Miss Jill

by Emily Hahn

  Jill arrived at the pot and put down three of her tins; the other two she held out. The distributor looked dubiously at them. “What is this?” he demanded.

  “I’m collecting for the room,” said Jill.

  He shook his head. “You know the rules; each one for himself.”

  From all the bystanders came a torrent of protest. “Come on, Johnny, don’t be that way!” “Oh, loosen up, Johnny!” “You know Jill; can’t you check up if you don’t believe her?”

  “Why not go up to the room and find out?” “Such nonsense! As if we all have time.…”

  “All right, all right,” said Johnny, and he hunched his shoulders comically. “I’m only trying to do what’s right. All right, Jill, let’s fill ’em up.”

  “I wouldn’t cheat you, Johnny,” she said. “You know me!”

  She was greeted in her room with another animal cry. Four women met her at the door and took their containers from her. Jill sat down with a sigh, landing on folded bedding.

  “I’ll try to eat it slow,” she said, “but I bet I don’t.”

  The others, already devouring their stew, did not reply.

  Jill hadn’t known many of the prisoners before; with one exception she had known nobody at all to talk to. She couldn’t compare them in camp, as so many of the others could, with what they had been before Pearl Harbor. It was an engrossing game, evidently, and she was sorry to be left out, but there was one great compensation. Jill, it seemed, was one of the good ones. She was liked.

  “You’re a cheery child,” said Lady Whitford sometimes. “It does one good to look at you.”

  Florence Leach, one of the women in her room, used to complain about it. “Aren’t you ever out of sorts?” she would demand bitterly. “For God’s sake, how do you stick this horrible life?”

  “Oh well,” Jill once said vaguely, “I’m not lonely here, anyway.”

  Florence, who had humor, laughed hard at that. The five of them lived in a room the size of a pantry. Jill possessed rights over a doorless closet, sleeping on one of her two blankets (one donated by the Welfare and one inherited from the repatriated Americans). She was glad of the alcove, in which she kept her “furniture” by day, for it might have been stolen otherwise. It consisted of such valuables as the blankets, an electric plate which Andy had sent in by means of bribery and persuasion, such odd bits of paper as she could scrounge, a precious five-pound jam tin for cooking and eating purposes, some pieces of clothing and cloth—the usual cherished possessions of the internee. She was good-natured even about sleeping in a stuffy corner. She spent her days in a sort of smiling mist, an exaltation, feeding her soul on the approval of Lady Whitford and everyone else’s rough-and-tumble acceptance of her. Like a child who has been spanked and forgiven, she snuggled into the bosom of Society and clung there.

  The community concerts, the lectures, the language classes, the unpleasant communal jobs such as cleaning toilets–Jill entered willingly upon them all. There were only a few popular movements in which she would not join, and she was mousy-quiet about her abstinence from them. She never helped put people into Coventry. Even when one of the women of her own room made herself violently unpopular by insisting upon applying to her feet an old-fashioned remedy for chilblains Jill would not join in the vote of censure.

  “Well, it probably is good for chilblains,” she argued with Florence. “If the Russians have been doing it all these centuries, there must be something in it.”

  “My dear girl, I don’t care if it’s good or bad for Yulia’s feet. They’re not my feet, but it is my floor, one fifth of it at any rate, and I don’t see why we should let her pee on it.”

  “She’s peeing on her feet. The floor is–well, accidental.”

  Florence glowered at her.

  “Besides, her chilblains are better now,” said Jill, “and yours are still bad, aren’t they?”

  “Oh, go away,” said Florence.

  This was only the first year.

  The one exception to Jill’s lack of acquaintance was Dr. Lionel Levy. She first saw him soon after she was carted out to Stanley with the others who had shared with her a nightmare time in one of the water-front hotels. He was standing near the inner gate of Stanley Camp when they arrived, looking on with the half-smile she remembered so well, but though she had not known he was anywhere within five days’ journey of Hong Kong, she was not really surprised. Nothing surprised her in those early days, after so much had happened which would have been impossible before Pearl Harbor. He, too, hadn’t been unduly impressed by the coincidence. But they were glad to see each other.

