Indiscreet Letters From Peking | Page 9

in existence. He, like everyone of the hundreds
of thousands of Peking and the millions of North China, is
waiting--waiting more patiently than impatient Westerners, but waiting
just as anxiously; waiting with ear wide open to every rumour; waiting
with an eye on every shadow--to know whether the storm is going to
break or blow away. There is something disconcerting, startling,
unseemly in being waited on by those who you know are in turn
waiting on battle, murder, and sudden death. You feel that something
may come suddenly at any moment, and though you do not dare to
speak your thoughts to your neighbour, these thoughts are talking
busily to you without a second's interruption. For if this storm truly
comes, it must sweep everything before it and blot us all out in a
horrible way. Our servants tell us so.
These servants of polite Peking society are favoured mortals, for they
one and all are of the Eight Banners, direct descendants of the Manchu
conquerors of China. And, strangely enough, although they are thus
directly tied to the Manchu dynasty, and that some of them may be
even Red Girdles or lineal descendants of collateral branches of the
Imperial house, they are still more tightly tied to the foreigner because

they are Roman Catholic dating from the early days of Verbiest and
Schall, when the Jesuits were all supreme. On Sundays and feast days
they all proceed to the Vicar Apostolic's own northern cathedral, and
witness the Elevation of the Host to the discordant and strange sound of
Chinese firecrackers, a curious accompaniment, indeed, permitted only
by Catholic complacency. This they love more than the Throne.
Your Bannerman servant is now the medium of bringing in countless
rumours which he barefacedly alleges are facts, and in impressing on
you that everyone must certainly die unless we quickly act. The three
Roman Catholic Cathedrals of Peking, placed at three points of the
compass, are almost strategic centres surrounded by whole lanes and
districts of Catholics captured to the tenets of Christ, or that portion
deemed sufficient for yellow men, in ages gone by. Every household of
these people during the past few weeks has seen fellow-religionists
from the country places running in sorely distressed in body and mind,
and but ill-equipped in money and means for this impromptu escape to
the capital which everyone vainly hopes generally is to be a sanctuary.
The refugees, it is true, do not receive all the sympathy they expect, for
the Peking Catholic being the oldest and most mature in the eighteen
provinces of China, holds his head very high, and "new people"--that is,
those whose families have only been baptized, let us say, during the
nineteenth century--are somewhat disdained. In a word, the Peking
cathedrals and their Manchu and other adherents are the Blacks; and
not even in papal Rome could this aristocracy in religion be excelled.
But although the newcomers are disdained, their news is not.
Everything they say is believed. The servants, therefore, browsing
rumours wherever they go, bring back a curious hotchpotch after each
separate excursion. Sometimes the balance swings this way, sometimes
that; sometimes it is ominously black, sometimes only cloudy. You
never know what it will be ten minutes hence, and you must content
yourself as best you can. Your body-servant being a Bannerman (my
particular one is a Manchu), and being reasonably young, is also a
reservist of the Peking Field Force, and consorts with other Bannermen
who may be actually on guard at one of the Palace gates. Who passes in
and who passes out of the Palace now spreads like wildfire round the
whole city, for the success of the Boxers will depend upon the support

the Peking Government intends to give them when the worst comes to
the worst. And the Peking Government is still fencing, because the
Palace cannot make up its mind whether the time has really come when
it must act. This lack of decision is fatal.
Late in the afternoon it transpired that the Empress Dowager was not in
the Imperial city at all, but out at the Summer Palace on the
Wan-shou-shan--the hills of ten thousand ages, as these are poetically
called. Tung Fu-hsiang, whose ruffianly Kansu braves were marched
out of the Chinese city--that is the outer ring of Peking--two nights
before the Legation Guards came in, is also with the Empress, for his
cavalry banners, made of black and blue velvet, with blood-red
characters splashed splendidly across them, have been seen planted at
the foot of the hills. Tung Fu-hsiang is an invincible one, who stamped
out the Kansu rebellion a few years ago with such fierceness that his
name strikes terror to-day into every Chinese heart. As for P'i
Hsiao-li--the false eunuch--he is everywhere, they say, sometimes here,