And I'd Do It Again

by Crocker, Aimée;

  Next day, Don José appeared – but how changed. Drawn and yellow, he seemed really to be suffering. I asked him, naturally, if he had had the ship’s medical service, but he said not, and that his wife was taking care of him as well and better than any ship’s doctor could.

  Thereafter his appearances were more and more irregular, and each time he seemed to look more like a handsome cadaver than the last. One night, about five days before reaching Hong Kong, the Green-Eyed Woman came to my stateroom as I was preparing for bed. She was tense. She was evidently “in a state.”

  “Can I trust you?” she asked me bluntly.

  I told her that she could, and my curiosity was bubbling over.

  “I don’t mean in the ordinary way,” she parried. “But suppose I should confide something really terrible in you? Could I trust you?”

  She had me there. Nothing could have determined me more quickly.

  “Well,” she said panting, and obviously on the edge of her nerves, “I must tell somebody. I shall go mad.”

  “Well?”

  “My husband is dying. He will be dead before we reach Hong Kong.”

  That would ordinarily have aroused me, but I knew that he was ill. She had led me to expect more than this.

  “I was afraid he was ill. Was that what you wanted to say?”

  But her long green eyes glowed through their curved slits, peering into my eyes.

  “Not entirely,” she said. Then she burst out with: “He’s dying of poison. He’s meant to die. Now do you understand?”

  I did not.

  “No? What do you mean?”

  “I’m poisoning him. I’m murdering him if you want to call it that. Now you know.”

  She sat there like gilded ivory, staring into the blank wall of my stateroom. I did not know what to say. Nor what to do. Finally I asked:

  “Why?”

  “I want his money. I married him for it five years ago, and he will never die unless I make him. Just that. No other reason. Now you can give me away to the Captain if you want.”

  And with that she got up quickly and walked out, slamming the door as though I had done her a personal injury.

  Murder!

  If this were not madness, a hallucination … if it were true, then, technically, I would be just as much of a murderess as she was. I ought to tell the Captain. I even quite convinced myself that I was going to do so.

  But I never did. I cannot explain why. I could not have done it.

  In two days the handsome old man was dead.

  “Phthisis” was the verdict, if I remember rightly. He was buried at sea.

  And that night, after the burial, his red-haired, green-eyed widow came to me … not to thank me, but to say:

  “You murderess! Why did you let me do it? ...” and words to that effect, in such a fury and in such a state of wild resentment of the fact that I should have permitted her to carry on, that I was bewildered. But I saw that she was not herself. I both despised her and felt sorry for her. And I was afraid of her, to be truthful. She was like some reincarnation of an ancient Egyptian cat-woman. I left her raving in my stateroom and went on deck. Two hours later, when I came back, she had gone.

  She was met in Hong Kong, at the pier, by a young Englishman.

  I learned later that she had purchased one of the finest residences on “the peak” and that they were both squandering Don José’s ill-inherited money.

  Women have always been a mystery to me, a woman.

  A New Vice: Opium Dens in France, an illustration from Le Petit Journal, 1903.

  ✥

  But let us get on to China and things more pleasant.

  Hong Kong, when I reached it, was as Sino-British as you please. England had “leased” it from the Chinese Empire about 1830, which really means that the Chinese Emperor had been afraid not to “lease it.”

  Immigration authorities were British. Police were Sikhs. Porters were Chinese, Cingalese, Korean … what-have-you. And the whole place, a little colony-city of some 300,000 yellow souls, not to mention the 15,000 or more white souls, was fantastically unbelievable.

  The harbor was like a lake. Blue-marine for ten miles, overshadowed by the Peak and the high Kowloon peninsula.

  Somebody aptly said once that it is Tommy Atkins’ farthest sentry-box, and I heard or read somewhere that a British soldier said on being sent there that you couldn’t send him any further from home without sending him nearer.

  It is true.

  That curious, unbelievable city of Hong Kong, a military stronghold, a coaling station for John Bull, teeming and thronging with little yellow men, tall parchment-faced men, fat Mongolians, brown Malays, Hindoos, Parsees, Portuguese, is like a cauldron of broth which the British are skimming.

  But it is beautiful.

  The beauty is not like that of Japan. There are none of the charming little gardens with red bridges. You do not have the sensation of stage scenery. But you feel the age. Centuries of age. In the tree, in the sky, in the good sunshine, in the moldering fogs.

  I think my first impression was a nasal one.

  I smelled Hong Kong before I ever left the big white boat. I heard a clamor, I felt a pressure, I sensed age and old power. The East was there, slightly tinged with the West, slightly cleaned up and made presentable for British officers and their wives. But it was the East. I was in it. I was plunging.

  In Japan you ride in ’rickishas. In China you ride in chairs. The Sedan-chair is an institution, not for speed as is the rickshaw, but especially designed to flatter the vanity of the occupant. It is easy to imagine oneself a queen in a chair.

  My hotel was on the Peak. That eminence is about two miles south of Victoria, the English military city, and lifts its snobbish head about 1800 feet into the blue heavens. There is (or was) a cable tramway, and your first ride is a new sort of intoxication because all the houses seem to be falling over and drunken.

