by Emily Hahn
“But everyone is wrong,” said Jill. “I know that’s what they say and I’ve never made any trouble about it, but I’m British just the same, Captain, and I’m no spy. You can ask the British consul in Shanghai if you don’t believe me, or the police in Hong Kong. They’ll tell you I’m speaking the truth. They have it on record. I–I’ve got a British passport, you know.”
The officer was slow to reply, and she could see that he was a bit shaken by her certainty. “Show me the passport,” he said at last.
“Come to Hong Kong and I’ll show it to you.”
He laughed.
“Or if you’re afraid to go to Hong Kong,” she continued, “let Mr. Yeh go and get it and we can wait for him here.”
“Mr. Yeh?” repeated the chief.
“Yes, Mr. Yeh–your friend and mine.”
The Chinese said nothing to affirm or deny it. “Where will it be in Hong Kong?” he asked, as if he were humoring a child.
“It’s in my large suitcase at the club, in the inner pocket. It’s there, all right, and Mr. Yeh needn’t be afraid to go and look. You don’t think I’ve prepared a trap for him there, do you? I’m not afraid,” said Jill quite untruthfully. “I don’t at all mind staying here while you find out. You had better ask somebody at the club who knows everybody in the Hong Kong government–any of those businessmen.”
Her heart was thumping as it had never thumped during that other interview in Tokyo, but Botchan had taught her long ago to control her face and manners. Perhaps the chief did not know that and expected her to behave like an ordinary European woman. Perhaps her calm impressed him more than her claim did.
“But even if you are British,” he said, “how do you explain your behavior, your friendliness for Japan and your visit to Russia?”
“If I’m British, why shouldn’t I feel friendly toward Japan?”
This piece of near insolence was more convincing, perhaps, than a passport would have been. It was very characteristic, certainly, of the British.… The chief sighed and began to talk to one of the guards, who was probably his second-in-command. Jill listened to as much of it as she could comprehend. They sounded puzzled, and she heard Mr. Yeh’s name several times. She gathered that he had left Canton and was not expected back until late the next day.
“We will investigate,” announced the chief at last. “You must remain in custody during our investigation.”
“Certainly,” said Jill.
“You will be safer in the prison,” continued the Chinese.
“In prison?” she repeated, dismayed. “The city jail? Oh, please, Captain, don’t put me there. It will be so dirty! Can’t I stay here? I won’t go out, I promise.”
He looked around the room, glanced at the opium tray, and as if that familiar sight reassured him he stood up. “Very well, I will leave a man here to protect you. Remember, you must be very careful.”
“Oh, I will be. Thank you, Captain, thank you a million times.”
They bowed, and the guards walked out after him with their unmartial shuffle. One of them, a large amiable-looking man, was detailed to remain on guard. The room boy had regained his color and self-control and ran to bring a chair, which was placed in the corridor. The soldier sat down on it, tilted the back of the chair against the wall, and closed his eyes. Outside the dark was lifting. In the glare of the electric light Jill dressed herself and lay down again next to the opium. Her legs would not stop shaking.
Would Yeh really be sent back to Hong Kong? And when he found the passport would he tell the truth or would he destroy it and stand by his original denunciation? It was a fifty-fifty chance; he would not like to lose his reward, but he had a healthy respect for a British passport which might carry her through. None of this, she was sure, would have happened in the beginning if he had known she was British and not Russian.
Jill drafted a telegram to Annette and then destroyed it and made up another to the Hong Kong police. But when she asked the guard to send it for her he only laughed and waved his hand, refusing to take on such an enormous responsibility.
“Anyway,” she said to herself, “it couldn’t get out through the telegraph censors, I suppose.”
Making herself a pipe, she thought of another expedient. Most Chinese workers and peasants, she had noticed, were amused and pleased when they saw her smoking opium. They had sympathy and understanding for the national habit; it always seemed to prejudice them in her favor when they saw a blond European woman using the drug. They were particularly surprised and tickled that she could manipulate the needles and cook the gum without aid. Most Europeans who used opium had to have a Chinese boy or girl to prepare their pipes. That was what gave her her idea.
