Chapter II: The Two Goddesses of the Boxers

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.