  The purser contrived to get my baggage into the hands of not more than three coolies and arranged a price that was not robbery. I also got me into a chair and the chair tottered with me as far as the tram and the tram managed to deposit me on the higher level, and my baggage managed to arrive hours later, God knows how.

  I had been advised by some one to live on the Peak; I have no other excuse for this absurdity.

  Things always happen to me.

  They began almost immediately happening in Hong Kong, but before I go into that it might be well to make a little picture of what I saw there and how I remember it, for of all the cities I have ever visited and under whatever circumstances, that first visit to Hong Kong remains so vivid, so striking, that it seems to me symbolic of all that is China … and I ought to insist that Hong Kong is no more like the rest of China than Boston is like the rest of America.

  Hong Kong is crowded. My expression is too mild: it is teeming. I was conscious of more persons living and breathing and “being” about me each moment than had ever lived and breathed and “been” about me before in my life. They were yellow, brown, black, gray, white, olive and back to yellow again. Curious, but there were few women. Men of all shapes and sizes thronged the narrow streets of the Asiatic city, but women were in a huge minority. Why? I found out later.

  It appears that the Chinese population of Hong Kong is largely Cantonese, and that the careful gentlemen from Canton leave their wives at home for two reasons. Number One: they do not trust the morals of the blond foreigner, be he British, an officer-and-gentleman, or merely a gentleman. Perhaps they have learned from Mr. Atkins. Number Two: It is cheaper to leave wives at home. A pretty good explanation, when you think of it.

  I said a little above that in China you take chairs, not ’rikishas. It is not quite true. There are the fast little runners (Japanese, too) to be found in Hong Kong, although very few. I remember them distinctly, because it was in a Hong Kong ’rikisha that I got my first shock of contrast here. I had been shopping. Of that more later, for whoever concocted the legal-latin “cavea
t emptor” must have done some shopping in Hong Kong … no longer on the Peak, by the way. I found a ’rikisha, babbled pidgin, and got under way at a great pace.

  The streets grew narrower, dirtier, more picturesque, if one can call it that. And more fragrant. Sewers had not taken root in old China, despite the admirable attempts of the British. Narrower, dirtier, more filled with draping signs in all colors and gold, crowded with little yellow men in black shirts and slippers and sleeves, with big yellow men the same, with tottering women … only a few children, animals of various sorts, darker and dingier and more fetid.

  And then, just at the minute I believed it was going to end in something more awful and more romantic than I had ever dreamed, the light burst in upon me and the fairer streets, cleaner and policed, the British city, surrounded me.

  Curious impression.

  Curious contrast.

  “Never the twain shall meet,” suggested the poet. You almost believe him to be a liar, and yet …

  Indian soldiers in their brilliant turbans draped themselves about. (They didn’t drape, exactly, but they were as decorative as drapings.) Sikh policemen looked very businesslike, efficient and contented. A tramway made its presence known, as though thumbing its nose at the ancient ways. And, in the midst of this extraordinary mixture of races and thought and purposes, there was a stall or tiny two-by-four shed which contained one Buddhist priest with an iron bar over three feet long thrust through his cheeks, blood streaming, bearing his pain with perfect composure, an object lesson to passersby.

  I learned that the priest submitted publicly to this self-torture in order to stimulate people into contributing to his temple which needed repairs. “If I can suffer thus, you can deprive yourself of a little …” That was the meaning.

  I guess we in the West know very little of what true religious fervor is.

  A little bit more description.

  Society in Victoria was conducted on the military plan. The Governor, two Admirals, a General, a Chief Justice and the Anglican Bishop were the leaders. Tiffin was a great daytime function. Dancing, gambling, drinking and things of even lesser moral worth filled the night.

  It is almost miraculous how we Anglo-Saxons can keep our Right Hands from consciousness of the deeds of our Left Hands. I wonder how it is that the Captains Sir Reginald Humpty-Blye-Blye, so austere and so military, can keep face with themselves. I don’t mean this to be a strict reference to the British. Hong Kong is British, but the same self-hiding goes on in Shanghai, Peking and other places, with Americans setting the pace.

  For instance …

  This story is by way of a confession; you can take it or leave it and you can judge it as you please.

  I was about to leave Hong Kong when a certain young officer who had demonstrated a rather more than lukewarm interest in me, decided that my education was lacking and that he should show me the “underworld” of Hong Kong.

  Little I knew.

  We had danced and he had done some drinking.

  (I ought to have mentioned that on my last trip home I had promised my mother that I would never drink alcohol in any form again. I never did. Otherwise I should not be alive to write this book.) We danced, he drank, we wandered.

  We took a chair to a section of the city I had never even heard of, much less seen.

  There was, in a street so narrow you could touch each side, and so dirty you could only use a bottle of smelling salts in defense, a weird sort of house built in five tiers and capped, each tier, like a pagoda. It being later than midnight, there was no one on the street, but somehow you felt conscious of people being near you.

  There was a door. Its appearance was not that of an unusual door, but it had nevertheless a certain presence. Captain X. rapped sharply after talking in Chinese with his private chair bearers. The door suddenly vanished. It flew upwards into space without a sound.