Jill went out into the corridor again. The soldier was asleep, and she had to shake his shoulder quite hard to wake him up; a good omen.
“Will you smoke?” she asked politely, offering him the pipe. He smiled and refused.
“I never use it,” he said. “Too dangerous.” He made a joking gesture, drawing his finger across his throat to show that the official punishment for opium smoking was still carried out in the Army, at least.
“Then may I call Ah King to cook for me?” she asked.
“Oh yes, miss, that is all right.”
Once the room boy was there with her, they conversed in whispers while the guard snored conveniently outside the door. Willingly he went out and bought a Chinese newspaper and translated what she wanted to know. There was a boat leaving that day for Hong Kong, and he described to her the signs by which she could recognize the place where she would find it. After that it was simply a matter of biding her time. Softly she put her few things in her bag and let Ah King take it out past the sleeping guard. The room slowly filled with swirling clouds of fragrant smoke, and the soldier slept on. With maddening slowness the morning sun rose.…
Jill gave Ah King nearly all her money, as she had promised. He swore with passionate gesticulations that he had fixed everything with the clerk at the desk; the clerk at the stroke of seven would leave his place and go somewhere in the back of the house, ostensibly to visit the toilet. On tiptoe, Ah King left the room, scanned the guard, and waved reassuringly at Jill reclining by the opium tray. She heard him moving softly to his pallet somewhere aloft. Everywhere else indoors was comparatively quiet, though the streets were raucous as ever.
Jill walked out as lightly as she could, trying to sound like Ah King in his felt slippers. The soldier did not wake up. She flashed to the front lobby, seized her suitcase, and was out in the street before the clerk ambled back to his post, but she left a few bank notes on his desk.
She gasped in the bright morning light and fought down a desire to be sick in the street. It wasn’t safe yet; there was no time to feel relief. She ran down the road toward the place Ah King had told her about. Was the boat there? Yes, there it was, looking battered and dirty, but with an English flag on it. Jill simply walked aboard, out of the nightmare.…
Afterward, when the ship had started, it was simply a mundane matter of arguing with an angry and suspicious captain.
“I’m awfully sorry,” she said again and again, “but I ran off from Hong Kong without thinking, do you see? There was my boy friend who got his orders to come all of a sudden, and he asked me to come along, and–well, frankly, maybe I’d had a bit too much to drink, but what with the rush, I forgot all about papers.”
At last the captain referred her to the purser. To him Jill repeated her story again, this time with circumstantial detail. The purser was more susceptible than the captain had been.
“I’ll take your word for it if you promise to show me your passport one of these days,” he said at last. “How about a little drink in my cabin?”
“I’d love to,” said Jill.
They were glad to greet her back to the club. There Jill was able to tell the true story, and Mr. Yeh was generally condemned, though nobody seemed to be very indignant about it.
“You are safe, that’s the main
thing,” said Mr. Wong, who happened to be there playing billiards when Jill arrived.
She went back to her little room to take a bath. Undressing, she thought briefly of the purser, with whom she had a date during his next night in town.
“I don’t think I’ll keep it,” she decided, for he had not been a very interesting man, nor generous. Altogether it had been a most unprofitable adventure.
“When I see Mr. Yeh again,” thought Jill, “I’ll make him pay for my ticket back.” She felt better after that and stepped into the tub.
XV
Time rolled itself up like a tape measure on a spring, and as the months went by Jill slowly transferred her allegiance from Shanghai to Hong Kong. She could not have said why it was. Ray Macklin’s presence had nothing to do with it, for after a few more chance meetings with him–she would never arrange to meet him deliberately, and he was not persistent in his efforts to persuade her–she felt indifferent about him; it did not matter to her when he went away, perhaps for good.
