And right in the centre of it all is the Forbidden City, enclosing with its high pink walls the palaces which are full of warm-blooded Manchu concubines, sleek eunuchs who speak in wheedling tones, and is always hot with intrigue.  At the gates of the Palace lounge bow and jingal-armed Imperial guards.  Inside is the Son of Heaven himself, the Emperor imprisoned in his own Palace by the Empress Mother, who is as masterful as any man who ever lived....

I beg you, do you begin to see something of Peking and to understand the eleven miserable little Legations, each with its own particular ideas and intrigues, but crouching all together under the Tarter Wall and tremblingly awaiting with mock assurance the bursting of this storm?  If you are so good as to see this you will realise the wonderful stage effects, the fierce Mediaevalism in senile decay, the superb distances, the red dust from the Gobi that has choked up all the drains and tarnished all the magnificence until it is no more magnificence at all—­this dust which is such a herald of the coming storm—­the new guns and pistols of Herr Krupp and the camels of the deserts and all the other things all mixed up together....

Oh, I see that we are absurd and can only be made more ridiculous by coming events.  Of course the Boxers coming in openly through the gates cannot be true, and yet—­shades of Genghis Khan and all his Tartars, what is that?  When I had got as far as this from all sides came a tremendous blaring of barbaric trumpets—­those long brass trumpets that can make one’s blood curdle horribly, a blaring which has now upset everything I was about to write and also my inkpot.  I rushed out to inquire; it was only a portion of the Manchu Peking Field Force marching home, but the sounds have unsettled us all again, and in the tumult of one’s emotions one does not know what to believe and what to fear.  Everything seems a little impossible and absurd, especially what I am now writing from hour to hour.

VIII

SOME INCIDENTS AND THE ONE MAN

12th June, 1900.

* * * * *

Even the British Legation—­“the stoical, sceptical, ill-informed British Legation,” as S——­ of the American Legation calls it—­is wringing its hands with annoyance, and were it Italian, and therefore dramatically articulate, its curses and maladette would ascend to the very heavens in a menacing cloud like our Peking dust.  For on England we have all been waiting because of an ancient prestige; and England, everyone says, is mainly responsible for our present plight.  Everybody is lowering at England and the British Legation along Legation Street, because S——­ was not sent for two weeks ago, and the language of the minor missions, who could not possibly expect to receive protecting guards unless they swam all the way from Europe, is sulphurous.  They ask with much reason why we do not lead events instead of being lead by them; why are we so foolish, so confident.  What has happened to justify all this, you will ask?  Well, permit me to speak.