beehive京华烟云英文版(部分)moment_in_peking

2021年1月15日发(作者：惠钟锡)
Chapter 1
It was the morning of the twentieth of July, 1900. A party of mule carts were lined
up at the western entrance of the Matajen Hutung, a street in the East of City of
Peking, part of the mules and carts extending to the alley running north and south
along the pink walls of the Big Buddha Temple. The cart drivers were early; they had
come there at dawn, and there was quite a hubbub in that early morning, as was
always the case with these noisy drivers.
Lota, an old man of about fifty and head servant of the family that had engaged the
carts for a long journey, was smoking a pipe and watching the drivers feeding the
mules; and the drivers were joking and quarreling with each other. When they could
not joke about each other’s animals and the animals’ ancestors, they joked about
themselves. “In such times,” said one, “who can tell whether one comes back dead or
alive after this journey?”
“You are well paid for it, aren’t you?” said Lota. “You can buy a farm with a
hundred taels of silver.”
“What is the use of silver when you are dead?” replied the driver. “Those bullets
from foreign rifles doesn’t recognize persons. Peng-teng! It goes through your
brain-cap and you are already a corpse with a crooked queue. Look at the belly of this
mule! Can flesh stay bullets? But what can you do? One has to earn a living.”
“It’s difficult to say,” rejoined another. “Once the foreign soldiers come into the city,
Peking won’t be such a good place to live in, either. For myself, I’m glad to get
away..”
The sun rose from the east shone upon the entrance to the house, making the leaves
of the big colanut tree glisten with the dew. This was the Yao house. It was not an
imposing entrance – a small black door with a red disc in the center. The colanut tree
cast its shade over the entrance, and a driver was sitting on a low stone tablet sunk
into the ground. The morning was delightful, and yet it promised to be a hot day with
a clear sky. A medium-sized earthen jar was standing near the tree, which provided tea
in hot summer days for thirsty wayfarers. But it was still empty. Noticing the jar, a
driver remarked, “Your master does good deeds.”
Lota replied there was no better man on earth than their master. He pointed to a slip
of red paper pasted near the doorpost, which the driver could not read; but Lota
explained to him that it said that medicines against cholera, colic, and dysentery
would be given free to anybody.
“That’s something important,” said the driver. “You’d better give us some of that
medicine for journey.”
“Why should you worry about medicine when you are traveling with our master?”
said Lota. “Isn’t it the same whether you carry it or our master carries it?”
The drivers tried to pry out of Lota information about the family. Lota merely told
them that his master was an owner of medicine shops.
Soon the master appeared to see that all was in order. He was a man of about forty,
short, stumpy, with bushy eyebrows and pouches under the eyes, and no beard, but a
very health complexion. His hair was still perfectly black. He walked with a young,
steady gait, with slow but firm steps. It was obviously the gait of a trained Chinese
athlete, in which the body preserved an absolute poise, ready for a surprise attack at
any unsuspected moment from the front, the side, or behind. One foot was firmly
planted on the ground, while the other leg was in a forward, slightly bent and open,
self- protective position, so that he could never be thrown out of his balance. He
greeted the drivers and, noticing the jar, reminded Lota to keep it daily filled with tea
as usual during his absence.
“You’re a good man,” chorused the drivers.
He went in, and soon appeared a beautiful young woman. She had small feet and
exquisite jet-black hair done in a loose coiffure, and wore an old broad-sleeved pink
jacket, trimmed around the collar and the sleeve ends with a three-inch broad, very
pale green satin. She talked freely with the drivers and showed none of the shyness
ususal among higher-class Chinese young women. She asked if all the mules had been
fed, and disappeared again.
“What luck your master has!” exclaimed one young driver. “A good man always is
rewarded with good luck. Such a young and pretty concubine!”
“Rot your tongue!” said Lota. “Our master has no concubines. That young woman
is his adopted daughter and a widow.”
The young driver slapped his own face in fun, and the others laughed.
