And I'd Do It Again

by Crocker, Aimée;

  I began to wonder if what I had seen was all it appeared. I began to wonder why two women … obviously women of culture and obviously fond of each other … should have killed each other in such a ghastly manner. I began to recall all the detective stories I had read and to wonder if it were possible that two persons should strangle one another. I began to wonder if this was not staged for me. By whom? Why? I began, in fact, to agitate myself considerably. Hysterics, perhaps. I do not know. I began to fear the Parsee, to wish that he would walk a little in front of me instead of a little behind me.

  But that was absurd. Nothing happened. He took me to my quarters and left with his scraping bow. All he said was:

  “It is perhaps better that the Memsahib does not remember these things.”

  That reminded me of the butler’s caution.

  I returned to my bed. It was already early morning, and the sun was fresh and bright, and I was so exhausted nervously that sleep was impossible. But when I finally arose, a little before tiffin, the vision of what I had witnessed early in the morning was so clear, and the fears and misgivings I had made for myself so strong, that I came to a real decision.

  Now I have none of the good, honest, Anglo-Saxon feeling of duty towards society. I care very little indeed about society and I find myself under no sort of obligation to that imaginary force. Under most conditions, I would have kept as silent as possible concerning what I had seen and my suspicions, but in this case my womanhood triumphed where my social conscience would have failed. I liked Joan and was sure I would have liked the remarkable woman who styled herself Mrs. Llewellyn. I reasoned about the matter in this way:

  Here are two cultured women, of English origin, living together, hidden away in India. The situation looks a little shady, and suggests that they were intent on avoiding the public eye. The term Lesbian was not current then, but everyone who knew anything about life knew all about that. Then here they are found dead under conditions which seem both impossible and unnatural. Could two women kill each other by mutual strangulation? I doubted it. Had there been a different crime from the one I had been made to see?

  These things tormented my brain until finally I decided then on the chance of a double murder by the butler or the Parsee, or both together, or any of the other servants, I ought to tell somebody what I knew.

  I did so.

  I told Shikapur. He laughed and said I was romantic and that I was either trying to impress him with a detective story, or else that I had had a nightmare. I tried in vain to convince him. At last I made him promise to go with me as far as the field and see the house, and then go and investigate for himself if he dared.

  The next day he dared.

  I waited for him where I would not be seen from the windows in case any of the servants were watching. He was not gone more than five minutes. When he returned, he was laughing.

  “Well you nearly won. It was a good story, but I won’t let you tease the others with it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Shikapur looked at me sharply. He told me then that the house was closed and that he had forced his way in through a back window, and that there was nothing in the house at all, not a stick of furniture, not the slightest signs of habitation, nothing.

  And if you think that I was able to convince him that not more than 28 hours previously I had really been inside that house and seen what I had seen, then you are mistaken. I went myself to the house and confirmed his report. In the blue room, which still was blue, there was nothing but the walls and the lacquered flooring. Nothing else. Nothing else at all.

  And although I knew perfectly well that things had been moved out in the night, and that every trace of life had been removed by some means … all except the vague odor of perfume that had belonged to Mrs. Llewellyn … I had nothing more to say. And I was teased, of course. Of that you can be sure.

  I received by mail, several times forwarded to different addresses, a clipping from a London paper, with photographs, saying that the bodies of Lady Maud M…. and Miss Joan P…., prominent society women, had been returned to England for burial from India, where they had died of fever while on an expedition into the interior of one of the lesser-known states.

  There was no letter, no signature. Nothing but the clipping.

  Calcutta.

  ✥

  In recounting that incident, another tragic story has been brought vividly back into my memory.

  It happened in Benares, that extraordinary city on the river Ganges. I had taken a small house there, just room enough for myself and a few servants. I lazed and did nothing. I had no adventures, practically no friends there, yet I was very happy and peaceful and gave myself up to meditation and thought and the rich, sober, powerful doctrines that are the soul of India.

  One day I returned from a walk to find, squatting cross-legged in the hall-way, a young man engaged in mending the straw mats of rented houses. He looked up at me as I came in and looked through me. I have often been touched by strong emotion in the presence of human beauty, but I must confess that the exquisite carving of the features of that youth … he could scarcely have been more than 19 … was as nothing I had ever known in my life. He was naked save for a loin-cloth, and as perfectly made as though carved in brownstone by the hand of some rich-minded sculptor.

  If I had known that right then and there some sort of a spark had snapped, if I had realized what the finger of destiny was writing, I might have been hard enough to have reprimanded him for cluttering up the hall and have chased him into the kitchen. That is the way a conventional woman, accustomed to India, would have acted.

  But I did not.

  As he smiled up at me, boyishly, I smiled at him, and passed on into my room, and promptly forgot him. But I had scarcely changed my clothes and made myself ready for tea when I heard the patter of bare feet behind me, and there was the young man, standing dazed and worshipful. He looked at me as a little dog I had once had used to look … as though he simply could not bear any longer not to be spoken to by me and was coming over to put his paw on my knee.

