CHAPTER XIIJOGGING ABOUT PEKING
There are various ways of getting about Peking, even though it lacks the principal one of most large cities in other lands; but of them all I like best riding “Hwei-Hwei.” He is the robust, shaggy-red little Chinese pony I brought back from one of my trips into the interior, and if he has not yet learned to look with equanimity upon a scrap of paper or a wheedling beggar that suddenly springs up at him, at least he can pass an automobile now without filling the timid hearts of all Chinese within gunshot with speechless panic. “Hwei-Hwei” and I have jogged together all over Peking and its surroundings, nosing our way through thehutungsand prancing down the broad streets of the Chinese as well as the Tartar City, exploring every sunken road and meandering path within reasonable distance outside the walls. I am under the impression that this is improper. Though the élite among the foreign residents play polo on the French drill-field and scamper over the broken landscape about the capital on Sunday afternoon paper-chases, even canter solemnly up and down the new cinder track at the edge of the Legation Quarter, each followed at a respectful distance by themafuwho will presently walk the blanketed and almost shaven native imitations of thoroughbreds slowly up and down before some improvised stable, I gather from the glances that are thrown sharply upon us that mere sight-seeing on horseback is not in accordance with the Peking social code. I am heartbroken, naturally, at the thought of infringing that vital document; but the opportunity of indulging in a luxury I have never before dared even to consider has outweighed even that consideration.
The truth of the matter is that keeping a riding-horse is a luxury even in Peking. “Hwei-Hwei’s” complete care and nourishment cost just twice what one human servant does; yet the reflection that this is, after all, only “Mex” and only relative has so far been sufficient to stifle the grumblings of a troublesome conscience. I suppose, too, there is a certain subconscious complacency in looking down, even from “Hwei-Hwei’s” height, upon the throngs with which we mingle in placeswhere perhaps no other foreigner, and surely no Chinese, has ever before intruded on horseback. Certainly I must confess that I find pleasure in watching the continuous succession of acrobatic feats with which Pekingese of all ages and degrees remove themselves from the immediate vicinity the instant it is borne in upon them that they are mingling with an animal that I can guarantee not to hurt an infant thrown under his very hoofs.
Outdoor fairs, seasonal markets, temples without number, corners unknown even to our Chinese teacher, have “Hwei-Hwei” and I explored together. But there is a line beyond which his advantages over Peking’s more common means of transportation cease. Even if it is possible to park him outside those ugly buildings in which China’s Parliament flings ink-wells at itself and refuses to draft a constitution even after it has voted itself a daily bonus for attending the sessions, he can scarcely expect admittance to the Forbidden City, or ask an evening hostess to find accommodations for him. When “Hwei-Hwei” must remain at home there are various substitutes, but only one of them is really feasible. Sedan-chairs, in these modern days, are only for brides and mourners, or the emperor himself; there are jolting Peking-carts which it would be infantile yet exactly descriptive to dub “peek-out” carts; mule-litters like gaily decorated cupboards on shafts come in at least from the northeast; on the moats outside the walls there are boats in summer and sleds in winter—except when the men laying up ice in mat- and mud-covered mounds along them deprive their fellow-coolies of this simple source of income; bicycles are not unknown; curious little one-horse carriages with shutters, and an outrunner who clings on behind whenever a corner or a crowd does not bring him running ahead to lead the horse or to shout the road clear, are still the favorite equipage of old-fashioned families of means. But none of these things ply the streets for hire; if they did they would be beneath the dignity of foreigners, and probably of many Chinese unconsciously under their influence. Ordinary mortals cannot call an automobile every time they wish to go around the corner, even if their nerves are proof against the madness of Chinese chauffeurs. Promoted only yesterday from the abject position of coolies, these conceive that they always have the right of way over anything they could best in a collision—an impression in which they are abetted by the police who, with outstretched hand, gaze only at the machine, like men fascinated, as it dashes drunkenly past through the maelstrom of pedestrians and other helpless forms of traffic—and, evidently gaining “face” thereby,they delight to make life a constant misery to the passenger by the incessant use of those atrocious horns that seem especially to be exported to China. So it boils down to the omnipresent rickshaw.
