SUNDAY, October 14.
An old Chinese woman, wrinkled as a winter apple, timidly opens the
door at which we have loudly knocked. It stands in the deep shadow of
a narrow passageway exhaling unhealthy fetid smells, between walls
blackened by filth, where one feels as shut in as in the heart of a
prison.
The old woman, an enigmatical figure, looks us all over with a
blank impenetrable gaze; then recognizing among us the chief of the
international police, she silently steps aside and permits us to enter.
We follow her into a dark little court. Poor late autumn flowers are
growing in the old walls, and we breathe faint sickly odors.
We are a group of officers, three French, two English, and one Russian,
who are there clearly by right of conquest.
Our conductor is a strange creature, balancing on the tips of her
incredibly small feet. Her gray hair fastened with long pins is so
tightly drawn back that it seems to raise her eyes unduly. Her dark
dress is indefinite in color, but her parchment-like face bears to a
high degree that something appertaining to a worn-out race, which we
are wont to call distinction. She appears to be only a servant, yet
her aspect, her carriage, are disconcerting; some mystery broods over
her, she seems like a refined matron who has resorted to a shameful
clandestine occupation. This whole place, moreover, is difficult to
describe to those who do not know it.
Beyond the court is a sordid vestibule, then a door painted black,
with a Chinese inscription consisting of two big red letters. Without
knocking, the old woman draws the bolt and opens it.
We may be mistaken, but we have come in all good faith to pay a visit
to _two goddesses_,--prisoners kept shut up in this palace. For here
we are in the common, the lower dependencies, the secret places of the
palace of the viceroy of Petchili, and to reach this spot we have had
to pass over the immense desolation of a town with cyclopean walls
which is at present only a mass of débris and dead bodies.
The animation of these ruins, accidentally peopled by joyous soldiers,
is singular, unique, on this Sunday, which is a holiday in camp and
barracks. In the long streets filled with wreckage of all kinds,
Zouaves and African chasseurs, arm-in-arm with Germans in pointed
helmets, pass gaily between the walls of roofless houses. There are
little Japanese soldiers, shining and automatic, Russians with flat
caps, plumed Bersaglieri, Austrians, Americans with big felt hats, and
Indian cavalrymen with enormous turbans. All the flags of Europe are
floating over the ruins of Tien-Tsin, which has been partitioned by
the allied armies. In certain quarters the Chinese who have gradually
returned, after their flight, have established bazars in the open air
in the lovely sunshine of this autumn Sunday,--bazars where in the
midst of incendiary ashes they sell to the soldiers articles picked
up in the ruins, porcelains, jars, silk dresses, furs. There are so
many of these soldiers, so many uniforms of every kind on our route, so
many sentinels presenting arms, that we grow weary returning the many
salutes received as we pass through this unheard-of babel.
At the farther side of the destroyed city, near the high ramparts in
front of the palace of the viceroy, where we are going to see the
goddesses, some Chinese, undergoing torture in a kind of pillory,
are lined up along the wall, with inscriptions above them describing
their offences. Two pickets guard the doors with bayonetted guns, one
an American, the other a Japanese, standing alongside of the horrible
grinning old stone monsters who watch, crouching, on either side of the
entrance.
There is nothing sumptuous, nothing great in this dusty, decrepit
palace which we have traversed unheeding, but it speaks of real China,
of old China, grimacing and hostile. There is a profusion of monsters
in marble, in broken faience, and in worm-eaten wood, falling to pieces
from sheer old age or threatening from the edges of roofs to do so;
frightful forms half buried in sand and ashes, with horns, claws,
forked tongues, and big squinting eyes.
In the grim walled court a few late roses are still in blossom under
trees a century old.
Now, after various turns along badly lighted passages, we reach the
goddesses' door,--the one marked with two big red letters. The old
Chinese woman, ever mute and mysterious, with head held high but with
lifeless eyes persistently downcast, pushes open the black doors, with
a gesture of submission which means: "Here they are, look at them!"
In a room which is almost dark and where the evening sun never enters,
two poor girls, two sisters who look alike, are seated with bowed
heads amid lamentable disorder, in positions indicative of supreme
consternation,--one on a chair, the other on the edge of an ebony bed
which they must share at night. They are dressed in humble black, but
here and there on the floor are scattered shining silks and tunics
embroidered in big flowers and gold chimæras,--the garments they put
on when going to meet the armies, in the midst of whistling bullets on
days of battle,--their attire as warriors and goddesses.
For they are a kind of Jeanne d'Arc,--if it is not blasphemy to
pronounce a name of almost ideal purity in this connection,--they are
the goddesses of the incomprehensible Boxers, so atrocious and at the
same time so admirable: hysterical creatures, exciting both the hatred
and terror of the foreigner, who one day fled without fighting in a
panic of fear, and the next with the shrieks of the possessed threw
themselves straight into the face of death, under a shower of bullets
from troops ten times as numerous as themselves.
The goddesses, taken prisoners, are the property, the curious bibelot,
if one may use the word, of the seven Allies. They are not badly
treated. They are merely shut up for fear they will commit suicide,
which has become a fixed idea with them. What will be their fate?
Already their captors are tired of seeing them and don't know what to
do with them.
On a day of defeat the junk in which they sought refuge was surrounded,
and they, with their mother, who followed them everywhere, threw
themselves into the water. The soldiers fished them out fainting. The
goddesses after much care came to their senses. But the mamma never
again opened her oblique old Chinese eyes. The girls were made to
believe that she had been taken to a hospital and would soon come back.
At first the prisoners were brave, animated, haughty, and always well
dressed. But this very morning they have been told that their mother is
no more, and it is that which has stunned them, like a physical blow.
Having no money to buy mourning dress, which in China is always white,
they asked to be allowed white leather shoes--which at this moment
cover their doll-like feet, and which are as essential here as the
crape veil is with us.
They are both slender and of a waxen pallor, scarcely pretty, but
with a certain grace, a certain charm as they stand there, one in
front of the other, without tears, with drooping eyes and with arms
falling straight at their sides. They do not raise their eyes even to
ascertain who enters or what is wanted of them. They do not stir as we
come in, nothing matters to them now. They await death, indifferent to
everything.
They inspire in us an unlooked-for respect by the dignity of their
despair, respect and infinite compassion. We have nothing to say to one
another, and are as embarrassed at being there as though we had been
guilty of some indiscretion.
It occurred to us to put some money on the disordered bed; but one of
the sisters, while appearing not to see us, threw the pieces of silver
onto the floor and with a gesture invited the servant to dispose of
them as she wished. So that this was on our part a further mistake.
There is such an abyss of misunderstanding between European officers
and Boxer goddesses that it is impossible to show our sympathy for
them in any way. So we, who came to be amused by a curious sight,
depart in silence with a tightening of the heartstrings at the thought
of the two poor creatures imprisoned in a gloomy room in the fading
evening light.
* * * * *
My junk, with five Chinese aboard, will go up the river under the
French flag, which is already a protection. The war department has
decided it to be more prudent--although my servant and I are armed--to
send two soldiers with us, two men with horses carrying guns and
munitions.
Beyond Tien-Tsin, where I have spent another day, one may go an hour
further by train in the direction of Pekin, as far as the town of
Yang-Soon. My junk, with two soldiers, Toum, and the baggage, will
await me there at a bend in the river, and has gone on ahead to-day
with a military escort.
I dine this evening with the consul-general, the one who escaped being
shot almost by miracle, although his flag was for a long time, during
the siege, a mark for the Chinese gunners.