Now hurrying on his way he knew that schools should be open and yet he saw not one schoolboy, and surely the shops must have taken down their boards, and yet they had not, although the sun was high. He made his way through strangely silent streets toward his home. Yet before he could reach it, at some signal he neither saw nor heard, the city began to stir, not to its usual life, but to something new and frightful. Good people stayed inside their gates, but the evil came out. Clem, clinging to walls and hiding in doorways, heard a bestial shouting, a rising roar, near the very quarter where the foreign legations were. There, too, the wealthy missionaries lived, the princes of the church. He hastened on toward his own. Perhaps they might be safe hidden among the houses of the poor. Perhaps God had some purpose, after all, in sheltering those who bore a cross.
At this moment Mr. Fong was looking up and down the street. He too saw that this day was different from any other and he knew why. His cousin had visited him about midnight and had told him what had taken place in the palace. Doubtless half the people in the city now knew. Many families had relatives inside the palace, women servants and court ladies, eunuchs who held offices from cooks to ministers, and these sowed among the people outside the Forbidden City the sayings and doings of those within. There was nothing the people did not know about their rulers.
Mr. Fong, remembering the agitated hours of last midnight, now decided to put up the boards of his shop and cease business for the day. Whatever happened he did not want to seem to know anything about it. He was a brave man but not a foolhardy one. He knew that the Old Woman would certainly lose but that she would be desperate and arrogant before she knew herself lost. Mr. Fong had read too much Western science. He knew that the Boxers could not possibly survive iron bullets. Still, it would take time to prove this. The Old Woman was so stubborn that she would have to see foreign armies marching into the city before she believed it could happen. He sighed in the semidarkness of his shop and was glad that he had had the prudence to buy up two months’ supply of millet and wheat. In the back court his wife had eleven hens and he had planted in another corner away from the chicken coop a small patch of cabbage. They would not starve.
He did not, however, feel strong enough to join his family for an hour or so. He wanted to be alone and as his usual pretext he drew out his account books and opened his ink boxes and uncovered his brushes. His wife never disturbed him when he was thinking, as she supposed, about money matters. Actually his mind went over all that his cousin had told the night before.
The city, his cousin had said, was full of Boxers. They were now bold enough to enter at every gate. Indeed they were wholly fearless ever since Prince Tuan had persuaded the Empress to let them come even into her presence and show proof of their magic powers.
“But are they magic?” Mr. Fong had asked his cousin with anxiety. In the midnight silence his reason was not so strong as by day.
“They are flesh and blood,” his old cousin had replied scornfully. This cousin was only a scribe in the palace but he was a man of sense and learning.
On the ninth day of the month, the cousin then went on to say, the very day when the Empress had returned to the city from the Summer Palace, some Boxers had gone to the race course three miles west of Peking and had set a fire, and they had thrown a Chinese Christian into the flames to burn to death. Inside the palace the Empress was telling her ministers that she would drive the foreigners from the city.
On the eleventh day, the cousin said, the Chancellor of the Japanese Legation was murdered outside the walls of the city. He had gone to the railway station to discover perhaps when the trains would run again to Peking. No trains were running now.
After telling all this, the cousin had gone away, drenched in gloom.
Mr. Fong sat another hour over his figures and then he closed his books, put them in the drawer and locked it. He went back into the inner courts where his family waited. They were all quiet, even Mrs. Fong. She was getting the noonday meal ready.
“Put more water into the millet from now on,” he commanded her. “We will drink soup instead of eating porridge.”
“Eh,” she sighed. “If we only live—”
He did not answer this. Having nothing else to do, he went to his room and began to read the Book of Changes, in which he often said all was foretold if one had the wit to understand.
After this silent meal, at which he strictly forbade any one of his family to go into the street and commanded the children to play quietly in the innermost court, he went to bed and to sleep for the afternoon. He rose only to eat once more at dusk and then he went back to bed. There was nothing he could do, he told his wife, and he had better save his strength for the days to come.
At midnight he woke abruptly to hear his wife screaming in his ears.
“Fong-ah!” she was calling. “Fong-ah, wake up.”
He had buried himself so deep in sleep that it was a minute or two before he could grunt a reply.
“Eh — what—” he muttered.
“The city is on fire!” she screamed.
He woke then and shuffled into his slippers lest a centipede sting him and ran into the court and looked up. The sky was red and the night was as light as day.
The children were awake now, and all were crying with fright and he turned on them fiercely when he came back into the house. “Be silent!” he commanded them. “Do you want the neighbors to think you are weeping for the foreigners?”
They fell silent instantly and he crept to his shop and opened the boards to the central door two inches, enough so that he could peer into the street. Twenty fires lit the sky and he knew what they were. The houses and churches of the Christians were burning. He closed the boards again and went back to his family. They were gathered in a small huddle in the gloom of the main room.
“Go back to bed,” he told them. “Fortunately we are not Christians and we will survive.”
Clem had waked his father after a moment of not knowing what to do. The fires were not near the hutung where they lived. They were nearly all in the better part of the city, near the Legation Quarters. He had not gone into the street since Mr. Fong had given him the warning. Even his father had gone out only by night — to beg, he supposed, at some missionary door, for he had come back with three loaves of foreign bread and some tinned stuff. One tin held Australian butter. Clem had never tasted butter. That night they had each eaten a slice of bread spread with the yellow butter and he had savored it curiously.
“We made our own butter on the farm,” his father said suddenly. Clem had been about to ask how when his mother said in a heartbroken voice, “Paul, don’t talk about the farm!”
Clem went to bed as soon as evening prayer was done, and had slept until the light from the red sky had wakened him in his corner of the small center room where his bed stood, a couch by day. He had got up and gone out into the court and then fearfully into the narrow street. There was no one in sight but he hurried through the gate again and barred it. Then because he was afraid and lonely he felt compelled to wake his father.
His father opened his eyes at once, silent and aware, and Clem motioned to him to come into the other room.
“Fires in the city!” he whispered.
His father came barefoot and in his underdrawers and they stared at the sky together.
“Don’t wake your mother or the girls,” his father whispered. “It’s a terrible sight — God’s judgment. I must go into the streets, Clem, to see what I can do. People will be suffering. You stay here.”