We often wondered how many rickshaws there are in Peking, until at length the metropolitan police reported that they had registered 41,553 such vehicles, of which 4,788 are private. Even if this really includes all those within the gates, there are thousands more in the dozen villages clustered close outside them, whence men run to places many miles distant. We still wonder how Peking got about in the imperial days before an American missionary in Japan, wishing to give his invalid wife a daily airing, invented the rickshaw. As late as the beginning of the present century, old residents tell us, this vehicle was unknown in the capital. To-day it is the most numerous, or at least the most conspicuous, thing in Peking.
Who but a man gone mad on the matter of speed would not prefer the rickshaw to the automobile after all? Silent on its pneumatic tires and the soft-shod feet of the runner, it is the most nearly like sitting at home in an arm-chair of any form of transportation. There is no formality about it; even the man who does not keep one for his exclusive use scarcely needs to call one, for it is a strange corner of Peking where a rickshaw is not already waiting whenever he steps out. Once in a rickshaw one can leave it to the runner to arrive at the right place, and turn the mind to the streets and their doings. It is not merely “Ha-li” who is so fond of “widin’ man,” though he is the only one of us who shouts aloud at each donkey and big stone “pup dog” we pass, especially at the camels as they stride noiselessly by along the wall or through a city gate, whenever we ride hither and yon about busy yet good-natured Peking.
The police go on to say that from sixty to seventy thousand rickshaw coolies earn an average of a hundred coppers a day, of which about seventy are for themselves and their families after deducting the rent of the vehicle. That means a daily income of nearly twenty cents in real money, which is high in Peking. An official inquiry, by the way, reported during the winter that the minimum on which a Chinese adult could support life in the capital is $1.87 “Mex” a month! One particularly cold winter, foreigners, especially women, almost ceased to patronize rickshaws, not so much for their own sake as for that of the poor fellows who sat outside waiting for them, and sometimes froze to death. It devolved upon the police to call their attention to the fact that death by starvation is even more painful, and is likely to includethe dependents also. I suppose that same omniscient body could say how many persons starve to death in Peking each winter; at any rate they once announced how many hundreds of free coffins they had been called upon to provide since cold weather set in.
Perhaps the constant sight of starvation more or less close upon their heels is the reason that Peking rickshaw-men are such excellent runners. They never slow down to a walk, as the much better paid ones of Japan, for instance, do on the slightest provocation. If the trot from our corner to Hsi-Chi-men station, diagonally across the Tartar City, is too much for one of them he turns his fare over to an unoccupied colleague when he is exhausted rather than disgrace himself by walking. Yet I have almost never seen a well built rickshaw-man in Peking. Their ribs show plainly through their leathery skins, and they are conspicuously flat-chested, in contrast to the men all about China who carry burdens over their shoulders. The belief that rickshaw-runners die young and often is wide-spread, especially in lands that have never seen one. The only personal testimony I can offer on the subject is that during this year in the Orient I have never seen, or heard of, a man dying in the shafts, and that there are many jobs in China that I would quickly refuse in favor of drawing a rickshaw. Certainly many runners, not to mention the vehicles themselves, reach a ripe old age in Peking; and there is evidence that they do not take up the profession late in life.
Some one once wrote asking us to send a copy of the child labor laws of China. When we had recovered from the resultant hysterics I went out to photograph some of the smallest specimens of rickshaw-runners along Great Hata-men Street for the benefit of the inquirer. Unfortunately a good example and photographic conditions never have coincided. I do not wish to be charged with exaggeration, and hence I will not assert that I have seen two boys of six or a single one of eight trotting about town with a big fat sample of the Chinese race lolling at his ease behind them; but I have no hesitancy in reporting that male children of eight and ten respectively may often be seen thus engaged. Perhaps these are house-servants or their offspring, or even members of the family itself, forced into service; more than once I have been sure of a facial resemblance between the perspiring youngsters and the unsoaped old lady who was urging them on. Often a small boy runs behind, pushing, who is hardly as tall as the hub of the wheel, but perhaps that is a form of apprenticeship. Recently there has been some agitation against employing rickshaw pullers under eighteen,though apparently only among foreigners. The Chinese of the rank and file bargain for their rides as they stump along, pretending they will walk rather than pay more than they are offering, and naturally they wish to be surrounded by as many clamoring competitors as possible. If the lowest bidder chances to be a child just heavy enough to keep the passenger from toppling over backward, or an old man who looks as if he had been unwisely rescued from the potter’s field,bu yao gin—it does not matter, for the average Chinese hardly distinguishes between real speed and a steady jogging up and down almost in the same spot.
