man thoughtfully; “and if there is a row and things look like going against us, I keep one cartridge in my revolver for myself.” It does not seem much when I write it down, such things have I heard carelessly said many a time before, but when I, a foreigner and a solitary woman, was contemplating a trip up-country, they had a somewhat sinister sound.
On the other hand again and again have I heard men scout all idea of danger, men who have been up and down the country for years. And yet but yesterday, the day before I write these words, a man looked at his pretty young wife, she was sweetly pretty, and vowed vehemently, “I would not leave my wife and child alone for a night in our house just outside the Quarter for anything on earth. If anything did happen—and it might———” and he dropped his voice. There are some things that will not bear thinking about, and he had seen the looting of Nanking and the unfortunates who had died when they took the Woosung Forts. “We went to look after the wounded,” said he, “and there weren't any wounded. The savage Northern soldiery had seen to that.” And those whom they mutilated were their own people! What would they do to a foreigner in the event of an anti-foreign outbreak?
“Are you afraid?” I asked a man who certainly lived far enough away in the city. He looked at me curiously, as if he were going to say there was nothing to be afraid of, and then he changed his mind.
“Perhaps I am when I think of it,” said he; “but then you see, I don't think of it.”
And that is the average attitude, the necessary attitude, because no man can perpetually brood over the dangers that might assail him. Certain precautions he takes to safeguard himself, here are the nations armed to the teeth in the heart of a friendly country, and for the rest Quien sabe?
And I talked with all men, and while I was making preparations to go into the interior, had the good-fortune to see a quaint and curious pageant that took me back to Biblical days and made me remember how Vashti the Queen was cast down, and the beautiful Esther found favour in the sight of her lord, and how another tragic Hebrew Queen, going down to posterity with a name unjustly smirched and soiled, had once painted her face and tired her head, and looking out of the window had defied to the death her unfaithful servant. “Had Zimri peace who slew his master?”
CHAPTER V—THE FUNERAL OF AN EMPRESS
A good republican—The restricted Empire of the Manchus—Condign punishment—Babylon—An Adventurous Chinaman—The entrance to the Forbidden City—The courtyards of Babylon—A discordant and jarring note—Choirs of priests—A living Buddha—“The Swanee River”—The last note in bathos—Palace eunuchs—Out of hand—Afternoon tea—The funeral procession—The imperial bier—Quaint and strange and Eastern.
The Dowager-Empress of China, the unloved wife and widow of the late Emperor, died, so they gave out to the world, on the 22nd February, 1913, the day I arrived in China. As Empress, just one of the women of the Court chosen to please the ruler and to bear him children, his consort in China never seems to have had any particular standing. This Empress was overshadowed by her aunt, the great Dowager-Empress whom all the world knew, but once the Emperor was dead, as one of the guardians of the baby Emperor she came into a certain amount of power, for the position of Dowager-Empress seems to be an official one as, since her death, another woman who has never been wife to an Emperor has been appointed to the post.
The power has gone from the Manchus, but China is wedded to her past, nothing passes, so even the Chinese Republic, the men who barely a year before had ousted the Empress from her high estate, united in doing her honour at her obsequies.
“She was the best republican of us all,” said a Chinese gentleman, learned in the lore and civilisation of the West, “for she freely gave up her position that China might be free.”
It was a pretty way of putting it, but to me it seems doubtful whether anyone in over-civilised China trammelled with many conventions, is free, and it is hardly likely that a woman bred to think she had attained the most important position in the world that can fall to a woman's lot, would give it up freely for the good of a people she knew absolutely nothing about. All the Manchus rule over now are the courtyards and palaces of the Forbidden City, and there they are supreme. It is whispered that only a week before the day of which I write, a man was there beaten to death for having stolen something belonging to the dead Empress. So much for the love of the Manchus for freedom and enlightenment. It carries one back to the Middle Ages—further, to Babylon.
“They slew there mercilessly, and they also feasted—so did the representatives of the dead Empress hold high festival in her honour.
“The King made a feast unto all the people that were present in Shushan the palace, both unto great and small, seven days, in the Court in the garden of the King's palace.
“Where were white, green, and blue hangings fastened with cords of fine linen and purple to silver rings and pillars of marble, the beds were of gold and silver, upon a pavement of red, and blue, and white, and black marble.
"And they gave them drink in vessels of gold... and royal wine in abundance, according to the state of the King.”
So Ahasuerus the King entertained his people of Babylon, when Vashti the Queen fell, and of Babylon only could I think when, first I entered the Forbidden City.
Standing on the walls of Peking, a city of the plain, you look down upon twelve square miles of grey-tiled roofs, the roofs of one-storied houses hidden in the summertime by a forest of trees, but in the heart of the city are high buildings that stand out not only by reason of their height but because the roofs of golden-brown tiles, imperial yellow, gleam and glow in the sunlight. This is the Forbidden City where has dwelt for hundreds of years the Emperor of China, often he must have been the only man in it, and always it was closed to all save the immediate following of the Son of Heaven.
I never realised till I came to Peking that this forbidden ground was just as much an object of curiosity to the Chinese as it would have been to any European nation.
“I went in once,” said a Chinese gentleman to me, “when I was a young man.” He was only forty then.
“Were you invited?”
“No, no. I went secretly. I wanted to see what it was like.”
“But how?”
“I got the dress of a eunuch and I slipped in early one morning, and then, when I got in, I hardly dared move or breathe for fear someone should find me out. Then when no one took any notice of me I walked about and saw everything I could, but the last hour was the worst, I was terrified at the thought that I might not be able to get out.”
“And if you had been caught?”
He looked grave even then at the remembrance of that bygone desperate adventure.
“Oh death, certainly.”
“Death?”
“Yes,
