And I'd Do It Again

by Crocker, Aimée;

  The two of us were led into another room, also richly furnished, and then up a staircase to one of the most charmingly feminine boudoirs imaginable. Then three young girls in black satin costumes and tight little caps on their heads came in, bringing loose robes. They made us understand that we were to undress and put on the wraps. We did so, I still more nervously, and even Miss B. growing silent and tense.

  Then the old woman appeared and beckoned to us.

  I insisted that Miss B. go first, and I remember almost better than any other moment in my life the next twenty minutes or so while I sat alone in that strange place, wondering.

  I heard almost nothing through the thick curtains that concealed the door through which she had passed, but there was a vague whining sound, like music. It reminded me of a violin, playing far away. Sometimes, when the sound was more distinct, I would feel a slight perspiration and a shiver. It is hard to explain.

  After a while, there was dead silence.

  Finally I heard the shuffling of slippers, and the curtain was drawn back. It was Miss B. returning.

  She was staring straight ahead of her. She did not see me. Her eyes were dilated, her face was flushed. She seemed in a trance. It was as though she had taken a powerful drug. What was it? I almost decided to run away, but the old woman was motioning to me, and I felt obliged to follow her through the door into darkness.

  I say darkness. That is not exact. There was the soft glow of a lamp … a single flame, burning like a soul. It made shadows on the carved ivory panels of the walls. The shadows flickered over a large Chinese bed in the room’s center. There was a grass mat on the floor, and absolutely nothing else in the place. The one window back of the bed was covered by an impenetrable curtain. There was not a sound.

  The old woman’s hands were held out for my robe. Frightened to refuse, I gave it to her, but I was terrified to give it. It seemed as though my last defense … against a mysterious, imagined something … were being taken away.

  She softly pushed me to the bed and motioned me to lie down. I did, as if I were hypnotized. Naked I lay out straight on my back, across the bed. I could see nothing but the flickering shadows of the lamp, and the old woman departing.

  Then suddenly there was some one in the room. I had not seen him come in. It was an old man, a very old man, with a thin, wax-like face.

  Almost without a sound, he shuffled in silken slippers over towards me, stopped about two yards from the bed, and peered at me in silence. His hands were folded under his large sleeves. His eyes glowed and picked up the light of the lamp from in back of me.

  Then, still looking fixedly at me, he unfolded his arms and brought out from somewhere a small stringed instrument with an abnormally long neck. He sat down cross-legged on the floor, turned his back on me, and began to play.

  That first note … it was as though it were drawn from my heartstrings. It was as though something in me were being played with a bow. It drew from the vitals of my life and being and plunged me into a voluptuousness that cannot be described.

  It was as though invisible hands were touching me and pouring a rich current of electricity through me and into me. My eyes closed, my body relaxed. Like a million hands pressing my body, torturing me with a delicious torture, that sound … or was it music? … enwrapped me and carried me out of myself into an orgy of physical hysteria.

  No, I cannot explain it. I cannot make myself clear.

  It was not alone sexual, not alone sensual. It transcended every and all physical pleasure I have ever known. All my body, all my soul and mind and conceptions were thrown into a maelstromic wave of incomparable joy, of supreme pleasure that was not unlike pain. For ages or minutes I was not capable of thought or action, only of the exquisite drinking of sensation. I felt myself going mad. Then I writhed on the bed, a prisoner of senses and pleasure. Faster and faster and more rich the sound came from the little man’s hands, rhythm after rhythm consumed me and lighted fires of passion and madness in me that are unspeakable, unfathomable …

  Then it stopped.

  I was left panting and in pain at the contrast. I was hardly conscious. Every nerve in my body was torn and strained, every muscle exhausted, every fiber of me trembling. I did not see the old man go nor the old woman come in with my robe, and I hardly regained complete understanding of actual life again until I was being led downstairs by Miss B., whose firm arm was tightly around me, guiding me and bracing me for fear that I fall. I tried to speak, to ask questions, but I found no voice. I felt myself being led out to the waiting chair and carried off by our coolies.

  Then I fainted completely from exhaustion, and knew nothing until I found myself in the ladies’ dressing-room of one of the foreign clubs of Shanghai with an Irish attendant holding smelling salts under my nose.

  I asked after Lady D. and her friend, when I could talk.

  “Lady D.?” queried the girl. “But it was a gentleman brought you here. He said you had a fainting spell and to look after you, Lady. But there was nobody else.”

  A man? Who? Where had he found me? Where were my English friends? What did it all mean?

  I never found out. I have never been able to find the house of the strange Chinese violin. I could not find my two friends in Shanghai again, either to thank them or to learn more of the extraordinary “experience.” And before I could ever trace them or the wonderful house of the ivory panels that turns pleasure into madness, I left Shanghai … quite suddenly and precipitately.

  Explanation? None in so far as I know. I have read of strange experiences with vibrations. It is a fact that the Medieval Chinese could kill by breaking the nerve cells of the body with the vibrations of a gong. It is true that at a certain Tabernacle in America, so-called “religious” fanaticism which was really sensual or even sexual, has been produced by a hidden organ pipe which vibrated at a certain pitch which the ear could not detect. But I have never had an explanation for what I shall always remember as my “experience of the Chinese violin.”