Soon another servant and a number of pretty maids, from twelve or thirteen to
eighteen in age, came out with bedding, packages, and little pots. The driver were
rather dazzled, but dared not pass futher comments. A boy of thirteen followed, and
Lota told the drivers it was the young master.
After half an hour of this confusion, the departing family came out. The beautiful
young woman appeared again with two girls, both dressed very simply in white cotton
jackets, one with green, the other with violet trousers. You can always tell a daughter
of a well-to-do family from a maidservant by her greater leisureliness and quietness of
manner; and the fact that young woman was holding their hands showed the drivers
these two were the daughters of the family.
“Hisaochieh, come into my cart,” said the young driver. “The other’s mule is bad.”
Mulan, the girl, thought and compared. The other cart had a smaller mule, but his
driver had a more jovial appearance. On the other hand, this young driver had ugly
sores on his head. Mulan chose by the driver rather than the mule.
So important are little things in our life, perfectly meaningless in themselves, but as
we look back upon them in their chain of cause and effect, we realize they are
sometimes fraught with momentous consequences. If the young driver had not had
sores on his head, and Mulan had not got into the other cart with the small and
sickly-looking mule, things would not have happened on this journey as they did, and
the course of Mulan’s whole life would have been altered.
In the midst of the hustle, Mulan heard her mother scolding Silver-screen, a maid of
sixteen in the other cart, for being overpainted and overdressed. Silver-screen was
embarrassed before everybody; and Bluehaze, the elder maid of nineteen, assisting the
mother into her cart, was silently smiling, being secretly glad that she had known
better than to overdress for this journey and had listened to the mistress’s instructions.
You could see at a glance that the mother was the ruler of the family. She was a
woman in the middle thirties, broad-shouldered, square-faced, and inclined to be stout;
and she spoke in a clear, commanding voice.
When everybody was well seated and ready to start, a little maid of eleven, whose
name was Frankincense, was seen crying at the door. She was utterly miserable about
being left behind to stay alone with Lota and the other servants.
“Let her come along,” Mulan’s father said to his wife. “She can at least help fill the
tobacco for your water pipe.”
So, at the last moment, Frankincense jumped into the maid’s cart. Everybody
seemed to have found a place. Mrs. Yao shouted to the maids to let down the bamboo
screen at the front of their covered cart, and not to peep out too much.
There were five covered carts, with one pony among the mules. The maternal uncle,
Feng, and the young boy led the party, followed by the mother, riding with the elder
maid, Bluehaze, who was holding a baby two years old. In the third cart were Mulan
and her sister Mochow and the adopted daughter, whose name was Coral. The three
other maids, Silverscreen, Brocade, fourteen, and little Frankincense, were in the next
cart. Mr. Yao, the father, sat alone and brought up the rear. His son Tijen had avoided
riding in the same cart with him, and had preferred the uncle.
A manservant, Lotung, who was the brother of Lota, sat on the outside in Mr. Yao’s
cart, one leg crossed on the shaft and one left dangling.
To the people who had gathered to watch the departing family, Mrs. Yao loudly
announced that they were going for a few days to their relatives in the Western Hills,
although actually they were going south.
Whatever their destination, it was obvious to the passers-by that they were fleeing
from the oncoming allied European troops who were marching upon Peking because
of the Boxer uprising.
And so with a waddle-ho! And ta…tr! And crackings of whips, the party started.
The children were all excited, for it was their first trip to their Hangchow home, about
which they had heard their parents speak so often.
Mulan greatly admired her father. He had refused to flee from Peking until the
evening of the eighteenth; and, now that they had decided to seek safety in their home
at Hangchow, he had made extremely cool and unperturbed preparations for the
departure. For Mr. Yao was a true Taoist, and refused to be excited.
