Miss Jill

by Emily Hahn

  It was partly because of the Chinese bankers that Annette made Jill particulary welcome. Obviously, from the very beginning, the Chinese took to Jill, perhaps because she took to them. She was not at all like Violet, who could never be trusted not to give Chinese gentlemen mortal offense. Violet had spent a long term in California, where she had picked up odd ideas that didn’t go down at all well in Shanghai.

  “Call these Chinese?” she would say sneeringly. “They’re not like any Chinese I ever met, and I’ve worked Honolulu. I can talk Chinese. These dumb clucks don’t know their own language.” It was averred by the other girls that Violet, when left without a chaperone, would actually say to some respectable Chinese member of the City Council, “You likee me? I velly nice, makee nice pleasee.” Annette never introduced Violet to the Chinese, but with Jill it was a different matter.

  It was Mr. B. K. Liu who first “discovered” Jill for his special social circle. B. K. had fallen into the habit of hiring the small dining room at Annette’s for dinner parties when he wanted to make a good showing, just as if Annette had been a Chinese woman and her place a high-class singsong house. The fact that her cuisine was European made it all the smarter, B. K. thought, and so did his guests. He would arrange beforehand that Annette’s girls should be at liberty when he wanted them, and they were hired to come in and entertain the guests quite as if they were singsong girls, except that they refused to behave like good Chinese girls and stay in the corners of the room. Annette backed them up in that, insisting that they take their places at the table with the men. (Annette also arranged that Violet should be busy elsewhere on those evenings.)

  B. K. fancied himself as a lady’s man, and he noticed Jill as soon as she appeared at her first party in the house. He monopolized her for the evening. He liked her so much for her yellow hair, her gentle ways, and her piping voice that he praised her to the skies the next day to his brother, B. W., and brought him in to see her that same evening.

  B. W. was a much quieter type than his ebullient brother, and long after B. K. had forgotten Jill and was amusing himself with some newer enthusiasm little B. W. continued to call in at Annette’s. He became really sentimental about Jill. He was no sensualist, preferring to listen to her chatter by the hour, or to give her little lectures on finance and health. He warned her against the various pitfalls of her career. He soon decided, naturally, that working at Annette’s was not a good career for her and often hinted to her that she ought to get out of it. He would help, he said; he would take care of her until she found something better to do.

  Jill never tried to argue. She would laugh vaguely and change the subject. It was not a new suggestion; at least half the men she met at Annette’s were shocked and sorrowful that she should be working there, though they seldom stopped availing themselves of the privileges of the house just because of that. Some of them wanted her to move away from Annette’s and allow them to protect her. At least they said they did. She did not let herself think of it. Annette was against it, always propagandizing against it, and of course Sanyi would never allow it anyway.

  The work itself? After a few weeks she was able to think of it as a part of normal life, sometimes unpleasant, as normal life is at times, but more often completely mechanical, and neither pleasant nor unpleasant. True, there was always that idea lurking somewhere in a neglected corner of her brain that she was sinning and would be held accountable for it someday. She was always afraid of the day of accounting, which she visualized as an ordeal in a confessional, but the fear never changed, never moved from its place, until in time it became a part of life, like everything else. She felt it as she would a toothache, but a toothache usually increases in pain and throbs fiercely sometimes, and this fear never did. All her feelings, in fact, behaved like that pain. They were there, but they gave no trouble. Perhaps the opium pills helped, but the chief reason for the numbness that was taking possession of Jill was something else, a very gradual process, day after day. Perhaps nobody can go on denying one half a day’s emotions without losing his grip on the other half too. Annette did not like emotions. She deplored any sort, even the pleasurable ones. She was a strangely squeamish woman, but sometimes, looking sharply at one of her girls at breakfast, she would say, “What’s the matter, Iris? You look awful. You have circles under your eyes. You’ve been enjoying yourself, Iris. You want to look out for that; you don’t want to let yourself go in this racket. You’ll wear yourself out in half the time.”

