IV
Monday, October 22.
Chinese workmen,—amongst whom we are warned that there are spies and Boxers,—who look after the fires in the two furnaces in our palace, have kept us almost too warm all night. When we get up there is, as there was yesterday, another illusion of summer on our light verandah with the green columns painted with pink lotus flowers. An almost burning sun is rising and shining upon the ghostly pilgrimage which I am about to make on horseback, toward the west, outside the Tartar City, and through the ashy, silent, ruined suburbs.
In this direction there were, scattered through the dusty country, Christian cemeteries which even in 1860 had never been violated by the yellow race. But this time they furiously attacked the dead, and left chaos and abomination behind them. The oldest remains, those of missionaries who had been sleeping there for three centuries, were disinterred, crushed, piled up and set on fire in order to destroy, according to Chinese beliefs, whatever might still be left of their souls. One must be somewhat acquainted with the ideas of the country in order to understand the enormity of this supreme insult to all our Occidental races.
The cemetery of the Jesuit Fathers was singularly splendid. They were formerly very powerful with the Celestial Emperors, and borrowed for their own tombs the funereal emblems of the princes of China. The ground is literally strewn now with big marble dragons and tortoises, and with tall stele with chimæras coiled about them; all these carvings have been thrown down and smashed; the heavy stones of the vaults have been broken also, and the ground thoroughly overturned.
A more modest enclosure, not far away, has for a long time been the burial-place for the European legations. It has undergone the same treatment as the beautiful cemetery of the Jesuits. The Chinese have ransacked the graves, destroyed the bodies, and even violated the coffins of little children. Some few human bones are still lying on the ground, while the crosses that marked the graves are placed upside down. It is one of the most poignantly affecting sights that ever met my eyes.
Some good Sisters who lived near by kept a school for Chinese children; of their houses nothing is left but a pile of bricks and ashes, even the trees have been uprooted and stuck back in the ground head foremost.
This is their story:—
They were alone one night when about a thousand Boxers came along, shouting their death cries and playing gongs. The Sisters began to pray in their chapel as they awaited death. However, the noise died away, and when day broke no one was in sight, so they escaped to Pekin and took shelter with the bishop, taking their frightened little pupils with them. When the Boxers were asked later why they had not entered and killed the Sisters, they replied: "Because we saw soldiers' heads and guns all around the convent walls." So the Sisters owed their lives to this hallucination of their executioners.
The wells in the deserted gardens fill the air to-day with odors of the dead. There were three large cisterns which furnished a water so pure that they sent all the way from the legations to get it. The Boxers filled these wells up to the brim with the mutilated bodies of little boys from the Brothers' school and from Christian families in the neighborhood. Dogs came to eat from the horrible pile which came up to the level of the ground; but they had their fill, and so the bodies were left, and have been so preserved by the cold and dryness that the marks of torture upon them may still be seen. One poor thigh has been slashed in stripes after the manner in which bakers sometimes mark their loaves of bread, another poor hand is without nails. And here is a woman from whom one of the private parts of her body has been cut and placed in her mouth, where it was left by the dogs between her gaping jaws. The bodies are covered with what looks like salt, but which proves to be white frost, which in shady places never melts here. Yet there is enough clear, implacable sunshine to bring out the emaciation and to exaggerate the horrors of the open mouths, their agonized expressions, and the rigidity of the anguished positions of the dead.
There is not a cloud to-day, but a pale sky which reflects a great deal of light. All winter, it seems, it is much the same; even in the coldest weather rains and snows are very exceptional in Pekin.
After our brief soldiers' breakfast, served on rare china in the long gallery, I leave the Palace of the North to install myself in the kiosk on the opposite shore, which I selected yesterday, and to begin my work. It is about two o'clock; a summer's sun shines on my solitary path, on the whiteness of the Marble Bridge, on the mud of the Lake, and on the bodies that sleep amongst the frosted lotus leaves.
The guards at the entrance to the Rotunda Palace open and close behind me the red lacquered doors. I mount the inclined plane leading to the esplanade, and here I am alone, much alone, in the silence of my lofty garden and my strange palace.
In order to reach my work-room, I have to go along narrow passageways between old trees and the most unnatural rockwork. The kiosk is flooded with light, the beautiful sunshine falls on my table and on my black seats with their cushions of golden yellow; the beautiful melancholy October sunshine illumines and warms my chosen retreat, where the Empress, it seems, loved to come and sit and watch from this high point her lake all pink with flowers.
The last butterflies and the last wasps, their lives prolonged by this hot-house warmth, beat their wings against the window-panes. The great imperial lake is spread out before us, spanned by the Marble Bridge; venerable trees form a girdle around shores out of which rise the fanciful roofs of palaces and pagodas,—roofs that are one marvellous mass of faience. As in the landscapes painted on Chinese fans, there are groups of tiny rocks in the foreground, and small enamelled monsters from a neighboring kiosk, while in the middle distance there are knotted branches which have fallen from some old cedar.
I am alone, entirely and deliciously alone, high up in an inaccessible spot whose approaches are guarded by sentinels. There is the occasional cry of a crow or the gallop of a horse down below, at the foot of the rampart whereon my frail habitation rests, or the passing of an occasional messenger. Otherwise nothing; not a single sound near enough to trouble the sunny quiet of my retreat. No surprise is possible, no visitor.
I have been working for an hour, when a light rustling behind me from the direction of the entrance gives me the feeling of some discreet and agreeable presence. I turn round, and there is a cat who has stopped short with one foot in the air, hesitating and looking me straight in the eye, as if to ask: "Who are you, and what are you doing here?"
I call him quietly, he replies with a plaintive miaul; and I, always tactful with cats, go on with my writing, knowing very well that in a first interview one must not be too insistent.
He is a very pretty cat, yellow and white, with the distinguished and elegant air of a grand seignior. A moment later and he is rubbing against my leg; so then I put my hand slowly down on the small, velvety head, which, after a sudden start, permits my caresses and abandons itself to them. It is over; the acquaintance is made. He is evidently a cat accustomed to petting, probably an intimate of the Empress. To-morrow and every day I shall beg my orderly to bring him a cold luncheon from my rations.
The illusion of summer ends with the day. The sun sets big and red behind the Lake of the Lotus, all at once taking on a sad, wintry look; at the same time a chill comes over all things, and the empty palace grows suddenly gloomy. For the first time that day I hear footsteps approaching, resounding in the silence on the pavement of the esplanade. My servants, Osman and Renaud, are coming for me according to instructions; they are the only human beings for whom the gate of the walls below has orders to open.
It is icy cold as we cross the Marble Bridge in the twilight to return to our home, and the moisture is gathering in clouds over the lake, as it does every night.
After supper we go on a man hunt in the dark, through the courts and rooms of the place. On the preceding nights we had observed through the transparent window-panes disturbing little lights which were promptly extinguished if we made any noise. These lights moved up and down the uninhabited galleries, some distance away, like fireflies. To-night's effort brings about the capture of three unknown men who with cutlasses and dark lanterns have climbed over the walls to pilfer in the imperial reserves. There are two Chinese and one European, a soldier of one of the allied nations. Not to make too much ado over it, we content ourselves with putting them out after cudgelling them well and boxing their ears.