  “Yes, I’ve been in Hong Kong more than a year,” he said. “Practicing. Strange that we never met.”

  “But you didn’t have to be interned, surely?”

  Levy shrugged his shoulders. “I’ve been working to get British papers for a long, long time, and I didn’t want to spoil my chances. Besides, what else could I do? The Japanese haven’t heard yet about anti-Semitism, as far as I know, but they are always taking lessons from the Nazis.… Better this camp than another under the Germans.”

  In the early rush for rooms Dr. Lionel had got in at the other end of the camp from Jill’s room, and because of this geographical arrangement she saw less and less of him as time went on. It was a crowded, insufficient sort of place, Stanley Camp, and yet somehow one drew smaller circles within the outer circle. One tried to save steps. One kept one’s working acquaintanceship within reasonable limits of distance. That was why Jill didn’t see much of Dr. Levy, her old friend. Or was it because he was an old friend? She moved in a mist, smiling among all the people she had never known before the surrender. There in the seething, unhappy little town between sea and mountain, she had new friends.

  Father Sullivan looked up from his book and nodded when she knocked at the open door. “You’re punctual,” he said. “I wasn’t sure with all this rain if you’d make it.”

  “Oh, rain! It’s better out of doors anyway.”

  They walked over to the veranda and sat down at the edge of it, ignoring the presence of half-a-dozen other people, as camp life taught everyone to do. Father Sullivan was a youngish priest with hair which had gone prematurely gray; the sentimental put it down to his experiences with the first Japanese who invaded his mission, but Father Sullivan never admitted this. He had been whipped by the soldiers and he had gone through a grisly time, trying to help the wounded Chinese who lay dying about his church. After the occupation excitement had abated, word came through from Tokyo, probably relayed from the Vatican, and the Japs didn’t molest the priests any more.

  The house where they sat was high on a steep part of the hill, and over to the left their view cleared the stone wall and journeyed out to sea. Around on the other side of the bay the curve of the island looked quiet and eternal. It was a beautiful scene if one could forget it was also prison. The drizzling rain made everything a little gray, a little foggy; the ocean rocked like melted lead. Father Sullivan stared at the water absently, silent and receptive, waiting.

  Jill’s long thin hands were clasped between her knees, and she looked at them instead of over the wall. “I’m still not sure about some things,” she began.

  Father Sullivan continued to look receptive and did not reply.

  “Ever since confession I’ve been wondering and worrying,” went on Jill.

  “Worrying? You said you had never been so happy as when you took communion.”

  “Well, that was true, too, but just the same … It’s just a little thing, Father. I haven’t confessed it because it seems such a little thing to bother God for. After the way you let me go through all my sins that first time … I’ll never forget it, how afraid I was, and how I thought I’d have trouble remembering all the things I’ve done. I always thought I’d have to make a list.” She stopped and swallowed. Father Sullivan smiled in a way characteristic of himself alone. It was a smile with a touch of grim amusement.

  “We are not expected,” he s
aid, “to do the morally impossible. In your soul you wanted to forget your sins, and so you did. It was enough to confess in–uh––in general. Is that enough reassurance for you now?”

  “No,” said Jill, “it isn’t. I’m sinning now. I’ve spoiled my confession. I’m sinning now and all the time.”

  “Do you want to confess?”

  “Not yet,” said Jill. “Not until it sticks. I’m not sure I can keep away from it. You’ve been very good to me, Father, and I appreciate it. I don’t want to bother you like a silly old maid with a whole list of little sins.”

  “One cannot bother, as you put it, the Church.”