  “Memsahib …” he said, in a whisper, “Memsahib …”

  “What is it?” I asked. But he said nothing, could understand nothing, only repeated:

  “Memsahib … Memsahib …”

  Then slowly and edgingly he came over to where was seated and put out his hand, very timidly, and touched me on the arm, pulling his hand away again immediately as though he were frightened.

  Now it is difficult to tell you what was going on inside me, but it is not a usual experience and there is nothing with which one may compare it. I was pleased as one is pleased when a great dog comes over and manifests a liking for one, but I was a little frightened, too, because there was only one translation of the burning of those enormous eyes … love. I have never seen such passion silently expressed in my life. This boy, still in his teens, was entirely consumed with it. He stood there trembling. He was speechless and even gasping. I was frightened a little, pleased a little, flattered, and amused too, and quite touched in the vanity. The latter is what made me do the wrong thing. I held out my hand to him as one might to a little boy. Entirely unexpectedly, he seized it in both of his and pressed his face to it, making strange groaning sounds that alarmed me. And then, without warning, he sprang at me, unleashed and temporarily mad, like a little wild animal that knows no control.

  I had one bad moment. Then I managed to extricate one of my hands and caught him a good, old-fashioned slap across the face. That had the desired effect. He stopped his absurd efforts at once, looked terribly frightened, stared at me for a minute, and then fell to the floor and groveled, muttering something in Hindi by which I knew he was meaning to ask my pardon.

  Now according to British law in India, this boy was now a criminal and I could have him flogged and imprisoned. However, I did nothing of the sort. I patted his head, called my maidservant and explained that I was going to engage the young man for a punkah boy, and told her to see that he ha
d a bath and some clothes.

  She explained this to him, and again he fell down and worshiped me, and had almost to be dragged from the room to his cleansing process.

  Well, I was a little ashamed of, and a little pleased with myself. One naturally does not carry on flirtations with children, and still less with Indians of impossibly low caste found by hazard in the service of mending one’s mats. But I was touched by the lad’s passionate adoration of me. I felt, after some strong self-criticism, that I had probably done a good thing, all the same.

  You will be able to judge when you see how it turned out.

  The following day brought me a visit from a very large and spongy-looking native woman, a man so completely emaciated that I thought he would evaporate while talking to me, and about six children. My servants would not let them into the house, so that I had to go out to see them, while the servants explained that they were the parents of my new punkah boy who had come to thank me for being his benefactress … Also my servants, who were of another caste, were indignant that I should have had anything to do with the boy or his family and they showed plainly that I had lost caste in their eyes.

  The family gratitude scene was pathetic. I understood not one word they said but I gathered that the pittance I offered to pay Mouki (so I discovered he was called) was more money than they had seen in their lives, and that I had become the new goddess of their creed. I had the servants give them something, and I left them scraping and chattering, and that was that.

  Well, things went on with Mouki not only being the best punkah boy that I had ever seen but following me around like a little poodle and mooning at me from his beautiful eyes whenever I was not looking directly at him. Furthermore, it was marked by some of my women friends who occasionally dropped in, and I am afraid that my arrangement was not quite understood. However, nobody ever does understand.

  One day Mouki was taken sick. I did not know what was the matter with him, but he was very definitely ill, and I was heartily afraid that it might be the pest. I had him taken to an American doctor, and learned that the poor boy was dying of typhoid. Apparently nothing could be done for he had stoically gone on suffering and concealing it until his state was so bad that he was really beyond help.

  Well, as you may imagine, I had grown very attached to the young man by this time. It was natural, for even if it had not fascinated me merely to look at him, he had rather upset my household, brought his family into my life, and had followed me about like a young watchdog with such loving care that I was often embarrassed. I sent him to a good hospital, had everything done for him, but it was no use. He died in a fortnight, calling weakly after me, saying Good-by, and being sad only that he knew he was going to leave me.

  This is morbid, I suppose, and what I am about to add is even more so. But it is worth writing down, if only for the ceremony that attended the funeral.

  Mouki was of a caste that cremates its dead. I cannot possibly make clear to you the great differences between the various religious beliefs of India, but it is significant that some bury, others leave for vultures to destroy and consume, and still others burn their dead.

  In Mouki’s case the mother and entire family took the body from my house, carrying my poor punkah boy on a rough litter, and I followed them, trudgingly. Far out of the city they carried it until, on one of the ghats of the Ganges, they came to that place reserved for the cremation of the dead, and there they laid him on a pyre while the flames destroyed the beauty of his earthly remains.

  It was very tragic. It was tragedy particularly for the family, and I felt in some curious and twisted fashion that I had been guilty of something which I could never repair … It was almost as though I had been responsible for Mouki’s death. Absurd and impossible, but that is the way I felt … I was glad to be able to subsidize the family with a few rupees. I never missed them, but there was joy mingled with the new sorrow of those poor people when they were able to have enough rice for a while.

  The gloomy part of this, the burning of Mouki at the ghats, recalls another experience which is not pleasant at all. The Parsees, as is pretty well known, neither bury nor burn their dead. They take the bodies to what are known as the Towers of Silence, and there the carrion birds destroy them.

