I would spend a full week in Marseille, where I was offered more advertising contracts than I could accept, riding through the streets adorned, again, with all manner of adverts for this and that. The stream of admirers who called on me at the hotel seemed never-ending, so much so that the local papers obliged me by publishing visiting hours. During my time there I called on the U.S. consulate to secure the signature of the consul to prove my presence in the city.
On January 20, a week after my arrival, it was time to press on. I had booked passage on a mail steamer, the Sydney, bound for the Orient. I had to make my way through thousands of onlookers who had crowded the docks to see me off. I would, months later, receive a clipping from Le Petit Provençal, one of the Marseille newspapers, that described the scene. The assembled masses “resembled a huge swarm of ants,” they reported. “The Soufre Pier was equally invaded. Along the quay, privileged hundreds came to make their goodbyes to the intrepid Miss Londonderry.”
As the ship, flying the French and American flags (in my honor), maneuvered through the port, the captain made a final pass close by the pier so the crowd could get one last look at me. Standing with my Sterling on the port side, I waved my riding cap until the pier, and France herself, slipped from view. I was prepared for a few days at sea by myself and looked forward to enjoying some peace and quiet after weeks in the company of others. But just a few minutes after Marseille had disappeared, I would get the shock of my life.
Eleven
There are two versions, well, many more, really, but two principal ones, of how I reached the eastern shores of China and then Japan from Marseille, and I told both of them, sometimes to different reporters on the same day in the same city, depending on how much time I had and what struck my fancy in the moment. There was the long story and the short one, but in truth the longer one was conjured during the shorter one. I can tell you this: I sailed from Marseille on the twentieth of January 1895, and arrived in Yokohama in early March of that year.
For those paying attention, this was a remarkably fast passage for a woman supposedly riding a bicycle across Europe, through Persia, Palestine, South Asia, and China, but it was filled with adventure. The ride from Bombay to Calcutta was made miserable by insects. I hitched myself to a royal hunting party and spent three days pursuing the great Bengal tiger. In the hinterlands of Asia, where many had never even seen a bicycle, I was mistaken for a flying squirrel, an evil spirit, or, on one occasion, a visitor from Mars. Many times my life was in mortal danger, my escapes always narrow, and my courage, and my spirits, always high. On several occasions warning shots fired from my pistol sent natives who wished me harm fleeing in fear. In eastern China, where war raged between China and Japan over control of Corea, as they spelled it then, I met up with two journalists and a missionary and traveled with them to the front lines of the conflict, at one point falling, with my Sterling, through the ice on a frozen river. When we reached the front, we were fired upon by Chinese troops, and I took a bullet to the shoulder, causing a wound that took a full month to heal. Our Japanese guide was killed on the spot. Mr. Moffatt, the missionary, was also shot, and his wounds proved fatal; he died a few days later. The fields were littered with war dead, sometimes packed so closely I had to roll my Sterling over the bodies. Now traveling alone, I was arrested by Japanese soldiers and thrown into a prison cell where, right before my eyes, I saw a Japanese soldier kill a Chinese prisoner and drink his blood while his muscles were yet quivering. Upon my release, thanks to a legion of French soldiers who arrived and demanded my freedom, I rode up to Siberia where I was witness to the cruelties of the Russian prison system, at one point passing forty prisoners being forced to march fourteen hundred miles. Some of this may sound familiar, for many of the stories I made up as a young woman of twenty-three made their way into bedtime stories I told you when you were a little girl.
The war between China and Japan over control of the Corean Peninsula had been front-page news around the world for nearly a year, even in America, where the outcome had little relevance for most Americans. Yet the dispatches from the front were so dramatic, the battles so pitched and brutal and bloody, that the conflict became yet another serial entertainment told in almost daily installments to readers eager for a taste of adventure. I knew that stories, seen firsthand, or at least told as if they were, would be of keen interest to American audiences, and most would hardly care if the storyteller were on the level as long as the accounts set them on the edge of their seats.