  I said I left Shanghai soon.

  The reason is to be found in the handsome but difficult person of Huan Kai. I have said his personality was changing, but I cannot describe the fear he was beginning more and more each day to inspire within me.

  In the first place his jealousy became unbearable. Spies were set upon me, even when I walked in the garden with the five little dogs he had bought me. And then, there was something increasingly evil in the huge almond eyes of Huan Kai. He was meditating something, and it was something about me. I could feel that.

  I began to recall stories that little Bonny Walke, of questionable veracity, had told me about him. Two wives, both very wealthy, had died shortly after marrying him. He was pressing me to marry him, almost madly. He was also called “Mr. Gold” for no very pleasant reason.

  The result of all this thinking was that I decided to escape before I learned about death in China in some way just as vivid and much more personal than the Death of a Thousand Cuts that I had witnessed with Huan Kai.

  No, there was no use fooling myself. I was afraid, and I was going to take no chances. I was counted a very wealthy girl in those days, and I could see no reason why the already full money-bags of Huan Kai should be overstuffed with my money, nor why I should be added to the list of his mysterious defuncts.

  I decided to take steps.

  First I learned from Meh-ki, the old woman who was devoted to me, that Huan Kai was invariably away towards the first of the new moon. Then I told her my plan. To say she was frightened is to understate. She saw knives and blood in every word I spoke. But she loved me, and after protesting that she too was in her master’s spy service and that she would certainly be killed if I escaped, she finally agreed to help me and we made arrangements. I won her at last by promising to take her with me and keep her always as my servant.

  Meh-ki first found coolies and a chair which it would be safe to use. She procured a silk rope. Then, when everything was ready, we planned to have the chair waiti
ng for us when the moon was high, at a little distance from the house.

  I will never forget waiting for the time.

  I knew that Huan Kai’s men were at my door, and all over the house. I knew that if anyone in the neighborhood should recognize me, they would betray me for fear of punishment from Huan Kai. I wondered if the chair-coolies would be there, and if they were really trustworthy. I was afraid for their honesty, because I had given them money in advance.

  But at last it was time. Meh-ki went first down the knotted rope, and I followed her. It was a distance of about 60 feet to the ground, and I will admit that, through sheer fright and nervousness, I several times nearly lost my hold and fell. I imagined that below me I could see the shadows of Huan Kai’s men. I imagined that the silk rope was slipping or being cut.

  But when I got to the ground and crept breathlessly away from the palace to where the immediate danger was, I felt the return of a certain security which had been missing since the first day when I set my American foot inside that magnificent but frightful Oriental building, and the doors first closed behind me.

  The coolies, thank Heaven, were there. They kept their word and had the chair ready for us, and it was not long before we were being swung along the streets of Shanghai by a roundabout way to the foreign concession. There we went to a hotel where I was known but where, I imagined, Huan Kai would not think of looking for me.

  I was wrong.

  It must have been about four in the morning. I had been sound asleep, with the little old woman curled up on a mat at the end of my room. Suddenly I was awakened.

  It was a curious, instinctive sensation which woke me – one of those which occasionally warn you about something not yet present but already approaching. I stared about me. I could see quite clearly, because of the peculiar lighting system of the hotel which shone over the panel-partitioning from the outer hall. My “room” was really an alcove, and I began to realize that it was senseless to expect security by locking the door, as anyone intent on harm could perfectly well crawl over the wall.

  I could see nothing wrong, but I felt something. In the dim light, I examined every corner. Nothing. I got out of bed and went for my dressing-gown. Suddenly I changed my mind, threw the dressing-gown on the bed, and fumbled in my handbag for a little pearl-handled revolver given me by my first husband. There was actually not a cartridge in it, but I forgot this in my excitement. I remember how safe I felt as my hand closed on it.

  Then suddenly, before I could cross the room again, I knew that there was some one standing just outside the wall, almost directly through the partition from where I was standing. I was paralyzed. I could not have made the slightest move.

  There was a slight patting sound outside.

  There was the faintest tap or knocking of something on the floor. I could not see from where I was crouching at the foot of the partition, but I knew that some one was peering over the top of that wall.

  Then there was a little thud on the bed. The sense of presence faded, and I seemed at once to know that whoever had been up at the partition had gone away. But it was minutes before I dared to relax or to turn my head and look.

  Nothing had changed. There was nobody there. Meh-ki’s breathing went on rhythmically as she slept. But when I reached to pick up my dressing-robe I saw that a long knife was sticking in it, buried up to the hilt in the folds of its thick, quilted silk, and in the bedding.

  Then I realized what had happened. The dressing-gown, thrown on the bed, had looked like somebody lying there in the half light. If I had not had that lucky impulse to get my little revolver … unloaded and all … I would have had about ten inches of razor-edged steel, thrown by a hand that would not miss, stuck through my neck where it joins the shoulder. It was an interesting thing to think over.