In contrast to these sorry dregs of the profession are the haughty men in the prime of life who run on a monthly wage for foreigners, or for Chinese of wealth and official position, some of them in livery and with clanging bells and blazing lamps that attest their importance. The tall youth who runs with a physically light-weight young lady of our acquaintance always calls a rickshaw when he wishes to go out on a personal errand. Well fed and not overworked, these private human trotters are often marvels of speed and endurance. I would like nothing better than to enter our wrinkled oldla-che-tiin an Olympic marathon—though foreigners who have tried that sort of test find that the men cannot run without their vehicle, which is so balanced as to help lift them off the ground. Like the runners, the rickshaws of Peking range all the way from filthy half-wrecks to rickshaw-limousines. The former are due both to the Chinese blindness to uncleanliness and to the fact that, human fares lacking, they are ready to accept any form of freight, be it even the bleeding carcass of a hog. The vehicle looking tolerable, however, most of us pick our rickshaw-men exactly as we would a horse, except that age is fairly apparent without examining the teeth.
Slavery is a dreadful institution, but if millions of the human draft-animals of China were slaves they would at least be sure of a place to sleep and something fit to eat. Yet they are a cheerful, good-hearted, likable lot of fellows, these swarming rickshaw-runners of Peking, amusing in their primitive ways. However much they may arouse sympathy, for instance, there is no surer means of being involved in a noisy dispute than by overpaying them. Find out the legal fare and pay it, and the chances are that your runner will accept it without a word and rate you a person of experience and understanding, for all your strange race. The louder and longer you wish him to dance and shout about you, the more you should overpay him. A soft-hearted old lady arriving in Peking almost directly from America and wishing tobe just toward the man who drew her from Ch’ien-men Station to the principal hotel handed him a silver dollar. It took three men from the hotel to rescue her from the frenzied runner and kick him dollarless outside the grounds.
The fact is that rickshaws are too numerous in Peking and their fares too low. Even foreign residents grow flabby from so habitually jumping into one rather than walking a block or two, though I confess it is easier to do so than to endure the endless gauntlet of persistent shouting, and even subtle ridicule in the case of “foreign devils” supposedly ignorant of the language, which every well dressed pedestrian must run. Hard-hearted men assert that the oversupply is due to the laziness of the runners also, that coolies would rather wander about with a rickshaw than work all day at some steady labor. What will become of them when the street-cars arrive, for which the French were long ago granted a much-opposed franchise, is a question which men of higher intelligence than the runners themselves cannot answer. Yet they are coming; cement poles are already creeping into the Tartar City from the northwest, and rails are being piled up before the Forbidden City; unless Mukden outstrips her, Peking will be the first to follow foreign-influenced Tientsin and Shanghai by desecrating her streets with the ugliness and clamor of electric tramways. We are glad to have known the inimitable Chinese capital before they came.
The slowness of her man-drawn carriages and the dead flatness of Peking give an exaggerated impression of its size; everything seems farther away than it really is. In my school-days we used to hear wild tales about this being the largest city in the world. Perhaps it has a million inhabitants, though eight hundred and fifty thousand seems nearer the mark. There is no “squeeze” to be had out of a census, however, and guesses will probably continue to be the only available information on that point for years to come. A one-story city with the courtyard habit, to say nothing of enormous palaces and monuments that scarcely shelter a human being each, and of big vacant spaces even inside its principal wall, can hardly vie with New York and London, however like rats many of its people may live. In what we foreigners call the Chinese City there is a maze of shops and dwellings outside the three south gates of the capital proper, human warrens here and there, swarming sidewalk markets by night as well as crowded rows of booths by day; but vast graveyards, cultivated fields, even great unoccupied areas take up much of this secondary enclosure, not to mentionthe huge domains of the Temples of Heaven and of Agriculture, playgrounds now of those with the price of admission, with tea and soda-water and pumpkin seeds served almost on the very spot where the Son of Heaven so long held his annual vigil.