  “Well, maybe not, but one can bother a priest. You ought to know that, Father. But the more I think about this one, the more I guess maybe it’s not a little sin. It’s so deep inside of me. Father, I’m full of envy and hatred, and it’s against a woman here in the camp. I’ve tried. I’ve loved almost everyone, the way you told me; I really do love the children, but that’s easy.… I can’t love her. Father, I hate Dorothy Macklin.”

  Father Sullivan seemed to ponder this announcement for a full minute. “You have slipped back into sin,” he said at last. “That woman should mean nothing to you now, if you have truly renounced your sins. She should never have meant anything to you. You have nothing to do with her; she is the wife of a man you should not have known as you did. You are indeed sinning, Jill.”

  She said impatiently, “But that’s just it; you don’t understand. I don’t hate her any more because I’m jealous or because I want Ray. It’s something else.”

  “Are you trying to deceive me, Jill, or your own conscience?”

  “No, no, Father, you don’t understand. I don’t want Ray. Even if I did, they’re not together any more; they’re divorced.”

  “There is no such thing as divorce,” said Father Sullivan.

  “Oh, even if they weren’t–and they’re Protestants, anyway–that’s not it, Father. I’ve been hating her far worse since Ray went away. I used to look at her before the war, just hating her because she’s no better than I am, no, not so good, and still she was getting away with it and I wasn’t. Ray may have been the beginning, but it was worse than that. I used to see her laughing and wriggling her shoulders and waving to people and making men look at her, until my hate was so bad I was almost sick.”

  “Yes,” said Father Sullivan sadly.

  “And now we’re here together in camp, even living in the same building. She doesn’t know me–I mean she does, of course, and maybe she even knows something about Ray and me, but she doesn’t pay any attention to me. She doesn’t know the way I feel, watching her.”

  “You must pray,” said Father Sullivan. “Pray to be forgiven these petty thoughts. Now especially, when no one knows what is planned for us, you should pray.”

  Jill twisted her hands together, pressing them between her knees, and spoke rapidly. “I can’t pray about it. It sticks in my throat,” she admitted. “I’ve been watching her, Father, and if I’d been wrong for hating her I’d say so.”

  “If? There is no doubt about it; you are in sin.”

  “I mean wrong in my judgment. I wasn’t. She isn’t nice, that’s all. She’s been getting worse and worse ever since we came in. She’s selfish and dirty; she makes eyes at anybody who can give her something extra to eat; she’s––”

  Father Sullivan put up a restraining hand. “It’s not for you to make any judgments except about your own soul,” he said in stern tones.

  “But it is my own soul,” insisted Jill. “We’re all mixed up together, she and I. I’ve known about Dorothy Macklin, it seems like, all my life. I hoped she’d be repatriated with the Americans, but they said she’s been divorced and isn’t American any more, and then I knew we would have to see this war out together. We’re all tangled up together, Father, and I feel as if we’ll never get away from each other.”

  For the next ten minutes Jill sat humbly, listening to a severe scolding from Father Sullivan. He dismissed her with a command to go home and repeat an Act of Contrition, to examine her soul again, and finally to prepare an exorcism by confession.

  The rain stopped just before sunset, and a puff of warm wind stroked her cheeks as she walked homeward. It would be a busy day for her tomorrow if she carried out all her resolutions. She was minding children in the morning; she was to give a hand with the paper costumes for the new play in the early afternoon; there were three women, too, who were special charges of Father Sullivan’s, and she had promised to call on them.

  At this time in the evening most of the prisoners were apt to look with grief and longing toward the sun, where it slowly sank over near home. There were not many people in Stanley who did not sigh at that time, wondering wearily if they were going to sit in prison camp forever, parched with homesickness, or if a massacre would end the story. Only Jill walked the pathway of the camp as if she had never known a happier road, making plans for tomorrow and looking no farther ahead of this earthly life than twenty-four hours hence. As for the after life, it was not for her, she felt, to make plans. That was all taken care of. Father Sullivan had said so.

