Part 11

Through the twisted branches of the cedars the horizon, which is occasionally visible, is all green, turning to an autumn brown. It is a wood, an infinite wood, out of which here and there roofs of yellow faience emerge. This wood is Pekin; not at all as one imagines it, but Pekin seen from the top of a very sacred place where no Europeans were ever allowed to come.

The rocky soil grows thinner and thinner as one rises toward the "big devil of China," as one approaches the peak of the isolated cone known as the Island of Jade.

This morning I meet, as I climb, a curious band of pilgrims who are coming down; they are Lazarist missionaries in mandarin costume, wearing long queues. With them are several young Chinese Catholic priests who seem frightened at being there; as though, in spite of the Christianity superimposed upon their hereditary beliefs, they were committing some sacrilege by their very presence in so forbidden a spot.

At the foot of the dungeon which crowns these rocks is the kiosk of faience and marble where the "big devil" dwells. It is high up on a narrow terrace in the pure, clear air, from which one overlooks a mass of trees scarcely veiled to-day by the usual mist of dust and sun.

I enter the kiosk where the "big devil" stands, the sole guest of this aerial region. Oh, horrible creature that he is! He is of superhuman size, cast in bronze. Like Shiva, god of death, he dances on dead bodies; he has five or six atrocious faces whose multiplied grins are almost intolerable; he wears a collar of skulls, and is gesticulating with forty arms that hold instruments of torture or heads severed from their bodies.

Such is the protecting divinity chosen by the Chinese to watch over this city, and placed high above all their pyramidal faience roofs, high above all their pagodas and towers, as we in times of faith would have placed the Christ or the Blessed Virgin. It is a tangible symbol of their profound cruelty, the index of the inexplicable cleft in the brain of these people ordinarily so tractable and gentle, so open to the charm of little children and of flowers, but who are capable all at once of gleefully becoming executioners and torturers of the most horrible description.

At my feet Pekin seems like a wood! I had been told of this incomprehensible effect, but my expectations are surpassed. Outside of the parks in the Imperial City, it has not seemed to me that there were many trees around the houses, that is, in the gardens and in the streets. But from here all is submerged in green. Even beyond the walls whose black outlines may be seen in the distance there are more woods,--endless woods. Toward the east alone lies the gray desert which I came through that snowy morning, and toward the north rise the Mongolian mountains, charming, translucent, and purple against the pale blue sky.

The great straight arteries of the city, drawn according to a singular plan, with a regularity and an amplitude to be found in none of the European capitals, resemble, from the point where I stand, the avenues in a forest,--avenues bordered by various complicated, delicate little fretwork houses of gray pasteboard or of gilt paper. Many of these arteries are dead; in those which are still living, this fact is indicated from my point of view by the constant moving of little brown animals along the earth, recalling the migration of ants; these caravans, which move slowly and quietly away, are scattered to the four corners of China.

* * * * *

A feeling that is akin to regret is mingled with my afternoon's work in the solitude of my lofty palace,--regret for what is about to end, for I am now on the eve of departure. And it will be an end without any possible beginning again, for if I should return to Pekin this palace would be closed to me, or, in any case, I should never again find here such charming solitude.

Yet this distant, inaccessible spot, of which it once would have seemed madness to say that I should ever make it my dwelling-place, has already become very familiar to me, as well as all that belongs here and all that has happened here,--the presence of the great alabaster goddess in the dark temple, the daily visit of the cat, the silence of the surroundings, the mournful light of the October sun, the agonies of the last butterflies as they beat against my window-panes, the manoeuvres of the sparrows whose nests are in the enamelled roofs, the blowing of the dead leaves, and the fall of the little balsam needles on the pavement of the esplanade whenever the wind blows. What a strange destiny, when you think of it, has made me master here for a few days!

