: Had the lovers of violence finally recovered their impetus? Would we be attacked, first from the rear and then from the front?

  But something happened now that none of us could have imagined possible. Some of Old Arm’s wharfmen—hard-eyed, disillusioned, tested beyond bearing by the miseries of their lives—joined us; they ran up to us and stood each on one leg. The first to do so caused a flurry of excited chatter in the crowd in the street—for it was surely a courageous commitment, entailing, with its defiance of Old Arm, an almost certain loss of work on the wharves. Then a dam of caution broke, and with shouts of reckless gladness, and with laughter, more, many more, many many more men jumped on the fence and ran to us. Scores of dirty wharfmen came up. I saw men in the tunics of ricksha-pullers. Some were well dressed—were shroffs with us, too? Now women began to come. Soon we were pushed forward; the yard was filling. I turned my head and saw that Old Arm was no longer standing on the flat-bedded cart beyond the gate; instead, there were half a dozen men balancing as sleeping birds. The street outside must be filled with sleeping birds! Thousands of whites standing as sleeping birds!

  Once as we were jostled forward by the growing flock within the yard, Rock gently took my hand, and the full intensity of my emotion poured out from my throat in a groanlike shout, as I realized what had happened to me, at last, at last. I was free!

  Somewhere in these confused actions I had come to realize that freedom could be felt at best only for moments: that even for the powerful, even for yellows, it was inconstant, elusive, fickle, and quickly flown. It turned out to be an experience rather than a status. Ayah, much needed to be changed in our lives, to give us, not freedom, but mere humanity. Freedom was not to be bestowed but grasped—and only for a moment at a time.

  This was such a moment. What a catch of exultation at my throat!

  Yes, this was my first moment of freedom. I felt it pouring into me, like a pure, cool stream slaking my ancient thirst: I had a picture in my mind of the perfect crystalline pool that I had seen on the day of the yellow masters’ picnic, after Nose’s death, at Jade Springs Hill, where cresses and water snowflakes and floating hearts swayed in the greenish depths. I drank till I was cool and peaceful.

  I was full of it, and I recognized it.

  I looked in Rock’s eyes, and I saw them brimming with it, too.

  Then I discerned, ahead, through and beyond the still-benumbed crowd of yellow workmen, reality walking into the yard, in the shapes of a squad of municipal policemen. There must after all have been a rear gate to the factory compound; police were streaming into the yard now in large numbers.

  I should have trembled but I was calm; I felt Runner’s calm and Rock’s strength, and I felt, above all, the cool sweet draughts of freedom in me that I had just drunk.

  They were approaching, armed with thick bamboo clubs. They knew what they were doing, and their first phalanx came straight at Runner and his nucleus. We st
ill perched. In a moment my sense of freedom deserted me, as I saw frail Pigeon bowled over. Some brave defender of the yellow order had picked out a tender target. She went down with a twisted mouth and eyes full of disbelief. How could such a thing happen? I felt the absolute horror of a world in which a strong human being of one color was driven to do this to a weak human being of another color.

  But then, miraculously before I myself was touched, I saw another thing. Two yellow policemen jumped on Rock, who, having no square footing, fell at once to the ground. The men ran over him and rushed a beggar. Then Rock—my quarrelsome, powerful man, Rock of the orphanage, Rock the trainer of Bad Hog, Rock who liked to give as good as he got—quickly rose, and with a look on his face of great determination, equanimity, and joy, he raised his left knee and stood quiet again. I knew then that I had been right to think of what I had felt as a moment of freedom, and that now we could not be stopped.

  EPILOGUE

  Virtuous Wisdom, Gentle Hand

  The Silence Is Broken

  WE TWO, at the center of the reviewing ground in a silence that is like a chambered privacy, are locked in a dialogue of eyes, and I have long since been forced to realize that my earlier guess was correct: Governor K’ung is simply going to wait me out.

  I feel resourceless; with recollections of the past I have deferred trying to think what I can do to counter him.

  How much time has drifted away? Excellency K’ung stands motionless and mute, his sword pointing forward, parallel to the ground. The sun shines on the fortlike yamen. The dog has not come back; there is no more laughter. The vendor lies off to the left among his scattered belongings, and the Governor, I still feel sure, is unaware of him.