I almost regretted my openness when I saw the effect which this confession produced on the poet. He turned pale, stammered once or twice as though unable to speak, and finally turned his back without a word, and rushed from the room.
It would be tedious to recount the particulars of my journey across a hemisphere to interview the extraordinary woman who had revived in our own day the fabled majesty of Semiramis.
I reflected that it was not a little singular that, in an age when the women of the Western world were clamouring for opportunities to play a greater part in life, this almond-eyed daughter of the Manchus had cast ridicule upon their agitation by proving that it was possible for a woman, born in the most conservative society of the globe, to achieve the supreme direction of five hundred millions of human beings, and to make sport of the statesmen of Europe and America.
“Finally he turned his back without a word, and rushed from the room.”
To reach Pekin was an easy matter, but my difficulties began when I embarked on the dangerous enterprise of travelling into the interior of the empire, through provinces seething with hatred of the foreign devil. In spite of the magic influence of my sacred tablet, I found it prudent to disguise my Western extraction under the official robes of a mandarin of the fourth class. Thus attired I travelled in security and comfort, everywhere received with the honours due to a high official honoured with a summons to the Court of Heaven.
As I approached Sing-fu I left the disturbed area behind me. The inhabitants of this inland region did not appear to have heard of the troubles in Pekin or the arrival of the German Michael with his mailed fist to exact redress for the murder of his Ambassador. They understood merely that the Son of Heaven had come among them for repose after the labour of chastising certain barbarian pirates who had been infesting the sea-coast.
It was given out by my attendants that I had come to report the successful execution of his Majesty’s sentence on the ruffians; and if I had really left the heads of the German Emperor, the Tsar of Russia, and President Roosevelt grinning on spikes over the gates of Pekin, my reception could not have been more cordial.
I found the Chinese court encamped in a sort of military fashion, in charming scenery, at the foot of a ridge of low hills, amid groves of fruit trees watered by a delightful stream. The tents of ten thousand guards and attendants clustered round the stately pavilions of the great mandarins, adorned with flags emblematic of their rank; and in the centre the great Imperial Dragon Standard floated over a fairy-like palace whose lacquered wood and silken curtains concealed the sacred person of the Mother of the Sun and Moon.
The disgraced Emperor, whose fate was still a mystery to his subjects, was closely imprisoned in one wing of the Imperial quarters.