The splendors of our long gallery in the Palace of the North are a thing of the past. It is already divided by light wooden partitions which may be removed without difficulty if ever the Empress thinks of returning, but which, for the time being, cut it up into rooms and offices. There are still a few magnificent bibelots in the part which is to be the general's salon, but elsewhere it has all been simplified; the silks, the pottery, the screens, the bronzes, duly catalogued, have been removed to a storehouse. Our soldiers have even found European seats among the palace reserves, which they have taken to the future apartments of the staff to make them more habitable. They consist of sofas and arm-chairs, vaguely Henry II. in style, covered with old-gold plush that reminds one of a provincial hotel.

I expect to leave to-morrow morning. When the dinner hour unites us once again, Captain C. and I, seated at our little ebony table, both feel a touch of melancholy at seeing how things have changed about us, and how quickly our dream of being Chinese sovereigns is over.

MONDAY, October 29.

I have postponed my departure for twenty-four hours in order to meet General Vayron, who returns to Pekin this evening, and undertake his commissions for the admiral. So I have an unexpected half-day to spend in my high mirador, and hope for a last visit from my cat, who will find me no more in my accustomed place, neither to-morrow nor ever again. It is now growing colder each day, so that in any case my work-room would not be possible much longer.

Before the doors of this palace close behind me forever I want to take a last walk into all the windings of the terraces, into all the kiosks, so dainty and so charming, in which the Empress no doubt concealed her reveries and her amours.

* * * * *

As I go to take leave of the great white goddess,--the sun already setting, and the roofs of the Violet City bathed in the red golds of evening,--I find the aspect of things about here changed; the soldiers who were on guard at the gate have climbed to the top and are putting her house in order; they have carried off the thousand and one boxes of porcelains and girandoles, the broken vases and the bouquets, and have carefully swept the place. The alabaster goddess, deliciously pale in her golden robes, still smiles, more than ever solitary in her empty temple.

The sun of this last day sets in little wintry clouds that are cold to look at, and the Mongolian wind makes me shiver in my thick cloak as I cross the Marble Bridge on my return to the Palace of the North, where the general with his escort of cavalry has just arrived.

TUESDAY, October 30.

On horseback, at seven in the morning, a changelessly beautiful sun and an icy wind. I start off with my two servants, young Toum, and a small escort of two African chasseurs, who will accompany me as far as my junk. We have about six kilometres to cover before reaching the dreary country. We first cross the Marble Bridge, then, leaving the great Imperial wood, pass through ruined, squalid Pekin in a cloud of dust.

At length, after going through the deep gates in the high outer ramparts, we reach the outside desert, swept by a terrible wind; and here the enormous Mongolian camels, with lions' manes, perpetually file past in a procession, making our horses start with fear.

We reach Tong-Tchow in the afternoon, and silently cross it, ruined and dead, until we come to the banks of the Pei-Ho. There I find my junk under the care of a soldier,--the same junk that brought me from Tien-Tsin with all the necessities for our life on the water intact. Nothing has been taken during my absence but my stock of pure water,--a serious loss for us, but a pardonable theft at a time like this, when the river water is full of danger for our soldiers. As for us, we can drink hot tea.

We call at the office of the commissary to get our rations and to have our papers signed; then we pull up our anchor from the infected bank that breathes of pestilence and death, and begin to float down the river toward the sea.

Although it is colder than it was coming up, it is almost amusing to take up a nomadic life again in our little sarcophagus with its matting roof, and to plunge once more, as night falls, into the immense green solitude of the dark banks as we glide along between them.

WEDNESDAY, October 31.

The morning sun shines on the bridge of a junk that is covered with a thin coating of ice. The thermometer marks 8° above zero, and the wind blows, cruel and violent, but health-giving, we feel sure.

We have the swift current with us, so that the desolate shores, with their ruins and their dead, slip by much more rapidly than on our other journey. We walk on the tow-path from morning until night in order to keep warm, almost abreast of the Chinese who are pulling the rope. There is a fulness of physical life in the wind; one feels light and full of energy.

