Another problem was the getting to the concessions. It was not the best of times for a girl to walk the highway alone. To be sure, she had come safely through from the junk; but it had not been far, and she hadn't had to approach a native army. She decided to wait an hour or so, until the plunderers there in the grove should be fully drunk; then, if at the moment it seemed the thing, to slip out and make a try for it.
And then, a little later, evidently from the road outside the wall, came a new sort of confused sounds; music, of flageolets and strings, and falsetto voices, and with it a low-pitched babel of many tongues. Whoever these new folk might be, they appeared to be turning in at the open gate. The music stopped abruptly, in a low whine of discord, and the talk rose in pitch. Over the brick screen appeared banners moving jerkily about, dipping and rising, as if in the hands of agitated persons below; a black banner, bearing in its center the triple imperial emblems of the Sun, the other two yellow, one blazoning the familiar dragon, the other a phoenix.
A few banner men appeared peeping cautiously about the screen; Manchu soldiers of the old effete army, bearing short rifles. They came on, cautiously into the park, joined in a moment by others. An officer with a queue and an old-fashioned sword and a military cap in place of a turban followed and, forming them into a ragged column of fours, marched them over the marble bridges and into the grove, where they disappeared from view.
Then a gorgeously colored sedan chair came swaying in, carried by many bearers walking under stout bamboo cross-poles. Others, in the more elaborate dress of officials, walked beside and behind it. Then came more soldiers, who straggled informally about, some even dropping on the gravel to rest their evidently weary bodies.
The chair was opened in front and a tall fat man stepped rather pompously out, wearing a robe of rose and blue and the brightly embroidered insignia and button of a mandarin of the fourth rank. At once a servant stepped forward with a huge umbrella which he opened and held over the fat man. And then they waited, all of them, standing or lying about and talking in excited groups. Several of the officials hurried back around the screen as if to examine the deserted apartments just within the gate, and shortly returned with much to say in their musical singsong.... An officer espied the body of Connor lying on the steps of the pavilion, and came with others, excitedly, to the foot of the steps. The key of the confused talk rose at once. There was an excited conference of many ranks about the tall fat man under the umbrella.
Then came, from the grove, that same sound of muffled shots, followed by a breathless pause. More shots then, and increasing excitement here by the screen. A number of the soldiers who had crossed the bridges appeared, running. The man in the lead had lost turban and rifle; as he drew near blood could be seen on his face. And now, abruptly, the officials and the ragtag and bobtail by the screen—pole-bearers, lictors, runners, soldiers—lost their heads. Some ran this way and that, even into the bushes, only to reappear and follow their clearer-headed brethren out to the gate. The umbrella-bearer dropped his burden and vanished. The fugitives from the grove were among the panic-stricken group now, racing with them for the gate and the highway without; scurrying around the end of the screen like frightened rabbits; and in pursuit, cheering and yelling, came many of the soldiers from the junk.
They caught the tall fat mandarin, as he was waddling around the screen, wounded by a chance shot; leaped upon him, bringing him down screaming with fear; beat and kicked him; with their knives and bayonets performing subtle acts of torture which gave them evident pleasure and of which the coldly observant Dixie Carmichael lost no detail. When the fat body lay inert, not before, they took the sword of a fallen officer and cut off the head, hacking clumsily. The head they placed on a pole, marching noisily about with it; finally setting the pole upright beside the first of the little marble bridges. Then, at last, they wandered back into the grove and left the grisly object on the pole to dominate obscenely the garden they had profaned.
Dixie leaned against the smooth sweet surface of the nanmu wood and listened, again, to the pleasantly soft sounds of waterfall and moving leaves and little bronze bells. Her face was chalk white; her thin hands lay limp in her lap; she knew, with an abrupt sensation of sinking, that she was profoundly tired. But in her brain burned still a cold white flame of excitement. Life, her instinct as the veriest child had informed her, was anything, everything, but the simple copybook pattern expounded by the naive folk of America and England. Life, as she critically saw it, was a complex of primitive impulses tempered by greeds, dreams and amazing subtleties. It was blindly possessive, carelessly repellent, creative and destructive in a breath, at once warm and cold, kindly and savage, impersonally heedless of the helpless human creatures that drifted hither and yon before the winds of chance. Cunning, in the world she saw about her, won always further than virtue, and often further than force.
She could not take her eyes, during a long period, from the hideous object on the pole. Her over-stimulated thoughts were reaching quickly, sharply, far in every direction. The feeling came, grew into belief, that she was, mysteriously, out of her danger. She felt the ropes of pearls under her blouse with an ecstatic little catch of the breath; and (finally) letting her eyes drop to that other ugly object on the steps beneath her, slowly opened her bag, drew out the bracelet watch (that the Manila Kid had given her out of an absurd hope) and fastened it about her wrist. And her eyes were bright with triumph.