  Well, I admit that there was no more sleep for me that night. I did not want to terrify Meh-ki by waking her and telling her. But I curled up on a mat on the other side of my bed and on the floor where nobody looking could ever have seen me, and there I sat until daylight came and until I was nearly dead with cramp from just squatting there. I decided that I was going to leave Shanghai as early as I could and get as far away from Huan Kai and his knife-throwing servants as possible.

  And it was not over yet.

  Meh-ki awoke with daylight. She saw me crouching beside the bed and tottered over to me, thinking probably that I was hysterical. She went out to have some tea sent to me, and she never came back. Her body was found at the end of the hall with a long knife through the back of her neck.

  The excited house-servants, accompanied by Sikh policemen, brought her to my room about two hours later. They suspected me, until I showed them the hole in the dressing-gown and the bedding, and explained what had happened. They are well-trained men, these imported Sikhs, and they wrote careful notes to make a report of a strange burglar who throws knives at American girls in hotels and kills their servants.

  Naturally, I told them that I suspected nobody, and they could make no other report.

  I did not wait to go to the Consulate. I just took a train that morning for Hong Kong. I was taking no more chances on Huan Kai.

  It is very curious, now that I look back on it, this affair of Huan Kai. I had been afraid of him from the very first instant I saw him at the Hong Kong “dive.” Afraid, but drawn to him. I could not ever have loved him, but he fascinated me. What is there about women that is so perverse, so incomprehensible? I wonder if anyone will ever explain it. We love one man because he beats us, and another because he does not. We hate one man who is a cad and we love another who is worse. We spend years on end with a man we are frightened of or whom we despise, pretending to ourselves that we love him, being jealous of him, wanting him, fighting for him, and we are cruel, mean, unfair to another who is sweet and good and loves us, and we will have nothing to do with him.

  Personally, I do not like women very much, but they are curious people to watch.

  I would not have missed the experience of Huan Kai for all the world. But marry him? Never. Love him? Ridiculous. Admire him? Enjoy him? Well, I’m a woman …

  Map of Hong Kong.

  ✥

  There is not much more to tell about my days in China. There was nothing more exciting about my journey to Hong Kong than the suspicion that mysterious Chinamen were hiding in corners of my railway compartment, to throw knives. It was not a pleasant journey.

  Furthermore, I made no attempt to avoid the “European” city of Victoria for the few days I remained there, and I stayed at the stuffiest and most thoroughly Anglo-Saxon hotel I could find and sought the company of the most decent, and safe, and inarticulate of lieutenants of Her Majesty’s foreign service.

  However, before I left Hong Kong for Java, Borneo and other romantic countries, I got to know more about how the visiting foreigners like myself lived when they did it conventionally. Some little things that happened were funny and some pathetic. I think I would do well to include a few.

  For instance, the bazaars.

  The effect of the bazaars on the foreign visitor is curious. In the first place one buys all sorts of useless and very pretty things at a price that seems cheap but is really much more than any Chinese person would have to pay. Very often you don’t know what the real use or purpose of the thing you buy is, and of course you have no idea what the decorative Chinese writing on it means. You are generally given to understand that these inscriptions are good luck charms or some such thing. And generally they are nothing of the sort.

  There was a woman from St. Louis who was making a tour of the world with her newly rich husband. Now in those days it was a fairly reckless thing to go globetrotting. There were none of your round-the-world cruises at low rates that the average family can afford once every five years. To trip round the world meant something, if only a lot of money. And that was just what this woman had. I have forgotten her name, but she was a type that most of us have seen only too often, the kind who, from being a simple daughter
of trades-people, had grown into a money-snob. Moreover she was decidedly fat, decidedly nosey, and decidedly overbearing. All this description is necessary for you to appreciate the picture of what happened to her.

  I saw her in a Hong Kong bazaar one day. She had two maids with her to carry packages, and she was out to get, I suppose, the largest collection of Chinese bric-à-brac in the Middle West. We followed her a bit, my companion and I, and were amazed at the wholesale way in which she permitted herself to pay money for things which she could have bought for half the price in St. Louis, or at least in any American Chinatown.

  At one booth her eagle eye caught sight of a very gaudy type of silk garment which the Chinese make for export purposes only. It was satin and embroidered, thick like embossing, with every conceivable design and color, and right in the center of the top part or jacket, worked into a circle, were two conventionalized Chinese characters. Upon asking what they meant, she was assured by the calm Oriental who sat in the booth that it was “one piece good luckee happiness” or words to that effect.

  All would have been well if Mrs. Newlyrich had not been so nosey. A youngish American … I think he was a missionary … happened to be at a near-by booth, poring over some Chinese manuscripts. It was easy to see that he could read them and our dear traveling lady called out to him after she had bought her silk garment.

  “Do you read this language, young man?” she asked. “If you do, I wish you would tell me what this business on the jacket means. The Chinks say it’s good luck, but I’d like to know what kind of good luck.”

  The young man’s nose came out of his reading. He lifted his hat politely and came over to her. He took one look at the symbol which appeared over the front of the jacket, exactly where the good lady’s stomach would come, and said very seriously:

  “Madam, it may be that he told you it meant good luck but the real meaning of those characters is something like this: stuffed and bursting with over-self-indulgence.”