  Over on the hill where the Japanese authorities lived, there were lights in the windows. The Baxters would be there, playing bridge with Jap government officials and eating their fill of good food. If she had been hasty or greedy she could have been there instead. She, Jill from Annette’s, could have spoken up at the beginning and proved her worth as an interpreter; certainly her Japanese was better than Mrs. Baxter’s, if only the others had known it.

  “But I didn’t,” Jill said to herself proudly. “I didn’t. Nobody knows.”

  She had no dealings with the Japanese. She behaved like all the other British women, pretending as far as possible that the Japs did not exist, and going out of her way to avoid passing the sentries in the boxes, to obviate the necessity of bowing to them. She pretended that the bowing was as irksome to her as to the rest of them, though in reality she wouldn’t have minded, knowing Japan as she did.

  It was better like this. She would not have liked to climb the hill, knowing that a thousand pairs of eyes were following her, a thousand people suspecting her, grudging her the little distinction. It was better like this. She was hungry most of the time, but so were the others. The less they knew about her, the less likely they were to find out about such things as Tada, for example. As it was, people were nice to her. They were nicer to her than they were to Dorothy Macklin; Dorothy was accused of being much too friendly with the Japs and the Indian guards. Yet in the old days how nice they had been to Dorothy; how cruel to herself!

  The thought of Dorothy sobered Jill, and she looked back on her interview with Father Sullivan and sighed. It was hard to think of hatred as a really mortal sin: it seemed so natural. Yet Father Sullivan had made more fuss about it than he had that other time, when Jill almost decided to go to bed with a policeman who had two tins of stewed steak but came to talk it over with the priest first.

  “I don’t think he understands about Dorothy yet,” she told herself. “Perhaps he just doesn’t want to.”

  For the first time in weeks she thought suddenly of Dr. Lionel Levy. He would have understood about Dorothy all right. In the old days she would have hurried to him in the first place to talk it over. She could still go to see him; it was not nearly time for bed. But what was the good of that? Dr. Levy could not save her from eternal damnation, and Father Sullivan could. She must go home now and pray. One must think of each confession, she remembered, as if it were the last chance. How lucky she was that she had been brought to confession at all!

  Smiling, she hurried up the staircase to her landing. She could hurry, for she was still strong and full of well-being. The food was not enough, of course, but they were getting used to it.…

  That was the end of the first year.

  XIX

  It was 1943, and Stanley Camp was stagnating. Somehow in the past two years the boundaries of the world had drawn in.
Literally as well as in thought they had drawn in, for the Japanese kept chopping bits off the territory of the prisoners, but most of them didn’t mind so much any more about space. They had no more energy to waste. The day which had once seemed long and empty, with nothing to do after putting away the beds in the morning, was now full of necessary tasks and makeshifts–there were the vegetable gardens, there was the ceaseless hunt for fuel and the squabbling over water and, first and foremost, the black market. A few of the prisoners were recognized leaders of this activity. One saw them here and there, barristers and businessmen, haughty Britons and Eurasian clerks, walking back and forth between the houses and the groups, arranging their secret little bargains. A watch sold here, a shabby pair of shoes bought there, but most important of all was food. Some of the guards were bribed to let eggs and Chinese brown sugar over the fence at night, until it became almost a recognized practice.

  Food was as much a mental necessity as a physical one. Though almost everyone was hungrier than ever–but the black market rulers ate well and became fat and sleek by dark–they had still to reach the third stage of starvation, when initiative dies out. That was going to happen, but there was plenty of life still in the twenty-five hundred prisoners of Stanley Camp. They struggled for food and made of that struggle a test of intellect as well as strength. The thing became a game, a passion which took hold of them in the same way gambling does. And tobacco, too, that cousin of food, became a longing and a vice as well as a necessity. Men and women quarreled over cigarette stubs or made intricate bargains. One could not have said if it was a true physical craving or a neurotic one.