  Jill tried conscientiously not to wear herself out. “Acting is better,” Annette often said. “Any woman can put on a good act.”

  One emotion stayed with Jill longer than any: her jealousy of Konya. Now that she was living at Annette’s she felt that he was slipping away from her, though indeed he haunted the place quite faithfully.

  “Keeping an eye out for his interests,” said Annette, who naturally did not like him. “He gives me the creeps, sitting there in the corner, reckoning up. How can you bear it, Jill?” But she never dared refuse him entry; she knew Jill would leave her then.

  Annette’s resentment of Konya faded somewhat when he began to be a customer of hers, but Jill made a terrible scene. “You–you were with Violet last night! You went upstairs with Violet! How could you, Sanyi, how could you? I’ll kill myself!”

  That, too, faded out. Sanyi soothed her and laughed at her. “Really, you are a baby. What difference does it make? And after all, what were you doing?”

  “But, Sanyi, that’s not fair; I do it for you.”

  Still, jealousy, too, seemed to become less sharp. It was there like the fear and the other half-forgotten feelings, but it no longer reminded her of its presence. Only now and then, like the last echo of an outermost door closing, Jill seemed to hear a warning far away.

  VII

  It seemed a long time since Jill had languished in her hotel room, waiting for Sanyi to telephone or knock on the door. It seemed even longer ago that she had felt so desperately lonely, fresh from the pleasant crowded bustle of Kikusan’s; so lonely that she had longed even for the cooler privacy of Botchan’s house, even though under the eye of Botchan’s wife. Now there was always someone to talk to, if not an admiring man in the drawing room, at least one of the girls upstairs, or Bob, poor harmless Bob, over a game of cards. But as the days grew fuller and the telephone rang for her more often, there were not so many card games. Jill was constantly busy, and Annette was pleased. Even the glum Tony was pleased and tried to smile when he opened the door to Jill on her return from shopping trips.

  She had a life of amusing variety. Everything that could be done in Shanghai, after a reasonably late hour in the morning, Jill did. There were the resources of the Europeans first: the hundred and one little restaurants in Avenue Joffre, the races in season, the cinema, the dance halls, the shops, the more or less public clubs. A Frenchman she knew very well for a while became infatuated with the idea of making a horsewoman of her. He bought her a habit, hired hacks, and took her out as often as she could be persuaded to go jogging about on the bridle paths at the city limits. As for the races, she loved them. There, if anywhere, it was fun to dress oneself up, to saunter along between racecourse and tiers of benches, glancing carelessly at the boxes along the higher tier. It was there that one saw them clustered together, the men and women whose names she read in the local society column. The women never seemed to see her at all: the men watched her furtively. Many of them she knew. It was good fun, but it was strangely painful too. A day at the races, whether she attended with one of the girls or with some man, always left her feeling frustrated and worried. Perhaps for one thing it upset her to see Sanyi peering out of a box, pretending not to know her, Sanyi making himself charming in some party of young women, Sanyi running to place bets for them and staring through her whenever they met during their rounds of the course. (“But why not? It makes things much simpler; it is easier for you, too, out with your new boy friend. Let us be practical, my little Jill!”)

  It was bett
er on the whole when she spent her time with her Chinese friends. B. W. depended on her more and more these days to act as chief entertainer when he gave parties, and as he had a stubborn theory that she felt happier for being outside of Annette’s, he usually had the dinners at Chinese restaurants or singsong houses. Jill learned a good deal about Chinese customs in this way. B. W. would not allow her to drink more than one or two cups of rice wine in an evening. He reminded her of Botchan when he made this rule, and she obeyed it good-humoredly. She didn’t care much for drinking, anyway, and was quite ready to sit back and watch without sharing when B. W.’s friends drank whisky and brandy.