Oh, Mary, dear, so much happened in those six weeks between my taking leave of Marseille and my arrival in Yokohama! I confess, I don’t know whether people believed these stories or simply reveled in them regardless, but they became a staple of the repertoire I was developing for my eventual return to America, where, I reasoned, I would find a public eager for tales of high adventure. I was living, dear, on the knife-edge between fiction and reality and needed an account of my travels more interesting than could be had on a mail steamer making its way from Marseille to Hong Kong.
* * *
The Sydney, like most mail steamers of the day, carried passengers, but it lacked the amenities of La Touraine. Far from a luxury liner, the Sydney was a more modest affair, a working boat that belched black smoke from its stacks day and night. It accommodated some two hundred passengers, ninety in first class, forty-four in second class, and seventy-five, me among them, well belowdecks in steerage.
Right after Marseille had disappeared from view, I went to my tiny cabin to take a nap and prepare myself mentally for the long voyage ahead, when there was a gentle knock on my door. I told you earlier that after receiving in Paris the letter from Susie explaining that she was soon to be wed, I saw her but a handful of times after my journey and before moving to New York. But I saw her one other time, as well, for when I opened the cabin door I could scarcely believe the sight before me. It was Susie, and I was unable to mutter so much as a word for the shock was complete. I could no more have imagined opening the door to find President Cleveland in his pajamas. Susie embraced me, but I felt my body go rigid, for I was too stunned to make sense of what was happening.
I recognized her, of course, but to the woman whose character I had come to inhabit she was a complete stranger. The sight of her had the effect of wrenching me without warning from one world, the one I was now living in, into another that was as far away and flat as photographs from a distant past. Susie took a step back and placed her hands on my upper arms.
“Are you not pleased to see me, my dear Annie?” she asked, her eyes pleading. She didn’t seem hurt, just curious. I believe she understood the profound sense of dislocation her sudden appearance had caused. Without a word I backed up slowly and plopped down on the bed, unsure that what I was seeing was real. I don’t know how much time passed before I spoke at last; I suppose it was the time it took for Annie Kopchovsky to swim up from the depths and reclaim her place inside me.
“But how… how… I mean, why…” I could hardly arrange words into a coherent sentence or question. “I am so confused,” I said, shaking my head as my feelings started to organize themselves. It was a rare moment when I did not feel completely in control, and here I was, flummoxed as never before.
“How did you find me here? I mean, I am happy to see you, of course, but I don’t understand. I received your letter in Paris, the one about your engagement. I cannot believe it is you, here, now, in the flesh.”
Susie came and sat beside me. She knew I was relying on her to help me make sense of her sudden reappearance in my life, especially far from Boston aboard a mail steamer sailing away from Marseille and across the Mediterranean, the last place on earth where I might have expected to see anyone I had known in my previous life.
“After I posted that letter to you in Boston, I immediately felt I must see you before my wedding, to speak to you, hold you, and, I hoped, to share my love for you one more time,” said Susie. “I told Alfred a white lie, that I was traveling to New York and Washingto
n to visit with friends for several weeks. But I had already arranged for passage to Le Havre from New York. Once there it was easy to determine your whereabouts. Every newspaper in France seemed to be tracking your progress! In Paris I learned you were riding south to Marseille and traveled there by train. I arrived two days ago resolved to surprise you, but there, for the first time, I feared you might not welcome my intrusion. I know I have been terribly selfish coming here like this, but when I read that you were to sail on the Sydney I impulsively purchased myself a ticket to Alexandria. I will make my return from there. Oh, my dear Annie, I hope my impetuousness has not made you unhappy. I am so very pleased to see you.”