“Excitement is not good for the soul,” Mulan heard her father say. Another
argument of his was: “When you yourself are right, nothing that happens to you can
ever be wrong.” In later life Mulan had many occasions to think about this saying of
her father’s, and it became a sort of philosophy for her, from which she derived much
of her good cheer and courage. A world in which nothing that happens to you can ever
be wrong is a good, cheerful world, and one has courage to live and to endure.
War clouds had been in the air since May. The allied foreign troops had taken the
fort at the seacoast, but the railway to Peking had been destroyed by the Boxers, who
had grown in power and popularity and swarmed over the countryside.
The Empress Dowager had hesitated between avoiding a war with the foreign
powers and using the Boxers, a strange, unknown, frightening force whose one object
was to destroy the foreigners in China and who claimed magical powers and magic
protection against foreign bullets. The Court issued orders one day for the arrest of the
Boxer leaders, and the next day appointed the pro-Boxer Prince Tuan as minister for
foreign affairs. Court intrigue played an important part in this reversal of the decision
to suppress the Boxers. The Empress Dowager had already deprived her nephew the
Emperor of his actual power, and was planning to depose him. She favored Prince
Tuan’s son, a worthless rascal, as successor（继承者） to the throne. Thinking that a
foreign war would increase his personal power and obtain the throne for his son,
Prince Tuan encouraged the Empress Dowager to believe that the Boxers had
threatened to capture “one Dragon and two Tigers” to sacrifice to heaven for betrayal
of their nation, the “Dragon” being the reformist Emperor whose “hundred days of
reform” two years earlier had shocked the conservative mandarinate, and the “Tigers”
being the elderly Prince Ching and Li Huangchang, who had been in charge of the
foreign policy.
Prince Tuan forged a joint note from the diplomatic crops of Peking, asking the
Empress Dowager to restore the Emperor to actual power, thus making the old woman
believe that the foreign powers stood in the way of her plan to depose the Emperor, so
that she decided to throw in her lot with the Boxers, whose secret of power was their
war cry of “driving out the Oceanic People.” Some enlightened cabinet ministers had
opposed the Boxers on account of the burning of the Euopean Legations, advocated
by the Boxers, which was against Western usage; but these opponents had been killed
by the power of Prince Tuan. The Chancellor of the University had committed
hara-kiri by disemboweling himself.
The Boxers were actually within the capital. A lieutenant colonel who had been sent
out to fight them had been ambushed and killed, and his soldiers had joined the
Boxers. Hightly popular and triumphant, the Boxers had captured Peking, killing
foreigners and Christian Chinese and burning their churches. The diplomatic crops
protested, but Kang Yi, sent to “investigate” the Boxers, reported that they were “sent
from Heaven to drive out the Oceanic People and wipe out China’s shame” and
secretly let tens of thousands of them into the capital.
Once inside, the Boxers, under the covert protection of the Empress Dowager and
Prince Tuan, terrorized the city. They roamed the streets, hunting and killing “First
Hairies” and “Second and Third Hairies.” The “First Hairies” were the foreigners; the
“Second and Third Hairies” were the Christians, clerks in foreign firms, and any other
English-speaking Chinese. They went about burning churches and foreign houses,
destroying foreign mirrors, foreign umbrellas, foreign clocks, and foreign paintings.
Actually they killed more Chinese than foreigners. Their method of proving a Chinese
to be a “Second Hairy” was simple. Suspects were made to kneel before a Boxer altar
in the open street, while a piece of paper containing a message to their patron god was
burned, and the suspect was pronounced guilty or not guilty according to whether the
ashes flew up or flew down. Altars would be set up in the streets toward sunset, and
the people who showed obedience to the Boxers would burn incense while they
danced their monkey dance, the Monkey Spirit being one of the most popular of their
patron gods. The smell of incense filled the streets, and once could believe oneself
living in the magic land of Hsiyuchi once more. Even important officials had set up
altars and invited the Boxer leaders to their homes, and servants had joined the Boxers
to tyrannize over their masters.
