H. Wells - THE NEW MACHIAVELLI

others. We began a little coldly, with duologues, but the

conversation was already becoming general-so far as such a long

table permitted-when the fire asserted itself.

It asserted itself first as a penetrating and emphatic smellof

burning rubber,-it was caused by the fusing of an electric wire.

The reek forced its way into the discussion of the Pekin massacres

that had sprung up between Evesham, Waulsort, and the others at the

end of the table. "Something burning," said the man next to me.

"Something must be burning," said Panmure.

Tarvrille hatedundignified interruptions. He had a particularly

imperturbable butler with a cadaverous sad face and an eye of rigid

disapproval. He spoke to this individual over his shoulder. "Just

see, will you," he said, and caught up the pause in the talk to his

left.

Wilkins was asking questions, and I, too, was curious. The story of

the siege of the Legations in China in the year 1900 and all that

followed upon that, is just one of those disturbing interludes in

history that refuse to join on to that general scheme of

protestation by which civilisation is maintained. It is a break in

the general flow of experienceas disconcerting to statecraft as the

robbery of my knife and the scuffle that followed it had been to me

when I was a boy at Penge. It is like a tear in a curtain revealing

quite unexpected backgrounds. I had never given the business a

thoughtfor years; now this talk brought back a string of pictures

to my mind; how the reliefs arrived and the plundering began, how

section after section of the International Army was drawn into

murder and pillage, how the infection spread upward until the wives

of Ministers were busy looting, and the very sentinels stripped and

crawled like snakes into the Palace they were set to guard. It did

not stop at robbery, men were murdered, women, beingplundered, were

outraged, children were butchered, strong men had found themselves

with arms in a lawless, defenceless city, and this had followed.

Now it was all recalled.

"Respectable ladies addicted to district visiting at home were as

bad as any one," said Panmure. "Glazebrook told me of one-flushed

like a woman at a bargain sale, he said-and when he pointed out to

her that the silk she'd got was bloodstained, she just said, 'Oh,

bother!' and threw it aside and went back…"

We became aware that Tarvrille's butler had returned. We tried not

to seem to listen.

"Beg pardon, m'lord," he said. "The house IS on fire, m'lord."

"Upstairs, m'lord."

"Just overhead, m'lord."

"The maids are throwing water, m'lord, and I've telephoned FIRE."

"No, m'lord, no immediate danger."

"It's all right," said Tarvrille to the table generally. Go on!

It's not a general conflagration, and the fire brigade won't be five

minutes. Don't seethat it's our affair. The stuff's insured.

They say old Lady Paskershortly was dreadful. Like a harpy. The

Dowager Empress had shown her some little things of hers. Pet

things-hidden away. Susan went straight for them-used to take an

umbrella for the silks. Born shoplifter."

It was evident he didn't want his dinner spoilt, and we played up

loyally.

"This is recorded history," said Wilkins,-" practically. It makes

one wonder about unrecorded history. In India, for example."

But nobody touchedthat.

"Thompson," said Tarvrille to the imperturbable butler, and

indicating the table generally, "champagne. Champagne. Keep it

going."

"M'lord," and Thompson marshalled his assistants.

Some man I didn't knowbegan to rememberthings about Mandalay.

"It's queer," he said, "how people break out at times;" and told his

story of an army doctor, brave, public-spirited, and, as it

happened, deeply religious, who was caught one evening by the

excitement of plundering-and stole and hid, twisted the wrist of a

boy until it broke, and was afterwards overcome by wild remorse.

I watched Evesham listening intently. "Strange," he said, "very

strange. We are such stuff as thieves are made of. And in China,

too, they murdered people-for the sake of murdering. Apart, so to

speak, from mercenary considerations. I'mafraid there's no doubt

of it in certain cases. No doubtat all. Young soldiers fresh from

German high schools and English homes!"

"Did OUR people?" asked some patriot.

"Not so much. But I'mafraid there were cases… Some of the

Indian troops were pretty bad."

Gane picked up the tale with confirmations.

It is all printed in the vividest way as a picture upon my memory,

so that were I a painter I thinkI could give the deep rich browns

and warm greys beyond the brightly lit table, the various

distinguished faces, strongly illuminated, interested and keen,

above the black and white of evening dress, the alert menservants

with their heavier, clean-shaved faces indistinctly seenin the

dimness behind. Then this was coloured emotionallyfor me by my

aching sense of loss and sacrifice, and by the chance trend of our

talk to the breaches and unrealitiesof the civilised scheme. We

seemed a little transitory circle of light in a universe of darkness

and violence; an effectto which the diminishing smellof burning

rubber, the trampling of feet overhead, the swish of water, added

enormously. Everybody-unless, perhaps, it was Evesham-drank

rather carelessly because of the suppressed excitement of our

situation, and talked the louder and more freely.

"But what a flimsy thing our civilisation is!" said Evesham; "a mere

thin net of habits and associations!"

"I suppose those men came back," said Wilkins.

"Lady Paskershortly did!" chuckled Evesham.

"How do they fit it in with the restof their lives?" Wilkins

speculated. "I suppose there's Pekin-stained police officers,

Pekin-stained J. P.'s-trying petty pilferers in the severest

manner."…

Then for a time things became preposterous. There was a sudden

cascade of water by the fireplace, and then absurdly the ceiling

began to rain upon us, first at this point and then that. "My new

suit!" cried some one. "Perrrrrr-up pe-rr"-a new vertical line of

blackened water would establish itself and forma spreading pool

upon the gleaming cloth. The men nearest would arrange catchment

areas of plates and flower bowls. "Draw up!" said Tarvrille, "draw

up. That's the bad end of the table!" He turned to the

imperturbable butler. "Take round bath towels," he said; and

presently the men behind us were offering-with inflexible dignity-

"Port wine, Sir. Bath towel, Sir!" Waulsort, with streaks of

blackened water on his forehead, was suddenly reminded of a wet year

when he had followed the French army manoeuvres. An animated

dispute sprang up between him and Neal about the relativeefficiency

of the new French and German field guns. Wrassleton joined in and a

little drunken shrivelled Oxford don of some sort with a black-

splashed shirt front who presently silenced them all by the

immensity and particularity of his knowledgeof field artillery.

Then the talk drifted to Sedan and the effectof dead horses upon

drinking-water, which brought Wrassleton and Weston Massinghay into

a dispute of great vigour and emphasis. "The trouble in South

Africa," said Weston Massinghay, "wasn't that we didn't boil our

water. It was that we didn't boil our men. The Boers drank the

same stuff we did. THEY didn't get dysentery."

That argument went on for some time. I was attacked across the