In all the time I had known Susie, throughout those years in which we shared the most intimate parts of ourselves with each other, I don’t think I had ever felt angry with her, or disappointed in her, or confused by our love for each other. It always had such clarity. But sitting there on that small bed in a cabin in the belly of a French mail steamer off the French coast I became aware of an unfamiliar feeling rising up from the depths. As the shock began to subside, when I was able to grasp that this was no apparition, I was angry… angry to have been taken off guard, to have been ambushed (unlike the ambush near Salon-de-Provence, this one was quite real and quite injurious), and with no way to escape, for we were now well out to sea in more ways than one.
Perhaps I should be more precise. The anger was Miss Londonderry’s, not my own. Now, I don’t want you to think I had taken leave of my senses, was suffering from a malady of the psyche, or had lost touch with my real self. That was not the case. I was well aware of who I really was. But in the six months since I had left home, with every mile I put behind me, I had grown accustomed to my new role, and it was one I was taking great delight in. I was no longer the downtrodden Boston housewife and mother who put bread on our table caught in endless days of domestic drudgery. I was a free woman unsaddled with the weight of the life I had left behind. Susie’s abrupt appearance was forcing me out of my new shell, my new armor, which was protecting me from regret, second thoughts, and guilt at, well, let’s face it, abandoning my family, your family. I was terribly afraid that if I allowed myself to retreat from the new woman I had become, and was still becoming, I might lose the fortitude to continue on, and I had very much determined that I would, indeed, carry on to the very end.
There was yet another irony I confronted in that brief moment when I was buffeted one way by the winds of my past and another by the winds of my future. In the six months I had been traveling I had undergone a metamorphosis. I left Boston in the most ladylike attire, adopted the bloomer costume in Chicago, and was now doing my riding in a man’s riding suit of wool pants and short jacket (with warmer overlayers as necessary). And my body had changed, too. As the French press had been quick to point out, I hardly conformed to French notions of femininity owing to the more muscular build acquired by my exertions on the wheel. My legs were more taut and sculpted, my waist thinner, and my upper body a bit broader. My skin, once soft and supple, had been weathered by the elements; my hands were rough and the skin on my face made me appear older than I was. Yet, ironically, as my appearance gradually became more “masculine,” I found myself less attracted to the women I encountered, and when I saw Susie I felt, for the first time, no physical attraction toward her. None at all.
Susie seemed to sense all of it in an instant.
“Oh, dear, my dear Annie. I have a made a terrible mistake, I can see it in your eyes and I can feel it. You are not pleased to see me. I thought this would be a delightful surprise, but I can see that I have badly misjudged the situation.”
I was unsure what to say, for Annie Kopchovksy still loved Susie very much, but she was indeed breaking a spell, so to speak, that left Miss Londonderry shaken. I took her right hand in mine, gave it a slight squeeze, and let go.
“I think I need a moment to collect my thoughts,” I said. My feelings seemed beyond corralling. “Please sit. I am in a bit of shock, to be honest.”
“Oh, Annie,” she said, “I do understand. Perhaps I should have told you, or asked you, before making this long journey to see you. It was terribly impulsive on my part, I know.”
I nodded, trying to figure out what to say next. The air in the cabin suddenly seemed stale and stifling.
A few awkward moments passed in silence.
“It’s a fine day,” I said at last. “Come. Let’s take a stroll on the deck and catch the Mediterranean breeze.”
And there, as we walked, I tried to put into words all the feelings I just conveyed to you.
I felt like a fish trying to explain life under the water to someone whose life was lived on land.
It was not Susie’s intent to remain with me for long. She had already booked her return passage to Marseille from Alexandria, the Sydney’s first port of call, but that was yet five days away. For better or for worse, we would be on this boat together for the next five days, five days during which the love I felt for Susie as Annie Kopchovksy would wrestle uneasily with the displeasure I felt as Miss Londonderry for having had the veil I had drawn around myself pierced without warning. It was a struggle that left me bewildered, disoriented, and distressed.