  Such towers are in Bombay on what is called Malabar Hill. I followed a funeral procession up that hill one day, irresistibly drawn and horribly fascinated. All were in white, all were droning some funeral chant. There was real sorrow there, such as we only counterfeit in our splendid European funeral rites. The body of the lost relative was carried to a raised platform on the hill’s top, and then, from the near-by trees, swarms, hundreds of vultures, circled the place and flopped down on those remains to gorge themselves in a diabolical feast, a banquet such as Poe or Baudelaire would have hesitated to describe.

  I came away sick.

  And as I reeled towards my hotel, down the side of that hill of horror, the dark shadow of a huge vulture flapped over me, high in the air. Something fell from his talons, some morsel of human flesh. I ran down that hill as though pursued by the devil, and never emerged from my room for the whole rest of the day.

  But there are more joyous things to tell about India. One concerns another Hindu prince who was quite a different sort of person from Bhurlana and the Maharajah of Shikapur.

  It all happened because of some friends of mine. They insisted that I join them at a dinner party which was supposed to be something of a rarity, because our host, the Rajah of K., was an eccentric who gave the most splendid parties.

  It took place in Calcutta, where I had gone to visit these friends. The Rajah lived in a palace that rivals anything you have ever seen in the movies for splendor, and the banquet he offered us was equal to the expectations of the most exigent. But there was one false note. I noticed that our host was under the influence of something. I first thought that he was slightly drunk, but then I discovered that it was some kind of narcotic. I mentioned it to my friends, and learned that, among his other eccentricities, the prince was an addict of the bangba, a preparation derived from hasheesh, and that it caused him to be most unusual and exciting.

  It was, as you may suspect, a woman who gave me this reply.

  As the evening wore on, the Rajah paid a certain amount of attention to me. I was not in the least annoyed, either, for he was a handsome man and an entertaining conversationalist. But when he made me a great protestation of eternal love as we walked together about the gardens of his palace, I felt that I had heard all this before and was not impressed.

  In fact, when he became a little demonstrative I suggested we go inside.

  We did. I did not notice exactly how we went in, nor by what door, but I suddenly found myself in a small, windowless room, with no light except that coming from a small oil lamp. The Rajah faced me with a look in his eye that could only mean one thing. He told me plainly what he wanted. I told him I was not interested, and that I had known schoolboys whose technique was far better. He tried being brutal. He practically tore the clothes from my body while I screamed and screamed. He laughed at me, and said:

  “Madam, you will learn as others have that I get what I want. There is no use screaming. No sound can get out of this room.”

  Things looked bad. He had worked himself into a frenzy, and I was frightened. He threw himself on me, striking and tearing at me, while I tried to evade him round the room. He caught me and held my arms with his powerful hands while I kicked and bit and he laughed in a wild, mad way. He held my neck under his arm, and I thought my time had come when suddenly he made a choking sound and fell on the floor and lay there moaning. I brought over the lamp to see what had happened, and saw that the veins of his forehead were standing out in bunches and that his face was red and congested.

  Then suddenly he stiffened, and relaxed.

  He was dead, and I knew it. He had been taken with a stroke of apoplexy.

  The Taj Mahal in Agra, India, c. early 1900s.

  ✥

 
; Oh, India! Perhaps the years that I spent in that never-to-be-understood land were the best of my life. I have told stories of it here, and stories of people, but I never can tell the poetry, the rich beauty of it. It was the last strand of truly free adventure and romance in my life. I returned once more to America and Europe, never to go back there, never to follow that curious call, that strangely beckoning and invisible finger. I have often regretted it, but I was never to return. Even now when I am too old for wandering I have sometimes considered going back there to spend the rest of my life, but I know that the golden memories I have of it would be spoiled, and even the less pleasant ones would have been molded into such realities that I would merely suffer disappointment.

  It was the people I loved. The Parsee girls with the white band over their heads, the beggars in the streets, rocking from side to side and crying “Dhurrum … dhurrum …” the piper with his Bansula, the worshipers before the images of Rama with their palms pressed tightly together. There is a realness about it, a closeness to the origin of things, which we miss in the West.

  I have not mentioned the lace-like beauty of the Taj Mahal. I have not told you of Amber, the dead city, inhabited only by monkeys and the ghosts of past glory, nor have I dwelt upon the circles of listeners gathered at the ghats of the sacred river while a learned native recited legends or poems or something that had been fascinating those people for centuries. I have not … but there is so much description that I have not given. These are simple recollections, and no travelogue. And my memory has grown faulty.

  But let me say that in spite of the suffering, real and imagined, that pinches India, in spite of the smugness of foreign rule there, in spite of the impossible bad taste of the new buildings, the Victorian glass furniture in the ancient palaces, the hiatuses and incongruities that have been India since Europeans came there to teach that beautiful civilization how to live like our rather cheap one, India is and always will be a kind of Eden. I could find it in my heart to urge that every girl be sent, not to Europe for that veneer called “finishing,” but to India to have an understanding of the meaning of life poured into her and distilled in the sunshine of that agonizing, pulsating, suffering, beautiful country.