And I'd Do It Again

by Crocker, Aimée;

  Then I fell in love.

  The subject (or is it object?) of my first and girlish passion was a certain German prince who had the handsomest uniform in the world, the most romantic saber-scars on his most noble, though rather pink, face, the most fascinating way of stiffening and clicking his heels together when he saluted you (they all had this, naturally, but none seemed quite so perfect as he), and the most wonderfully rakish manner of saying ponderous German compliments I have ever listened to.

  Oh yes, we became engaged. It was very formal, but very short-lived. I think it lasted a month. I loved him for his uniform, and even for the absurd gambling debts he had, and the terrible reputation he enjoyed (naturally I was sure he never had been really understood), but when I discovered one day that he had paid the equivalent of one hundred dollars for the handsome kid boots he wore, my good old California hardihood and sense of proportion got the better of me, and I broke it off with appropriate dignity.

  I recall that he did not commit suicide.

  It was a pretty close shave! I might have started life by being a princess in comic opera.

  But just about that time Mrs. C. did something that altered our whole situation. She vanished.

  She had spent all our money and used up all the patience of all the tradesmen in Dresden with her reckless debts. We had noticed vaguely that she was very nervous and excited, even irritable, but we did not give it much thought. One fine morning, however, we awoke to the fact that our jolly chaperon had packed her bags during the night and absconded, and furthermore, that we had nothing left in our luxurious apartment to pay the servants with or even to eat with. It was pretty mortifying and fairly tragic, but a cable to our collective parents brought temporary relief, and the very next boat brought several worried mothers to Germany.

  Thus finished “finishing” in Dresden.

  The Royal Palace of Madrid in Spain, during the 1890s. Vintage engraving from Trousset encyclopedia, 1886–1891.

  ✥

  Now comes several months of cavorting about Europe, much or most of which is uninteresting. It is important, however, that my mother took me, among other places, to Madrid, for there I fell in love again.

  This time it was quite a different sort of person from my German prince and his golden boots. The gentleman in question was a toreador. Perhaps not really a great matador (I seem to remember that he was the apprentice or perhaps the servant of one) but to me his greatness was simply enormous.

  Most American girls of today will be “left cold,” as they say, at the idea of a toreador. They have known their Valentinos and their Novarros (whether on the silver screen or in front of the local drug-store), but for a fifteen-year-old tomboy, removed from early Sacramento ranches only by a boat-ride and several yards of silk court-dress, a real live toreador (in the Eighties, too) complete with be-buttoned and be-ribboned and be-caped costume, was something to take away the breath.

  This one took mine.

  His name was Miguel. As nearly as I can remember him now he was handsome in that classical, long-eyed, swarthy, swaggering way that Spaniards are supposed to have and all affect. He was brutal, conceited, haughty, passionate, direct, childish and completely irresponsible. He was accustomed to getting … or taking … whatever he wanted. He wanted me, it seemed.

  He had seen admiration in my eyes. He flashed his teeth at me and flourished a be-jeweled sombrero and waited for me to come to him. These are not quite the facts of the case but it amounted to that. My vanity prefers to leave the intimate details out of the story.

  I came, all right. I made secret dates with him. I heard him through my ears, my eyes, my flesh, my pores … saying phrases that sent maggots into my brain, poured brimstone into my blood. In the same instant he could be my master or at my feet. His touch left scars on my soul. And when he kissed me, his breath proclaimed the fire that was to follow its vapor and bathed my body and heart in its madness while his hands gave off their electricity.

  Well, we will not go into the details of my puppy love. Suffice it to say that my mother, who had a head on her shoulders, decided that we were going to England, and off we went, directly.

  Just about time, too.

  I learned, incidentally, that dear Miguel was killed in a corrida only a week after we left, so I suppose my tender and girlish nature was spared a real tragedy.

  In London my aching heart was cured. It was a fairly brief process and a fairly odd one, and, although I never suspected it, it was to account later on for one of the most adventurous periods of my life. The man’s name was David Kalakaua, and he was nothing less than king of the Hawaiian Islands.

  Now you must not suppose that King Kalakaua was an ordinary savage, bedecked with beads and wearing fringe. On the contrary. He was quite a gentleman, even distinguished in a way, and had studied in the best schools of Britain, wore his cutaway or evening clothes with the best traditional air, and had a true gift of conversation (chiefly about himself and his fascinating country). He was childlike, too, in many ways, but that did not prevent him from becoming something of a rage among the bustled maidens of Victoria’s court.

  This was not a case of love, by the way. It was fascination, rather, that diverted my mind from the sway of my torrid toreador. I used to sit for hours and listen to tales of Hawaii, the costumes, the customs, the dances and the simple, natural life. It was the Finger of the East beckoning to me again.

  And London in itself was a glorious adventure, for I was young enough and pretty enough … and rich enough … to be the object of attention of so many ardent young gentlemen that my little head was fairly turned.

  But it was not to last.