Distressing are many of the noble monuments that make Peking justly famed the world over, not merely because of the ruins they are becoming under an anarchistic republican régime, but by reason of the rabble that is permitted to overrun and defile so many of them. Ragged beggars masquerading as caretakers beset the visitor in almost all of them; foreigners, or Chinese with money but without influence, may still be required to pay their way into Pei-Hai and the Summer Palace, but once inside they find themselves jostled and gaped upon by loafing soldiers and ill-mannered roustabouts whom the gate-keepers have not the power or the moral courage to exclude. How long before imperial Peking will be but another Baalbek or Nineveh, for all the busy streets that surround it, is another subject for guessing.
We found few soldiers in Peking, however, compared with such places as Mukden, and those are still curbed in a way that would bring gasps of astonishment from their fellows in the provinces. Before the Boxer days Peking had no police force in the Western sense; to-day the little stations are as numerous as in Japan, while the white-legginged gendarmes under a Norwegian general stroll the principal streets in pairs, with drawn bayonets and an eye especially to the protection of foreigners. We have tried in vain to impress upon our friends at home that Peking is safer than any city we know of in our own land. A lone woman not even speaking the language, and bespangled with jewels if you like, can go anywhere in Peking, whether on foot or with a rickshaw coolie picked up at random, at any hour of the day or night, without the ghost of a chance of being molested, to say nothing of running any real danger. They are a curious people, the Chinese. They will often starve with riches within easy grasp rather than screw up their courage to an act of violence, as they will display the cheerfulness of contentment far beyond the point where Westerners would have even a transparent mask of it left. There is something uncanny, if we ever paused to think of it, in being so well protected by a police force whose meager wages are many months in arrears; and the petty graft they inflict upon foreign residents may almost be justified. Their task is greatly lightened, of course, by the pacifist temperament of the Chinese; but criminal, even violent, characters cannot be lacking even in Peking. Punishments are still drastic, after the Chinese custom. Out towardTungchow and over beside the outer wall of the Temple of Heaven groups of men are frequently shot, and they are by no means all assassins. When the invasion from beyond the Great Wall was being repelled last spring and bullets were singing across our corner of the city, the police were instructed to punish with summary execution anything suggestive of looting. A Chinese of some standing, friendly with several foreigners of our acquaintance, went up broad Hata-men Street to borrow a few dollars from an exchange-shop that had often favored him with small loans. The proprietor happened to be out, and the youth in charge did not know the client. “Oh, that’s all right,” the borrower assured him; “your master always lets me have small sums when I need them, and I am in a hurry.” He picked up a few dollars, jotted the amount down on a slip of paper, and started away. The youth shouted, the police came running up, and although the proprietor appeared at that moment and identified the prisoner as an old friend who had acted in no way improperly, a headless corpse was left lying in the dust before the shop.
There are incredible contrasts, too, among the scenes past which the pony and I jog on our afternoon jaunts. Legation guards of half a dozen nationalities play their boyish games almost across the street from rag-pickers who are scarcely distinguishable from the garbage-heaps out of which they somehow claw a livelihood. Along “Piccadilly,” as foreigners call what is “Square Handkerchief Alley” to the Chinese, we can easily imagine ourselves in the days of Kublai Khan; and around the corner from it the Wai-chiao-pu is a more modern foreign office, outwardly at least, than London, Washington, or Paris can muster. Beneath the “Four P’ai-lous” motor-cars speed north and south while barbaric funeral processions crawl under them from the west between two long rows of squealing pigs, resenting the cords that bind their four legs together and the discourtesy with which they are tumbled about by sellers and purchasers. City gates like mammoth office buildings tower above long vistas of lowly human dwellings; lotuses bloom on the lake of the Winter Palace, and the visitor thither is pursued by all but naked mendicants—yao-fan-ti(want-rice-ers) the Chinese call them in their kinder language. Sumptuous private cars stand before most modern buildings, and Peking street-sprinklers, consisting of two men and a bucket, with a long-handled wooden dipper, attempt to lay the dust about them. We remember these sprinklers only too well, “Hwei-Hwei” and I, for during the winter the sprinkling turned to ice almost as it fell, and our progress was a kind of equestrian fox-trot. But for them,and the water-carriers whose screeching wheelbarrows drip so incessantly, Peking streets would be easy going the year round, for the whole winter’s snow has been but a napkin or two that faded away almost as it fell. Nor have I ever known a genuine Peking dust-storm, though I have seen the air and the heavens, the inmost recesses of my garments and my food, even the contents of locked trunks, filled with those flying particles of her own filth and her surrounding semi-desert which the capital of Kublai Khan has always charged against the distant Gobi. Old residents tell us that this season’s dust-storms have been unusually rare, but my family was vouchsafed one of the first magnitude during my absence. A welcome wind blew all one hot spring night, and only in the morning was it discovered that it had carried volumes of dust with it, so that the sleepers looked as if they had been traveling across Nevada for a week without so much as a wet cloth available, and everything from hair to mattress-covers had to be washed at once, which was particularly difficult with the blowing dust obscuring the sun for several days to come.