THURSDAY, November 1.

Our boat trip lasts only forty-eight hours this time, and we have but two frosty nights to sleep under a matting roof through which the shining stars are visible, for toward the end of the second day we enter Tien-Tsin.

Tien-Tsin, where we have to find a shelter for the night, is horribly repopulated since our last stay here. It takes us almost two hours to row across the immense city, working our way amongst myriads of canoes and junks. Both banks are crowded with Chinese, howling, gesticulating, buying, and selling, in spite of the fact that few of the walls or roofs of the houses are left intact.

FRIDAY, November 2.

In spite of the cold wind and the dust, which continues to blow pitilessly, we arrive at Taku,--horrible city,--at the mouth of the river, by mid-day. But alas! it will be impossible to join the squadron to-day; the tides are unfavorable, the bar in bad condition, the sea too high. Perhaps to-morrow or the next day.

I had almost had time to forget the difficulties and uncertainties of life in this place,--the perpetual anxiety in regard to the weather, the concern for this or that boat laden with soldiers or supplies, which is running some danger outside or which may founder on the bar; complications and dangers of all sorts connected with the disembarking of troops,--a thing which seems so simple when looked at from a distance, but which is surrounded by a world of difficulties in such places.

SATURDAY, November 3.

_En route_ this morning for the squadron out on the open sea. At the end of a half hour the sinister shore of China disappears behind us, and the smoke-stacks of the iron-clads begin to pour forth their black smoke upon the horizon. We fear we shall have to turn back, the weather is so bad.

Dripping with fog, however, we arrive at last, and I jump aboard the _Redoutable_, where my comrades, with no taste of high life in China to break the monotony, have been at work for forty days.

FOOTNOTE:

[1] Monsignor Jarlin, the coadjutor of Monsignor Favier.

V

RETURN TO NING-HIA

Six weeks later. A cold and gloomy morning. After having been at Tien-Tsin, Pekin, and other places, where so many strange and gloomy things have come to our notice, here we are back again at Ning-Hia, which we have had time to forget; our boat has gone back to its old moorings, and we return to the French fort.

It is cold and dull; autumn, which is so severe in these parts, has brought with it sudden frosts; the birches and willows have lost all their leaves, and the sky is cold and lowering.

The Zouaves who are living in the fort, and who came so light-heartedly only a month ago to take the place of our sailors, have already buried some of their number, who died of typhus or were shot. This very morning we have paid the last honors to two of them, killed by Russian balls in a particularly tragic manner, all the result of a mistake.

The sandy roads strewn with yellow leaves are solitary. The Cossacks have evacuated their camps and disappeared to the other side of the Great Wall, in the direction of Manchuria. The agitation of the earlier days is over, as well as the confusion and the joyous crowds; all have gone into winter quarters in the places assigned to them, and as the peasants of the vicinity have not returned, their villages are abandoned and empty.

The fort, though still ornamented with Chinese emblems, now bears a French name; it is called "Fort Admiral-Pottier." As we entered trumpets resounded for the admiral, and the Zouaves, ranged under the guns, looked with respectful sorrow at their chief, who had just honored with his presence the funeral services of two soldiers.

As soon as we cross the threshold we feel quite unexpectedly as though we were on French soil; it would be hard to say by what spell these Zouaves have made of this place and its surroundings in one short month, something which is like a bit of home.

There have been no great changes; they have been content with removing Chinese filth, with putting the war supplies in order, with whitewashing their quarters, and with organizing a bakery where the bread has a good smell, and a hospital where the many wounded, alas, and the sick, sleep on very clean little camp beds. All this at once and quite inexplicably creates a feeling that one is in France again.

In the court of honor in the centre of the fort, in front of the door leading to the room where the mandarin is enthroned, two gun-carriages stand, unharnessed. Their wheels are decorated with leaves and they are covered over with white sheets, upon which are scattered poor little bouquets fastened on with pins. They are the last flowers from the neighboring Chinese gardens,--poor chrysanthemums and stunted roses touched by the frost, all arranged with touching care and kindly soldierly awkwardness, for the dead comrades who lie there on these carriages in coffins covered with the French flag.