  B. W. had no prejudice, however, against Jill’s smoking opium. In the restaurants’ private rooms and in his special club there was always a broad teakwood couch waiting at the side of the table, ready spread with opium for anyone who might prefer it to wine or whisky. The little Chinese entertainers knew how to prepare pipes as a matter of course, and Jill was curious and eager to learn for herself. Most of the guests were amused by this and more than ready to help with the lessons. They liked to see her, so blond, so completely European, cooking the drug in a businesslike way, rolling it on her finger to test its consistency, shaping the pellet on the pipe bowl, and then offering it with a polite bend of the head. B. W. would chuckle at the sight. As for the occasional pipe she smoked for herself, “Better take it that way,” said B. W., “than to eat it. Yes, she has been eating it in pills.”

  The other Chinese, grave in their silken gowns, nodded seriously. “Eating it is bad. Smoking is all right if you do not overdo it,” they told Jill. They said, “You need never get the habit if you are careful not to smoke every day at the same time. One day at two in the afternoon, the next at ten in the evening, and the next do not smoke at all. That way you will be safe.”

  After such an evening with B. W. and his friends Jill always slept heavily and long, waking with a brain still full of the dreams she had been having, yet feeling very fresh and wide awake, too, though the world around her was hazy. If she was tired she didn’t know it. In general it was a pleasant feeling. She never spoke about the opium to Annette because Annette didn’t like it.

  “Meddling with that stuff is the easiest way in the world to lose your looks,” said Annette, speaking of all drugs together. “I’ve seen plenty of the Harbin girls once they got started on heroin. There’s no turning back with that stuff. You stay off it, Jill.”

  “But opium isn’t the same,” Jill expostulated, though only once.

  “That’s what they all say,” retorted Annette. “I don’t know the difference myself and I don’t want to. You stay away from that stuff.”

  Aside from other gentle dissipations, B. W. tried to teach Jill something about his famous collection of paintings. He was most insistent that she admit the superiority of Chinese art to that of Japan; he spent a good deal of time showing her the difference, and she was interested enough, willing to pore over his scrolls for hours if he wished her to. It was all Culture. When he had to go up to Peking to take care of his family Jill really missed him. There were other rich Chinese gentlemen willing to take his place, and Jill remained popular, but she missed B. W. and hoped he would soon return. He had been so courteous and he made so little trouble. When his brother came to Annette’s he seemed to suffer in comparison with B. W., though the other girls liked him much better.

  “Poor B. W., he’ll be awfully upset when I marry Sanyi,” Jill used to say to herself. “But he’ll be glad I’m a countess, for my sake.”

  At Annette’s, as in many other houses in Shanghai, the talk veered round more and more frequently to the old days of ’32. The nervous tone of the newspapers brought those troubled times vividly to the minds of the veterans. Annette began to speculate on the chances of selling out and retiring with Bob once and for all. But they didn’t have quite enough yet, she said thoughtfully; they wouldn’t be able to swing it properly, not yet. Besides, if you paid attention to every little rumor in China you would be in a fine state. You would never get anywhere.

  “Don’t you believe it,” Violet said wisely. “She’s been talking that way these ten years. They must have plenty salted away, but Annette won’t quit until they drive her out.”

  Sometimes when the newspaper was particularly alarming Jill tried to sound out her Chinese friends, but they did not seem to take a very wide view of the matter. War? Why, said the Chinese, perhaps war would come. China indeed was always at war; there was war going on right now, unofficially, in the North and the Northwest. Shanghai was different. Shanghai was international.

  But the Japanese, insisted Jill, what about them? They had moved to Peking, hadn’t they?

  In a manner of speaking, said the Chinese. Yes, in a manner of speaking. Their own properties in the North were–well, temporarily inaccessible, that was quite true.

  But if the Japanese did attack Shanghai?

  “You are afraid?” said the Chinese, smiling indulgently. “You have nothing to fear, Jill. You have British papers. If it gets too close, why not go to Hong Kong? My brother”–or cousin, or uncle–”has a nice house in Hong Kong; I will give you the address and you can stay there.”