Often our way through a city gate or along a narrow street is made disagreeable by passing wheelbarrows filled to over-slopping with the night-soil of the city—sewers being as great a luxury as running water in most Peking households. This is dried along the outside of the city walls and distributed among the vegetable-gardens which, protected from the north by rows of tall reed wind-breaks, take up much of the land immediately outside the city. It goes without saying that the use of chloride of lime is as fixed a habit in the kitchens of foreign residents as boiling our drinking-water. The Chinese cannot understand why Westerners persist in wasting the richest substitute for potash, spending money to have it destroyed instead of gaining money by selling it. Sometimes the foreigners are converted to the Chinese point of view; I know at least one American mission school which supports two of its girls on what it contributes to the fertility of the neighboring fields.
But it is not difficult to forget all such drawbacks when one looks down upon Peking from her mammoth wall or the lonely eminence called Coal Hill. Obviously “Hwei-Hwei” cannot climb Mei-shan; it is bad enough to have outside barbarians of the human kind looking down upon the golden-yellow roofs of the Forbidden City. This is not especially forbidden now, with more than half of it open to the ticket-buyer, and the rest hardly free from intruding politicians and their protégés. But there still hovers an atmosphere of mystery, of somethingmildly akin to the Arabian Nights or the Middle Ages, about the northern end of the enclosure, within the moat in which coolies gather submerged hay and set up fish-traps, and above which tourists shriek their delights from Peking’s lone hill, even from airplanes. For, sadly shrunken as it is, the imperial Manchu dynasty still holds forth within.
China is, I believe, the only republic on earth with an emperor. It was stipulated in the agreement of 1912 between the imperial court and the republican party that the emperor should keep his title, his imperial abode, and certain other privileges, should receive a large annual allowance from the Government for the upkeep of his court and household, and should “always be treated by the Republican Government with the courtesy and respect which would be accorded to aforeignsovereign on Chinese soil.” Thus the young man who, as a child, abdicated the dragon throne can still go and sit on it any afternoon that it pleases his fancy to do so. Perhaps no such caprices come into his head, for if we are to believe his English tutor he is wise, as well as regally polished, beyond his years, and does not really consider himself emperor. He has lived in the imperial palace of the Forbidden City ever since he was actually Manchu sovereign of China, however, and is still accorded imperial honors there. Any one who rises early enough may meet Manchu courtiers in ceremonial dress, a trifle shabby, their red-tassel-covered hats still not entirely out of place in modern Peking, jogging homeward on their lean ponies from an imperial audience at the unearthly hour at which these have been held in China for centuries.
Most Chinese have several different names, and emperors are no exception to this rule. There is a “milk name” during infancy, ahao, or familiar name by which one is afterward known to one’s intimates, a school name, a business name, finally, but not lastly, in the case of an emperor, a throne name or dynastic title. But though the present occupant of the Forbidden City has such a name, to wit: Hsuan T’ung, even this cannot be freely used; you cannot call a man to the billiard-table by his dynastic title. The names by which we know former emperors of China are really their “reign titles” and not personal patronymics. This left the present head of the Ch’ing dynasty handicapped, for, not being a real sovereign in spite of his legally imperial title, and unable to have a reign title at least until he is dead, there was no name by which he could be properly and generally called, whether to dinner or to an audience. Being a sensible young man, of modern rather than reactionary tendencies and by no means hostile to foreign influence, noting moreover that not only do foreigners who remainlong in China have a Chinese name but that Western sovereigns have personal appellations, he decided to take a foreign name. The fact that his foreign tutor is an Englishman may or may not account for the fact that he has chosen to be called “Henry.”