It is a surprise to find this vast mandarin's room transformed by the Zouaves into a chapel. A strange chapel truly! On the whitewashed walls the vests of Chinese soldiers are fastened up and arranged like trophies with sabres and poniards, while the candlesticks that stand on the white altar-cloth are made of shell and bayonets,--thus naïvely and charmingly does the soldier know how to manage when he is in exile.

A military mass begins with trumpet blasts that make the Zouaves fall upon their knees; mass is said by the chaplain of the squadron, in mourning dress,--a mass for the dead, for the two who are asleep on the wagons near the door decorated with late flowers. From the court Bach's Prelude, played on muffled brass, rises like a prayer, the dominant note in this mingling of home and foreign land, of funeral service and gray morning.

Then they depart for a near-by enclosure which we have turned into a cemetery. Mules are harnessed to the heavy gun-carriages, the admiral himself leading the procession along the sandy paths where the Zouaves form a double row, presenting arms.

The sun does not pierce the autumn clouds that lower this morning over the burial of these children of France. It is cold and gloomy, and the birches and willows of the desolate country continue to drop their leaves upon us.

This improvised cemetery, surrounded by so much that is exotic, has also taken on a French air,--no doubt because of the brave home names inscribed on wooden crosses that mark the new-made graves; because of pots of chrysanthemums brought by comrades to these sad mounds of earth. And yet just beyond the wall which protects our dead, that other wall which rises and is indefinitely prolonged into the gray November country, is the Great Wall of China; and we are in exile far, frightfully far from home.

Now the coffins have been lowered, each one to its hole, adding to the already long row of new-made graves; all the Zouaves approach in serried rank while their commandant recalls in a few words how these two fell.

"It was not far from here. The company was marching without suspicion in the direction of a fort from which the Russian flag had just been hoisted, when suddenly balls began to rain like hail. The Russians behind their ramparts were new-comers who had not seen the Zouaves, and who mistook their red hats for the caps of the Boxers. Before they recognized their mistake several of our men lay on the ground; seven, one of them a captain, were wounded, and these two were dead. One of them was the sergeant who waved our flag in an effort to stop the firing."

Then the admiral addresses the Zouaves, whose eyes, all in a row, are filled with tears; and as he steps forward upon the pile of loose earth so that he may reach the graves with his sword, and says to those who lie there, "I salute you as soldiers for the last time," a real sob is audible, heartfelt, and unrestrained, from the breast of a big hearty fellow who looks to be not the least brave among those in the ranks.

* * * * *

Beside all this, how pitifully, how ironically empty are many of the pompous ceremonies at official burials with their fine discourses!

In these times of weakness and mediocrity, when nothing is sacred and the future is full of fear, happy are they who are cut down where they stand; happy are they who, young and pure, fall for the sake of adorable dreams of country and of honor, who are borne away wrapped in the modest flag of their country and greeted as soldiers with simple words that bring tears to the eyes.

VI

PEKIN IN SPRINGTIME

I

THURSDAY, April 18, 1901.

The terrible Chinese winter which has pursued us for four months in this ice-filled gulf of Pekin is over, and here we are again at our wretched post, having returned with the spring to the thick and yellow waters at the mouth of the Pei-Ho.

To-day wireless telegraphy, by a series of imperceptible vibrations gathered at the top of the _Redoutable's_ mast, informs us that the palace of the Empress, occupied by Field-Marshal von Waldersee, was burned last night, and that the German chief-of-staff perished in the flames.

We were the only ones of all the allied squadrons who received this notice, and the admiral at once ordered me to depart for Pekin to offer his condolences, and to represent him at the funeral ceremonies.

