Lady Macdonald has forty Europeans in all to feed three times a day including servants, and at table they sit down thirty-three. She is very sensible, and has only one dish. Nobody thinks of dressing for dinner, except the Marquis Salvago, and I think it shows things are truly far gone when English people dine, but do not dress.
Our little mess is very attractive, and as our stores are much more numerous and of a greater variety than those of almost any mess here, we manage to have, up to the present at least, a most satisfactory one. We have tinned beef as our pièce de résistance, and rice is our mainstay—of a necessity, as it is that of which we have most. Tomato catsup tastes very good in this hot weather. Oatmeal is another staple that we have, and as luxuries we have a good stock of jams, tinned fruits, tinned vegetables, sardines, tinned mackerel, Liebig’s extract, a big box of Stilton cheese, coffee, tinned butter, and white flour. Mr. Squiers has a large supply of champagne, and every night we have one or two quarts with our siege dinner. The men work so hard, and the women’s nerves are so much on edge, that a small amount of stimulants is surely a blessed help.
Our mess being comparatively small, these delicacies are lasting nicely, as we use them with discretion, for we remember in the old days before the siege a dollar was a dollar, and would buy a tin, but in these days a tin has no market value—they cannot be bought. When one’s tins are gone one can eat horse-meat and rice. We brought a small lead-lined ice-box with us from our Legation, which seemed foolish at the time, but which is a great comfort to us now. We keep our wine and drinking-water in it, and also well-water, which is very cool, so that our drink is somewhat cooled, and is not the same temperature as the air. No other mess can attempt to have things cool, and this is one of the features of our room—that we are as comfortable as we can be under these extraordinary circumstances. During this sizzling weather cool water is a great comfort. It is so hot that a tin of meat, if left open all night, spoils by morning.
There is an English newspaper-man, who, when he can spare a few moments from the siege-work, gets his camera and takes a few photographs of things as they are. He is fond of chaffing, and to-day the Committee on Fortifications are of opinion that the house used by the French Minister, M. Pichon, is being undermined by the Chinese from outside, though indistinct noises, etc., are as yet the only proof of it. The Minister was more than usually perturbed about this new personal danger, and was not pleased, or at all amused, at the remarks addressed him. “I am making photographs for the Paris Figaro of this siege. Very soon your quarters will be blown up by dynamite. My camera is ready to take the photographs, and as you will be the principal person in it, how would you prefer me to take you—as your Excellency is going up wholesale, or as you are coming down retail?”
At this time people are not well-balanced, it seems to me. Some take the daily horrors as a matter of course, are more callous than they should be, and the others are so miserably pessimistic and mournful that one shuns them, fearing to catch this infection. There is a young man here who has been known to indulge in temporary aberrations, usually at night, following long, hard days of work in the broiling sun. On one occasion he was on his sentry beat, and on being relieved by his chief, the sight of whom was too much for him after having walked some hours on his dangerous sentry route (which seemed doubly dangerous in the pitch-black night) he, doubtless brooding over his probable approaching death, pointed the muzzle of his gun straight at his relief. “C’est à cause de vous, misérable, que je suis venu à Pékin et encore c’est à cause de vous que ces belles années de ma jeunesse seront salement terminées ici!” By not moving an inch the man thus threatened undoubtedly saved his life, and most intelligently agreed with his attacker, “Probably so; let’s talk it over.” In a few minutes the crisis had passed, but the following day the man who had been in such danger requested the General Committee to change his night sentry duty to a different part of the compound, so that his young secretary should not again be tempted to hold him responsible.
Sunday, July 1.
I have been quite under the weather, to use a civilized expression, and I assure you that things have got (not are getting) to such a state that to live and act and talk as one would do at home is quite out of place. How soon people get accustomed to an idea! Now that we have prepared our minds for a possible massacre we seem to be getting back, to some degree at least, our old spirits. Now that I am well, how much nearer seem the soldiers who are coming to relieve us!
What a place this compound would be for an epidemic! There are barely enough mattresses for the wounded and dying at the hospital, so that, should we have one, and take a house for those taken sick, I am sure that there would be no ordinary comforts of any kind for them; they could only be isolated. Let us pray that we will have no such horror to add to the already long list.
The hospital is already full, men lying on straw bags in halls—crowded in every conceivable corner. They are brought in dying and wounded every day. Dysentery has its grip on almost everybody here. The treatment is almost to stop eating and to drink rice-water in large quantities. Our four-times-divided cook—the other three messes in the United States bungalow have a lien on him too—is off for some hours daily on work which all personal servants have to give to the General Committee. When the kitchen is comparatively free, Mrs. Squiers, my maid, and I make gallons of rice-water, thick, nutritious but tasteless, which we bottle in quart-bottles and place to cool in our zinc-lined, cold-water-filled box. It is placed in a corner of our two-roomed quarters, and the constant stream of men coming and going to that box would lead an uninitiated observer to believe that at least a Hoffman House bar was hidden there and doing a steady business.
The rainy season and the bad time of the year par excellence has begun, and the temperature is like a Turkish bath without the clean smell. Apropos of smell, a whole story-book could be written about the Peking smell. The dry heat was nothing compared with this damp temperature, that seems to soak out of Mother Earth the most incredibly disgusting odours. There are so many dead dogs, horses, and Chinese lying in heaps all around the defended lines, but too far for us to bury or burn them. The contamination of the air is something almost overpowering. All men who smoke have a cigar in their mouths from morning until night as a protection from this unseen horror, and even the women, principally Italians and Russians, find relief in the constant smoking of cigarettes.