Those who have seen him describe “Emperor Henry” as a tall, slender young man who is still growing, with the Chinese calligraphy of an artist and some of the poetic gifts of his imperial ancestor known as Ch’ien Lung. Not merely does he wield a wicked brush in both the classic and the modern colloquial Chinese, now and then having a poem published under an assumed name in a Peking paper, but he writes a very legible English with pen or pencil. His English speech is described as slow but correct, with a strong British accent. He reads newspapers voraciously and is said to be unusually well abreast of the times, both at home and abroad, for his years. His greatest single blow to date against tyrannical conservatism, however, and the mightiest example of his progressive tendencies occurred last spring at one fell swoop—he had his cue cut off. The three imperial dowagers and his two distinguished old Chinese or Manchu tutors tore what was left of their own hair in vain. “Henry” was determined to be up-to-date even if he is confined in one end of the once Forbidden City. The result is that for the first time in nearly three hundred years there is hardly a pigtail left within the Purple Wall, though the two old tutors, as a silent protest against what they consider an act of disloyalty to the traditions of “his Majesty’s” house, still wear their cues.
During last winter “Henry” turned sixteen, and it was high time he took unto himself a wife—two of them, in fact. He is reputed not to have wanted two—possibly he is not so ultra-modern as we have been led to suppose—but his retinue insisted. Number one wife would have too many duties to be able to perform them all alone; besides, what would the neighbors say? So they chose him two pretty Manchu girls several months his junior and set the date for the wedding. But “Henry” has a mind of his own, and if he could not go out and pick a bride on his own initiative he could at least exercise the sovereign rights of any citizen of a republic and choose between the two candidates allowed him. Thus it came about that the girl named by the high Manchu officials to be “empress” became merely the first concubine, and vice versa. Some time during the seven weeks of ceremonies between the betrothal rites and the actual marriage “Henry” conferred upon the lady of his choice the name of “Elizabeth.”
The wedding itself took place between the end of November andthe dawn of December, according to our Western calendar. By republican permission the streets between the lady’s home, out near the Anting-men, and the East Gate of the Forbidden City were covered from curb to curb with “golden sands”—which in Peking means merely the earth we use in a child’s sand-box. At three in the morning the principal bride set out along this in a chair covered with imperial yellow brocade and carried by sixteen bearers, with a body-guard of eunuchs from the palace. The procession was no longer and hardly more elaborate than those that may be seen along Peking streets on any day auspicious for weddings; some of the impoverished Manchu and Mongol nobles, members of the imperial clan, and former officials of the old empire looked, in fact, a trifle more shabby under the specially erected bright lights along the route than do the wedding guests of a wealthy Chinese merchant. But there were some unusual features. The sedan-chair had a golden roof, on each corner of which was a phenix, a design that predominated in all the flags, banners, and mammoth “umbrellas” carried by the hired attendants. Instead of the familiar Chinese wedding “music” produced by long, harsh-voiced trumpets, there were two foreign-style bands, one of them lent by the President of the republic. These played over and over, not in concord one with the other, “Marching through Georgia,” “Suwanee River,” and “When Johnny Comes Marching Home.” It was a memorable night for Peking.
The chief escorts sent by the emperor to receive his favorite bride rode horses and wore mandarin costume, including the official cap with a peacock plume and buttons of every former rank. Promptly at four in the morning the Phenix Chair, followed by a series of yellow-covered litters containing the ceremonial robes of its occupant, passed through the Gate of Propitious Destiny into the central and most sacred portion of the imperial precincts. Foreign as well as Chinese guests had been admitted as far as the large open space before this, which is used as a parade-ground for the imperial guard and as a place of reception for the camel caravans which still, even in these republican days, bring “tribute” from beyond the Great Wall to the Manchu emperor. With the moon just dropping out of sight in the west the scene was of a pageantry which has almost disappeared from our modern commonplace world.