Let me be plain. Miss Londonderry carried the day. Our conversations were frequent, sometimes awkward, but mostly limited to the mundane. Susie had no news of my family, for she didn’t really know them and traveled in different circles. The winter in Boston, she said, had been particularly frigid, the skating pond on the Common crowded for weeks. Much snow had fallen. In all these conversations I could see the pain in Susie’s eyes; she had traveled a great distance and incurred considerable expense for what she hoped would be one last romantic interlude before her marriage, but the woman she expected to meet had run off somewhere, her body inhabited by a harder, more distant, far less accessible woman. Truly, I felt sorry for her; I took no pleasure in her pain but was unable to assuage it. We dined together, walked the deck, and sometimes caught the rays of the sun in the chairs set out for passengers, but we slept in our separate cabins. Those five days, as the Sydney made its way east across the Mediterranean, passed with excruciating slowness. I was ready to fully reclaim my new identity and to be among people for whom Annie Kopchovsky did not exist, where I would be a stranger among strangers and free to be whomever and whatever I chose to be.
As you can imagine, our parting at Alexandria was likewise awkward and painful. I could only apologize to Susie for being so distant, for disappointing her so, for causing her any pain at all, for the real me trembled at the thought of all those things. I begged her to understand, to forgive me, and the look in her eyes told me she was trying, truly trying, but had not fully arrived at that destination. I allowed myself to give her a genuine and prolonged embrace, hoping that she would at least feel the sincerity of my apologies, though I also felt the apologies she offered me were indeed quite necessary.
* * *
The very next day, after a brief stopover at Alexandria, I was relieved to once again be alone. After Susie’s departure, the sand quickly filled in the hole she had dug. I gave her intrusion little thought.
The Sydney sailed on to Port Said, a major coaling station at the northern end of the Suez Canal, where the ship would be refueled and lay over for two and a half days, just enough time for me to fulfill my dream of seeing the holy city of Jerusalem.
Passenger boats moved regularly between Port Said and Jaffa, a voyage of about ten hours. A narrow gauge railway, built in 1892, ran from there to Jerusalem. Though just some forty miles distant, the rail trip to Jerusalem took a painstaking three hours. Once there I had just several hours to see some of the sights; the view of the city from the Mount of Olives, the Wailing Wall, and the al-Aqsa Mosque. Although the city was nominally divided into quarters—Moslem, Armenian, Christian, and Jewish—Moslems were the majority population in each. Most streets in the city were paved and cleaned with regularity, unlike the thoroughfares in many American cities, which
were usually gritty and dirty. Regular garbage collection kept the streets looking tidy and welcoming, and even in winter it felt more like springtime at home. Important landmarks such as al-Aqsa and the Dome of the Rock had undergone major repairs in the 1870s and been kept in good condition, so that overall, despite its ancient history, Jerusalem felt fresh and orderly and very civilized. Jerusalem, birthplace of the world’s three great religions, was not the contentious place it is now in 1947. I do hope, before I die, to see the birth of the State of Israel; in 1895 it was not even a notion.
* * *
In a photography shop in Jerusalem I purchased a large collection of lantern slides for the slide show I was putting together for my lectures. Once I reached the States, it was my plan to make good money lecturing about my journey as I made my way from California to Chicago. No sooner had I arrived in Jerusalem than it was time to leave and make the long trip back to Port Said. I could ill afford any delay lest the Sydney depart without me but with my precious Sterling.
As luck would have it—bad luck, that is—on the return trip the train stalled an hour from Jaffa owing to some unexplained mechanical failure. As the delay wore on I became increasingly alarmed, a concern that proved to be well founded. By the time the train lurched into motion again we had been stuck for well over two hours, and I missed the boat I had planned to take back to Port Said. The next scheduled departure was eight hours hence, which would have put me back in Port Said two hours after the Sydney was scheduled to sail. I was apoplectic: I had no plan B and had no idea what I would do if the Sydney sailed without me. Normally cool and collected, I started to panic.
Spin Page 13