The visit to the club came to an end. Jill allowed herself to be tempted out of it by a Fukienese banker who set her up in a flat. She had always decried that sort of arrangement– “All they want to do is avoid the tariff every night,” she had said in the old days at Annette’s–but the banker was generous, and when they parted company, for he was moving to Singapore, she had a few pieces of good jewelry and her tuition paid at another business college.
“I don’t know what it is about me,” she thought, “that makes a man send me to business college. And I always get bankers. I wonder if they’d refund the money once he’s safely away?”
They would not, but it had been a halfhearted hope at best, and Jill was not unduly disappointed. At the suggestion of a Eurasian girl she met at the club she moved into another house, Rosemary’s, a sort of Hong Kong equivalent to Annette’s. Rosemary was both more and less discreet than Annette; her clients were far less frank and publicly rowdy, but the landlady did not exercise the same vigilant watch indoors. Neither her girls nor her customers were protected as Annette’s had been. The affair of the police, for example, would never have happened in Tibet Road. Jill’s Canton adventure had come to the ears of one of the young men of the police department, where all the Colony records of Europeans were kept. No doubt the disgruntled purser carried the story. The policeman came to see Jill when he was off duty as soon as he heard of her presence at Rosemary’s.
“What are you going to do about it?” he said. “I could make a lot of trouble for you, you know.”
Annette would have sent him packing and then blustered at his boss, but Jill knew that Rosemary would never take such a risk.
“Oh well,” she said resignedly. “I’ll do whatever you like, I suppose.”
After that she had to be nice to quite a few other members of the police department at drastically reduced rates. Being blackmailed annoyed her, but even so she couldn’t make up her mind to leave Hong Kong. The warm sunny spaces of weather and the dreaminess of long afternoons and especially the excellence of Hong Kong opium made even the importunate police bearable.
However, life in the house grew more and more onerous, and she began to think of some other escape with some new banker, perhaps, or by taking a trip on her own. One night something happened which decided her. A girl in the room next to hers, knowing Jill was alone, came and called her. It was very late at night and she sounded worried. She was a newcomer to Rosemary’s, a big-legged Italian girl with hair dyed almost purple-red. Jill did not like her.
“What’s the matter?” whispered Jill.
“I don’t know. You come and look.”
In the Italian’s bed lay a man asleep. Jill stole close to peer at him, as the girl silently implored her to do. She recognized him as a regular visitor to the house, an elderly, heavy-set Englishman who usually arrived at least half drunk. Tonight there was something peculiar about his face. He was flushed to an unnatural color; a blue tinge underlay the red. His breath came short and fierce like the puffs from an engine.
“You’ve been doping him,” said Jill. “Rosemary won’t half give it to you.”
The Italian began to yell distractedly in French and English. “It never hurt anybody before,” she declared. “I use it all the time and nobody ever acted like this. Maybe he’s got a weak heart. You’re not supposed to give it to people with hearts.”
Jill soaked a towel in cold water and wrapped it around his head. Then she went back to her room, rang for the boy, and ordered brandy with ice on the side. With the other girl’s help she got some of the brandy down the sleeper’s throat, and after a little while his breath became more normal and the flush faded.
“He ought to do now,” said Jill. “I don’t know if what we did was right or wrong. It could have been a nasty business. You better be careful after this.”
The Italian gave her victim an inquiring poke in the arm and pulled open one of his eyes inquisitively. “Oh, he’s all right,” she said. “Now let’s get down to work.”
Scandalized, Jill watched her going scientifically through his clothes. The change pocket, the wallet, the watch–she put the watch back with a scornful sniff–yielded something more than a hundred Hong Kong dollars.
“Seventeen, eighteen, nineteen–here you are, Jill, twenty for you, and many thanks,” said the Italian.
“But see here–you can’t get away with it! He’ll make a frightful row in the morning.”
“No, no,” said the girl, “he was drunk. I’ll tell him he had nothing when he arrived and that I had to pay for the drinks. Leave it to me: I know my business.”
“My word,” thought Jill, putting the twenty dollars away in her purse, “I have come down in the world. I’d better get out of here.”