What took place beyond the gate that swallowed up the “empress” ordinary people know only by hearsay. This has it that the bride, having been carried over fire—pans filled with glowing coals—as oldChinese custom decrees, was set down at the foot of the throne and greeted by the emperor and his first concubine, after which he and all those of the male gender except the eunuchs immediately retired. The concubine had merely walked in without ceremony twenty-four hours before, one of her first duties being to welcome the real bride at her arrival. Gossip has it that she did not make the requisite number of kowtows to her more fortunate rival and that “Elizabeth” took this so to heart that she shut herself up from the emperor for some time. No sane person will vouch for the truth of Peking rumors, however, imperial or otherwise. The fact remains that “Henry” and “Elizabeth” were duly married, the clinching rite being the ceremonial drinking together of the nuptial cup, and the latest report is that they are all three living moderately happily, at least, this long afterward.
An American girl is tutoring the “empress” in English and Western ways, as she did before her marriage, and the emperor continues to grow, mentally if not physically, under his cued and uncued tutelage. Even the first concubine is said to be fond of learning, and the two no doubt comment on their similarity of tastes with “our” husband. There is probably less friction between the two young ladies than their Western sisters may fancy, now that relative grades are inevitably fixed—with reservations depending on the birth of a son; the most powerful woman in Chinese history, the dowager who long ruled the country under the puppets Tung Chih and Kuang Hsii, was, it is well for the two young ladies to remember, only a concubine. Court etiquette prevents conflicts in their demands upon the husband. By a rule said to be centuries old the emperor is entitled to the company of his empress six times a month, of the first concubine ten, and of the second concubine fifteen, in reverse ratio, of course, to the social demands upon them. “Henry” should by the rules of the game have chosen his second concubine before this, but like all those to whom the Chinese owe money he has not been paid his allowance for years, and there may be excellent reason for putting off this addition to his cozy little household. It is what school-girls call “thrilling” to think of him toasting his toes alternately with his two brides, perhaps of dissimilar temperaments as well as mental and physical charms, and still having every other evening left free for the pursuit of his studies.
Misfortune, of course, does not spare even throneless sovereigns. Fire has just destroyed much of that portion of the Forbidden City which the head of the abdicated Manchu dynasty had left him, and hasgiven a hint of life within those mysterious precincts. Though the conflagration broke out before midnight nothing worth while was done to curb it until two in the morning. Most of the courtiers have always lived within the Purple Wall and had never seen a disaster of such magnitude, so that when they saw the palace buildings in flames the whole court, including “Henry” and “Elizabeth,” some stories have it, were seized with nothing more effective than frenzied excitement. Partly for fear of looting, partly because no orders were given by their superior officers to break an ancient rule, the guards refused to open the gates to the two Chinese and one foreign fire brigades that offered their assistance. After a lengthy conference these were admitted, but by this time the fire was so far advanced that only by cutting down many old trees and leveling some of the smaller buildings was it finally brought under control at seven in the morning. Even the Chinese admit that almost all the effective work was done by the foreigners; whatever their excellencies the Celestials do not shine during emergencies.
Many priceless treasures, and the portraits of many former emperors, were destroyed. The official report had it first that the fire was caused by the bursting of a boiler in the palace electric-light plant, but the more probable truth has since leaked out. The latest assertion is that it was deliberately set by palace eunuchs, disgruntled over the failure to receive their allowances, or to cover up their thefts of imperial treasures. The time was close drawing near for the annual inspection of these when the conflagration occurred. Looking about the next day “Henry” found many precious things gone even from places which the fire did not reach, and incidentally, the story runs, he discovered a plot against his own life. Cynics wonder that the new régime has not hired some one to do away with him long before this. Various eunuchs were handed over to the police, some with bits of loot upon them, but “unfortunately,” to quote one Chinese paper, “the emperor no longer has the power to order their heads off.” When he demanded the arrest of some of the chief eunuchs, however, he found they were under the protection of two old imperial concubines—of Hsien Feng, consort of the famous dowager, and of Tung Chih, her son, respectively, who have been dead sixty-three and forty-eight years! So “Henry” and his two brides ran away to his father, who has a “palace” outside the west wall of the city, and refused to come back until all the eunuchs were discharged. This may have alarmed the old concubines, as the newspapers put it; certainly it frightened the republicans, with no president in office and the country threshing about for want of a head; pressure came from somewhere, the eunuchs went, and “Henry” came back.