Indiscreet Letters From Peking | Page 5

was irate and raised his fat hands above his fat person, took a discreet look around him, and then hinted that it was this Legation, the British Legation, which stopped the marines from coming.
The French Minister was quite irate, and after his discourse was ended he slipped quietly away--possibly to send some more telegrams. The crumbs of his conversation were soon gathered up and distributed and the conviviality somewhat damped. As yet, however, the Boxers are only laughed at and are not taken quite seriously. They have killed native Christians, it is true, and it has been proved conclusively now that it was they who murdered Brooks, the English missionary in Shantung. But Englishmen are cheap, since there is a glut in the home market, and their government merely gets angry with them when they get into trouble and are killed. So many are always getting killed in China.
So the Boxers, with half the governments of Europe, led by England, as we know by our telegrams, seeking to minimise their importance--in fact, trying to stifle the movement by ignoring it or lavishing on it their supreme contempt--have already moved from their particular habitat, which is Shantung, into the metropolitan province of Chihli. Already they are in some force at Chochou, only seventy miles to the southeast of Peking--always massacring, always advancing, and driving in bodies of native Christians before them on their march. Nobody cares very much, however, except a vicar apostolic, who urgently requests forty or fifty marines or sailors "to protect our persons and our chattels." Foolish bishop he is, is he not, when Christians have been expressly born to be massacred? Does he not know his history?
Lead on, blind ministers plenipotentiary and envoys extraordinary; lead on, with your eternal political situations in embryo, your eternal political situations that have not yet hatched out; while one that is more pregnant than any you have ever conceived is already born under your very noses and is being sniffed at by you. But no matter what happens outside, Peking is safe, that is your dictum, and the dictum of the day. So, yawning and somewhat tired of the evening's convivialities, we go our several ways home, in our Peking carts and our official chairs, and are soon lost in sleep--dreaming, perhaps, that we have been too long in this dry Northern climate, and that it is really affecting one's nerves.

III
OVERCAST SKIES
28th May, 1900.
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It is only four days since we discussed the Vicar Apostolic's letter, and laughed somewhat at French excitability; but in four days what a change! The cloud no bigger than your hand is now bigger than your whole body, bigger, indeed, than the combined bodies of all your neighbours, supposing you could spread them fantastically in great layers across the skies. What, then, has happened?
It is that the Boxers, christened by us, as you will remember, but two or three short weeks ago, have blossomed forth with such fierce growth that they have become the men of the hour to the exclusion of everything else, and were one to believe one tithe of the talk babbling all around, the whole earth is shaking with them. Yet it is a very local affair--a thing concerning only a tiny portion of a half-known corner of the world. But for us it is sufficiently grave. The Peking-Paotingfu railway is being rapidly destroyed; Fentai station, but six miles from Peking--think of it, only six miles from this Manchu holy of holies--has gone up in flames; a great steel bridge has succumbed to the destroying energy of dynamite. All the European engineers have fled into Peking; and, worst of all, the Boxer banners have been unfurled; and lo and behold, as they floated in the breeze, the four dread characters, "_Pao Ch'ing Mien Yang_," have been read on blood-red bunting--"Death and destruction to the foreigner and all his works and loyal support to the great Ching dynasty."
Is that sufficiently enthralling, or should I add that the invulnerability of the Boxer has been officially and indisputably tested by the Manchus, according to the gossip of the day? Proceeding to the Boxer camp at Chochou, duly authorised officers of the Crown have seen recruits, who have performed all the dread rites, and are initiated, stand fearlessly in front of a full-fledged Boxer; have seen that Boxer load up his blunderbuss with powder, ramming down a wad on top; have witnessed a handful of iron buckshot added, but with no wad to hold the charge in place; have noticed that the master Boxer gesticulated with his lethal weapon the better to impress his audience before he fired, but have not noticed that the iron buckshot tripped merrily out of the rusty barrel since no wad held it in place; and finally, when