Jill did not say good-by forever to Rosemary and the rest of the household; after her crestfallen return to Annette’s she had resolved never again to take such a risk. She bought a round-trip ticket to Bali and set out with mingled emotions of pleasure and apprehension, the latter because she had outraged her rapidly developing sense of property, no Santa Claus having offered to pay for the jaunt.
In her luggage was a carefully selected wardrobe: slacks, boyish shirts, and the tailored coats and skirts that suited her so well. She was determined to live throughout her holiday as a respectable woman, and no one must be able to guess from her clothes that she was not. She also took with her a box of pills which a Chinese servant at Rosemary’s had assured her would help her cure herself of the opium habit. “Take ten the first day,” he said, “three in the morning, three at tiffin, and four when you go to bed. Nine next day, and so on.”
Perhaps the pills did help; if they did, Jill reflected, she would have been a violently sick girl without them. Even with them she was sick, suffering chills and sweating, bad stomach and terrible nighttime remorse and despair. Fortunately the steward assumed she was merely seasick. It was four days before she felt normal enough to make an appearance on deck. But the sun was warm, the ocean sparkling, and the passengers inclined to be friendly.
Late in the afternoon, walking around the deck and still feeling rather shaky, she suddenly stopped short. Instinctively she swung about and went over to the railing. But she could not go on lurking for the entire voyage, she realized; it would be necessary to face the girl down–Sonya, from the Casino.
Sonya had succeeded in the attempt made by every Russian dancing girl in town. She had married. Jill had heard at Annette’s house of this happy triumph but had never seen Sonya afterward. The Russian had stayed away from her former haunts as soon as the wedding was an accomplished fact, and none of the girls saw her any more. They had talked maliciously and jealously about her, how she had settled down with her husband, a Dutch businessman; Sonya was letting him in for far more than he had bargained for, they said, making him support her mother and her father and her little sister and brother. And respectable! Sonya had become so respectable that you would die laughing to see her, twittered the girls.
Remembering this, Jill took a deep breath, looked straight ahead, and walked past Sonya, who lay in a deck chair. She, Jill, would not be the first to speak. She had her pride. If Sonya wanted to recognize her, well and good; if not … She peered out of the corner of her eye at Sonya, whose chair was aligned next to that of a bald man who must have been her husband. She saw the Russian girl give a little surprised start. For just a second it looked as if Sonya, too, wanted to turn away. Then she seemed to recollect herself and nodded coldly.
“Doesn’t want to go any further,” Jill decided. “Well, if she behaves herself, so will I.”
That evening in the bar she chattered in ladylike manner with a shipping clerk from Tientsin, and he introduced her to a married couple, and over their one round of cocktails they arranged to play bridge after dinner. It promised to be a dull evening, for which Jill was thankful. She wanted to feel dull. Alone in her cabin without opium, life was painfully undull; quiet repetitive conversation was what she wanted.
Her four days of illness had left her stranded back of the rising tide of gossip which always floods ships’ passengers. She was absently studying her cards in the second rubber when she heard Mrs. MacQueen say:
“Look, Charles; there’s that Macklin woman in evening dress again. Absolutely ridiculous, dressing for a crowd like this.”
Jill turned to look. She had heard of Dorothy Macklin off and on ever since she had come to Hong Kong, but this was the first glimpse she had ever taken of her rival. She saw a tall girl with a small waist, brown bare shoulders, and very short, very fair, very curly hair.
“She’s attractive, isn’t she?” Jill threw out the remark for bait and was delighted when Mrs. MacQueen seized it.
“If you like the type, but I’ve always thought she picked up too many American ways while she was married to that newspaperman. Still, there are plenty of men who would agree with you.”
“Newspaperman,” said Jill thoughtfully. “Oh yes, Ray Macklin. Why, I knew him!” She turned again to look at Dorothy, imitating to perfection Mrs. MacQueen’s supercilious air. The fair girl was talking with intense coquetry to a tall, cadaverous man.