IV

OUR GUARDS ARRIVE

31st May, 1900.

* * * * *

We had been dining out, a number of us, this evening, with result that the good wine and the good fare, for the Peking markets are admirable, left us reasonably content and in quite a valorous spirit.  The party I was at was neither very large nor very small; we were eighteen, to be exact, and the political situation was represented in all its gravity by the presence of a Minister and his spouse.  The former has always been pessimistic, and so we had Boxers for soup, Boxers with the entrees, and Boxers to the end.  In fact, if the truth be told, the Boxers surrounded us in a constant vapour of words so formidable that one might well have reason to be alarmed.  P——­, the Minister, was, indeed, very talkative and gesticulative; his wife was sad and sighed constantly—­elle poussait des soupirs tristes—­at the lurid spectacle her husband’s words conjured up.  According to him, anything was possible.  There might be sudden massacres in Peking itself—­the Chinese Government had gone mad.  Rendered more and more talkative by the wine and the good fare, he became alarming, menacing in the end.  But we became more and more valiant as we ate and drank.  That is always so.

It was all the guards’ fault.  Telegrams despatched in the morning from Tientsin distinctly told us that the guards were entraining; later news said the guards had actually started; and yet when we were almost through dinner, and it was nearly ten o’clock, there was not a sign of them.  That was the distressing point, and in the end, as it thrust itself more and more on people’s attention, the first great valour began to ooze.  For although the Guardian of the Nine Gates—­a species of Manchu warden or grand constable of Peking—­has been officially warned that foreign guards, whose arrival has been duly authorised by the Tsung-li Yamen, may be a little late and that consequently the Ch’ien Men, or the Middle Gate, should be kept open a couple of hours longer, the chief guardian may become nervous and irate and incontinently shut the gates.  This alone might provoke an outbreak.

This train of thought once started, we busily followed it up, and soon all the wives were sighing in unison more heavily than ever.  I shall always remember what happened at that psychological moment.  A strip of red-lined native writing-paper was placed in somebody’s hands with a long list of the different detachments which had just passed in through the Main Gate.  At last the guards had arrived.  Speedily we became very valorous again.  P——­ afterwards said that he knew something which he had not dared to tell any one—­not even his secretaries.

From this little list, it was soon clear that the British, French, Russian, American, Italian, and Japanese detachments had arrived.  The Germans and the Austrians were missing, but we concluded that they would arrive by another train within very few hours.  The important point was that men had been allowed to come through—­that the Chinese Government, in spite of its enormous capacity for mischief, could not yet have made up its mind how to act.  That consoled us.