  Nevertheless, she had learned enough of their ways to see that they were not so easy in their minds as all that. There was a flurry of business going on among the wealthy Chinese. They were juggling their affairs in the interior and sending their treasures to Hong Kong or Indo-China and clearing their decks, just in case. The stock market was very active too. Sanyi spoke sometimes in a knowing way of the stock market.

  Most jittery were the European visitors to Annette’s. They were frankly worried, though their worries seldom seemed to go beyond wondering what to report to the home office. “It’s too bad that this place is in the International Settlement,” said an Englishman. “You’d all be better off in the French Concession, I should think; the Nips have some claim to this district.”

  “No, thank you,” said Annette. “I’ve held a house in the French Concession before this, and it cost too much in squeeze. Those French police! Why else do you think I moved?”

  It was Iris, the Russian girl, who said the only original thing Jill heard in all those weeks of uneasiness. “I think it’s coming,” she said. “I hope not, because I saw it before in Harbin. The poor people, if it does! The poor people !”

  “The people?” Jill repeated, puzzled.

  “I am talking of the Chinese in the country. War will mean hunger for them, and trouble. My parents walked across Siberia to get out of the other war, and we have seen so much of it since in the North! You girls don’t know here in Shanghai. Hunger and blood in the streets, and looting.…” She shuddered. Jill looked at her uncertainly.

  “You’re joking, Iris.”

  “Oh, but I am not. If I knew where I could go I would get out of this before it is too late, but there is nowhere to go. I wonder if I could get Portuguese papers. They say you can for a few hundred dollars. But even then where could I go?”

  It was seldom that Iris spoke in this way, dramatically and with truth in her voice. Jill was so unaccustomed to it that she tried to laugh it off. “You are kidding,” she insisted.

  “Sanyi,” she asked later that day, “how much money do we have now?”

  Konya raised his eyebrows at the unusual question. “We are not doing badly,” he said. “We have nearly enough, very nearly enough. Why? You do not need another dress already?”

  “Oh no. I only thought that things are looking bad here and maybe we should get out while we can.”

  Sanyi laughed and smoothed her hair. “You must not believe too many rumors in China, Contessina. You will be a nervous wreck if you try to keep up with the Chinese talk. We are all right.”

  “But maybe you ought to change the money into something else and not keep it in Mex. Can’t you buy gold with it or something?”

  “I will talk to the bank about it,” said Sanyi.

  “And we do have quite a lot, do w
e? I was thinking about it: we must have quite a lot.”

  “Shhh. Don’t worry your head about it. I am very watchful of that money, and I will surprise you when the time comes. It is very nearly enough,” said Sanyi.

  It happened soon after that conversation. There was a particularly alarming rumor among Annette’s clients about the Japanese moving into a few more provinces in the North. What really alarmed the Shanghai people was the fact that Chiang Kai-shek in Nanking had said he would not allow Japan to move any farther inland, and the Chinese vernacular papers greeted his statement with daring enthusiasm. For a day or two Annette looked really thoughtful, and some of her richest Chinese customers disappeared. It was said they had gone South. After a few days, as usual, the excitement died down, but several others of Jill’s acquaintance had dropped out of sight in the meantime. One of the most noticeable absences, after three days, was Konya.

  “Where’s your friend, Jill?” said Violet on the fourth morning. There was a malicious glint in her eyes.

  Jill looked puzzled and worried. “I don’t know. I can’t get any answer on his telephone, not even from his boy. I thought I’d go over there this afternoon and see what’s the matter.”

  “Want me to come along?”

  “I wouldn’t bother if I were you,” said Jill coldly. She had never quite forgiven Violet, though the worst of her jealousy had long been forgotten and buried under other provocations.

  She walked over to Sanyi’s flat, but when she came into the building and greeted the elevator boy he shook his head and did not start the car.

  “He gone.”

  “Gone out? What time did he go?”

  “He all gone,” said the boy. “Go two, three days ago on big ship. Takee all he luggage.”