Mr. Yao, being a well-read man and in sympathy with the reformist Emperor,
thought the whole thing silly and dangerous child’s play, but kept his convictions to
himself. He had his own good reasons to be “antiforeign” in a sense, and hated the
church as a foreign religion protected by a superior foreign power; but he was too
intelligent to approve of the Boxers, and was grateful that Lota and his brother Lotung
had kept away from the rabble.
There was fighting in the city. The German minister had been fallen upon and
murdered by Kansu soldiers. The Legation Quarter was under siege, and the Legation
Guards had been holding out for two months, waiting for relief from Tientsin. Yung
Lu, one of the most trusted men of the Empress Dowager, who was put in command
of the Imperial Guards to attack the Legations, was not in favor of the attack and
secretly gave orders for their protection. But whole blocks of the city near the
Legation Quarter had been razed to the ground, and whole streets in the South City
burned down. The city was truly more in the hands of the Boxers than of the
Government. Even the water carriers and toilet cleaners were not allowed to pursue
their business unless they had red and yellow turbans wound around their heads.
All through this period Mr. Yao had refused to consider moving. All he consented
to was to destroy a few big foreign mirrors in his home and a collapsible foreign
telescope that he had bought as a curiosity. His house was a little out of the zone of
great destruction. To his wife’s pleadings for flight from the killing, looting, and
turmoil, he did not reply; he refused to consider them. The country around was
swarming with troops, and Mr. Yao thought that it was better to sit still than to make a
move. He believed that men contrive, but the gods decide; and he was willing to take
things as they came.
His calm and nonchalance exasperated his wife. She accused him of intending to
live and die with his curios and his garden. But when the allied troops were actually
approaching there was a real fear of a sack of the city, and she said, “If you don’t care
for your life, you must think of these little children.”
This argument drove home, although he said, “How do you know it will be safer on
the way?”
So on the afternoon of July 18 they decided to go. He thought that if they could get
mule carts and go straight south to Tehchow(德州), the first city in Shantung, an
eight- or nine-day journey, they would then be safe. The new governor of Shantung
had driven the Boxers out of his province by force and so preserved peace and order.
The Boxers had originated in Shantung, because it was there that several “religious
incidents” had taken place, including the one which caused the leasing of Tsingtao(青
岛) to the Germans and the dismissal of the previous governor, Yu Hsien, who had
encouraged the Boxers.
One day the new governor, Yuan Shikai, had asked a Boxer leader to come to him
to prove their magic powers. He ordered ten Boxers to stand in line and face a firing
squad armed with modern rifles. At a signal, his men fired and, marvelous to behold,
the ten Boxers were unhurt; the rifles had not been loaded. The Boxers chief was
elated, and cried, “You see…!” Before he had finished the governor himself drew a
revolver and killed the Boxers one by one. That had finished the Boxers in Shantung,
and after a brief campaign they all drifted over to Chihli.
Flight through Tientsin was impossible. If Peking was in a state of pandemonium,
Tientsin was in a state of hell; and the route to it was in the direct line of battle.
Refugees from Tientsin to the capital said that traffic on the Grand Canal was jammed
for miles, and boats had been known to make only half a mile advance in a whole day.
So they were to go by land south to Tehchow, on the Shantung border, before taking a
boat on the Grand Canal; and because there were hunhun, or bandits, outside
Yungtingmen Gate, they must go by way of the Marco Polo Bridge, and follow the
route to Chochow before they struck southeastward.
They journey from Tehchow down the Grand Canal to Shanghai and Hangchow
would be safe also, because the governors in southeast China had signed an agreement
with the foreign consuls to preserve peace and protect foreign lives and property, so
that the Boxer conflict had been strictly localized in the north.
“When are we leaving?” asked Mrs. Yao.
“The day after tomorrow,” replied her husband. “We have to arrange for the mule
carts. Then we have to do a little packing.”
Now that she had won her point, Mrs. Yao was dismayed at the thought of packing.