  My mother, with good common sense, decided that my European “education” had gone about far enough, and planned to take me back to San Francisco before I lost the strength and solidity of our own New World through the blandishments of the older and more sophisticated world. Or perhaps before I became the victim of some commercial, if amusing, gentleman who had dollar signs for eyes.

  Back we went, and there ended my childhood altogether.

  Sutter’s Fort, Sacramento late 1800s.

  ✥

  I think the ruling passion of my life has been my love of contrasts. I remember reading somewhere … probably nowhere of consequence … a bit of philosophy that always impressed me as being the closest anybody has ever come to explaining the word “happiness.” Vague as my memory is, the idea was this: It is not the having of things or people or experiences that gives happiness. It is the magic moment when your hand just closes on the thing. You may be bored or tired of it the very next moment, and so in order to keep on having the pleasure, you have to arrange for a whole series of getting … an entire and very rapid series of closing your hand, so to speak.

  No doubt I never could have thought that out for myself, not being philosophical, but that is just the way I feel. I think it explains very well, too, the way I lived.

  Returning to California after being “finished” in Europe provided one of those contrasts. I did not want to return, but once on the boat, memories of the tomboy days in Sacramento by the filthy but wonderful water fronts came back to me vividly. So little Aimée Crocker left behind her the memories of shaven-headed German officers, red and yellow Spanish crowds, and ardent bullfighters, and the nice London Oxonians so correct in haberdashery and tonsorial art.

  Contrasts grew. In Sacramento I lived on a ranch with cowboys, learned to ride anything on four legs, use a lariat and swear still better. In San Francisco I fell easily into the social life, had an apartment of my own (which I called a studio, Heaven knows why) and acted like a trained social seal. The experts my parents had paid to make me into this had done a good job.

  That was my downfall.

  I became engaged, secretly, to Porter Ashe.

  He was the son of a prominent San Francisco family, very decent, very stubborn, and very much in love with me. And to make a long story short, we eloped and got ourselves married. I was jus
t seventeen and he was twenty-one. A couple of young fools, may I add. The newspapers, always looking for some scandal or other, noticed that two scions of California families were rambling about together under an assumed name in a city where they did not belong. They caught us, and in order to avoid a nasty affair we had to confess … and to prove, mind you … the truth.

  We were both in for parental rage. We both finally received parental blessings. And then we went on a real honeymoon, this time perfectly in the open.

  We went to Los Angeles, and it was on this trip that I first met tragedy and death face to face. Our sleeper was attached to a train, part of which was a special to transport a large number of Chinese coolies. The train was overcrowded. We dined and retired for the night in our compartment, and we were thoroughly asleep when I awoke suddenly with the sensation of being in mid-air. The car was tipping forward and to the side. Then there was a terrible crash under me. I was thrown from my berth. I heard my husband cry out. Another grinding crash. The car rolled over. I was tossed about and bruised. Bodies fell on me. I still clung to my bedclothes and buried my head in them. Then there was a third terrific smash and the car seemed to crumple under me. Then I remembered nothing.

  I came to. It was black night, but everything about me seemed to be glaring red and yellow light. Fire. I moved my hand and felt the broken splintered end of what had been a steel beam. I knew the car was burning. I heard cries and moaning about me. I dragged myself, dazed and frightened, to a sitting position, and then to my feet.

  Flames were higher. Roaring and crackling. I found that I was standing, not upon the floor of the car, but upon the ground where the car had been turned over and was on its side, most of the woodwork having been torn away and the glass pulverized. I looked up and saw that the other side, too, was smashed, so that I could get through … by climbing. I looked for my husband, but he was nowhere in sight, and the side of the compartment where his berth had been was a splintered mass of twisted wood and iron, lighted by the flames which now towered over the car.

  My head ached, but I was otherwise unhurt as far as I could see. I started climbing. I heard men’s voices outside, footsteps running, screams of pain. I succeeded in getting my head over the edge of what had been the other side (now overhead) and called out to some one who was running by. It was my husband. He had a handkerchief over his nose and had been unrecognizable, for the smoke was drawn down by the wind. He broke through and helped me to clamber up and over. It was high time.

  I was able to draw back a little and see what had really happened. It was terrible. The entire train had left the track on the side of a mountain pass and had plunged down several hundred feet, telescoped and smashed six of the cars which now lay in flames, twisted and mangled like a huge broken snake.

  But the last car, the one loaded with the coolies, had, strangely enough, rolled on its own wheels down the entire slope and, its speed checked by the underbrush and mud, had come to a stop at the bottom, unhurt, unscarred, unbroken, its entire charge of Celestials safe and sound.

  I learned this later, but I could see the car down there, illuminated by the flames that burned the others.

  Men and women crowded around me, most of them practically naked as I was myself save for the bedding to which I had instinctively clung. I was crying, too, I remember. I was not alone.

  Bodies were being carried past us from further down.

  Wrecking crew, local farmers, unharmed men amongst the passengers, even the despised Chinese coolies, were doing their best to recover the dead and injured from the burning wreck.