There was just twenty-five minutes for my preparations, for the packing of luggage, great and small; for the boat which must take me ashore cannot wait without risk of missing the tide, and so being unable to cross the bar of the river to-night. At the end of an hour my foot is on the soil of horrible Taku, near the French quarter, where I must spend the night.

FRIDAY, April 19.

The railway destroyed by the Boxers has been rebuilt, and the train which I take this morning goes straight to Pekin, arriving there about four o'clock this afternoon,--a rapid and commonplace journey, very different from the one I made at the beginning of winter by junk and on horseback.

The spring rains have not begun; the chill verdure of May, the sorghos and the young willows, later than they are in our climate, emerge with great difficulty from the dry soil and cast a hesitating shadow upon the Chinese plains, powdered with gray dust and burned by an already torrid sun.

And how different is the appearance of Pekin! The first time we approached it, not by the superhuman ramparts of the Tartar City, but by those of the Chinese City, less imposing and less sombre.

To my surprise the train passes right through a fresh breach in the wall, enters the heart of the town, and lands one at the door of the Temple of Heaven. It seems that it is the same with the line from Pao-Ting-Fou; the Babylonian enclosure has been pierced, and the railroad enters Pekin and comes to an end only at the imperial quarters. What unheard-of changes the Celestial Emperor will find if he ever returns!--locomotives whistling and running right through this old capital of stability and decay.

On the platform of the temporary station there was an almost joyous animation, and many Europeans, too, were on hand to meet the incoming travellers.

Among the numerous officers who were there is one whom I recognize, although I never have seen him, and toward whom I advance spontaneously,--Colonel Marchand, the well-known hero, who arrived in Pekin last November, after I had left. We take a carriage together bound for the French quarter, where I am to be entertained.

The general quarters are a league away, still in the small Palace of the North, which was known to me in its Chinese splendor, and of whose earlier transformations I was a witness. The colonel himself lives near by in the Rotunda Palace, and we discover in the course of conversation that he has chosen for his private dwelling the same kiosk which I used for my work-room last season.

We make the trip by way of the grand avenue used by processions and emperors, through the triple gates in the colossal red walls under the murderous dungeon; over the marble bridges between great grinning marble lions, and between ivory-colored obelisks surmounted by animals out of dreamland.

And when, after the jolting, the noise, and the crowds, our carriage glides at last over the large paving-stones of the Yellow City, all this magnificence seems to me, on second sight, more than ever condemned,--a thing which has had its day. Imperial Pekin, in its everlasting dust, is now warmed by the rays of the April sun, yet it does not waken, does not return to life after its long, cold winter. Not a drop of rain has fallen yet, the ground is dust, the parks are dust.

The old cedars, black and powdery, seem like the mummies of trees, whilst the green of the monotonous willows is just beginning to appear in the terrible ashen-white sunshine.

The highest roofs rise toward a clear sky which is a mixture of heat and light,--pyramids of gold-colored faience whose age and dilapidation are more evident than ever amid the green and the birds'-nests. The Chinese storks have come back with the spring, and are perched in rows along the highest parts of the great roofs, on the precious tiles, among the horns and claws and enamelled monsters; they are small, motionless white creatures,--half lost in the dazzling whiteness of the sky,--who seem to be meditating on the destruction of the city as they contemplate the dismal dwellings at their feet. Really I find that Pekin has aged since autumn, aged a century or two; the April sunshine emphasizes all this and classes it definitely among the hopeless ruins. One feels that its end has come, and that there is no possible resurrection for it.

SATURDAY, April 20.

The funeral of General Schwarzhof, one of the greatest enemies of France, took place at nine o'clock this morning under a torrid sun; he came to a most unexpected end here in this Chinese palace just as he seemed about to become quartermaster-general of the German army.

The entire palace was not burned, only that superb part where he and the marshal lived,--the apartments with the incomparable ebony woodwork and the throne room filled with _chefs-d'oeuvre_ of ancient art.