  A single lantern burned dimly in a plain, uninteresting room. We went in, and the door came back from space and closed upon us, still without a sound. At the end of the room a curtain of heavy, rather dirty yellow silk moved aside, and a fat Cingalese bowed over his folded hands, indicating a stairway.

  My captain apparently knew his way, and escorted me downstairs. Below I could hear vague sounds suggesting music. I could also hear more knocking on the upstairs door. More visitors.

  The room below was less plain, covered by several straw mats, but unfurnished. Another curtain, another Cingalese, and another stair. We descended, and then the music was plainer and a vague flair of aromatic smoke greeted us. A long, brightly lighted passage, draped in silk (clean, this time) and another silken door, and then we found ourselves in an enormous room with an enormous mixture of people in it in various positions.

  I suppose to you of the younger generation who know your night-clubs and your Chinatown-for-fifty-cents tours this may seem all very tame.

  But those things were unknown, especially to young women in their twenties, in those days, and I am willing to admit right here that I was not only impressed but also a little alarmed. It was plainly “not nice.” There was nothing in the room upon which you could put your finger and say “this will not do,” but there was a certain air which the French might call “louche.”

  A modern roulette table centered the room. There were women. There were men. There were rich costumes, oriental and European. There seemed to be a certain tension, though that may have been imaginary.

  Nobody noticed us except four oily Chinamen in gorgeous colors who seemed to be the principals of the establishment, and who acted like over-eager tradesmen expecting us to buy something.

  Captain X. knew many. He saluted and was greeted in return. I was introduced to several groups, but we did not stay in the roulette room.

  Passing through and under more of the inevitable curtains, we found ourselves in another large room whose atmosphere was quite different. Music came from somewhere … Chinese music, full of weird harmonies and weirder discords. But it was very soft. In the diminished light I became conscious that the room was more than really a room but had alcoves made of draperies all about it and that these alcoves had people in them.

  Seated on mats here and there were solitary figures, Chinese, smoking pensively, not talking, not seeing.

  “This is called vice,” said my Officer-and-Gentleman.

  Opium.

  But my guide had other things in mind. We did not inspect more closely the people whose souls were floating far away in some opiate dreamland, but went down another stairway, this time rather splendid and decorated in gold lacquer and with grotesque and beautiful carvings.

  Another mixture of races greeted us.

  Tables distinctly un-Chinese were conveniently arranged round the most curious room I have ever seen. The floor was carpeted thickly and richly, black and gold was the note in colored lacquer over the heavy carved beams that braced the ceiling, arched slightly, and suggestive of the interior of a pagoda. (I had, at that time, never seen the interior of a pagoda.)

  At the tables sat the army, and with them, drinking tea and other liquids, were silken little girls, chiefly Chinese, but with many a blond head among them, in low and intimate conversation.

  We were seated. We were served. We scarcely talked.

  I was nervous and rather embarrassed. I was soon to be more so.

  In one corner of the room was a table which seemed rather more noticeable than the others because the talk was louder and there had been more liquids served.

  As we took our places, a young man in evening clothes saw my captain and got up, rather shakily, to greet him. There was a brief introduction, and my guide excused himself for a moment and went over to the other table, leaving me alone.

  I had not been alone for more than a few minutes when the palace was frozen by a scream, the long, agonizing, heartrending scream of a woman.

  The Anglo-Saxon faction was electrified. Men stood to their feet. The Chinese fat-gentleman who smoked lazily on a platform at one end
of the room merely puffed his pipe.

  Then the curtains which concealed the stairs we had just come down were thrust aside, and something walked slowly through.

  It was a woman.

  She was so blond that at first sight she seemed an albino, or to be wearing a powdered wig. She walked stiffly, frozenly, her eyes fixed straight ahead. And in her beautiful face, in her wide staring eyes, there was a horror such as I have never imagined could be expressed in the human features.

  Then without warning and before anyone could shake off the tension that held us all, she screamed again.

  She threw back her head, threw her arms out and up, and screamed, and then fell in a heap on the floor, moaning and making plaintive little sounds expressive of mental agony.

  The fat Chinaman blew smoke in her direction.

  Seven Anglo-Saxons rushed to her. At their touch she screamed the louder.

  “Go away, you dirty ——s.”

  The little girls stopped their drinking and their chatter to look at her, each one with her own rather superior manner.

  I couldn’t stand it. I got up and went over to her and laid my hand on her shoulder and spoke to her.

  “Can I help?” I asked, or something like that.

  Perhaps it was my voice … something had an effect on her like cold water. She stopped writhing and looked up at me, breathing hard. There was surprise in her face, and wonder.

  “Get away from here, for God’s sake,” she whispered.

  “I’m sorry. I meant to help. You are in trouble …”

  She sat up there on the floor, puzzled. She stared at me … There was a group around us by this time, but she did not see the rest.

  “Jesus, what are you doing here? You’re only a kid … only a kid.”

  My captain came back to his post. He pressed my shoulder.

  “We’d better go,” he said.

  “Yes, go. Take her out of here, you damned fool,” said the girl. “What did you bring her here for?”