  We were led back, up a difficult pass, to the railroad track where a flat car pushed by a dummy engine had rolled up. Shelter. The flat car was loaded with bodies, being piled up like lumber. The place was echoing with the moans of the injured and dying. It was insane, unbelievable, indescribable.

  My husband, I learned about this time, had had a very narrow escape. He had been thrown through the window when the car turned over and had escaped being crushed to death by the other coaches only by a miracle. His face was fairly cut up by the glass of his window but there was nothing seriously wrong with him or with me either, for that matter.

  There were, in all, forty-five killed and several hundred injured. Many were not then nor ever accounted for.

  That was the famous wreck of Tahachapee Pass. A fine beginning for a honeymoon.

  Honeymoon!

  It was under a bad omen. I shall leave it and the consideration of my first marriage out of this book altogether. Let it suffice to say that we continued to Europe after recovering from the shock of the wreck and after staying a week in Los Angeles. But there was a jinx on us, despite the birth of my daughter and despite all that Husband Number One and I could do to make it go; it did not and could not last. I fled, so to speak, from Europe alone. My child arrived when I was in San Francisco. My divorce arrived soon after. And “Finis” was marked indelibly upon the first entry in my book of matrimony.

  Clipper Ship Southern Cross leaving America, by Fitz Hugh Lane.

  ✥

  Is there anything so bewildering as a very young person who becomes, for one reason or another, “fed up with life”? One reads in the newspapers of youngsters who commit suicide just because their schoolmarks were not up to what they thought their parents expected of them, or because Mamma would not let Minnie go out with Eddy after ten P.M., or else because Papa refused to let Reginald, aged seventeen, wear the paternal dinner jacket to the High School Prom. Fed up. Disillusioned. Tired of this life. Some run away. Others try veronal. It all amounts to the same thing.

  Well, my case was a little like that. It was in the same spirit that I made up my mind that I was through with the people of my world and with “civilized” life, for all time. I would go away into the green, natural places where men are men and women are all Hula-hula girls, and live my own life.

  In short, I would go to the South Seas.

  It was the call of the East: I did not know it then, but I was listening attentively to that spell. My plan was to be alone, to do everything alone, to be independent, not to have anybody to criticize nor to make suggestions. Here was I, a young divorced woman (very young and just barely divorced) and with an independent income, and why should I not? My imagination was on fire.

  But where first?

  I remembered the stories I had heard in London from King David Kalakaua, dapper monarch of the Sandwich Islands, better known as Hawaii. And the more I remembered, the more I became decided. Kalakaua had invited me himself. He had even urged me to come. So I determined to become one of those lotus-eaters who fed upon the fruits of that beautiful country and upon the beauty of solitary thought.

  After winning a rather Pyrrhic victory over my ardently protesting parents, I set about finding a ship.

  My advertisement in the San Francisco newspapers brought in a collection of replies that would make a good story in themselves had I the time to write it. Every sort of sailing vessel you can imagine was available and offered. Barques, brigantines, sloops, clippers, complete with crew, willing to do anything from copra trading to piracy.

  But only one interested me.

  In large, breezy, wispy, flowing hand came a letter, signed “Ephraim Judd (Captain),” who described his seventy-foot schooner, Tropic Star, as being the “trimmest and seaworthiest little craft that ever sailed the Pacific. And, Madam, she is at your service provided only that you are not a missionary. Her last service was missionaries and the crew will not stand for no more of them, so I ask you, Madam, to be frank with me on this score, if it please you, Madam.”

  A missionary ship!

  Amused, I wrote him and made an appointment. The Tropic Star turned out to be all he claimed for her. She was a little slow, perhaps, but seaworthy and comfortable and in excellent condition. The crew, with the exception of the first mate, Mr. Dow, were a mixture of Kanakas, Scandinavians, negroes and less definite races, totaling ten. Mr. Dow was an American from New Bedford, and
he was the official strong man of the ship. There was also a Chinese cook, called Sam, who had learned to smile when he was very young and practiced it perpetually.

  Having reassured Captain Judd that I had no interest in saving the souls of savages or of anybody else, and that as far as I was concerned there would be no gospel preaching aboard, we bargained for a year’s charter of the Tropic Star to a point where I was only slightly cheated, and the trip was definitely planned.

  Our immediate destination was Honolulu: after that … anywhere in the world. We got off, I being the only passenger, amid the earnest warnings and tearful misgivings of family and friends, and soon the Golden Gate was vanishing behind our wake. The voyage was totally uneventful, barring a storm that gave me a glorious thrill when I recovered from my first fear, a shark which we harpooned and hauled over the side, and one single incident which is worth telling.

  Mr. Dow, as I have said, was the strong man of the ship. He was a silent, hard-faced, thin-lipped man of forty or thereabouts. He was of only medium height, but he had the broadest shoulders and the deepest chest I have ever seen on a human being, whatever his race. I also remember that he had a perpetual scrubby growth of black whiskers, as though he forgot to shave more than once a week, and that his eyes, very far apart, hidden under thick shaggy eyebrows, seemed to be triangular. I have since noticed that prize-fighters have similar eyes. Perhaps it is the sign of a certain instinct.